Rezaf Diary

To be a pioneer, or to conform?

2013-01-23T19:22:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking a lot recently, and have realized a few things about how we behave in a society. The following is an observation regarding this. I have always liked to be the contrarian. To be the pioneer, the challenger to the status quo. The one who comes up with bold, new ideas. It is a romantic notion, going against the odds and beating it.

But lately I have come to a new conclusion: The society rewards conformance. It doesn't like a pioneer, it is scared of him. When you want to join another group of people, whether it is a job in a company, a social group or anything else, they look for conformance to what they think you should be, not who you are.

Is the life of a pioneer one of perpetual loneliness, always fighting against the world alone? And how do leaders attract others to their cause? One obvious way is extreme conformance, otherwise known as populism. But what about the true pioneer with a vision? How can he attract a following?

The only solution I can think of is to curb your enthusiasm for a while. Conform to the standards, join a group, and make them accept you as a member. Only then you can gradually start to move the whole group towards your vision. In this respect, human society acts as a cold-blooded frog, which you cannot drop in a boiling pot, but can leave in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature to boiling.

This might look sad, but it is hard and cold fact of life as a human being.

Consider the following two scenarios, where a hiring team discuss two candidates after interview.
A) "This guy is not bad. I'd score him a B, maybe a C. But he knows how to do what we do. And John and Jane are about to retire, and we need to keep the wheels rolling. Let's hire him, we can always teach him to better do what we do."
B) "Man this guy is good, very good! He's definitely an A player! But, he has some crazy ideas. He even suggests we change the way we work! What he says might work and get us rich, and he has the credentials. But I'm still worried something might badly go wrong. I don't know man, he's too risky".

Results: the first guy gets hired, even though he's technical level is C. The second guy, a motivated pioneer with A-level technical qualifications is deemed too risky and is left out.

Talk about priority inversion!

More from AppleTV Linux Saga

2012-12-23T01:44:00.002-06:00

In my last post I mentioned my adventure with installing linux on an Apple TV (1st gen). I spent another couple of hours on it, and got it to a good shape. Here I'd like to document the steps. For some more info, read the post right before this one.

Step 0. Get an AppleTV. Open it up and replace the hard drive with a new one. Well you can use the old one if you'd like.

Step 1. Create an ATV-Bootloader USB disk. Use the excellent GUI tool from here: https://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

Step 2. Boot into ATV-Bootloader using the USB disk. Then, Partition the hard drive using: http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/wiki/PartitioningLinux I ended up creating 5 partitions on my hard drive.

Step 3. Download a Linux live CD image and burn it on a USB disk with a command like like
dd if=/path/to/img of=/dev/sdb
. Now, I tried many combinations of Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on using 8.04 hardy. Technically no one on the internet has managed to boot AppleTV with Linux Kernel 3.x, so you're stuck with 2.6.x branch. On Ubuntu side, that is at most 11.04. I did try 12.04 or 12.10, but neither boots up. 11.04 installer didn't boot up completely, complaining about not finding a cdrom. I didn't try the ubuntu 10.x or 9.x branch either. Also ubuntu 9.10 and higher use grub2 bootloader that is incompatible with ATV-Bootloader. There is a download package on ATV-Bootloader website that supposedly fixes this, but I cannot verify it.
Long story short, save yourself some trouble and stick to 8.04. I didn't and wasted a lot of time on it. Anyway, the instructions on this page are very good for booting into the Linux installer: http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/wiki/BootingLiveCD
I suggest alternative CD installers or ubuntu-servers, as the graphical installer uses too much memory, which will end up freezing the AppleTV.

Step 4. Go on with the installation.

step 5. In order to not need the USB disk to boot, you can install the ATV-Bootloader on the proper partitions you created in step 2. http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/wiki/PartitioningLinux http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_Ubuntu_and_XBMC_on_Apple_TV_1#Start_Linux_installation

Step 6. You can make the whole thing bootable by editing com.apple.Boot.plist and changing "none" to "auto". By now, you should have a proper ubuntu 8.04 server installed on your AppleTV, and when you turn it on it should load up all the way to a command prompt login.
Now let's try installing a graphical interface.

step 7. Install X11. sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-dev xinit xfonts-base x11-xserver-utils xauth
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_Ubuntu_and_XBMC_on_Apple_TV_1#Start_Linux_installation

step 8. Before rebooting, download the 304.x version of NVIDIA graphics driver from their website and install it.

step 9. Ok, now that we have X11 and a graphics driver, let's install a Desktop environment. Currently LXDE is known as the most efficient and usable desktop environment. http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=59

step 10. Let's reboot the machine. If you're lucky, you should boot into a working environment.

step 11. Install the wireless network driver: http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/wiki/InstallWireless

step 12. Install the sound driver. Well I install it but I don't have HDMI audio, and haven't tried analog ones yet. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_Ubuntu_and_XBMC_on_Apple_TV_1#Install_atvclient

step 13. (from the same link as above) install atvclient, which stops the annoying LED blinking.

step 14. I suggest not updating your packages. I did, and it broke my openbox window manager, and no matter what I couldn't get it to work again. I eventually had to remove it, install lxde 'lite' session manager, and replace openbox with metacity (sudo pat-get metacity, and change a config file, google for it) to get it to work again.

step 15. Unfortunately installing LXDE this way is an underwhelming experience as it comes with no pre installed program, and still some of the programs that I install do not work (including firefox and opera, but midori works and is a decent browser).
Unfortunately the first ubuntu version which had lubuntu alternate installer CD (to escape from the graphical installer) is 11.10, which has a Linux kernel 3.2.x that in incomatible with ATV, and it's a no-no. I tried installing ubuntu-server 11.04 and planned to run "sudo apt-get install lubuntu", but as mentioned earlier the installer got stuck looking for a real cdrom.
In retrospect, I probably should have picked xubuntu instead of lubuntu (edit: LXDE works just fine, thank you!). Still, I have a decent setup as of now. ~~Well, no audio yet and flash didn't work in midori.~~ Latest version of firefox works fine and plays youtube flash videos full screen sized! (with about 100MB of memory usage). It's a full Linux box with decent GUI at the moment. The only thing that doesn't work yet is HDMI audio, ~~and I haven't verified if analog audio is working (Apple TV uses RCA outputs, kind of non-standard)~~ but the analog audio output works just fine. But Hulu videos are slightly choppy. Still watchable, but a but choppy. During a Hulu playback session in full screen, the flash plugin uses about 85% of CPU cycles and 52% of the 256 MB memory. The firefox process doesn't use much CPU cycles (0.7%), but uses another 15% of the physical memory. I credit the adobe flash player's use of the nvidia GPU capabilities. My guess is that the CPU is basically used for network and streaming workload, and the GPU takes care of the rest.
For now I'm going to call it a day and use it the way it is now. If I do more, I'll post it here.

==============================================
Edit: I decided to set it up for now as a home server for remote ssh and possibly a web server. I could use it for squid too, but these services will come at a later point.

Why? Well I forgot to tell you that I removed the fan inside the Apple TV, and it is working just fine. The fan seems to be useless, it's not even installed on the CPU, It's just there. Anyway, without the fan, I have a noise-less machine at my home. Perfect for a 24/7 server.

Another piece of info about the memory usage. gnome-system-monitor reports that the current installation (with lxde and metacity) uses a grand total of 68MB of active, writable memory, and 188MB of free memory. That's a drastic change from when I had Mac OS 10.5.8 running on it, when the free memory would at best reach around 50~60MB. I'd say, mission accomplished!

60 hours with Linux

2012-12-09T23:27:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone, loooong time no see :-) So a few things happened since my last post here. I finished my PhD studies and finally graduated. I spent maybe a quarter of last year traveling. I started playing the Persian setar, and maybe, only maybe, I might be on the path to start a startup company. Anyway, this post is not about the past year or two, it is about the past 60 hours, where I spent wrestling with Linux two separate Linux installations (and a total 8 hours of sleep).

Exhibit A:
The first one was setting up a modern Linux variant, Ubuntu 12.10 on an up-to-date PC, one which I bought components for in this past black-friday. We are talking Intel core i7 3770K, 16GB of memory, NVIDIA GTX480 (which I got from NVIDIA as a gift in the last GTC conference), SSD, etc. The intent here was to setup a CUDA 5 development station. I wrestled with installing 12.10 first, then 12.04 and finally only got everything to run under 11.10. The problem turned out to be assumptions, and lack of enough documentation. See, I first tried to install NVIDIA drivers downloaded directly from NVIDIA website on Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04, but for whatever reason it didn't work. Googling around, I found out that ubuntu has now packaged the latest drivers (310.19) in their repositories, and it's just a matter of a simple "sudo apt-get install nvidia-current". But but but, turned out the CUDA 5 toolkit assumes the libraries are not in /usr/lib/nvidia-current, where the ubunutu developers have decided to put them. More over, the CUDA 5 make file structure has changed, and instead of a including a common.mk file, each make file is not independent. So I would have to modify every single SDK sample by hand to make it work. Another problem: ubuntu 12.10 has moved to gcc 4.7, which is NOT compatible with CUDA 5. Solution: I moved back to 11.10, where gcc is 4.6, and NVIDIA drivers install just fine. Although I think I may move the machine to 12.04. Another problem I experienced is that the Atheros AR8161 ethernet chips that are integrated on my GA-Z77-DS3H motherboard do not yet have a driver on Linux, apparently on any version of ubuntu at least. I'm sure time will fix this problem, but at the moment it seems the only solution is compiling a custom Linux kernel and installing kernel modules manually. Moral of the first story: Make sure to understand the assumptions used in Linux packages. Also, the situation in Linux world (or ubuntu world at least) is as hectic as it ever was.

Exhibit B:
So I ended up working very late in my new lab (at the IGB building at UIUC, which seems to be an empire of its own, but that's a story for a different time). Why? Because I don't yet have a keycard, and the building is locked after 5 PM and weekends. Geeeez! Anyway, after I installed the ubuntu 11.10 and got my CUDA 5 working, I went back home at 2 PM. Well I still had the Linux itch in me, and had the components ready for another go. SO I started a weekend project, to install Linux on my Apple TV (first gen). I had previously replaced the Apple's media player OS with a version of Mac OS X leopard (10.5.8), but I was never happy with the performance. AppleTV only has 256MB of memory with a 1GHz pentium M processor. The processor isn't bad, but the RAM is really limited and the system starts thrashing as soon as you want to do anything useful. Add this to the slow speed of the original 4200 RPM hard drive, and the experience is very lethargic. Anyway, I first tried to go without the prepackaged crystalbuntu images, but neither the live USB nor the installation image could boot the system. I suspect the reason was that I had put a brand new SSD drive insead of the hard drive. Dang! I finally found out about the ATV-Bootloader project, which is pretty neat. The idea is that when AppleTV BIOS can't find its Apple provided TV, it will fall back to a recovery partition and run whatever it is there (assuming it has an Apple Boot.efi). ATV_bootloader does exactly that. You partition your hard drive (or USB) with an Apple partitioning scheme, use the correct boot.efi from Apple, but then hand it a Linux image to boot. The result is that the system boots up to a busybox kernel. From there on, you have control and can boot into another kernel using another neat trek called kexec, which is the same idea used for exec, but for kernels. It works since Linux (Unix) kernels are image based, all you need is a vmlinuz and initrd.gz (or initrd.lz in newer ubuntus). So after I got into busybox, I tried installing ubuntu 12.10 or lubuntu 12.10. Neither would load up. So after Googling more, I decided to curb my enthusiasm and settle on what has shown to work, ubuntu 8.04. I also decided to go with lubuntu / LXDE, but alas Lubuntu wasn't available back in 8.04 time frame. Anyway, ubuntu 8.04 LIveCD (copied onto a USB) would run fine, but the installation process was VERY VERY SLOW. It took it 6 hours (!!!) to get from page 1 of the install script to page 6, and it finally froze on page 7. Sooo, back to drawing boards again. This time I decided to use 8.04 server edition, and lo and behold the installation worked out just fine! W00t, I have a functioning Linux. Then I went ahead with installing X11 package y package and then LXDE on top of it. The whole thing ended up in a pretty fast Linux experience, which wouldn't need much more than the 256MB RAM available. I set aside a large swap space on the SSD, but haven't got to the point to try out its effects yet. I had a little bit of adventure with older NVIDIA drivers not liking 8.04 due to the support for XEN in that version of the kernel. I ended up installing the latest legacy driver package from NVIDIA, 304.xx, and it seems to work fine. However, I'm still having a hard time getting the wireless chip to work. My network at home is WPA2, which is proving to be too hard for the current configuration. (I'm not even sure if the broadloom hardware supports it.). For the time being, I'm connecting it through ethernet to my macbook pro (using "internet sharing" functionality, since I only have wifi in my house and no wire. Sharing internet with my neighbor can be economical, but once in a while you end up wishing for a wire!) I'm currently using midori for the browser, which is slightly more memory consuming than dillo (where I was a Mac OS X contributor for a short time), but much more functional. Turns out installing X and LXDE from scratch is a bit of an underwhelming experience, since pretty much nothing else is installed. That's why a distro helps you so much, it already has a lot of stuff included. I'm not fully done with it yet, since putting "startx" in /etc/rc.local ends up loading LXDE in root mode, which isn't a very good idea. And in my last round of tinkering, I lost the window manager functionality (probably open box got crushed somehow). I have X and graphics, but no window borders!

Moral of story: It's fun fun fun to tinker with Linux, but don't expect to get very functional setups. At the end of the day, I'm glad I have my Macbook pro with its very functional unix based OS that works and doesn't need constant tweaking. Also, I would like to switch to some distro that doesn't change all the time. From Ubuntu 8 to 12 SOOO MANNNNYYYYy things have changed! I'd like to invest my time in a more stable distro that doesn't change all the time. I think RHEL and its open source equivalents (CENTOS, Scientific Linux) probably change less often, but I'm too unfamiliar with RPM based distros that I'm afraid to move. I like my apt-get! And Debian itself isn't sexy enough for many, for example there is no NVIDIA CUDA package for Debian. So, I guess for the time being I'll stick to ubuntu and accept the fact that it changes all the time. Well, maybe if I stick to LTS releases ...

Picasa for Mac

2009-05-15T04:44:00.000-05:00

I have been waiting literally for ages to organize my pictures. At one point I almost did it by using Picasa, but unfortunately it was only a few weeks before my transition to a Mac. Ever since, I have been trying to convince myself to change my picture storing habits from self-controlled folders to trusitng iPhoto to do the correct thing, but it never worked for me. I think I just need to have the control.

Any way, Picasa is finally available to macs. And it works quite well, especially since at its core Picasa is an image viewer, not an image organizer like iPhoto. By the way, I have the same problem with iTunes, I wish it could only monitor my music folders and show their contents, but that's a different story.

Anyway, hopefully this move will make emailing and Picasa-Web-Album-Sharing of my pictures much easier and hence pheasible. People who know me usually think my camera is a one way black hole, and even though my pictures are usually good (photography is one of my hobbies) they rarely get to see the final shots! Hopefully it won't be the case anymore.

To coelebrate this development, here's a picture of the sunrise in Galveston Island, Texas.

Enjoy!

Large Japanese soroban, belonged to John Nash.

2009-05-11T11:07:00.001-05:00

I found this soroban in an admin room. Now belonging to our university, it used to belong to John P. Nash.

Being impressed

2009-05-10T17:39:00.001-05:00

How technology has progressed! I'm on a conference call with two colleagues, sending SMS messages to another friend, taking a picture of my back yard and writing a blog post about it. All at the same time, from my cell phone. That's why I like to be in this industry. What you can only dream of one day will be accomplished in no time.

My motorcycle

2009-05-04T02:25:00.001-05:00

So here it is. Doesn't it look great?!

Let's hope it will provide me with countless hours of safe fun and excitement.

A post after a long hiatus

2009-05-04T02:07:00.001-05:00

Ok, here I am after a long delay. It's been hard to keep up with all the work. Well, I'll try to write more often. Anyway.

Today I rode on my motorcycle for the first time. What a pleasent rush of feelings! The wind, fast moving scenary around you, and the looming danger which requires you to be 100% aware of everything. Nice experience.

Well, yes, I had not mentioned it earlier. I did big a motorcycle a few days ago. And I'm so happy I did. I'll post some pics in my next post.

Software I cannot live without

2009-02-07T12:41:00.015-06:00

As a graduate student, there are a few software packages I cannot live without. They do an impressive job in organizing my tasks and projects, helping me in research and organizing my life in general.

They are also all Mac OS X applications. Some of them come pre-installed with a Mac, some you have to buy. Fortunately they are usually not expensive, and are really worth every dollar.

So, without further ado, here they are:

Apple Mail. Comes with Mac, integrated with everything else on the Mac. If you are a Mac user, you just "have" to setup Mail. I have set it up to connect to gmail servers using IMAP (DO NOT USE POP3, it is "inferior"!), and it works handsomely, almost like a poor man's exchange server! Also can read RSS feeds, which is invaluable.
iCal. Again a great application. Integrated with Mail. And everything else on Mac.
Preview. Great FAST application to work with PDFs and images.
Safari. I left firefox and became a safari user. It does have its quirks, but it has PDF viewing integrated at its core, and for a graduate student, nothing is more important.
OmniFocus. I "LOOOOOVE" this app! Cannot live without it. I got it as a gift from a friend (thanks Ellick!), but it is worth every single dollar. Gets your life organized. iCal is cool and everything, but it is only a calendar, and a calendar can go only so far. It is designed based on GTD (Getting Things Done) principles, and does a great job doing it.
Papers. Creates a catalog of papers you have downloaded on your computer. Great searching functionality. Costed me $25, and is worth it.
Microsoft Office 2008 suite. Well, I use them, and they do the job. They are clunky compared to other Mac apps, but with docx and pptx files being sent around (and virtually being the standard formats), there is no other choice. I've heard good things about the new iWork 09, but for now I'm sticking to MS Office. Costed me $50 with educational discount, and I'm generally happy with it. Note: Word, PowerPoint and Excel are the standard ones, but Entourage is also useful as a newsgroup reader. I don't use it for its mail and calendar functionalities, Apple Mail and iCal are better integrated.
MacTeX. Great app for LaTeX users. Comes with great front end apps like TeXShop, LaTexIT (Mathematical Expression editor), and of course the TeX engine.

So here you go. There are other features in the Mac OS X itself that make life easier for me, but that's a different story.

P.S. Apple Mail (in IMAP mode) works great with iPhone's Mail. Same with iCal, and OmniFocus.

I'm worth....

2008-04-04T19:01:00.001-05:00

<span> Powered By Adult Toy Shop

I dreamed of flying

2008-02-19T07:14:00.006-06:00

Last night I dreamed of flying. It was such an awesome dream, such a nice feeling. Indescribable!

Part of it was because of my flying apparatus in my dream. Think of it like a motorcycle. A Kawasaki ninja to be more precise. Something like this one:

(Image from www.pashnit.com, all copyrights belong to them)

But it had retractable wings, each like 3 feet, and that was it! It also had a strange-looking helmet built-in, which would automatically place on your head, and had some HUD (head-on-display) stuff in it. Think master chief helmet:

(Image from www.videogamesblogger.com, all copyrights belong to them)

Now here's the best part of it: I bought it (of course in my dream) for a little bit below $3000! Yep, dreams! I flied to somewhere in Britain, and such a fly it was!

Man, I have to go to a flying school now!

Strange plants

2007-10-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

Computer Graphics have come a long way. Just look at these plants. They look soooo real!

I have come back, to my senses.

2007-09-17T19:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a procrastinator. Here, I admitted it. I spend hours and hours reading about gaming industry's rumors and news instead of playing them (Yeah, that's retarded!) I spend even more hours reading news, to see what's happening on the face of our poor planet. I kill time watching pointless youtube videos.

So, I may have come back to my senses. How? Well, it was a coincident. I came across this funny video from Digg. Well, it's certain that you'll feel something wrong with it after laughing for a few seconds: It's so kiddish! I mean, I haven't done any type of these "funny" stuff for almost 15 years now!

BANG! Reality suddenly hit me hard. Here I am, in one of the top national graduate schools wasting my time watching teenager stuff, and wasting my time reading the damn comments!

NO MORE, I say. I've gotta quit this, as hard as it may be. And the best way to quit something is taking it away. But wait, I'm a research student, I need google at least twice an hour! Well, the answer is this: BLOCK the sites you know are time-hogs!

As great as sites like Digg, Youtube, Google news and Balatarin (Persian equivalent of Digg) are, they just consume TOOOOO much of my time, and hence are blocked. Well, I've set them to be accessible 1 hour per day. If anyone wants my modifications to Gina's hack (add a finish time to the view limit), please say so in comments.

I hope this solution can help me quit my addiction to cyberslacking!

P.S. The rule of tolerable ten looks promising too!

Google is filtered in Iran?!

2007-09-17T01:34:00.000-05:00

This may sound unbelievable, but in the latest round of filtering internet sites in Iran, google.com and many of its services have been filtered. The filtering is not limited to a single ISP, and users in many cities who use different ISPs are experiencing the same. Even Gmail is not left out, and many users cannot even access their email accounts.

Aside for almost every political Persian language site, many popular sites such as Wikipedia and youtube are also filtered in Iran.

If you can read Persian, you can go to this link on Balatarin.com (which is the Persian equivalent of Digg) and read the latest news about this problem.

wii have to go?!

2007-09-13T00:22:00.000-05:00

So I got a wii, in a moment of madness! Saw one at the local Walmart and grabbed it without even thinking. But, it has left me unimpressed.

See, there are not many games I'd be craving to play on Wii, unlike XBOX360 or even PS3. I'll put a list of the games I'd like to play here, partly to try to convince myslef not to put the wii on ebay!
The ones that I pretty much want to play are:

Metroid prime corruption (which 3 of my best pals got me for my birthday, God bless their souls!)
Resident Evil 4 wii edition
The legend of Zelda, twilight princess
Mercury Melt down revolution (not out yet)
soul calibur legends (not out yet)
Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party (dance with a pad AND wii-mote, not out yet)

2'nd tier games would be:

Super paper mario
Super mario world (virtual console)
The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time (virtual console)
Super mario galaxy (not out yet)
Super smash Brawlz (not out yet)

3'rd tier ones:

Mayby Warioware?
Super Mario 64 (virtual console)
Sonix 3(Just because I couldn't get to play this as a kid!, virtual console)
Golden axe (brings back memories!, virtual console)
Mario kart 64 (virtual console)
resident evil: umbrela chronicle (On rail shooter, similar to the house of the dead? not out yet)
Loony tunes:ACME arsenal (not out yet)
Mortal combat: Armageddon (not out yet)

As you can see, there not much game for wii currenly that I crave, and for that matter even games who are supposed to be released in the coming months. I can easily get away with not playing the 3'rd tier games, and maybe with a bit of cursing I can ignore the second tier ones.

Well, maybe virtual console can make me keep it. Then again, I can subscribe to console classix and get many of those games much cheaper! Also, I'll get to play it on my laptop then, which frees me from bearing with never-ending rants of certain female family members, whining about a soap opera or something being played on the TV when I play the Wii!

Not sure yet, but I think it's a goner!

Apple store on iPhone day

2007-07-03T23:33:00.000-05:00

There has been so much haloo baloo about the iphone I'm not even going to start, and this post is not about it at all! You see, I went to buy a macbook on exactly that date, Friday June 29th (yeah baby!) So I go there while awaiting a huge mess and tired sales people. But what I saw positively surprised me! About 3~4 Apple sales people were clapping and congratulating people who would enter the store! WOW! Take a look for yourself:

By the way, this is my very first video ever uploaded on youtube! And of course yes, I made it with my macbook (took the footage with my cell phone, a palm treo).

Entering unknown waters

2007-03-08T17:04:00.000-06:00

So I've been suddenly pushed into the world of linux kernel hacking. I've been waiting for this for a long time now, but now that I'm struggling with some kernel and device driver books, I feel soo confused and lost! Well, I hope after being exposed for a longer period to this type of material, everything make sense at some point.

I just did the first step, I'm downloading the linux kernel source code right now. It is 50+ Megabytes of zipped information, which is really scary! OK, download completed, I'm off to new unexplored (for me) terrains!

My new cell will make me feel like a president

2007-02-19T22:16:00.000-06:00

I bought a new treo 680 cell phone on the president day, so I'll be feeling like a president from now on. I'm still waiting for my newly bought treo to come in a few days, but I've been using a Nokia smartphone for a 3 years now. With my Mp3 Player in a pocket and Palm Zire organizer in another (and the big chunky Nokia in a third) I felt like anybody excpet an executive!

So, how my treo is supposed to make me feel like a president? First of all it's going to eliminate three humps on my pants! With a leather case on my belt and my trousers finally fitting on me, I'll definitely LOOK more like an executive.

Then whenever I pull my treo out, I'll feel as exclusive as a president, cause I went through all the troubles to get an exclusive arctic white treo. Not a bland grey or silver, but the absolutely great looking white one!

Aside from aesthetics, I've been relying on my Palm to organize my life for a long time now (my first Palm was an m105 back in 2001, and I never felt OK with the Symbian. Stylus rocks!). I simply can't live without my calendar, and the occasional missing of an appointment due to my laziness (of finding in which pocket I've put my Palm) or bad luck (oops, I forgot to bring the Palm!) should totally vanish with my treo.

I'm going to set my three different email accounts to be popped automatically on my treo, so no more running back and forth between my office and seminar rooms. I'm still a (grad) student, and it would be nice if I can get my emails in the classrooms or seminars too.

Let's see, so many times I had to prepare a PowerPoint presentation in 20 minutes because a professor just decided to visit our group! Yep, treo can do that too! I write reports and papers a lot, so maybe the Microsoft word compatibility can help me sometimes, although I confess the cramped keyboard hinders fast typing. Well, we live in a world of compromises, right?!

Let's not forget about listening to 8 giga bytes of MP3 (treos now accept SDHC cards, and they're cheap!). No more Ipod! Oh, let's not forget the Nintendo emulator software! Mario, where are you?! (See, us Gen. Nintendo kids have to keep Mario near). Life of a president is not all about work after all, even a president needs some entertainment once in a while - ask Bill Clinton about it!

Oh, and let's not forget I can SSH into my home Linux server using pssh. This one rocks!

The fact that there are thousands of third party apps to choose from (for cheap of coarse!) and my ability to write Java programs for my treo is just the icing on the cake!

The cars I would like to get

2007-02-17T14:31:00.000-06:00

Acura TL or RL
Mercedes C280 luxuary or an E class
Lexus IS 350
Lexus GS 350
Audi A4
Cadillac CTS

BUT, I'm pretty happy about my Honda Accord, it's awesome!

Palm is screwing up its users

2007-02-13T15:42:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'm feeling angry and upset! I finally made up my mind to pay $400 and buy this new cell phone, Palm treo 680 in arctic white color (The second phone from right in this picture). I believe it's much more interesting than the bland graphite version (First one from left). I decided to go and buy it on Wednesday last week, and I checked the Palm website to make sure they have it. Yep, they had it.

Now, on Friday I took my credit card and went to their web store to buy what I've been craving for the last month. But,.... it's not there! To be more exact, they only had the graphite version up on their website! It turned out that Cingular has bought all color treo 680s for itself, and it seems that their deal gives the exclusive rights of color treo 680s to CIngular. So, Palm just decided to screw their customers who are not on Cingular, like me. Now my only option is the dull gray (graphite) one. BOOOH!

Listen Palm, I use T-mobile, and I was going to add $400 of my hard earned money to your pockets. NOT ANY MORE! Unless you give me an arctic treo 680, I'm not going to get one! Are you listening Palm?! You screw your loyal customers (I've been having Palm devices since 2001. This makes me a 6-year loyal Palm customer), YOU GET OUT OF BUSINESS!

Take a look at these photos too and see for yourself why I want the arctic color! (The two following pictures are copyrighted images taken from engadet website.)

Open loop vs closed loop control

2007-02-04T14:01:00.000-06:00

Do you ever wonder what the hell is a closed loop control system? How doews it differ from an open loop control system? If so, read on!

Theoretically, an open loop control system should be able to do whatever their closed loop counter parts do. All you need is a 100% accurate mathematical model of your system, and every other environmental factor which could affect the systems operation.

Ok, we want to control real stuff. In reality you can never model a system accurately 100% (it is just too hard!) , and it's even harder to account for environmental factors (or noise if you like). Thus you see a good amount of deviation from what you modeled in your real implementation.

How does a feedback control system work? It doesn't care about the internals of the system, just looks at it as a black box. It will look at the outputs of the system and will say: "hm... I'd like the output to be 10, but it is 8, so let's increase the input a bit. ok, now it's better, we're getting to 10... oh oh , we passed 10 and are now at 10.5, oh boy, let's decrease the input a bit. Ok, that's better, output is at 10 now, I'm done! But I'll keep an eye on the output in case an unknown noise comes in, in which case I can compensate for it by changing the input."

Now the problem with the feedback control is that since our systems are real (the tech word is causal) and our controller cannot foresee the future (DUH, we're talking about real world!) and moreover it doesn't know that much about the system internals and noise, We
will usually have overshoot (like the scenario I told you, i.e. we want 10, but for a short period we get 10.5) and oscillation (like 8...9...10...10.5...9.75...10.... unless you set your feedback controller to work really slow.

So to sum it up, open loop should work fine and beautifully, but only in your dreams! put an open loop controller before a real system, and you'll see deviations, which the controller cannot even correct. In real world we use feedback control systems all the time.

As an interesting side note, our brain controls our limbs in a feedback control system, which is set to overshoot and oscillate a bit for fast responses. Check it out: stretch your right arm, and then try to quickly bring your palm in front of your face, and stop it there. You'll surely see the overshoot and oscillation!

Odyssey of a good Bath.

2007-01-14T15:10:00.000-06:00

Bath (n.): process of soaking the body in water or some other aqueous matter such as mud, steam, or milk. The bath may have cleanliness or curative purposes, and it can have religious, mystical, or some other meaning. A bath is often used as a technique to temporarily reduce the symptoms of illness or pain of drug withdrawal.

Shower (n.): a bath in which water is showered on the body; also: the apparatus that provides a shower.

I have never been a big fan of bathing; I always took a quick shower. It is much faster to take a shower, and it fits well with my hectic lifestyle. So, yeah... Everything was fine until last week. I was quite tired, physically of course, after a Sunday picnic in which my buddies and I tried to play some of our childhood games. I came back home with my body tired and battered, so I thought: well, a hot bath would be your cure!

Well, not quite! The bath turned out to be a disaster! See I always take a shower; I never cared about how my bathtub's walls are filthy, because usually water never reaches that high anyway! Needless to say, the bath got filled with numerous small pieces of calcite (and other things which I'd like to think of them as calcite!). To make it worse, hot water ran out in the middle of my bath (I live in a small apartment with my own heating system, not a big central one). While the lower half of my body was warm, the upper half was freezing!

Okay, bad experience. So yesterday I scrubbed the whole bathtub and bought and installed a new shower curtain, and now the bath tub looks much cleaner. Not as white as I would like it to be (you know, like a new bath) but it's clean and white enough. I'm thinking of buying a rotary scrubbing power tool to make it cleaner. I still have the hot-water problem, which for now I remedied with a trick. I fill the tub with about an inch of hot water, lie down in the bath and turn the shower on, so that I get hot water raining on me! Again not as nice as I would like, but at least not a disaster anymore. Yet, my odyssey of a good bath continues...

White and Nerdy!

2007-01-01T23:48:00.000-06:00

You know that I sometimes think of myself as nerdy. If you don't remember me mentionin it, just look at my nerd score of 97 on the right hand column!

So, naturally I get delighted to see this clip by Al Yankovic.

Wow, this is awesome!

Waiting for my new car to come!

2006-12-31T21:21:00.000-06:00

Well, not exactly a new car, but my new car, and I'm so proud of it! I'll later announce to the whole world what it is, as soon as I have it under my name to be exact, but let me tell you that if it passes the mechanical inspections on next Wednesday, I'll be a proud owner of a .... um, wait for a few days!

Awesome act by Jerome Murat

2006-12-14T01:05:00.000-06:00

1. With no comments, just watch this awesome video!

jerome murat
Uploaded by segalier

2. Life sucks! In 7 hours I have an exam :(