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Thu 31 Mar 2005
I have moved my blog to http://www.drifty.org/AT/blog/ . There you will also find a link for an RSS 2.0 feed. Please update your links and RSS aggregators.
Sun 27 Mar 2005
The quarter finished. Ended up with straight A's again. No major issues with any of my finals. Actually thought I did well on all of them.
Went to PyCon again this year. Sprints were productive for me, although I ended up wasting some man-power I had. Ended up with a couple of people wanting to participate in sprinting on the AST branch, but I needed to flesh out the design document for it before I could really have anyone work on it. That, unfortunately, took three of the four days. Luckily, at least on the first day, people were able to help by trying to get the AST branch to compile on Windows. The fourth day, Tuesday, I worked on my thesis instead of sprinting. Having written out the introduction to my thesis longhand on the flight over (which was kind of like being in a nursery with the amount of kids surrounding me) I spent the day on the section explaining other type inferencing algorithms.
The conference itself was good. Wednesday I had two talks to give. In an open space session (which is basically for people a place to give a talk if it was rejected by the paper committee) I gave my same talk as I did last year. Had about ten people attend which was unexpected. Later on that afternoon I gave a talk on my thesis which was very well received. Had two people whose opinion I respect tell me they were impressed with the work and that I had done a good job (one of whom gave my work a "golden diamond" in his presentation before mine for what I had done; have to see the presentation to understand).
Guido even mentioned my work in his keynote the next day. Spent most of Thursday just listening to talks. Attended the lightning talks for the first time this year and they were a lot of fun. People loosen up it seems when they have only 5 minutes to get their point across.
This was easily the best PyCon for me. I got to meet a ton of people I was looking forward to meeting (such as Alex, Christian, Holger, and Raymond) and even more whom I have not had any interaction with (such as Richard and Mick). And this doesn't even include the people I always enjoy visiting with every year at the conference. And the icing on the cake is that I felt like a true core developer this year. Previously I have felt like a junior member of the core development team; the guy who writes the python-dev Summaries and closed some bugs and patches on occasion.
But this year I felt like I was more of a peer to my fellow core developers. I still don't think my coding skills and knowledge equal out to the other major developers, but I definitely didn't feel like the proverbial intern in the group. Now I just feel more like the young guy on the team.
And actually that is all I really care about. While the Summaries have given me a name in the community, that kind of broad fame is not overly critical to me. Yes, it is nice when people know who I am, but I would rather have the respect of my fellow core developers and not be known by anyone else.
And now I am spending the weekend at my mother's helping her with random stuff around the house. Plan to go back to SLO Monday and then leave Tuesday for SF to hang out with Randy for a week. Hoping to get a bunch of thesis work done with breaks working on the AST branch and to plan out ConfigureWTF with him.
I have also decided to actually learn C++. Up to this point I have read "Thinking in C++" by Bruce Eckel and it didn't really turn me on to the language. I have pretty much resisted truly learning it up to this point thanks to its mainstream usage and its reputation of being immense; rule of thumb is in any one project you will use 5% of the language's features compared to C where you use 95% of the language.
But some things have come about to change my mind. One is that I now understand why the language is they way it is thanks to reading "The Design and Evolution of C++" by Bjarne Stroustrup. Why he made the decisions he did based on his goals has helped me to see why the language is the way it is and be more forgiving of its flaws. Second, I realize now that it is just as fast as C++ while having a better way to organize your code. That's nice since I always thought it was at least a little slower and thus not worth it when you needed C-level speed. Third, found out Google uses it extensively. Actually, in terms of lines of code (LOC), at Google the order goes C++, Python, Java. Learning C++ will have me knowing three of the top five languages well; C, C++, and Java, while not knowing Visual Basic and JavaScript (well, I know some JS, just not enough to write a random program in it).
So I have given in and ordered some C++ books to truly learn the language and the standard library. Hoping to make C++ the language I learn in the month of April. I plan to learn a new language every month. Haskell is covered by the seminar, so that doesn't count. Don't know what I am going to learn in May and June. I am leaning towards more esoteric languages that will teach me some new paradigm. I am thinking of a concurrent language for May. June is totally open, maybe an old-school one that lots of languages are based off of.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my grandiose plans for this quarter. With such a light load I am really trying to cram things in. I want to start working out again. Wardrobe is going to start being revamped once I choose where I am going for grad school. Going to write code in every language I want to be able to claim I know in order to not make it a lie on my résumé. =) I am still working on speaking clearly; seems to be coming along, although retainer doesn't help matters. And I am still determined to start sleeping on my back so that I never wake up with my hip hurting again.
Tue 08 Mar 2005
It was one of those days that reminded me of my year off between my undergrad and grad years. I woke up at noon, nicely rested. Got up, did my usual morning routine.
After I got dressed I took a walk with Shaw up into the hills near the house to relax. Came back, tried to squash a Python bug (which someone else was also working on and managed to fix literally seconds before I tried to commit my fix). Clarified some documentation for Python development.
After that I just did some random stuff. Finished off the night baking some cookies to eat with my ice cream and Cool Whip while I watched 'Finding Forrester'.
No homework, no PhD app stuff, no stress. A nice day. I definitely could retire and not have an issue keeping myself entertained.
To give a PhD application update, I have been accepted to UBC, Indiana U., and UC Santa Cruz. Rejected by Stanford, UW, U. Chicago, and now UPenn. Today I called around to find out when schools were expecting to notify me of acceptances. They varied from late March to "by April 15" which is not good since they want an answer by that date. Could be a sign they sent out initial letters already and are waiting on some responses before mailing out more letters.
Thu 24 Feb 2005
Today was not a perky day, although through most of it I think I stayed rather positive.
First, I got rejected by the University of Washington. I was really hoping to get into either UW or The Farm (AKA Stanford). Both are top ten schools for CS in the US. Both are in places I would love to live, during grad school and permanently afterwards. Alas, it is not going to happen for the former.
So where does this leave me? I have been accepted to the University of British Columbia and Indiana University so far. I still have yet to hear from 10 other schools. I am hoping to hear from those left over the next two weeks or so. With that timeframe I am hoping to at least know where I have been accepted by Spring Break so I can mull over the choices while at PyCon. At best I will have a decision by then so I can just be released of that stress.
On top of being rejected today the family dog, Beezley, was put down today. He was going downhill quickly in terms of health and so it was decided this was the best route to go. Going to be weird going home to visit my mother and not having him driving everyone nuts when you walk in the door.
Wed 23 Feb 2005
Spent this past extended weekend in Newark with Jeff and Debbie from Friday night to Wednesday morning (need to stop doing the leaving in the morning thing; too damn tired during the drive). A large chunk of time was spent playing WoW with Jeff and some with their roommate. Got to level up a couple of times and make a ton of money. Need to take a break from the game, though.
Did do other things, though. Saturday was spent in Fresno. Debbie does real estate stuff and so had to go look at housing developments there. Boy is Fresno just out in the middle of nowhere. Not only that but Jeff and I couldn't tell where the hell everyone in that town went to work! Didn't see a single building higher than two stories and everything was just houses, churches, schools, or shopping plazas.
And yet the town is booming! Most of the housing developments we visited had either already sold all of their houses or had sold a majority of them. It was insane. But they are cheap; really nice houses for sub-$600,000 can be had there compared to kind of dinky house that amount of money would get you in the Bay Area. But I couldn't live that far out there from civilization.
Also got a smog check from a guy who sure was chatty. Passed of course. Now I need to go to AAA to pay for my overdue registration and get my new sticker.
Otherwise having the cute girl at Coldstone's in Fremont flirt with me was rather nice. =) Power of working my mojo (you just go "eww" Jackie and Jer?).
Get to spend the rest of this week on homework in both of my classes. Hopefully some more thesis work will come about as well.
Sat 12 Feb 2005
... maybe. I found out yesterday I was accepted into the Computer Science dept. at the University of British Columbia.
Needless to say I was rather ecstatic when I found out. Got to celebrate with my second cousin by going out to Linn's in Cambria for dinner. Good food, relaxed atmosphere, and way too much dessert. =) Plus it was cool to get to hang out with someone who was really happy and proud of me for what I have managed to accomplish.
But another important aspect of this acceptance is that it was from a top-tier school. I almost didn't apply to UBC because it such a good school and out of the country. I figured my chances would be lower since I would be coming from American schools. But it was suggested to me by my professors since I do have my Canadian citizenship (which was verified with the Canadian consulate). So I applied. Glad I did. =)
Now the question becomes what schools do I still care about hearing from. Since I am no longer a beggar I get to be a chooser. =) I definitely want to hear from Stanford and UW. After that, though, it is iffy. My original list of other schools that I would consider on equal footing are Purdue, UPenn, Northeastern, Indiana, and U. Chicago (the latter three mostly based on the strength of their programming language research).
But then I did some searching on UBC in terms of their place in the world. According to UBC's standard propaganda they were ranked 35th out of 500 internationally. And a blurb at the bottom of this page says that the CS dept. is ranked in the top three in Canada (which I believe; the only schools I know of in Canada that could compete is Simon Frasier, University of Ontario, and the University of Waterloo).
In other words UBC is up there. This also boosts my hopes of getting into UW or Stanford. Since I have not heard from either school yet (just checked UW's status site and my app is still pending) I really can't make predictions. But if I were to get into either UW or Stanford I will most likely go with one of them.
Getting into both, though, would be a a real tough call. If that managed to happen (would be personally shocked, but then again I was about UBC, so shows what I know) I really don't know which one I would go to. Stanford is ranked 2nd in the nation with UW at 8th. Both are in places I would love to end up in. Both will also most likely end up with good friends already being there (Stanford since I already have friends there, UW if Jer ends up going there). Although I definitely have a certain draw to UW just for the change of scenery by getting out of the state for a while and being back up in the Seattle area. Plus it isn't The Farm. =)
But school rivalries aside, it is Stanford. I mean it is an institution that is world-renowned. One of those schools where you could say you went there over in Europe and people know what you are talking about (although you can also tend to say that about Cal and yet I met someone in England who didn't know the school).
I don't know. All of the arguments in favor of UBC sans having friends already there apply to UBC as well. And there is no guarantee I will get into UW or Stanford. UBC might just be a fluke in the end and I don't get into any more schools.
Regardless, an interesting side-effect of all of this is that I now feel like I have to live up to my acceptance. I would have thought that once I got in to a school my drive for my work at Cal Poly would actually drop off even more. But in actuality I now feel like I need to do a good job to prove my acceptance is not a fluke. That's a pain. =)
Sun 30 Jan 2005
Wow, 25 days since my last post! My friend Jer once said it is a good thing when I don't post since it means I am busy with real life instead of having the heavy burden of enough free time to post here. Well, that might be true, but I sure could use some more proverbial let-your-hair-down free time.
I have managed to finish my doctoral applications. 14 schools and over $2000 later I am done. Now I just wait until mid-February to start hearing from schools. The responses should continue to trickle in to March. I should hear from all of the schools before PyCon.
School continues. Compilers would be more fun if it wasn't in Java and I was not constantly under a deadline to get things done. Architecture has its moment of interest, but is basically on the dull side. Feels like an actual class. 590 is nothing special yet.
I should be working on my thesis. I have final benchmark numbers and they are really no different from the last time I talked about numbers here; type inferencing in Python's compiler with no semantic changes is just not worth it.
Been playing World of Warcraft in my spare time when it is so late my brain is too fried to do schoolwork. Fun game and I am getting to play more and more with friends of mine which makes it that much more enjoyable.
Otherwise my life has been school. This might be the first quarter where I actually have to draft a homework schedule to make sure I get things done in a timely fashion. If I don't my thesis is just going to slip more and more into next quarter; slipping is not a big deal, but I want to get it done.
Wed 05 Jan 2005
Why does affection shown by non-family members feel better than when it comes from family? I wondered this today after hugging a friend goodbye who stopped by my place to use my printer. There is a heightened feeling of caring when a friend hugs you than when family does. Why is that?
I think it stems from the near obligatory love of family. While you don't have to like your family member, you practically have to love them. Thus receiving affection from family doesn't seem to be as voluntary as when a friend expresses affection. I am lucky to not only love my immediate family but to like them as well, but that still does not lower the almost required need to hug them. And I don't want to come off as if I don't want affection from my family, because I do want it. There is just a different feeling behind it.
Friends, on the other hand, have no obligation to hug you, let alone touch you. I think because of this it feel more true, almost altruistic. It's along the lines of when a friend just does someone nice for you; you are not shocked that they would do something nice for you, but they certainly were not required to do so.
And this all extends to men as well as women. While all of my female friends are quite happy to give me a hug when I see them, only two male friends ever give me that male hug of shaking a hand, pulling the other guy in, and patting him on the back. My other guys friends are all a handshake, but just isn't the same as a guy hug. This too seems to tie into the whole obligatory/voluntary show of affection. While a handshake is in no way needed, you hand those out like candy to strangers you have just met. But with a hug, you just don't hand those out unless you are a really friendly person.
And this is all my mother's fault for asking to request less hugs from her as a child when I used to want them constantly. =)
Sun 02 Jan 2005
Well, my hectic Fall quarter ended with a 4.00 GPA. Now I need to get a new set of transcripts for Cal Poly to milk my 3.867 overall, 4.00 grad GPA.
Winter break was nice. I think I got to speak to or see all of my friends. Visiting Whidbey was nice and relaxing. Great to get to hang out with my step-sister for an extended period of time which I have not gotten to do in ages.
And now Winter quarter is about to start. Had a schedule change thanks to the grad course I wanted to take in Spring; now taking the continuation of 508 which was the class that had me write that long paper. Looks like I will get to work on it some more. Hell, might even finish it.
So, the whole New Years resolution thing doesn't work for me. I am constantly trying to improve myself so I don't have a need to have a specific day where improvements begin. I would like to think that I have enough motivation and drive to not need such explicit due dates.
So, what am I currently working on? Well, the list has been pretty constant for years. One is speaking. While I have mostly gotten over my nervousness when speaking in front of a group (thanks to PyCon) so this is specifically about speed and enunciation. Spent my Winter break working on this and I have managed to slow down and speak much more quickly. It seems I am finely starting to get to the point where I don't have to think about it and I just naturally speak slower and more clearly.
Although how people have reacted lately you could have fooled me. I have had people ask me to repeat myself more lately than when I just spoke quickly. Maybe it has to do with people being used to hearing me speak the old way and when I slow up it throws them off. Either way I have to make sure to not let the discourage me.
The other thing I am going to start working on soon is my posture. Anyone who has met me knows I tend to hold myself with my shoulder and head forward. Makes me an inch or so shorter. Nasty habit, I know, and my parents have been trying to break me of it for years. Well, at this point it is just the natural position my body rests in. When I actually pull my shoulders back and hold my neck straight up I feel like some animal puffing up its chest in hopes of looking larger to competition.
Which, in a sense, is what I am doing. I am not fixing my posture for my health but to look and feel better. When I catch myself feeling tall (yes, it happens even though I have been taller than most people for quite some time now) it is an empowering feeling. And when I walk down the street with the correct posture I feel taller. And feeling empowered leads to more confidence and also to me just looking better. Got to get those peacock feathers together so I can strut my stuff.
But the trick is fixing the posture. While I can consciously make sure I stand up straight, it feels awfully strange.
I am also going to be cutting back on television watching again. Before I was watching "That '70's Show", but I have actually watched enough to have seen every old episode. And with the new season sucking I am just cutting it out. I am going to replace it with Scrubs, but that won't take up too much time since I don't think anyone shows repeats yet. With that, Aqua Teen Hungerforce, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Justice League Unlimited, and One Tree Hill that should be enough TV for me.
My dad got a Canon G6 for X-mas which meant I got to get a copy of his camera software. This means I got to finally stitch together some panoramic shots I took a while back. I have three from my trip for my brother's wedding (mountains on the way to Mammoth, Yoesmite's Half Dome, a redwood at Sequoia, and the mountains on the way to Hume Lake) and one of the sky at sunset overlooking SF from the roof of my Benvenue apartment. I love my Yosemite and Bay night sky shots. Too big to stick up online randomly but if anyone wants a copy (or of any of my photos for that matter) I can put them up.
Sat 11 Dec 2004
... or at least not with my teeth, or so two of my friends have told me in the past two weeks. It was an interesting comment to hear. One comment was that I should show my teeth in my smile more since now that they are straight my smile is improved. My other friend said I should just plain smile more.
What people have to realize is that my father has for years now been telling to "smile" when I did not seem cheery enough for my current position in life. That has always irked me severely. So having my friends tell me was a little off-putting. Put I know they meant well.
The quarter is now over. Don't know what grades I am going to end up with, but then again I don't care at this point. Applications are moving along (Stanford, UCSD, Purdue, UPenn, UBC, and UW are all done) and won't know of this past quarter's grades unless I bother to shell out the cash for more transcripts.
The rest of this vacation is going to be spent on playing catch-up with my Python to-do list now that the latest version has been released. And lots of reading.
Wed 01 Dec 2004
Had my last lecture for my grad course today. Paper was turned in on Monday (34 pages with 35 citations). Nice to be finished with that class.
Sent off my first doctoral app today. Stanford should have everything by tomorrow. Turned out to be rather hectic since I was not expecting to actually get to apply since Cal Poly had quoted me a timeframe where I would not have gotten my transcripts on time. One down, about 17 to go.
I just wrote my first Tcl script. Kind of an odd language in that everything is a string. The ramifications is that what some people might consider basic things such as addition cannot be done in a normal way; to add 1 and 2 you need to specify you are executing a command with expr {1 + 2}. I thought I was going to like it more, but after coding with it the rules for how to handle commands and executing things did not feel quite right. I think I am going to do the script in Python for a nice baseline comparison. Probably going to feel much nicer.
Thu 18 Nov 2004
So what causes me to not update for over a week and a half? School. During that entire time I have been doing homework. I have a massive paper that I have been working on for my software engineering class. Initially I was panicked about the 40 page length goal that we were supposed to have. But considering I have 24 pages single-spaced (the 40 page goal is double-spaced) so far and I have only finished 2 out of about 6 sections this thing is going to be a massive tome in the battle against Java.
Networking will be killing this weekend. Fun.
At least I got a break when I went to my cousin's play. She did a good job. One guy in the production was just off with his inflection. Otherwise everyone else did well.
My thesis has now been officially rejected by LL4. It was interesting because they said it was too technical. I thought they would reject me because of my negative result or because I wasn't up to snuff. But that was not the case! They just thought it would be too technical without giving a good background on Python and just bore the audience (which it might have, but I like to think of myself as an entertaining presenter so I don't think it would have been that dull).
Oh well. I still have PyCon to apply to and I know it will get accepted there.
Read a cool article about the history of a Mac app at http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/ . Well written. But what really caught my eye was the part where they took an interview with Apple and they wanted to hire them on. Reminded me of when Google called to interview me for that consultancy job. That was a great day. Even though I had to turn them down it was an amazing feeling to have Google, one of my "I don't think they will ever hire me but aiming high is always good" companies, actually call me up and want to talk to me about a job I didn't even apply for. Still brings a proud smile to my face when I think about that day, jumping up and down in the parking lot at Mustang Village out of frustration and pride, talking to my parents about what had just transpired.
The only thing left on my "wouldn't it just be cool" things to happen in my programming life would be to meet someone for the first time at a non-Python event and have them know who I am. That was be insanely cool. Someday hopefully. Just need to get Python used in more places.
Sun 07 Nov 2004
Spent the weekend doing random stuff. Friday night was off with some friends of Shaw's. Saturday was homework and dinner with my cousin. Today was reading for my software engineering paper. Of course I managed to slack off during all of this doing grading and fixing some random Python bug I discovered and researching something I plan to add at some point.
Forgot to mention that I finally finished 'The DaVinci Code'. Originally a gift from Jer from last year, I made it my non-tech book to read at the start of the quarter. Unfortunately to took me this long to finally finish it. That is kind of sad since it is a very quick read. A good book, though.
So 'The Incredibles' is just fantastic. Definitely buying the DVD when it comes out.
My thesis is one step away from being declared an official wash in terms of performance. The four benchmarks I have been running, when taken as a whole, don't paint a pretty picture. Two are faster, one by 0.2% and the other by 6.3%, while one shows my work being slower, by 1.6%, and the other one is a total wash. Oh well.
Fri 05 Nov 2004
So I am not happy about how the presidential election turned out. Made a promise to myself a couple weeks back that if Bush won I would find out everything I could about my Canadian citizenship and see if I couldn't get a Canadian photo ID before the school year was out.
As for my silence, I have just been very busy. I don't get much done during the day since my open time slots on Tuesday and Thursday are now filled by my TA work. I have also been under the gun getting my thesis coded so I can submit an abstract to a workshop at MIT by Nov. 12 (and will lead to its own time crunch since that workshop is on Dec. 4). Hoping to finish that finished before the weekend begins.
Networking has been on a slight break, although our last assignment was just given to us. Looks like a doozy.
This weekend is going to be spent working on my software engineering paper. Still hoping it doesn't turn out to be too difficult.
Still preparing for grad apps. Letters of rec. are in the process of being written (I hope). Next step is to get my transcripts together. Statement of Purpose is written and my CV has been updated. I also need to come up with my list of schools. Dr. Keen has been really helpful with that. Gave me a bunch of suggestions on specific schools. Also suggested that I find lists of CS dept. rankings and just start looking at them to see if they have any research work in languages. From there, if I am interested in the school, start to break them up into tiers (I am thinking three tiers). So tier 1 are long shots, tier 2 are 50/50, and tier 3 are expect to get in. Planning to 3 -4 in tier 1, 5-6 in tier 2, and 5-6 in tier 3. Going to be nice and expensive to have 15 sets of transcripts (have three sets I have to get), GRE scores, letters of rec. and application fees to pay. Plus just the time to fill out those damn forms. Luckily they are online these days so filling one out usually only takes about 2 hours.
Python work has partially been on hold because of my workload. Way behind on the Summaries; still have not done the one for the first half of October. I have caused a slight stir with a patch that I don't want to commit right now since we are close to releasing a new version and other people thinking it is okay and wishing I would. But I am sticking to my guns on this one.
At least this last time I was able to take a break by going up to stay at Jeff and Debbie's with Randy visiting for a good portion of that. Had a lot of fun just relaxing and not doing much of anything. Always enjoying seeing them. My only regret is not having more time to just stand around and talk. Always enjoy the conversations I have with all of them when we are just standing around in the kitchen or sitting in the living room with the TV off. Next time.
This weekend is going to be all about homework and grading. Fun stuff.
I am so ready for Winter Break (and no, I did not accidentally leave out Thanksgiving Break since I will probably have to do schoolwork during it).
-Brett
Tue 19 Oct 2004
Let's see if I can remember everything that has happened since my last post...
I spent most of Saturday grading CSC 310 stuff. Took much longer than I thought.
That Saturday I also went bowling with the GSA (Graduate Student Assoc. for CSC students), shot some pool, and went to Denny's for dessert.
Sunday was fixing a Python bug for strptime. Who would have thought that someone would want to be able to tell the date based on the year, week of the year, and day of the week. That algorithm was a pain to figure out and I am still working the kinks out.
My father needs to learn to keep his cell phone on him as my brother found out the hard way on his b-day of all times.
Finished my thesis and discovered it was not giving a performance boost. That was disappointing. Now I need to try to figure out ways to make it not be slower. Hopefully something will come up. If not there is a possible extension I can do to add another step to it, but that requires more work and I doubt I can get it done in time for the workshop I want to submit to.
Had a friend fall ill this morning and needed me to drive them to and from the Cal Poly Clinic. Missed a guest lecture in a class and had to turn in my homework into the professor's mailbox. Hopefully he will understand and let it slide.
One more thing to add to the b-day list: a pool cue. Discovered the standard 58" long pool cue does not cut it in terms of being long enough. Found a single place at http://www.billiardwarehouse.com/cues/schmelke/schmelke_pool_cues.htm that sells cues where you can get them up to 65" long. Unfortunately the cheapest you can go is $85 + $30 for the extended length.
Tue 12 Oct 2004
I had dinner with a friend tonight and I ended up mentioning I didn't get a good chance to talk with any of the single women at the party we had here on Saturday since they all ended up playing Cranium and I hate that game.
This somehow led my friend to make the point that they were all English grad students and thus probably would not work for me. I asked why and my friend stated that I needed someone who had a better balance between science and creativity. Thus I was curious what majors would and would not work for me in terms of a girlfriend according to her.
The first major she listed was architecture. Obviously one must have a certain scientific bend to them in order to be able to design a building that stands. But it also requires an aesthetic ability to come up with one that isn't uglier than your friend's baby who everyone knows should have a bag over its head. Although she listed other majors, architecture seemed to be the epitome of what would cover the stereotypical personality type I would mesh well with.
She then pointed out majors that would not work well for me; math and CS were the big ones. Yes, she mentioned my own major and I agree wholeheartedly. If you look at who my friends are, there are practically no people who graduated CS. Most either took a muddled major that happened to have a CS underpinnings, or were some other major like bio or sociology. And if you look at the people I talk to in my CS courses they tend to be folks you would not immediately pin as CS people. It's a real pain to be in a major where the stereotypical personality completely rubs me the wrong way.
Anyway, beyond pointing out the need for me to find someone who had both a creative and scientific side to them, she made some interesting points about traveling. First, that she would need to like to travel. Second, she would need to enjoy learning on the trip.
And both of those points are true. All of my trips where I just loved the entire trip involved appreciating the town for its history and then appreciating it for what I was able to learn while I was there. Name any of the major trips that I have taken purely just to go to the place (NYC, Chicago, London, York, Edinburgh, Oxford) and my most memorable times are either just wandering the city looking at the architecture and pondering the philosophy of life there, or it is visiting something that contains history (whether it is a museum or some historically important place).
And if I have any desire to go to some place purely for its beauty, chances are it is for its natural beauty and thus for the history of how nature created it. And after that it comes down to being able to relax by just talking with whomever I am with or to read a book. It is never about shopping (although going to London with no clothes in my suitcase and buying my entire wardrobe while I am there sounds really cool if I had the money) or just lying on the beach sunbathing or something.
So basically my friend suggested I am looking for someone who is well-rounded, educated, likes to travel, and continues to strive to learn new things. Works for me. =)
Fri 08 Oct 2004
So here is how nutty my life has turned out this past week. In networking I have been trying to get the second programming assignment done by midnight today in order to get 25% extra credit (more on that in a bit). In Software Engineering I had to come up with a paper proposal since my thesis was rejected as a possible topic (didn't have enough of a software engineering aspect to it). I don't think I did work on my thesis beyond figuring out what opcodes I wanted to implement. Dr. Haungs emailed me asking if I was interested in trying to get a paper written for a "tier 1" conference with a due date of the 29th. Obviously we will see if that short of a deadline works. I am now a student assistant for a class (once again, more in a bit) and I started today. And both of my roommates had their birthdays this week.
Yeah, it's been busy.
For networking has an assignment where I need to get a file over a network. Normally not a big deal, but we have to deal with possible lost data over the network. I had diagrammed the flow of the program and knew how I wanted to implement it. So I started coding Wednesday night.
After 10 minutes wasted on a stupid syntax error (such a pain to have to put a semi-colon after a struct) I continued work today thinking that the major code was written since an initial test worked. But then I tried transferring a big file. That flopped.
So I spent three hours trying to basically copy bits properly from longs and shorts into a char array. You would think it would be simple. Turned out to be a pain to verify it was working. And I may have had it working earlier than I thought since I then realized that I was getting the info off the network not in the simplest way possible. Once I fixed that it all started to work. So it turned out my design was good.
Now I just have to do one more part tomorrow. Blah.
Ever since I met the professor in charge of the TAs for the CS dept. here he or someone else has been after me to become a TA. It didn't look it was going to work with quarter because of my thesis so I had to pass. But then an opportunity to do very light grading and to help out in a lab for a class came up.
So now I am a grader and lab assistant (with the official title of "student assistant" since I am paid per hour instead of per unit taught) for CSC 310, Computer Science for Poets. Basically it is a class on the history of CS and how to make a simple web page.
Just so you get an idea of what the class covered, today I spent most of my time either helping people use an SFTP GUI client (fancy terms for a program to get their web page copied from the computer they were working on to the web server) or explaining how linking works. Ended up spending an extra hour in there helping folks.
OK, I have stayed up late enough. Time for bed.
Fri 01 Oct 2004
So my LCD came in today. It is now all set up and you can how my desk now looks here. It is really nice! Totally crisp, easy on the eyes, and big! =) Definitely worth the money.
The thing even allowed me to do better cord management. The base has a cord ring to snake the cords going to the LCD through. Since the LCD has four USB 2.0 ports built into it I now have my input devices going in there since the distance is shorter than going across my desk to my USB hub. It is also cleaner since I can just drape the cords straight back on my desk and then loop back to the LCD base. So now I have a cleaner desk as well.
And the thing even adjusts enough to be eye level for me! Now once I get my new chair I will finally have a fairly ergonomically-correct workstation.
Managed to get work done on my thesis yesterday. Gathered stats on how often certain opcodes and methods can be inferred. Surprising how often I can't. For instance, the Python standard library has hardly any constant math expressions in it. But there are a couple of situations that consistently across the board come up. I have a list of 10 situations I could optimize for. Need to talk to Dr. Keen and find out what he thinks.
As for this weekend, don't know what I am going to be up to. Roommate #2's mother is visiting. Today's plans were dashed thanks to an emergency with a friend (I am not involved). Probably will try to get some homework done since my second program assignment for 464 (networking) has a 25% extra credit if I can turn it in by October 9th at 00:00. That would be a nice buffer against any bad midterm or final grades. Also hope to get some laundry done since I got a ton of socks and a new pair of pants in so those need to be cleansed of fabric softener before I wear them.
Sun 26 Sep 2004
So you can all thank my step-sister for this list coming out now; she asked.
Money. The ultimate give in terms of flexibility. While I know my father hates this as a gift because of how impersonal it is, it is also the most versatile. What other gift can you use to buy food, electricity, or movie tickets with? Unless you are pimping yourself out to the checkout girl at Vons, the guy who reads the electricity meter, and the ticket person at the movie theater, there is no other gift.
Girlfriend. The timeless classic for the bachelor who is tired of that label being true. Or how about hooking up with a girl for the night? A nice make-out session with some pretty girl at some party works as well (yes, I did not list a one night stand; I still don't think I could ever do that while being sober). =)
I was going to list an LCD, but my mother of all people basically forced me to buy one. Since part of the reason I wanted a new laptop was for the dual screen setup and the output to my CRT was such crap my mom basically told me to order the LCD (I went with the Dell 2001 FP like I said I would) to fulfill the justification of the PowerBook gift. So at least that item is off the list.
Sitag Emotion task chair (model #G20030; included seat depth adjustment). This is my favorite chair when I attended NeoCon a few years back with my dad and Richard. It also won the "Best of NeoCon" that year. You can see the chair's price here.
Canon PowerShot S70. I have a Canon PowerShot G2, and it is a great camera, but the sucker is big. I thought I was going to want quality over diminutive size, but that has turned out to be wrong. My G2 is too big to keep in my messenger bag 24/7 and that is really what I want for my camera. That way I don't have to think about having it on me and allows for random photos. The S70 seems to meet the size need all while having the spiffy features my G2 allows me to have, all with a higher MP to boot. See Amazon for price info.
DVDs. Amazon has my wish list. Not exhaustive by any means, but good enough.
Music. Once again, my Amazon wish list has some items. But there is also the option of gift certificates to the iTunes Music Store.
Clothing. I was going to ask for socks, pants, and some stretch shirts from Banana Republic. But I got the socks, am trying some new sizes for pants, and I need to check the size I wear for the BR shirts. Basically that all means the BR shirts are the only pieces of clothing I am interested in having but I need to check the size when I get home first.
Adjustable weight dumb bells. I still have aspirations to get back on to my workout regime. But since my brother took back his bands and has subsequently recommended using real dumb bells, I need to get some weights to use for the work out. And being one to minimize the amount of crap I have in my own personal space, I want dumb bells that can easily have their weight adjusted without having to have a ton of weights strewn across my floor. ProBells and Power Blocks seem to be the popular brands, although I know Copelands has another brand. Trick with all of this is making sure that they total weight possible for each dumb bell goes high enough to be useful in the future.
With that out of the way, I can discuss my weekend.
Picked up friends from Ontario International at 23:09 that night; their flight was delayed a full hour. After that we went and got some food at a Taiwanese café where I obviously stood out. Had peanut butter french toast and did my little maple syrup drinking stunt. After that I went home.
Saturday was John & Erni's wedding. Ceremony was nice considering it was Catholic and thus long. Reception was fun since I got to sit with all of my friends on top of getting to see some people I had not seen in a while. Dance floor was opened up later than I would have liked and there was no garter thrown, but it was still fun. Lesson learned from all of this; a chocolate fountain to allow for fondu-like snacking is a good thing.
Spent the night at Jer's so as to allow me the great pleasure of taking everyone to the airport for their 7:30 flight. At least we all hung out a little bit before we all crashed hard for the little amount of sleep we were going to get.
After getting home at 7:45 in the morning and sleeping in until 12:45, I eventually got my mom set up on my old iBook. Hopefully this will be easier for her to use and make my life simpler. Luckily I thought ahead and installed osxvnc on it so that next time she has a problem I can just deal with it remotely.
OK, now back to my homework.
Fri 24 Sep 2004
So Thursday at about 16:30 I managed to finally have the final graphs for the test runs I had done. This means that I managed to actually surmount the problems I had been having with everything and get my work done. I am personally amazed I was able to pull it off for a while there it was looking like some problems were just not solvable (and what was worse was they were not consistent).
But it's over! Or at least for now. The next thing is Dr. Haungs goes off to Austin to present our work to a gather of Internet2 members. After that we will be getting the dataset for all of the US and that will require installing some external storage and running the tests again. So at some point I will have some more work to do. But at least, for now, I don't have to worry about it.
But that doesn't let me off the hook for my thesis as my mother has suddenly decided to remind me about (as if I need reminding since I used to be such a shoddy student and constantly lose grasp of my deadlines). Next week is going to be Thesis Week.
My thesis breaks into three phases in terms of coding. First is to get the algorithm for type inferencing work. The next phase is gathering stats on what the most common operations are on specific types. The last one is implementing type-specific opcodes and benchmarking in hopes that there is some form of a performance boost.
Phase one is done, thank god. Phase two is the next part and what I hope to have done by the end of next week. After that I have phase three and that should have me up to the point of needing to write the actual paper. This next phase should go relatively quickly so I don't expect a huge delay in it.
New laptop update: I have stopped using my external monitor. I honestly don't know if it is just because my eyes have adjusted quickly to the beauty that is the LCD on my PowerBook or if the DVI-VGA conversion is just bad, but text just looks horrible on my CRT monitor. This is a rather big disappointment since one of the big reasons I wanted a new laptop was to be able to connect my external monitor to my laptop and have dual monitor support for coding to up my productivity, but it looks like I won't get that unless I buy an LCD myself with my last paycheck or I get it as a birthday/X-mas/graduation gift or something (which I doubt will happen since my mom already gave me my laptop for that gift and my dad is not into giving "normal" gifts).
Anyway, if I were to buy an LCD today, I would get the Dell 2001FP. It's a 20.1" LCD that goes for $809.10 right now. Not only did Maximum PC name it the best LCD out there thanks to a high response time but it also has S-Video and Composite Video input which means I could hook in video game systems into it and I could finally play my console games again.
But then again I am trying to live cheaply this year. My plan is to live entirely off my financial aide loans for the year. Whether I pull that off I don't know, but it is a goal. And if I buy the LCD on my own that will definitely make it all a challenge. Could have bought it had I not done all of my framing or bought some nice dress clothes. Oh well, life is full of choices and I made mine. Joys of being a poor college student.
Mon 13 Sep 2004
Work continues to be frustrating. After finally getting all of the pieces I needed to do our testing I keep bumping into lame limitations deriving either from the software I have to use do access the data or from Windows itself. First it was the license server not liking it when it got hit by a bunch of clients at the same time; had to stagger client start-up by ten seconds to deal with that. After that problem was finally isolated and fixed I ran into a new issue of suddenly having the code asking where I file is that is in plain sight; suspect Windows has a connection cap and we are hitting it. And having to physically be at all of the Windows machines to start tests is a pain; makes you appreciate SSH and SCP that much more.
As for dreams, I can remember two that I have had in the past two or three nights (don't remember how long ago I had the oldest one). The one from a couple nights ago I only remember having my friend Anna introducing me to a friend of hers that I took a liking to. What made this odd was that she was Asian with a British accent, both of which cancel out all of Anna's friends that I have met.
The second dream happened last night. All I remember from that dream is lightly caressing some girls face. Yes, I am a hopeless romantic.
I think that last dream stemmed from two things. One is from thinking about a random situation I always thought would be cool to be in with a girlfriend; her, wearing glass with her hair messily pulled up, leaning over a laptop reading something and just glancing up at me after realizing I was just staring at her with a smile on her face. The other is bourbon. Roommate #1 and who will be dubbed Friend #3 all joined me for some bourbon last night.
Actually, we did more than drink. Friend #3 came over and cooked a good chicken and potatoes curry with some white wine. After that we played in the park's jungle gym. That inspired a random trip to Avila Beach to play on the jungle gym there. After a learning that my bony ass does not like swings thanks to the direct pressure of the seat on my hips and a quick jaunt along the water (yes, I wore my shoes the whole time) we came back and had s'mores over our fireplace. We then did what we all originally were coming together to do; crack open my virgin bottle of Maker's Mark.
Luckily I still like bourbon. =) That means I have finally found a hard liquor I like that I can drink in social situations. But it turned out to be rather strong for the other two and I was definitely biggest lover of the whiskey.
My new PowerBook is pretty much up and going now. Turning out to be a great laptop. A hell of a lot faster than my old one. Took a while to get all of the files transferred over from my iBook and to get my commonly used apps installed and configured.
Only two negatives have come about from my laptop. One is that I now want an Apple LCD bad. It is gorgeous on my laptop and it makes my CRT monitor look like utter crap. The difference is so dramatic I have been contemplating making my laptop the primary screen and my monitor the secondary instead of the other way around.
The other negative is that it resulted into the replacement of my power strip. While I was on the phone today with Jer I notied a buzzing sound. It wasn't coming from my laptop (thank god), but it did turn out to be coming from the power adapter for my PB. Roommate #1 came in with his trusty wattage measurer and we discovered that the amount of volts coming from the power strip I had was really low. So I had to go out and get a new power strip. Not totally negative, but it did end up costing me.
Fri 10 Sep 2004
Today I finally got to run our tests, and stuff went wrong. The minor one was that my charts were mislabeling the x-axis (# of clients); easy fix. The big one was that having more than 30 clients access the license server we have for using the DLL we use to access the map data leads to the rest of them popping up a dialog box to enter registration information. It looks like it might be a race condition and that if the clients open up the map data one at a time we will be okay and not run into any issues. Basic design was hashed out at the end of the day and I get to spend midday tomorrow (yes, Saturday) trying it out. If it works I won't have to go in Sunday.
At least my thesis is working out. I figured out a good way to test that type checking works properly. So I am going through and having the applicable opcodes raise syntax errors when they are applied to improper types. I have already gone through and fixed the ones that I tried out initially. Now with the testing in place I can fix them as I add the error checking. Rather cool to have something like [x for x in 42] raise a syntax error thanks to GET_ITER picking up that you can't get an iterator for an integral.
It's been interesting hanging out with my professors over the summer. I don't want to say they act like I am not there, but they don't hide anything from me when they are talking, so I know all the dirt on the department. =) Rather cool.
My early graduation gift from my mother (new laptop) is on its way and supposedly might get delivered tomorrow. I doubt it and expect it some time early next week.
In case you have been wondering what the hell I have been working on this past summer, go to http://events.internet2.edu/2004/fall-mm/sessionDetails.cfm?session=1601&event=219 and you can see the abstract on the talk being presented. You can also click on my name to read the lame bio I gave them.
Tue 07 Sep 2004
Work continued to be productive. Wrote a script that presents a command-line interface for generating graphs easily. It looks like I am going to have all the code written and tested for our tests sans actually having the DLL I need to fetch the data. Perk of this is that when we finally do get the DLL we should be able to blaze through tests. Hopefully, though, we won't have to wait too long for the DLL.
Worked on my thesis some more tonight. Began adding type checking for opcodes. I ran the test suite and got a unexpected failure, but it turned out to be correct since the test was triggering a type failure. That was a cool surprise. =)
If you ever read the Daily Python-URL you will notice my name pop up on occasion. Almost always it's for the python-dev Summaries, but on occasion something else will come up. Well, two of the past three days have had a post related to me. Both have been recipes that I submitted to the Python Cookbook.
Funny thing about this is that both recipes I came up one morning during a break at work explicitly for the editors of the second edition of the book. I had emailed them to congratulate them on their wedding and was asking how the next edition was shaping up. They mentioned they were short on some recipes covering some areas so I tried to come up with some quick recipes to fill the gap. the Daily Python-URL happened to pick up both as well as the editors seeming to want to include them in the next edition. So that was cool to have some random code I whipped up to be considered good by some people.
And once again it just floors me how I actually have some form of a name in the Python community. Steve didn't realize I had one until Bryan told him. So I explained to him what I did in the community and what exactly Bryan meant by "celebrity".
But it is still rather odd to realize that people whom I have never met know of me and my exploits. Being able to sit down at a table at PyCon and introduce myself and have people recognize my name is really cool and shocking to me. Don't think I will ever get over it.
Mon 06 Sep 2004
Friday night, knowing that I was going to be occupied during the entire extended weekend I worked on my thesis. I started by turning on some rather verbose error messages. I was still having the issue but I was trying to see if other things were being affected as well. But it turned out to be a pain to add the extra error reporting messages so I rewrote the C preprocessor macros I was using to make it cleaner. I then ran the failing test again to verify I didn't break anything.
Well, the bloody thing passed. I thought perhaps I had used the wrong flag and had run it using it without what I was testing. No, I had not. So I compiled again and it passed. I checked the other test that had failed previously when I had tried my quick fix earlier in the week. That passed as well. With bated breath I ran the entire test suite. All but one test passed (and the one that failed said it couldn't find some test file so I am chocking that up to something outside of my cause)! So for some random reason changing the testing code was enough to lead to the code to get fixed. Have no clue why it works, but I am ecstatic that it does.
And then I had the perk of one of my best friends from high school, Bryan, coming to visit on Saturday. He decided to not listen to me when I said it took over 3 hours to get here with no traffic and thought it would take 2. He paid the price and spent 4.5 hours in the car thanks to Labor Day traffic. But he did finally get here. Roommate #1 and I showed him downtown and then mostly hung out the rest of the night. Managed to get him and Roommate #1 into some comics that I have.
Sunday was spent playing a ton of video games; mostly Soul Calibur II. Then another good friend from high school, Steve, show up. He didn't get here until 20:30, though, since he decided to take the train unexpectedly. We went to dinner, came back and played some more games. And then just hung out.
Today was more food, a little bit of gaming, and then the two of them took off. And with the temperature being rather high today I have not done much since they left.
This weekend made me realize how much I missed having a summer vacation. While work took a good amount of time, I did have spots of downtime. But that was filled by work on my thesis. And I am not going to any downtime between now and school starting since crunch time is going to kick up and I am probably going to end up pulling some late nights. Guess I have to work for Winter Break for some true downtime...
... sort of. I have to start dealing with grad school apps at that point. Going to have to start worrying about getting a hold of transcripts and letters of recommendation again. Plan on using Cal's letter service again since it is really handy to use when you have a ton of apps. Transcripts will be another issue, though, since I have three schools to get them from (PCC, Cal, and Cal Poly). If they don't have online ordering I will need to go and pick up a ton of them up personally to mail in myself. Yuck.
Wed 01 Sep 2004
A long time ago Raymond wrote an email to python-dev about the School of Hard Knocks and what various painful things one must go through to basically be considered a major Python developer. Well, today I finally met the one requirement I was lacking.
PEP 3000 is co-authored by me and I just made my first edit of it. Writing a PEP is kind of a personal milestone for me since it is one of the few major things that most of the Python developers have done that I haven't (last thing is to contribute some major feature to the language).
Today I took the last type of feasible transportation (plane and train don't work here) to or from school by walking home after work. Took an hour. Would have gone fast had I taken a more direct route (walked along California since it is more scenic) or didn't have my laptop in my bag.
But if I had not gone that way I would not have been spotted by a fellow Cal grad. Yes, some random guy driving by recognized me from hanging around Soda and/or Cory Hall at Berkeley. He pulled over and asked if I went to Cal. Told me where he recognized me from. Turns out he is going to be in EE here at Cal Poly. Guess I am kind of hard to not notice. Gave him my card.
Dealt with a bunch of people's birthday gifts today. Inspiration for unique gifts has left me lately. I seem to have spurts of great inspiration and then not being able to think of anything neat.
I offloaded all the photos I had from my cell phone. They all look like they were passed through an Impressionist painting filter in Photoshop. Makes some of them look rather cool and others lose their quality.
And speaking of cell phones, I think I am going to get pinched in terms of a good time to do it. If I switch to T-Mobile I am screwed since there are no local providers. And if it can take up to three days to switch I am going to get screwed since I am going to need my phone. That makes this weekend bad. When I go down to LA on the way to John Ernie's wedding, but I will need to make sure that I have someone else with me to act as a temporary phone.
Unless my other phone still works. If the transition time is short between the two providers then it won't really matter. Guess I need to investigate this weekend if I have the time.
So I went up to the Bay Area on Friday. Having discovered I don't fit in off-the-rack suits anymore I decided to take the opportunity of being in a fashionably-centered town to go clothes shopping for dress shirts and slacks. And, as always when shopping for me, it was a challenge.
Jackie and I went over and hit up Banana Republic. Turns out they don't even come close to carrying my needed sizes in anything, so it is a non-starter there.
Macy's was next after we met up with Jer. Hit the shirt department and went over to the guy with the tape measure around his neck to get measured. Well, I was a 16.5/36-37 according to him. So we grabbed some 16/37 shirts and I tried them on; not good. They were too damn short.
Next up was Nordstrom. Had a nice fellow help us out. Managed to discover that Nordstrom brand shirts of the size 16/39 fit well. Bought a white shirt there and ordered what they claimed was a "yellow", but was more of a yellowish-green. But still no pants since I was told that my desired inseam of 38 was not available and only one pant came in 37 which did not look good on me. So pants were still needed.
Next day was Jackie's birthday party at Sandy's. Usual fun with that group. Had good French food prepared by Sandy.
After that we went to the MayFair mall. Hit up the Nordstrom there. Was passed on to a man name David who managed to pull off the miracle of not only having slacks that fit well but discovering a brand of shirt that fit me well; Hugo Boss. Never thought I would wear Hugo Boss, but there you go.
After meandering around the mall with the ladies doing there thing while Channing and I did our best to entertain ourselves we went over to Gabe's for his birthday party. As usual got to see people I have not seen in a while on top of being surrounded by people I see, as one person put it, "for three hours out of the year". Spent most of the night wandering between conversations.
Once that party finally wrapped I went to Jeff and Debbie's for the night. Stayed up late talking with them as I always do when I hang out with them.
After sleeping in (although since we had stayed up so late I still didn't get 9 hours of sleep) we all went to go meet up with our friend Randy who is back from studying in Japan for a year. After he stopped stating how "huge" I was, we decided to eat. Ended up at Claim Jumper. Spent the meal being our ridiculous selves. Luckily Randy is one of my friends where I can just go off the deep end on my humor (read: taking digs at each other while being completely un-PC and dirty) with and we just bantered back and forth.
After the meal we played Trash Talk Double-Trash (more properly known as Mario Kart Double-Dash) for a while. With Randy and I on a team while Jeff and Debbie were another we managed to beat both 100 cc and 150 cc difficulty Extra races. Amazingly enough Randy and I managed to be the ones who passed the 150 cc while Jeff and Debbie took 100 cc. Crap I sometimes miss video games.
We then just talked way too late. Randy had to get back for school that morning (what time he did not know; typical Randy). It had gotten so late that I couldn't drive back without fear of falling asleep at the wheel so I napped for four hours before I took off at 6:30 the next morning.
Pulled into work at 9:30 (rather shocked I did the trip in three hours but there was no traffic so I think that helped a lot) and started. Work details later on.
That night, shortly after getting home, my roommate and I went over to a friend's of his for dinner. Nice girl and we planned on a night hike the next night. After dinner I went over to hang out with my second cousin and her mom.
Managed to get to work by 9:00 the next day and work. Took a nap after getting home but shortly after took off for the hike. Climbed Bishop's Peak with my roomy, cousin, friend of roomy, and a bunch of friend's of the friend (keeping people anonymous is a bitch). Took about an hour to get to the top. Fairly dark when we reached it. When we headed down, which took an hour itself, the moon was out. Great time.
OK, so work update. Right now I am writing up a test driver for the tests we will need to generate numbers for the paper that is apparently to be presented in September and March which could also be up for journal publication. Trying to automate it as much as possible and so far it has been working fairly well. Pretty close to being done sans actually doing the test since we are short one piece which is out of my control.
As for my thesis, I have not touched it in a while. The last bug still needs to be squashed. Once that is done I will hopefully be done in terms of getting recompilation done. That means I can then turn on detecting errors from improper types being applied to each other. That should not be too horrible to debug. After that it is statistics gathering for the type-specific opcodes. Then it is benchmarking to try to show that it is all worth it.
And speaking of my thesis, hardly anyone seems to remember that I am working on this. Just the other day someone said the guy who wrote Starkiller (an app that does full type inferencing but it is time-insensitive and only works if you execute the code you compiled against) should get grant funding since type inferencing is so important. It feels like I missed catching the limelight for this by a year. Hopefully my numbers will be positive and I will be able to present at the next PyCon. I know it is egotistical to be feeling this way, but that's life. I want recognition for my hard work and I just have not seen it.
Wed 25 Aug 2004
... or at least not during the summer. I decided to give public transportation a try today to see if the routes I picked out worked for getting to school. Plan to use the bus for when it rains or when I want to show up at school in decent attire (i.e., non-biking dress).
Anyway, the bus seemed like a strange microcosm of LA sans vanity. No one talked to anyone. No one made eye contact. And there is tall, young me walking on to the bus with a smile on my face facing two other people who couldn't care less about the mood I was in. Oh well.
Work was interesting again. Had to add a table to the DB and make the code auto-assign computers. Doubt the assigning algorithm is worth anything but it seems to work. So basically the code can be considered in beta. I now have to have it do proper error reporting, clean up the API, and then document.
My walls are now mostly decorated. I put up two posters (Chinese New Year that is a VW Beetle ad and my Z3 poster), my diploma, my Edinburgh map, and my print of "School of Athens". Now I am only waiting my poster of Victoria Silvstedt to come to hang behind my door (finally going to have a "guy" poster =) .
For the first time someone in their blog spoke negatively of me. The person basically said I was "whining about the whining" in reference to the whole decorators hoopla in PythonLand (it's what led to me reading 1,289 emails for the last python-dev Summary). Don't know the person at all so I don't know how much umph he has behind his words, but they seem to be getting to the point of arguing with me. Be interesting if I ever meet the guy in person how I handle myself.
Tue 24 Aug 2004
Quick thesis update. Looks like one bug is left. I think I have a hackish way to deal with it but I want to try to fix it properly. Just need to find the time to try to find the problem.
Work finally made a turn for the interesting last Thursday. I began doing DB work for the testbed grant and that required learning SQL (which you pronounce the letters and not as "sequel" as everyone else in the world says, apparently). So that made it interesting. Looks like it is pretty close to being feature-complete (just need to implement a change Dr Haungs came up with today). After that it will be clean up, documentation, and testing with multiple machines.
The orthophoto grant is supposedly moving forward. The switch is in, but the network card we need had its order fall off the face of the earth. Software we need is supposedly going to be in our hands this week. Looks like the scope of the paper will be scaled back thanks to the delays and having little time left before school starts.
Went down and visited my mom this past weekend to help her set up her room. Managed to get most of it done. Got to see the garage organized and cleaned up for the first time since my mom moved. There are a lot of lock-top baskets in there filled with toys from my childhood.
Did the python-dev Summary for the first half of August. Couple of milestones associated with it. First is that I have been doing the Summaries now for two years. Both AM and Michael who did it before me were not crazy enough to do it that long. It also consisted of the most amount of email in a single summary: over 1,200. Led to me stating I was going to scale back what was covered. Gave the community a choice over specifying what they wanted covered or letting me choose. It has been unanimous so far to have me choose what I want.
After realizing I have not been able to participate with python-dev as much as I would like recently I did a bunch of random work after I got the last summary out. It's been a nice break from other stuff.
Looks like I am going to end up going with T-Mobile for a new cellular service provider. Both Verizon and Sprint don't have Bluetooth functionality and I have gotten addicted to wireless updates from my iBook and having a wireless headset. I really could care less about the other features of the phones. Have yet to discover my dream phone that is call-centric but has Bluetooth. Probably will never happen since Bluetooth is connected with high-end features.
Sun 15 Aug 2004
So that nasty bug that has been plaguing my thesis was finally squashed. But then I ended up with another one! Luckily I managed to solve that one as well (the CST was being modified by changing a numeric constant being applied against '-' into a constant with just a negative sign; led to my code putting two '-' in front of the number and ending up thinking it was 0.0). As of right now I am running the test suite. Seem to have some random errors (4 total) but most of the tests are passing so it looks like I am fairly close to being in working order. Need to clean out all compiled files, compile both my version and a pristine one and then run the regression tests for both versions to compare errors. That way I can just focus on the tests that are not supposed to be failing. Unfortunately at this point they will be nasty bugs (have to output all the opcodes generated and then compare them between an innocuous single compilation and when I forcibly recompile 'for' and 'while' loops; slow, boring, and painful) so I am hoping that all the failures are expected.
Work this week shifted over to the testbed grant completely. Dr Haungs and I discussed the design and seem to have a decent one laid out. Unfortunately the project is in PHP so that kind of sucks. But luckily there is a PHP has an xUnit testing framework available so I will be able to at least test my code.
And the parts for the other grant have started to come in as well. Looks like I will spend all of next week on the testbed grant and then switch over to the orthophoto grant beginning after this upcoming weekend.
Got back my framed stuff. Have not put them up yet since my mother supposedly has these amazing picture hooks. So I should get to hang those up next week.
One roommate is back so at least I am not alone in town anymore which is nice.
Trip up to SF got cancelled for this weekend.
Tue 10 Aug 2004
So that little bug I mentioned last time? It managed to trigger a syntax error in code included by OS X (specifically from stdio.h)! I had to rip out all of my code just to get my code to compile again! And none of it is my fault! That is destroying my lead time.
And I realized another possible issue with TAing. If work gets really delayed and I end up needing to work during the first couple weeks of school that will really hurt my free time, and thus hurt any TA work I would be doing. The world is against me teaching, I swear.
I did other stuff, but just not in the mood to regurgitate at the moment.
