So, don’t try to build from SVN and all that fancy stuff. Just do:

1) Download the latest Python from python.org
2) Download the numpy dmg from sourceforge
3) Download the scipy dmg from sourceforge

Install in that order and move on.

The eeePc I am planning to build into my wrx

The Xandros packaged with the 701 was more of a joke than anything else. Fantastic for the very inexperienced user who will only ever use skype, pidgin and firefox. I need something more powerful and less buggy, so I’m going with EEEbuntu 3.0 base, since this is the most stripped down “full-featured” ready-to-go OS for the 701 I could find.

After downloading, burning and installing (luckily I have an external CDROM) I went through the following steps:

1. Run Update Manager and install all the updates (it’s based on Ubuntu 9.04)
2. Install GPSD, gpsdrive, tangogps, python-gps though synaptic
3. Plug in GPS (gpsd launches automatically), and go for a test drive

I drove around the neighborhood with the GPS pushed into my sunroof (smart huh?) and the eeepc on the passanger seat. I was very impressed with tangogps and logged my trip around campus with it. At first glance everything worked seamlessly with no configuration needed!

A quick test trip logged using tangogps

I’ll be looking into touchscreens to install in place of the regular cd/radio/tape head that is currently in there, and keep writing about my progress.

What if... WRX + eeePC

I’m planning to build a computer into my 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX. And not just any computer, but hopefully my small eeePC 701 – the original netbook that started the revolution.

So, as with any big project, this one starts with a list of dreams I wish I had, and some research online into what other people are doing. Actually, any big project starts with a glass of Zinfandel (check) and brainstorming for a name. In this case, it was easy. My WRX is called Rex. And it’s getting a computer. So, RexPC. Onwards, then!

I should quickly address those of you thinking “Why is this guy not upgrading his exhaust to a full catback, or getting new rims and high performance tires, or upgrading his intercooler and air intake, or rechipping the engine ECU, or, or, or… why is he installing a *computer*??” (TJ I know what’s going through your mind). Simple, really, the computer is the cheapest mod I can do at this point, since the eeepc is just collecting dust on my shelf at the moment, and it’ll be awesome once it’s in the car.

My list of requirements. The design process (courtesy of CS147 with Scott Klemmer), once a certain type of user has been identified, kicks off with a need-finding phase to explore possible problems to address in your product. Since I’m the user, this should be easy. Here’s the list of things I want Rex to be able to do

RexPC User Requirements (aka Dreams)

Media

• Play my complete (160gb) music library. And stay sync’d with my desktop.
• Play other people’s plugged-in iPods
• Play AM/FM Radio
• Record video with backup and front camera (obviously, tagged with audio and location)
• Show backup camera when in reverse

Location

• Map my trips in detail
• Provide navigation when I get lost
• Provide weather and road condition information (incl. current temperature, etc)

Vehicle

• Provide Engine Diagnostics (OBDII readout)
• Provide extra gauges (for example, oil temperature and pressure)
• Provide chassis orientation information (angles, direction)
• Provide performance information (acceleration, cornering, wheel slip, lap timing, bodyroll, etc.)
• Control interior and exterior lighting, and windows.

Communication and Countersurveillance

• HAM Radio abilities including APRS
• Family Talk radio
• Police Scanner
• Show traffic cameras
• Radar/Laser detector alert logging and tagging with location
• Bluetooth phone integration

Infrastructure

• Work seamlessly with the car’s ignition system to provide startup and shutdown of electronic components with the rest of the car.

Now I have this initial list of things I want my car to do (some of them probably beyond the scope of this project since it will demand always-on interwebs, and I don’t know if I’m ready to shell out for a monthly 3g contract). So what do we need to do this?

Hardware Requirements

• eeepc running custom linux
• external usb-powered harddrive (250gb or more)
• microphone
• audio-out to current speaker system
• GPS
• accelerometer
• compass
• network connectivity (wifi definitely, possible 3G for always-on)
• OBD II interface to car diagnostics
• outside temperature sensor
• ham radio, computer-controlled
• police scanner (hopefully part of ham radio)
• integration into current radar detector (I’m not building one of these things…)
• touchscreen built into car

Current Carputers out in the wild

I’m obviously not the first to want to attempt this project. Several awesome people who are inspiring me to do this is the work. Avatar-X built a dell laptop into his Subaru Legacy that does most of these things and more! His process is nice to read (although not very well documented in terms of replication) and inspired me to look into this. Redian has a much more detailed post on installing a real motherboard into his wrx wagon which is also very informative. mp3car.com has, in general, been a good source of inspiration, information and encouragement, so check them out.

Next up, testing the eeepc’s abilities to handle this kind of workload, and looking at bashing out the list of dreams into a more concrete set of features interacting with each other.

Unfortunately Mac’s fantastic screen sharing implementation doesn’t play well with Windows. You can connect to it with a VNC client (I recommend TightVNC) but its incredibly slow.

An easy fix is to use the awesome Vine VNC Server for OS X on your mac, and connect to it with TightVNC.To get that  buttery smooth feel, use TightVNC’s CoRRE encoding as your compression medium. Boom! A usable remote desktop connection from a windows to a mac box.

So I came up with a smart alternative. And boy did that create probems… But I did get something running in the end!

Smart Idea 1:

I’d create an image of my whole disk, resize the image (which Disk Utility can apparently do), and then restore the image to the larger partition. Except, you have to save this image somewhere… And this image is 27gb big. Well, no problem, I can store that on one of my other harddrives.

Except that the one hard drive has FAT32 on it to be comaptible with everything, and you can’t store files larger than 4gb on it. And the other is NTFS, and mac can’t write to that if you’re booting from the OS X install cd. OH boy. So, due to filesystem issues, I skipped this plan.

Smart Idea 2:

Use Time Machine! After having my old macbook destroyed in a car accident, I moved all my data to my new macbook by using Time Machine. Why can’t I do that again? So I created a Time Machine drive (by borrowing an external HDD) and backing up by whole drive. I reinstalled OS X onto a bigger partition and used the Migration Assistant to bring all my files and applications back.

It was beginning to look like a success, until I attempted to open Photoshop. I’ve been working on mockups of my new website, so I was happily using Photoshop CS3, for which I bought through my friend Rohit at Adobe. So, I’ve been feeling extra-good about how I actually use a legal copy of Photoshop for my website. But this good feeling was greeted with a Activation window. It remembered my  serial from my old install, but when I clicked to Activate it (activate it again??) I was kindly informed that I’ve activated this photoshop copy enough times by now and I can’t before I deactivate another copy.

Well, heloooo adobe! Unfortunately for you, the previous install is long gone and there’s no way I can click your sweet little deactivate button. Apparently this is not good enough for them, so I’m stuck with a software program that cost me several hundreds of dollars, which I can’t use because I reinstalled my computer. Of course this means I’ll have to use less savory means to run Photoshop. At least I can wave my flag if they complain about doing things that way…

So, for future reference – deactivate your adobe software. At least, until enough people have yelled at them to take away that “feature”.

I don’t want to talk about going to grad school or which classes to take. Go talk to you faculty adviser for that. This is a talk to get you to think. I titled it:

“Reflections on the story of the Engineer and the Guillotine”

The joke goes like this:

It’s the french revolution, but a modern engineer is standing in the long line to be executed. ahead of him is a physician and a businessman. First up is the physician. The executioner ask him – ‘Any last wishes?’ The physician says, “i’ve been really watching what i eat, so i would have a nice meal”. When the guilloine falls after the meal, it sticks and he is not killed!

Next up is the businessman. Same question – and he replies “I’ve been saving my money my whole life. Let me look at them now.” Again, when the blade comes down, it sticks!

When the engineer comes up, they ask him the same question. He says “I’ve lived my life the way i want to. But i wish to lie facing upward.” They’re happy with this, and they ready to execute him. And as they want to execute him, he says “Wait! I see the problem with the blade!”

My dad, a retired engineer, also likes this story when I told it to him, and he reflected on how true this story is of the engineering mentality.

As engineers we are so concerned with how this mechanism isn’t working, that we miss the big picture. But there is another side to it. Behind this story is a kind of sweetness, and gentleness to Engineering that is reflected in this engineer’s perspective. you might not appreciate this yet, but i remember i started to notice it around my senior year in relationship to my friends in other areas. They grew hard in their approach to life, those who would not help those around them for fear of their grades. That would not happen in engineering, we would look down on those who didn’t help each other. This attitude of really feeling that your contributions are part of a larger whole, and that everything else will take care of itself. This trust is so strong that, in the story, engineers believe that their contribution and solving of a problem is important, while the chain of command will take care of them.

We engineers expect to be taken care of – there is a sweetness and a naivety to us. and this is no necessarily a bad thing.

Lets think about this kind of trust and mentality.

Think back to the idea of the story of John Henry and the steam drill. Its a song, I believe. What, none of you guys know this? Man i had to learn it in elementary school. John was a driller, and he was competing with the new mechanized driller, and he dies in competing with it. Engineers welcome mechanization, since we believe we make the world better for everyone, since those benefits will be shared amongst everyone. As a 1950s approach, the engineer says – in a world of mostly women trapped in a life of domestic drudgery, the invention of a vacuum, of a laundry machine, dishwashers, so forth, are an unmitigated liberation. You no longer have to be stuck in this life! your time is free! The engineer’s perspective is “OK Great!”. Someone else would say – how would the engineer look on the story of the average person saying “I can now divorce my old wife and marry one that is more useful in other tasks…” *laughter*

The engineer believes that he is making the world better, yet mostly people’s reaction is often “great, i’m going to grab a bigger part of the pie for myself!”

So in today’s context – teamwork is very important. Economies of scale – you can imagine that for a particular company, value is not added additively by different agents, but adds multiplicatively. One person brings some percentage gain, the next brings another percentage gain, and this multiplies up to make something exponentially bigger. That’s where the value of teamwork comes from.

If we think of this value adding up of how the pie is made, how will we divide it up? How can we share it so that people can measure it with their contribution? How do we do this fairly? How do we measure their contribution? How would you think about it?

*silence*

As engineers you should be thinking about this!

*silence*

Once is – we divide the entire pie and divide it equally amongst the contributors. But is this fair amongst people contributing differently? How do we do i proportionalize it to the amount of people?

*person*:normalize it!

OK, sure, so person A bought 10%, does he get 10%? But if 50 people each had a 10% marginal contribution, you can’t give each of them 10%! It adds up to more than the total! So there’s some problem already… Now what?

*person*:Do we know each person’s contribution?

Yes!

*Person:*so how about we normalize the percentage values and divide it then?

So if we want to satisfy some axioms of neutrality, how do we do that? what would those be?

*Person:*lets look at the ratio of percentages

That is assuming that 10% increase is worth 10 times a 1% increase. Is it? No matter how we segment it, there is a concept of fairness. We should think about this particular principle – the idea of a symmetry. Something over here should behave the same as that same thing, divided up somewhere else. What does this mean?

Someone should get this – anyone? One person with one amount of contribution should get the same amount as two others with a net same contribution? What’s that someone’s whispering?

Yes! Take logarithms! That takes this into an additive problem, which we know how to divide up equally, and you feel a little thrill. And now does the world work like that?

NO! The world does not work like that! Why?

*Person:* We’re not all engineers!

We’re thinking of everything statically, but things change over time. you are a collective of 10 people. You produced x. Now you add one more person to the team, who makes a 20% contribution. How much do we offer this person? If he says “i’m willing to increase your productivity that 20%, what will you offer me?”

well, we want to come out on top, so we might want to offer him up to 0.2 times of our current sharing system. he’s bringing the same amount – but suddenly he’s getting a 1/5 of the pot? and you’re dividing 4/5 amongst yourselves now! That doesn’t make sense! Would you actually offer the person the full 20%? How do you make that decision?

So, if we give him 19%, we all get a 1% increase, and he gets a huge bunch of money. So we want to go as low as we can. What is the lower limit? Well, it is set by competition. Since at some point he would go somewhere else!

what does this have to do with the engineer and the guillotine. You’ll be surprised at how this will affect your career. I was talking to some MBAs about how the economy changed. Companies are acquiring each other rather than developing in-house. This is madness in my engineering view. Startups are even acquiring other startups. There are economies of scale – a startup has a lot of overhead!

but the MBAs said – “you have it totally wrong!”. Ask an MBA – would you want to be in charge of the acquisition that brings in $5million a year by spending $300mil. Or would you want to lead a team in-house that will finally bring in $30mil a year and only spending $60mil? I said obviously the second – higher values, more efficient!

but thinking like the engineer, where we all get judged by the amount we put it. But they all said they would do option one. Why? Can anyone tell me why?

*Person:* She gets to throw around a lot more money and a lot more power?

Ah! Yes! good! She can use the money by throwing it around to some other people to get into her book, she’s building these relationships.

This is one part. What is the other?

*Some guesses follow*

When she’s done with the product development, her value is understood inside the company only. Versus doing an acquisition, it goes on her resume, it is unambiguous. That skill is something tangible for her, so she can command that value in switching. And people are biased to saying, obviously you had a lot of people helping you in that company if you just did the prod. development.

She puts herself in a larger box by going the merger.

This is related to how much do you pay that person for their value. The market says you’re not paid for your value you bring, but for the threat of what others are willing to give you.

What does this have to do with the original joke? If someone says – you add a lot of value to the company, and i want you to build a system that your value is only valued in my company. would you fall for it? Well, what about if it is dressed as a great technical problem?

what is there in the field that is like the guillotine to the engineer?

A Patent!

As a quick summary – a trademark says “dont pretend to be someone you’re not”. Think of the Aqua song “Barbie Girl” and the court case. a copywrite says “you can’t make a verbatim copy of this.”. Then there is a patent. This came from congress, saying that they may grant limited rights to the creator of inventions. This tries to prevent the proprietary knowledge in guilds where knowledge gets lots with guilds. The compromise was that guilds would share fully as to how to do it, in exchange for a limited monopoly for the full idea.

So how do I say that patents are like the guillotine? You hear phrases like “This patent is to protect yourself from the competition!”. Think like an engineer! Remember, the law does not see companies as an inventor – the order of names listed on a patent, is the people in order of their contribution. You say “I have fully and completely disclosed how to best make this idea work!”

What happens next is that the patent is assigned! Those rights are tradeable. You cannot sell yourself into slavery, that’s not recognized by law. But you can sell patents. And it is a right to exclude. Who holds this patent has the right to exclude others. Like back in the day when ancient feudal lords gave “patents” for certain trade. So what it really means is not “protect”.

Engineers have excellent BS detectors. We should ALWAYS ask ourselves “What are you TALKING about? Show me the actual worldly happenings and i’ll then understand the abstraction”. We’ve all done this by saying “great, its a constant time algorithm” versus “shit, O(4) is 4 times more wires!”.

Patents protect whom from whom? You have to understand the concept. Who has the most skill at improving this invention?

*Person*:Japan!

*Laughter*

good guess, but japan is not a person! The inventor is the person most likely to improve it! So what it means is that a company is protecting itself from you, the inventor. This is a practical thing! They will try to dress it up – make the claims as broad as possible! For example, showing how to make a particular mousetrap, then saying you invented mousetraps. so they will try to get you to write the claims as broadly as possible. Those claims are then handcuffs on you. Those are legally binding!

*Person*:Is a patent lawyer involved?

Yes! So why is the engineer paid $50 an hour and the patent lawyer is paid $500 an hour, where the patent lawyer is just translating the engineer’s idea to paper. Aren’t you getting suspicious? We as engineers have the tendency of saying “we don’t want to deal with this. i’m assuming this lawyer has my back”.

So as a practical step, you have to remember that you’re signing off on this. So read the claims, make them as narrow as possible! So that it only covers exactly what you did. Now i don’t suggest you go off and take part in a mass protest. But your own interest says that you should be sure these handcuffs are made of spiderwebs, not steel!

They will come out and say “all you have to do is saying that you’re aware of it!” but you have to stand on what you are comfortable with. This is something practical in terms of the engineering community. This has to do with outside alternatives.

I’ve seen it happen – students working with Digital Fountain. And then they appeal at a conference, saying “we need patent-free versions of this!” Everyone uses JPEG. Who uses JPEG2000? Its much better! But its patented!

when I saw the rise of the Free Software Movement and this idea of saying software that is free to work and edit. This was going on during the height of the dot com boom. And people were saying, you engineers are crazy! Why are you giving stuff away?

This analysis shows you that your ideas are not crazy. It is YOUR FREEDOM that is being protected! No-one can stop you. Freedom is most powerful in the hands of the people doing the work. Certain legal instruments can be thought of as blocking your share of the pie.

This reminds me of story that Bob Dole told. His brother said “wouldn’t it be great if we had the way the fuedal system worked, and we had hordes of slaves?”. And he replied “Stupid! We were the ones who were the slaves!”. And both these ideas are very American.

In the context of the value change, you should ask – do you want to be the person capturing the value or doing something about it? In thinking about the problem of value capture – maybe these patent handcuffs are necessary – ask yourself: “Is there symmetry? Is somewhere else on the value chain an equal system?” You’re told that all you do belongs to the company, since they pay you for it. Does the same standard apply to others?

For example – apply to the CEO. If someone says – getting this person a great gift would help the company. Does he fill out a form saying “Oh, you can recreate this relationship between our company and this person? Describe!. And after you leave – you can’t talk to those people anymore.”

And that is ridiculous! And if you get that idea of “this is ridiculous” from something derived from symmetry, think!

The story of the Engineer with the Guilltoine is real. It comes from something good – but you have to use it for something good.

I’ll close with a comment.

Progress hasn’t stopped. If you think about the industrial revolution as ridding the world from slavery. Is this done? There is the issue of wage slavery. And a lot can be done about it. Engineers lead the world – but we have to accept this, and the greatness we can accomplish. And in this there is a story, from a painting. It goes like this – there was a boy and a very sacred urn. This little child fell into the urn, and became trapped. He was crying “help me!” but the adults couldn’t get the child out. And they lamented, we cant get him out. They poured oil and and tried to get him out. Then another came along, yelled at the child about how stupid the child was to fall in. Then a boy came along and whacked the urn with a stick. As the urn broke, the child was free. You have to keep your eye on what is important. We adults forget these basic thing, we lose track of the basic idea – people are more important than things. So in your life, you have to remember, sometimes you have to smash the urn. Nothing really is that sacred, except your value and your vision – that you care about this world and want to make it better. We combine a respect of the natural world with a sense of what you want to do. This will lead you to great things.

*Clapping*

Don’t just sit there complacently! Argue amongst yourselves, shout at each other.

*Question:* Well, isnt patents good while you’re at the company?

Sure. so if you sign a patent saying that the rights are with this patent for 15 years, ask them to include a 15 year employment contract. And watch their face – and you’ll know the relationship right here.

*Question:* These ideas aren’t inherent in the law is it?

No, but your contract with the company states these things. The legal situation is complicated. The idea is more to remember… again, ask yourself about the CEO symmetry argument.

*Question:* do you have any power in this? Don’t you just get fired if you resist?

Well, if you say, “This patent it too broad. I don’t sign this”, they just made their patent worthless. You could hypothetically say that the company agrees to cover all your legal cost in any case with this patent. This would protect you even when they sue you.

And when you do this – Watch their faces. *Laughter* and you’ll know what the relationship is about.

*Question:* I agree with this, but does this close doors to you?

I agree in some sense, but what i’m saying that this should provoke thought. Since the non-confrontational nature of engineers make us lose quietly so often. If you ask them “give me the direct order in writing” or “put down in writing that i am completely protected” as a general attitude of ethical behavior, then this makes sense. If you take seriously what you do in life and you take seriously what you are signing, it will follow though. Most companies make no money from patents – its just a bean count.

*Question:* You talked about the counteroffer idea. Is this actually a good idea?

Take into account that there is actual and hypothetical value. In one company you have no track record, but if you have to shift later, you want to build on the progression of your skills. So often people say you have to shift to other companies. Just remember you will be payed for your outside value, and they will try to make up the difference. They will try to keep your inside value within reach of your outside value.

At least be aware of it!

Again, these are NOT the opinions of the University, the State of California, the Department of EECS. It is provided as food for thought.

The wonderful Gleb Denisov and Ashley Brown took me to the newly-opened Intellgentsia Coffee Bar in Venice Beach on my last visit to Los Angeles. As a fan of Blue Bottle and Ritual Coffee, both in San Francisco, my idea of a funky, fun, excellent coffee house involves highly-trained baristas serving me connoisseur-quality coffee-based drinks magically prepared along with a row of other drinks for those who are ordering with me. I will then take this little cup of heaven, find a place to sit or stand, and rave about the quality of the coffee and the hip-ness of the atmosphere. After finishing the delightful drink (possibly over some textbook or code), I leave with a happy caffeine high and none the wiser of where all this magic came from.

Intelligentsia does things a little different. As you walk into their glass enclosure of a shop, a barista offers to help you at their own espresso and coffee station, on one of the four corners of what looks like a big lunch cart that fills most of the store. As you follow him to his espresso machine, you pass by delicate pastries with shocking price tags (absolutely worth it, might I add) to the tune of, in my case, the great RJD2, one of my favorite electronic musicians. The decor and architecture makes you want to hang around this place, and the large assortment of coffee-related merchandise (from $1800 espresso machines to $10 milk frother jugs) pleases any coffee fanatic looking for that missing piece for their home setup.

But then comes the best part of Intelligentsia. Once you and the barista gets comfortable at his espresso machine, he makes you what you want, to order, right in front of you. You get to look at the whole process, and see how your cup is made. This is your espresso, made as you want it, while you’re chatting away with your obviously skilled and very down to earth barista. After sitting down with my espresso and finding an absurd amount of enjoyment from sipping the dark drink, I found myself more attached to this espresso than I usually am at coffee bars. In fact, it felt just a little bit like my own espresso’s I brew at home. Better in quality, yes, but also more personal. This is not your starbucks/peets/insert-other-coffeehouse experience of being handed a drink from behind some mysterious silver machine. No no, you were involved! By golly, you might not have turned any knobs or pushed any buttons, but you where there for every step of the way. And that makes a difference. Because if espresso is art, visiting Intelligentsia is like commissioning the artist. And I loved it.

Domain specific knowledge not only helps with productivity, it also makes a big difference in accuracy. That’s where the example comes in.

I’m a big fan of Lupe Fiasco’s music, and his old mixtapes were some of the best works in hip hop since the early 90s. So I was listening to his “Happy Industries”, enjoying his brilliant lyrics and mash-up abilities. So I figured I should check out the full lyrics and post it on facebook. This is what I found on each of the top 5 google results for “Lupe Fiasco Happy Industries Lyrics”:

Once upon a time not long ago
An ID yeah that’s what I had
To take DNA
As a little pro two
With my MCing ways and make em mad
Just having fun not chasing cash
Apologise now for it make ya mad
Had to call g wall tell em warm up the mic
Put the pendant on the wall tell em make some maaagiicc
Shorty it’s nothing lavish
Matter of fact
It’s just an attic
Background noise from the family
Hearing the mic slaying in the outside traffic
Still turned out fantastic
Turn my vocals up just a tad bit
Fresh from the first and fifteen
Quarantine touching you super cool that asset

I’m sorry, but this is utter crap. Some fan with very little knowledge about the music industry must have transcribed this. It makes no sense whatsoever, and unfortunately the state of hip-hop is such that most people will accept that fact that it makes no sense. But Lupe tends to have great lyrics, so on listening to the song again, this is what he’s really saying:

Once upon a time not long ago
An idea yeah that’s what I had
To take demon days
And a little pro tools
With my MCing ways and make a mash.
Just having fun not chasing cash
Apologize now if I make ya mad
Had to call g wall tell em warm up the mic
Put the pendant on the wall tell em make some maaagiicc
Studio is nothing lavish
Matter of fact
It’s just an attic
Background noise from the fan
Hearing the mic slaying in the outside traffic
Still turned out fantastic
Turn my vocals up just a tad bit
Fresh from the first and fifteen
Quarantine touching you super cool thats just ah sick!

Notice what just happened. The lyrics went from some song filled with what we can only consider to be slang we don’t understand and randomly “slaying the mic” to a song about him making “sick” music using just his laptop and his little home studio in his attic, not here to make money but here for the magic. He talks about using Pro Tools, something that people with experience in the music industry knows about, and making mash-ups between tracks. Funny, because the song itself is exactly a mashup of Gorillas’ Demon Days album and his lyrics. It should be obvious that these are the correct lyrics.

If Hip-Hop is so infused with the ideas of making money that a song saying “its not about money” can so quickly become so convoluted… You be the judge.

To give you a snippet of the kind of things we do, I’ll pull out some highlights from the product page:

Today, BruteSoft provides enterprises with a radically new approach to managing their computers in an efficient and effective way, saving you money and reducing your carbon footprint.

BruteSoft innovates software solutions based on our patent-pending federated distribution technology (DBx). Our solutions are secure, exponentially scalable and self-healing, eliminating hardware layers and delivering unrivalled speeds in an energy efficient way. DBx decouples client demand from distribution servers, which enables software distribution to an unlimited number of clients without the need for additional infrastructure.

Our products have reached the pinnacle of software distribution efficiency. As a proof point, our products are capable of transferring the equivalent of a DVD of 5GB within 5 minutes to 10,000 desktops on a 1Gbit LAN/WAN.

Go check out the website, and if you’re managing a large amount of computers (or know people who do!) send them out way!

BruteSoft.com

You see, it has this neat easter egg. “import this” prints the following poem, see if you can state the gross error. To make it easier, I’m putting the gross error in BOLD.

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Oh come ON! Anyone who’s ever done numerical simulation or any kind of computational physics knows that Implicit has the same error as Explicit but is unconditionally stable!

Give me implicit euler integration or give me death.

The discussion centers around learning languages and becoming comfortable with the features, the APIs and your tools, but some comments focused on another area of programmer productivity that can be called “Knowing what to write”. Domain specific knowledge allows you to have huge boosts in productivity since you only code what is really necessary, and you don’t waste time coding peripheral features or get mired down in struggling with where to start and how to move forward.

The discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590460

So I have one suggestion for both building domain specific knowledge and avoiding the slump of getting stuck, or writing unnecessary code: Prototype and Iterate! It’s already a fairly well established idea in design and programmer circles, but the advantages of prototyping becomes even more clear if you consider it in the light of learning a domain.

That 10x programming speedup you’re looking for probably lies in coding simple systems, and building on top of them, rather than spending hours writing code that “will come in handy later” or attemping to complete some set of the code before moving on to the next.

My friend Marcello mentioned the amount of projects he’s started – much more than he’s ever finished. I think that this points to going through the process of learning a domain by building prototypes, throwing them away, and letting your ideas organically grow as you build things.

So let’s go be productive!

2 years ago I, with much excitement, ordered a pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pro’s. Both Gleb and Matt has a pair, and after listening to theirs… Apple’s little iPod buds just didn’t cut it anymore. I loved my pair so much that their connector ended up being severely bent when i squeezed past a, um, slightly oversized person sitting next to me in economy class on a flight back to South Africa. Anyways, the deed was done and the headphones became pretty much unusable, since only the one channel was getting through the bent pin!

I finally got around to rewiring them, which was more tricky than i expected! So here’s a post for others trying to do the same thing.

On stripping the connector, you discover 4 wires, rather than the expected 3:

First thing’s first, TIN THESE WIRES WITH SOME SOLDER! I had no idea that the copper strands themselves were covered by a thin film of resin, which needs to be burned off with some solder. If you try to connect an alligator clip straight to the bared wire, you get no connection, causing much confusion.

The 4 wire mystery was solved when I peeked into the left earphone. The two drivers are separately wired all the way to the connector. Two wires per channel = 4 wires. The mapping I discovered is as follows:

White – LEFT, GROUND
Black – LEFT, SIGNAL
Blue – RIGHT, GROUND
Red – RIGHT, SIGNAL

As follows:

If you’re interested, inside the left headphone there’s a little splitter board:

I bought a nice connector from Radioshack and wired this up. Be really careful when soldering the wires to the connector and don’t use too much heat! The shielding melts quickly and you don’t want your cable all melted together inside. I connected the two grounds from the two drivers together, which worked just fine.

After doing this, I was rewarded with a fantastic set of cans working again!

Its nothing super fancy, but as part of the assignments I’ve been working out for the graphics class I’m TAing (CS184 at UC Berkeley) I’ve been putting together a framework for the students to explore raytracing in. And while we’re at it, why not try to make it run in realtime. Turns out that cutting out disk access and loading everything up into RAM, using OpenGL as a final pixel buffer to display images, gives you gobs of performance for free. Now who would have thought that?

So, I’ll clean this stuff up and post some demos. Phong shading has never looked so good as when you can swing the camera around objects!

At this point I’m very happy with my dual 20″ Samsungs, both at 1680×1050, but I had some reason to add another two screens to my setup. The 16:10 aspect ratio of that resolution is really great for coding with side-by-side editor windows. They’re just not big enough to prevent me from constantly resizing windows. And whenever I work at home on my dad’s 1920×1200 screen, I have significantly less of these issues. My preferred coding setup is two sets of 80-characters-wide text screens with a project explorer and outline view flanking them. This just fits well with 1920 by 1200 pixels. Which is why I’m out shopping for a good pair.

Fry’s had one of the 2343BWX on the showroom floor so I had the opportunity to see it in bad light running at a shitty resolution. Hmm, the 16:9 did look a little less “coding-friendly” than what I currently had, and the incredibly shiny bevel looks plasticky next to the matte bevels found on monitors aimed at professionals. Since I didn’t want to order a monitor online and find that I didn’t prefer its features. So right now I’m looking at a comparable Samsung 2233 monitor ($199). Also shiny bevel, also 19:6 but a lower resolution of 1920×1080 (compared to 2048×1152) and I find that my worries were unfounded.

The shiny bevel, although nothing to be excited about, becomes unnoticeable against the very bright screens and impressive contrast of the latest Samsung releases. The 16:9 is great for movies, but since a 1080p monitor has less vertical than the 16:10 monitor of equivalent width. After messing with Eclipse on the 1920×1080 resolution, I came to the conclusion that upgrading would only be worth it if I gain a decent amount of pixels both vertically and horizontally. So I’m taking these back and waiting until the larger 23″ 2048×1152 monitors are back in stock.

Of course, the real answer comes in a much simpler package – 30″ of pure viewing bliss like the monitors in the Graphics lab!

In my case, I’ve been hacking at Prycr.com all through Friday and Saturday. The website is blank, since its not a web service (yet) and it was for Hackathon 09, so no time was wasted on nice frivolities like “websites” and “marketing”. All the focus was on our SMS application, that does price lookups for UPC codes texted to it.

The scenario is as follows: You’re standing in Fry’s, looking at some piece of tech gadgetry that you just have to have. But are you going to be angry that you bought it here if there’s a sweet deal online? Or even better, what if Best Buy across the street had it for 20% off and you didnt know? Send off a text message with the UPC product code to our service, and you’ll receive a reply looking something like this:

"WD 250gb My Passport Hard Drive. (4.5/5) $52 at CompUPlus.com, average price of $69. Locally at Best Buy for $75"

I built this with an impromptu team of three other Berkeley students – Timothy Liu, Dounan Shi and Irving Lin – and decided to do this text message based service similar to DialPrice.com (which, BTW, is also a very cool service, but I find that whenever I use it I’m extremely frustrated that I have to make a call and stand there, waiting for the voice prompts to read me info on my product.) It was a really fun experience, and although we didn’t win anything we’re planning to build this out into a serious web service that people can use.

For future hackers, if you’re doing a mobile app, have it ready to demo on the judges’ phones. Let them whip out their cell and use it. We didn’t do this and we realized after showing it to people later that day that the coolness factor is just about zero until someone can do it themselves. And good luck!

Another cool thing I saw at Hackathon was Mugasha.com – online electronic music sets from premier DJs. I’m jamming out to it right now! They release DJ sets (those hour-long musical journeys that DJs create by mixing many different tracks) in a track-by-track form in their music player. Finally, you can get both the awesomeness of these DJ sets and the convenience of knowing which song it being played, and jump to the songs you particularly like.

Finally, it was interesting to see a different interpretation of the “Hack day” concept from the Yahoo hack days I’ve been involved in. Yahoo hack days are known for their 90 seconds presentation, and I wish they did that as well. We had 4 minute presentations, and it was a lot harder to follow the main points of people! 90 seconds is an excellent time limit to explain hacks done in 24 hours. Schwag, Pizza and Beer was also notoriously missing… is the recession taking its toll? Hmm, no, because they had Sushi (which disappeared in a matter of minutes) and burritos in the afternoon. Possibly the lack of alcohol explains the productivity! The turnout was amazing – 25 teams in total! – which they managed to do by offering $200 to the student group that turns out the most entries. So they had CSUA, IEEE and UPE all working for them, which was utter genius.

Anyway, the sun is rising and I’m off to go pick up my new Samsung 23″ HD monitor. My aim for desk domination through sheer pixelcount is nearing completion since I’m about to put down the third monitor on my desk. Once I upgrade to 4 by duplicating the current purchase (yea, im waiting for the end-of-the-month paycheck) I’ll finally have that 3840 by 2300 pixels of screen space on my desktop. 30″ monitors be damned!

Undergrad was a fairly easy decision. Go to the best school you get into. Grad school… A little more complicated. The questions range from “Can I afford the area?” (easy, fellowships!) to “Will I want to marry someone from here?” (interesting… but not very informative still) to “Are there people I want to work with?” (crucial… but true for too many!) to “Do I want to live here?” (which just makes it harder).

I’ve had a fantastic run at Berkeley, and although there’s plenty I don’t agree with and plenty I’ve loved, I came out on top overall. But now that I need to again ask the question of where to go, life gets a lot more complicated really quickly!

On the plus side, it is President’s day, so maybe I’ll spend some money on two new monitors to complete my 4-screen desktop setup. Hmmmmmmmmm how does 3800 by 2400 pixels on your desk sound?

Sweet!

The way to go about installing OSX on your PC these days are fairly simple. You figure out what instruction set your PC supports – is it AMD or Intel, and does it have SSE2, SSE3? Then you download a prepatched distribution for your particular system, install a vanilla attempt, and start tweaking drivers to get your system working.

Here’s the specs of my system:

Asus P5K-E WIFI motherboard with intel P35 chipset, 1333mhz FSB
Intel Core 2 Due E6550 2.33 Ghz dual core processor
8gb Patriot Viper DDr2 memory @ 800mhz
NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256mb video card
1x WD Raptor 150GB 10k sata hdd, three partitions (liux ext3, windows ntfs, osx hfs+)
2x Seagate 750gb baraccuda storage drives, one NTFS, one FAT32

When I started this process I already had linux and windows running, which I wanted to keep. I tried both the iDeneb and Kalyway distribution and found iDeneb to work the easiest.

I used Ubuntu to create a partition for this install, and left it unformatted as a primary partition on my main hard drive. I popped in the iDeneb 10.5.5 dvd, used the Disk Utility to format this partition as a mac extended (journaled) partition, and customized my installation as follows:

- Kernel: Sleep
- Chipset: ICH*
- Video: NVinject256
- all the available applications (specifically we want osx86 tools)

Everything else you can install later.

Once the install was done it booted into osx (with the cd still in the drive).
From the “applications->iDeneb App->osx86tools” folder in finder I launched osx86 tools, and clicked “Download and Install Hardware Drivers”. This is basically pure awesomeness. It will prompt you to install probe utilities – do so, and then restart the computer. Once you’re back in osx, launch osx86 tools again, open the same Download and Install Hardware Drivers box, and it will start probing for hardware.

I selected “AD1988b” for my audio driver – experiment to see what works! Everything else was listed. IMPORTANT: Before installing, I REMOVED the listed Graphics controller by selecting it and clicking “remove item”, since I found that this driver conflicts with the already-installed driver I selected during setup.

Click “Download and Install”, and after a couple of dialogs your install would be complete. Reboot your computer (keep that disc in the drive) and you should have an awesome setup ready to go now.

Setting up multiboot

I was getting annoyed at having the dvd in the drive to boot osx and I wanted access to the other OS’s on the system. To enable this I wanted to reinstall GRUB on my MBR, which I did by using an Ubuntu live cd, and the help of Restoring GRUB and OSx86 installation guides. Restore GRUB to the main harddrive, then add osx to your grub list.

You should be all set now! Go on and install Quicksilver and enjoy OSx!

PS: Using Parallels desktop, you can turn your windows partition into a virtual machine inside OSx so that you can run all those expensive apps you bought for windows inside osx. its awesome!

“Life is both sad and solemn. We are let into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other and wander together for a brief time. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.”

My response to this was (and still is) a humble “Wow”. Gaarder expresses both the majestical highs of exuberance and the unthinkable but ultimately true end of life without judging or diminishing both. And is that not how life truly is? Although this quote deals on a first level with life as a whole, it is just as true for our daily lives. It amazes me to experience the daily comings and goings of people, the connections we make with humans that we meet one evening and afterwards, as we walk away, not realize that we will never see them again. The profound sorrow that is a part of all existence, but also the profound joy of every moment that we share amongst those we connect with. I sometimes wish that we can hold on to the beautiful moments, the great achievements and the times of joy and happiness, that we can freeze time, that we can relive our profound moments in more than just memory. But as this quote so aptly conveys, this is not the way of the world. But that is not a reason for despair or sorrow. No, it is just a motivation to cherish every moment for all that it encompasses. If we could relive times at our slightest whims, if we could get a second chance at life, maybe we would find that, instead of finding recaptured glory and awe, we are only diminishing the worth of the moment. Maybe the biggest factor in creating the exuberance and awe that we experience is the fact that we can’t relive it. Why would we walk the extra mile now if we can do it tomorrow? But still, our heart yearns for the chance to recapture and relive. And not in vain, for by doing so, I believe we keep the memories unstained and unspoilt, the memories of our “brief time” in this wonderful world. Although we all spend only a limited time here, this world in filled with so much emotion, so much strength and weakness, so much love and hate, so much exaltation and so much sorrow, that “wonderful” fails to describe the awe, humility, joy and love that we find here on earth. I would not exchange my memories for any riches or glory.