Categories
China General

Detecting Climate Signals, Detecting Life Signals

A new manuscript came across my desk this morning which pleasantly surprised me. The author was Samuel Shen, my Master’s thesis research supervisor with whom I continue to have a mentoring relationship, and the subject was detecting climate change signals using statistical methods.

This topic in particular brought me back to a moment in 1999 when I was floating around the university in my home town, trying to decide what to do next in my life. I noticed a posting in the math department for a colloquium talk on this topic to be given by a visiting researcher. The topic interested me, even though I had no background in climate studies, so I went and checked it out. Samuel Shen, whom I had not known before, was the host professor for the talk, and I was sufficiently impressed by what I experienced in that moment in time. A few days later, I found myself in his office requesting to study a Master’s degree under him. This led to two and a half years of study, and upon graduation, the opportunity to work in China. The rest, they say, is history.

Categories
General

Compact Love

If you have a digital camera, it probably came with a memory card (Memory Stick, SD Card, Compact Flash, etc.) that’s too small for practical use, and in all likelihood, you replaced it with a bigger card. So what can you do with the small card? Well, here’s a great “little” idea.

Create a slide show of pictures and text that tell a story, number the filenames consecutively, and place them on the card to give to a loved-one. The best way would be to borrow the card that came with your loved-one’s camera and slip it into the camera when they’re not looking. Then they’ll find it someday when they turn their camera on.

Now you’ll probably want to make the last frame some kind of arrow or something that indicates which direction the storyline goes, since the camera will show the highest-numbered frame when it starts the playback mode. The rest is up to you and your imagination. You can make textual frames in any image editor, but remember that some cameras have very tiny screens.

Happy Valentining!

Categories
Astro

Shoot the Moon

[18-day old moon]

Last Wednesday I shot the moon. Because of my knowledge of the Lunar cycle and the recent full moon, I was expecting the moon to rise a few hours after sunset. So I left my room at the appointed time and made my way to the main building on campus. I took the elevator to the 10th floor, climbed the stairs past the elevator room at the top, and emerged on the roof of the building. And there she was, a beautiful orange moon, 18 and a half days old, just rising over the buildings in the distance. It was a very clear night, but the pollution in Beijing still turned the moon orange.

This shot was made with my Canon PowerShot A70 digital camera (a highly configurable point-and-shoot), at full zoom (3x), hand-held, and pressed against the eyepiece of my tripod-mounted 10×24 travel binoculars. I’m impressed with the results, but it took me about 40 shots before I started to get sharp and in-focus images.

Categories
FreeBSD

Server Madness Madness

In my last post, I ranted on about the hardware troubles that I was having with my server. After writing the entry, Bruce and I had a long keyboard chat about our situation and how we were going to proceed with the network and the machines we had available to us. It was a productive meeting. But here’s the kicker: right after we finished chatting, Bruce’s desktop kicked the proverbial bucket. Man is it a bad month for him and me, technologically speaking! He figures it’s the 1 GB RAM chip that went bad. Unfortunately, there’s no money to get a new one.

Bruce connected a keyboard and monitor to the server so he could use it as a life raft to contact me. As we chatted this second time, he tried to get the old server back together. Fortunately, he succeeded, despite having been unsuccessful with that hardware configuration a few days before. So the new server became Bruce’s new desktop and we brought the old server out of its two-week retirement. So server-wise, everything is back to the way it was before I began changing it all around.

Whew! It was a heck of a ride. But for now, my experiments are dead in the water and my hopes for some really cool applications for the Swing Beijing! website have been dashed. I await further inspiration while hoping to avoid any more meltdowns.

Categories
FreeBSD

Server Madness

I am a FreeBSD god. I can administrate my way in and out and upside down a FreeBSD box like mad, and do good work, too. Computers used to frustrate me endlessly until one day in 2000 I installed FreeBSD 4.0 on an unwanted machine and all my problems magically disappeared. It just made sense. And it worked. And the documentation was so complete that I hardly ever had to search the web for how to do stuff. So the unwanted machine became my desktop, and eventually I set up another box as a server for my (then) website, and as a firewall/router for my friend Bruce. That server has been serving us faithfully for many years, a Pentium I, 100 MHz machine with RAM varying from 32 MB to 80 MB.

Over the last month, however, I started planning for some future projects and my experiments showed that “the little server that could” just “couldn’t” any more. I needed more raw CPU power. So I replaced the server with my Mom’s old Celeron 500 MHz machine, and that’s where my trouble began. Twice, the machine locked up for no reason when reading in from swap during my experiments. It was running the latest FreeBSD 5.4. So I wiped it clean and reinstalled FreeBSD 4.11, the latest stable version from the 4 branch, thinking that somehow the problem was with the 5 branch of FreeBSD. But this morning, doing a simple cp -Rp /oldroot /usr/, it locked up again.

Damn, this is annoying.

I’m starting to suspect the new hard drive, or its interaction with the hardware. And this is where my power as a FreeBSD god fails. I can’t do nothing about how well the system runs if it’s running on flaky hardware. And so I’m frustrated, so frustrated, yet again. I have a few ideas on how to proceed and resolve this whole mess, but for the moment, I’m just waiting on Bruce’s assessment of the situation. Blogging this is part of my therapy to step back and perhaps feel better about the situation. How’s it going so far?

I do admit to one fundamental mistake: running experiments on a production system, or more accurately, replacing a tried-and-true production system with an experimental system. I could have (and should have) run both systems at the same time, ensuring the stability of the new system before retiring the old one. But the one thing that stood in my way was the number of ports in Bruce’s hardware router. I should have just told him to go and buy a larger hub. Oh well, back to work…

Categories
Audio Philosophy

Context-Dependent Memory

Jon Udell recently wrote about his experiences with context-dependent memory associated with his podcast listening while bike riding. He explains it thusly.

I’ve noticed a weird synaesthesia effect. When I first listened to Jim Gray’s discussion of asynchrony I was at mile 23 of this route. When I listened to it again and transcribed the quote for my blog, I saw that landscape again. It works the other way too. If I repeat a route, I remember what I heard along the way.

I’m glad to know that someone else has experienced this, and in particular, in association with podcast listening. It happens to me all the time too. So the world I walk in has now become the index for audible information that my brain has stored. Jon concludes:

I can’t decide what’s more strange or wonderful: the fact that I have an URL that points to mile 23 of that route, or the fact that an important idea from Jim Gray is waiting for me when I get there.

That’s a pretty damn cool thought. Thanks Jon!

Categories
Antiwar Speech

After the Flood

In a recent post, I pointed you to an article written by a paramedic couple that were trapped in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They were featured recently on This American Life. The episode is in the 2005 archives in Real Audio format, under episode number 296, entitled “After the Flood”.

It’s disturbing and angering, but there are great moments of true humanity as well. And we find out from another interviewee about the true mission of the “armed thugs” moving about the Convention Center. It is well worth listening to and spending some time contemplating.

Categories
Tech

I Want One of These!

[Das Keyboard]

Dude! I want one of these. It’s a variable-weight keyboard designed for über geeks, called Das Keyboard. It’s coolest feature? No labels on the keys whatsoever. Awesome!

And it might be the perfect keyboard for using the Dvorak keyboard layout. Ah, keyboard lust!

Categories
Tech

Oh My God! Oh My God! Oh My God!

That was awesome! In my last post I told you about Cringely’s NerdTV and where to get the first episode, but I actually hadn’t watched it at that point—it was still downloading. But now that I’ve watched it, I’m blown away. It was incredible. A very simple interview, with Bob asking Andy Hertzfeld (the first Macintosh programmer…ever) basic, but good questions, and Andy recounting some amazing stories from his adventures in high tech. My two favourites: Steve Jobs phoning up Bill Gates to apologize for something he said, and Donald Knuth and the story of the source code for the original Mac Paint program. Go watch it for yourself. And if you can’t download video, there are mp3s of the audio available too.

Categories
Tech

NerdTV is Here!

Bob Cringely’s NerdTV is finally here! Yay! Episode 1. Today.

You can start downloading the show via this torrent.