Archive for March, 2008
I made my first actual commit at TOPP yesterday.
Okay, okay. I deleted a period. It’s not that cool. But the “woo! I can now actually contribute!” warm fuzzy feeling is cool regardless, and I’m now hunting for other easy (but a little more involved than deleting periods) tickets. Also, in the process of finding that blasted period, I learned about grep, ack, and other things including cpan (it’s like pypi for perl instead of python, but I get the feeling most people encountered them in the reverse order – pypi is like a python CPAN). Also a cool learning-thing: <() which is the syntax for process substitution in bash – it is different from | (pipe) because it makes the stuff pretend to be a file. (Or makes it a file temporarily. They’re kind of the same thing, I think.)
Also, I’m finding Conway’s Law to be more and more amusing as time goes by. (My previous reaction was “Well, wait, of course. But why is this surprising?”) Now it’s become a (probably futile) game to see how far I can push Conway’s law in projects…
Tonight is the kickoff for the Story Jam at UNICEF. I’m surprised at how calm I am right now, knowing that I’ll be running around like a maniac for the next 3 days, and running around like a maniac for a few days after catching up on work and sleep. I’m actually determined to not let work slip at all this weekend. If I can do that, it will be the first Jam at which I’ve done so (the lack of sleep is something that I’m far too used to – well, I’ll tackle that problem later in Seattle). Just need to write down a list of things I want to finish before Tuesday so that I can hold myself accountable.
Finally, I did not know thick blankets took that long to dry. I used up twice the money I was planning on spending on laundry this morning, and worked from I.House before lunch. (Did you know you can get wifi reception if you’re sitting on top of the washer? Yeah!) Had I thought the blasted thing would dry between now and when I was going to sleep tonight, I would just hang it up and let it drip, but I was skeptical whether even that would happen (although I am not a very good judge of laundry water-saturation).
And with that draught of brain-breathing-room oxygen, I’m now going to plunge into 3 days of furiously anaerobic activity – see you on the other side…
Friday, March 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Regular expressions are awesome, but ridiculous. I did not know there were so many implementations and syntax variants. I think it is time to read the book. For the uninitiated (and so that my parents can understand this post), regular expressions are powerful bits of syntax that make search operations (like grep) much cooler and more functional.
For instance, take… uh… google. I know my parents have used google. You can query google with words and phrases, like “cab” if you’re looking for websites about taxis. This will give you websites that use the word “cab” in them. (Similarly, if I’m writing a paper about taxis, I might search for all instances of the word “cab” in there.)
What if you want more complicated searches? You can do things like “cab” OR “taxi” or “cab” AND “taxi” which gives you the intersection and union of results containing those words, respectively – not a big deal.
Okay. But wait, why do our search results suddenly return things on cable television? Oh yeah. Cable television. But we just want the word ‘cab.’ So what if we did something like…
&lt;the word has to start here!&gt;cab&lt;the word has to end here!&gt;
Or in some regular expression syntax variants, ^cab$ (it’s faster to type ^ and $ than the tags above).
What if we were studying chromatography and wanted to find references to color – I mean colour – I mean… actually, we don’t care how it’s spelled, only that it starts with “col” and ends with “r”? (So words like colander and colthisisacompletelymadeupwordr are also things we are, for some reason, looking for.)
We could search for something like this: col&lt;stuff can go in the middle, we don’t care&gt;r - or in shorter, more common syntax, col*r, the asterisk (*) being shorthand for “stuff goes in here, but we don’t care what it is, or how long.” There are special characters and a syntax where you can say things like “A single character goes here, but we don’t care what it is as long as it’s a character,” or “there should be whitespace between these two words – we don’t care how much or what kind, you can use tabs, a space, a bazillion spaces, whatever” and search for those.
The list goes on. You can match…
palindromes: ^(.?)(.?)(.?)(.?)(.?)(.?)(.?)(.?)(.?).?\9\8\7\6\5\4\3\2\1$
email addresses: ^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$
and so on, and so forth, and hooray for simple ideas with great power. (See, mom and dad? This is why I get all excited about these kinds of things. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And there’s far more to it than regular expressions.)
Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
(As of yesterday, all my notebooks – save the current one I’m writing in – have been processed. That backlog’s gone. Hurrah!)
I was taking notes at an Olin Presidents’ Council meeting. The best phrase from those notes is “Learn to be, not learn to know,” which seems to be the crux of the notes of that particular discussion on “what makes Olin different?”
There’s also a note on “who has not spoken [about what we can do to make our school better]? What have we not talked about? Who stays silent [in these conversations]?”
And another one, from the middle of a rousing discussion on (again) what Olin should do more of. “This is what Olin should do more. We are coming here to ask how to reinvent our school. Well, asking [the question] is how we do it [reinvent our school].” Followed by a less hurriedly-written memo saying I need to learn how to have better handwriting.
And then there’s this diagram, after the note “being small forces us to be reactive. We have a low C(apacitor) constant. Don’t low-pass too much! Want to learn how to cope with change.” The conversation was on using Olin as an in-between system that would amplify the good things that came of its experiments with engineering education and output that to “the world” – vague term, I know. In any case, I then drew this…
Following this diagram are the words “I have spent too much time on ECS.” I think it was meant to illustrate that despite Olin’s touted flexibility and wackiness, we have our limitations, and a not-insignificant slew rate (that is, we can’t change instantaneously). Also, we’re not the only world-component that can do this. Other op-amps exist.
I also have a page where I tell myself to “get over the whole ‘but I’m not an engineer’ identity crisis by reading about the arbitrariness of categorizations and labels,” which is a good example of how the qualitative research methods class with Prof. Silbey had affected my thinking about how engineering society works.
Interspersed between these pages are some sketches of Madge and Lauren Hafford giving their AHS capstone presentations, with notes on the presentations floating around them. Man. That was a year ago?
There’s also the conversation from when I was this close to not graduating.
Mel: (paraphrased) I’ve already learned a lot, and I’ve learned that learning is something internal – why do I need the rubber stamp of a degree?
Gill: (paraphrased) To change the system you need to do it from the inside. The “rubber stamp” is your key.
Lynn: “If you want to be able to be effective in a culture, you need to understand and speak the language even if you don’t buy it. This is what Gill said, and I know you understand it. Speaking the language != selling out.”
It’s odd to think that I’ve taken most of this year to trickle through the impact of the last few months of my undergraduate education (which included a lot more than the formal learning specified in the curriculum I was going through). A one-year time-out seems, really, just about right.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Design notes! Wow. It’s great to see these things again.
- Coffee cups and how people carry out their orders (trays, caddies, bags) from coffee shops, from a distributed design class with the wonderful Chandra Little and Phil and Hiroo from Scotland. All sorts of sketches about the hand positions people hold their cups with, how they juggle bags and purses and vessels of hot caffeinated liquid while going through doors with small children… we later filmed reenactments of most of these – that was a fun, fun morning. Then again, working with Chandra is just never not-fun.
- Portable microwave designs from another Bootstrap round with Eric Munsing. That didn’t get quite as far as menus or the Echo, but we got to do some sketch prototyping in the dining hall, and that was entertaining. (“Pretend this tupperware is a microwave… and, ah, stick on the buttons that you’d like to have?”)
- Very, very detailed notes on opportunistic beamforming. The notes were very detailed because I didn’t understand what was going on, and when I don’t understand things, I become verbose.
- Drafts of ideas that eventually became the Echo – tiny anthropomorphic PDAs, a cell phone app that worked on public transit, a list of things that each teammate valued in our final design concept (mine: accessible by illiterate and untrained users – others were things like low cost, environmentally friendly, etc).
- Flowchart of “the Olin subsystem,” from MetaOlin. Well, different versions of it, anyway. That was an interesting – if messy – paper, and one definite example of the journey being more important than the destination, because the paper that we turned in… wow. We were a prime example of the burnout/tiredness cycle we were trying to model as we wrote it. I’m not sure if I want to read it again. Maybe in a decade. I had a great time writing that paper and learned a mind-bending amount of everything, but the paper itself is kind of enh, as I remember it.
- Some notes on noisy channel coding. It also took me a moment to remember that “PDF” could stand for things other than “Portable document format.” (power density function, I believe.)
- “Pumpkin concepts” from the Halloween advising family party at Gill and Janey Pratt’s house. These include “Mix n’ match 3-pumpkin man” (three pumpkins speared vertically on a rod; heads carved on the top, bodies in the middle, feet on bottom, so you can revolve the pumpkins to make different creatures,” a “pumpkin slide rule” (which I still want to build someday), and the two we ended up actually carving, a pumpkin snake and Pumpkin Gill. There are pictures somewhere of Gui and myself covered in orange pumpkin dust from attacking both pieces with a Dremel, and photos of sawzall-assisted pumpkin lobotomies (which are VERY fun).
- On the page after this is a sign reading “It’s Saturday. We have Gill’s head.” This sign was posted on Ben Linder’s office window when we got back from pumpkin carving at Gill’s on Saturday night (we were carrying the Gill-head pumpkin) and Ben was still working. We managed to get him to stop for about 40 seconds to look at the pumpkin.
- Did I mention I love our professors?
- Some notes on tracking pianist movement – which eventually conclude with a resolution to study piano again seriously at some point in time, paying attention to the muscle mechanics, in the hopes that it will be relevant to ergonomic keyboarding (as well as being able to make more beautiful music; I miss music)
- From art class: “How do you do a habitat drawing when your definition of habitat is ’something I don’t have [a stable one of]‘?” (Back from when Gui was even more nomadic than he is now, and when I was notorious for being impossible to find in any consistent set of locations – I still am.)
- Our matsci project on bike frames; drawings of the oven with vials of saltwater we hung rings of bike tubing inside to make them rust
- Notes from our matsci project on taking apart a CD case, and the Indestructible Diode of Doom. “Duc dissolved the diode casing in Hf (a powerful acid)… alas, the Hf had not dissolved the plastic… [after multiple attempts at trying higher molarities of Hf] …dremel won’t remove casing… razor won’t remove casing… dental picks won’t remove casing. We gave up.” (We eventually used a grinder. That did the job.)
- Drawings of… Ferrite! Austentite! Maltensite! (Cementite!) and mounting samples in phenolic.
- Did these words ever once make sense to me? “Baseband time-slotted block-fading channel model.” Hm. After a few seconds of thought, they snap back into focus again, so I suppose I’m not all that far gone.
- Pages and pages of tight, precisely handwritten, highly mathematical notes, and then a HUGE scrawl across the bottom of a page rejoicing. “AHAHAHA! The paper makes sense!” with a large arrow pointing to it with black text annotating it as “The Moment.”
- Modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms, and resolutions. Terms that, to this day, I can never quite keep straight. My “cheat sheet” notebook page for when I had to use one of the terms in a proof.
- Sketches from the first Game Jam, for posters for the different teams’ games.
- Caricatures of m_stone, coderanger, and cscott.
- A drawing of the world, my family, the United States – a conversation I had with an elderly lady, an immigrant from China, who spoke about as much English as I did Chinese before I’d actually studied the language over this past winter. We were both waiting for the bus. With pictures, we talked about our families, where we’d come from, where her son went to school (Harvard)… eventually her husband arrived, and then the bus, and she gave me a bag of plums from the haymarket before going on her way.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m not sure how I missed pdb before, but it’s magically awesome. (Thanks to Jeff for inadvertently introducing me to this during PyCon.) This may be because I’m used to breakpoints and debuggers from my forays into embedded stuff, but I went “YAY DEBUGGING EVERYWHERE” crazy today before I realized excessive use of pdb does not enlighten you further after a certain point; it just slows you down.
But that was fun. And now I have a new tool. Yay! Toys for my brain!
Also, I’m proud of myself because I managed to use my computer reasonably sufficiently for a few hours last night without X or internet – just me and the command line and some manpages. (And then I figured out how to unbork X all by myself. Which I’m also proud of.) I feel like a proud toddler who’s waddling into the kitchen to show off that look, shoelace tied and I DID IT BY MYSELF MOMMY but – well, in the world of computers, isn’t that pretty much where I am? More or less steady on my own feet, able to run around and converse in reasonable (if childish and lacking in vocabulary) sentences with mature “adult” beings in the field, a long way to grow but definitely starting to see how I could get there?
And it only took me 7 years to reach this point. Woo! (Well, maybe I’d call myself a preschooler with computers/coding, and a toddler with electronics.)
Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This is a letter I wrote… about 2-3 years ago, I think – about Maker House long before it came into being. It’s only been edited to take out identifying stuff. There was a second section to the letter that wasn’t Maker House related, so I didn’t put it in. Kind of interesting to see how I’ve begun to carve out a non-physical space for my hacking since then – a portable Maker House I can take with me, so to speak.
I’d like to dream about Maker (Yellow) House for a while. I know the last time we talked about it didn’t go too smoothly. For me, Maker House isn’t a workshop full of cool gadgets – I love tools, love designing spaces, and definitely want a kickass floorplan and toy chest.
For me, MH is a community, not a Nifty Gadgetland. Being free and random to hack comes so naturally to you; you can do it anywhere, with anyone. I can’t. I know it’s all in my mind, but no matter where I go… there’s always a voice following from society saying… don’t do this; I need a place where those voices will go away, and so I want MH. It’s not so much to workshop to me as a home where I can be who I am (which is, in large part, a hacker).
So forgive me if I gloss over the floor plans and don’t start looking for drill presses just yet. I’m trying to find people, figuring out a locale and a source of funding – all the things you have to do to get a roof over your head before you can start hacking the stuff under the roof.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
More notebook fragments! I hadn’t realized how far back this stack reached in time. I have notes here from sophomore year when I started keeping a notebook with me at all times – notebooks that still have not been gone-through.
After overhearing the term “meta-culture” tossed around in Taipei
One interesting source of meta-culture examples are world religions.
They have to be pretty darn locally accessible and compelling to build a presence in different places, but keep a common thread of belief, recognition, and acceptance between different subcultures in order to stay a coherent global presence and community.
They can be connected virtually, but religious communities are, almost exclusively, ultimately locally based institutions. Some choose a common language, at least for their most fundamental principles and prayers (the Torah, the Kyrie Eleison) – most localize linguistically. Forks happen all the time when people disagree (Luther!) yet they can still be recognized as and called by a name that implies some shared, unified belief.
While being overwhelmed by information
In the absence of coherent input, all I can do is try to make my output as coherent as possible and beg people to give me course corrections.
After returning from Taiwan
I feel as if I’ve become unstuck in time, so I’m going to try to put myself back together again. It’s August 12, 2007. My name’s Mel – I’m sitting in a bookshop in Boston, not entirely sure what to do with myself.
A shopping list… but I’ve forgotten what for
cream of chicken, nutella, cream of wheat, microwaveable chicken, parmesan, broccoli, bananas, peaches, plums, melon, salami, french bread
Quickie math for unknown reasons
(x^3 – 5x^2 + 2x + 20) / (x-3) [and then the subsequent working out of this down one page margin]
Reading more John Holt
- The training needed for continuous learning is continuous learning.
- Interesting. The definition of education being used in this book is education as something people do to others – Holt wants to eliminate rather than improve it, likening it to saying “we can make slavery more humane.”
- (Holt, on why he disagrees with compulsory schooling but does not condemn the presence of all schools, using language schoosl as an example:) “[Language schools] do not say, either, that if we would like to speak another language, we must learn it in a school, let alone their school. They only say that if for our own reasons we would like to speak another language, they have resources… which may help us and which (usually for a fee) we are welcome to use if we want.”
Prototypes of Stat!
This is a sketch of a screen mockup for something that Andrew, Mark, and myself once wanted to make. The query in the search box is “how much wood do woodchucks” (with the cursor after it, presumably still in the midst of typing) and the search results below include:
- Woodchuck chucking, 1997 – 20,796 references
- Chuck’s wood output 1980-2004 – 14,200 references
- Wood output by animal – 14,166 references
(With a description like that, I defy anybody – except Mark and Andrew, of course – to figure out what Stat! was supposed to do. *wink*)
Other fun finds
A sketch for a layout I like much better than my current webpage design (which I whipped up on the subway back to my apartment yesterday). I do, however, like this layout a lot better than my former “well, I’ll put up a wiki and pretend that I’m going to fix things up for about a year, but never actually do it” game plan, despite its complete lack of images, color, or visual appeal.
A long letter about Maker House. I may post parts of it up later.
Some illegible notes about the role of “truth, beauty, and goodness” in schools. Or about the role of schools and teachers in conveying “truth, beauty, and goodness.” I can’t tell; my handwriting is poor enough that I can’t even tell what I wrote down as definitions for each.
Furniture layout drawings for my suite single.
Naming schemes for my electronic gadgets. (Except for “dandelion,” the desktop since passed on to a cousin, they all are named after made-up words in Jabberwocky.)
Notes from various restaurants, from when Eric and I were doing Bootstrap, an exercise in extremely rapid (48 hours) product design. We were trying to redesign menus and came up with a couple neat concepts and some excellent excuses to go out to restaurants in the name of “research” (well, how else were we going to observe how people used restaurant menus?) This is the same Bootstrap project that eventually led to Echo, the robot-design-concept that just won’t die. That robot keeps coming up in conversations and emails and just seems to be begging us to make it real.
Notes on continuous-time signals. The smallest nonzero T for which x(t+T) = x(t) is called the period, T_o. (This is the only one from that page that I can render reasonably in text – the others require TeX to look sane.) I love clear formal definitions. A dictionary of mathematical terms is, to me, like a book of poetry.
A reminder to “leave hungry.” This is in reference to my tendency to overdo things – the best way to ensure I’ll do something a nth time is to not satisfy myself fully the (n-1)th time I do it.
A drawing of a cube, a ladder, a horse, a landscape, and flowers – and a poorly-rendered raincloud. I think that only Chandra knows what it means. I’ve certainly forgotten.
A baby phoenix cheeping out of a broken eggshell. Drawing for Jon Tse for a project that I don’t think ever happened.
Notes on what I thought I’d be doing after graduation (driving across the country teaching math camp? Learning Chinese? I guess I’ve done some of them, and come reasonably close to others.)
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Another discovery from the depths of notebook archives. After taking the Myers-Brigg type test about 3 years ago, I went and read whatever I could find on my type, INFP. Comments from today in parentheses inline.
- Everything has a deeper meaning.
- Laid back, unless values are threatened.
- Oblivious to mundane details of life maintenance. (Oh. Right, we’re supposed to drink water. And sleep sometimes.)
- Personal rather than impersonal judgments (This makes it hard to scale your decision-making powers…)
- Perfectionist, self-reliant, and won’t ask for help (Hey! I’m working on it!)
- Sees good in everything (Of course. Isn’t it?)
- Fantasty and reality intertwined, like Calvin and Hobbes.
- Extreme depth of feeling, often hidden.
- De-jargonizes (“bahasa geek to English” translations)
- Interprets symbols (what does that mean?)
- Often gifted with language
- Reluctant leaders; motivate through praise (I think that anybody who’s taken a class I’ve taught would probably agree with that.)
- Avoids conflict and undue attention – undersells self (I’m working on it, I said.)
- Likes leisure, but finds it hard to separate leisure from work. (But work is fun!)
- If an INFP loses control of the work they do, they lose their belief in what they’re doing, and then they lose interest in it.
- Easily distracted. (I have no idea what you’re talki- oooh, shiny.)
According to the notes above, some resources go on to tell you what kind of work environment an INFP needs. It should express your vision, values, and beliefs, let you have control and time, particularly private time, while still retaining the ability to bounce ideas off people. It should have a flexible schedule, no tension, many others like you, and no competition or bureaucracy. The job should allow you to help others learn how to develop their potential, involve deep relationships and understanding people, and big-picture thinking. (Wow. This sounds awesome. I I always want to have jobs like that.) You get impatient with routine details. (Yes. Yes, I do.)
A school that you go to should be flexible, with teachers who take a personal interest in you. Creativity should be rewarded; you “interpret” assignments as you will. (Hey, this sounds a lot like Olin.) Deadlines force you to decide when your work is “good enough.” (Or rather, they remind you in hindsight when you were irrational about making something too perfect.)
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I love going through old notebooks. There’s a wonderfully cleansing feeling to it, a way of revisiting the past so you can let it go and move on with it. I’m working through my entire stack of backlogged notebooks (3 down, 5 to go). Expect a flurry of posts today as those come out.
From this summer in Boston:
- “Dreamt I was an electrical component. Dreamt of impedance mismatch.” (from the “this no longer makes sense to me out of context” department)
- “Do not build semantics into the… game! Instead, tubify it.” (What?)
- “I can’t read lips because of the @!#_; mike.” (notes from a Wikimania speech)
From my notebook in the Philippines, a short collection of moments.
- the bus swerving repeatedly into opposing traffic, passing five cars, then slamming back into the right lane inches before a certain-death collision with a bus coming in the opposite direction doing Exactly The Same Thing (it was the best cardiovascular workout I’ve ever gotten from public transportation)
- a roadside kiosk named SHINNY BUBBLES VIDEOKE [sic]
- raking rice to dry on the driveway, on basketball courts, on the roadside… carpets of tiny brown grains everywhere, dogs and small children occasionally running across them (now I know why people wash their rice).
- goats and chicken grazing in a barbed-wire-fenced yard next to a shed of men welding together bright orange hand mixers for cement.
- a billboard for PLACENTA beauty-care product (yes, it contains real placenta). Same billboard being used as a clothes hanger for the shanties built around it; there’s something incongruous about the beaming face of a white-skinned, larger-than-life model surrounded by flapping faded clothes on cheap plastic hangers.
- tall, white-tufted fields of grass with white cattle roaming placidly within them.
- “vulcanising shops” advertised by tires nailed to the doorway with white-painted letters around their rim.
- a mesh hammock hung underneath the undercarriage of a truck parked by the side of the road, with a barefoot, long-legged man snoozing in it, head barely clearing the rear axle by a few inches.
- a little shrine to the Virgin Mary carefully shielded by a ragged umbrella that used to advertise hot dogs
This isn’t a bad way to spend an Easter afternoon, actually. I might not get that Trac plugin started, but I’ve found that deliberate procrastination is my friend – when I “decide” to do something (which isn’t actually under some deadline I have to meet), I usually end up not-doing it, but doing something even better/cooler (in my eyes). So the original activity becomes a bar of “productivity” over which whatever actual action replaces it has to climb.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I didn’t become a hacker because I thought it would be an aphrodisiac. I became a hacker because I liked to make things. There are far more efficient ways of attracting mates than learning the calculus of variations. This also assumes that one is attempting to attract mates in the first place.
By the way, if you think this post refers to you, it doesn’t. However, it’s been on my mind after a series of random, unrelated, but similar encounters over the last two weeks. I’m grateful things like this keep pulling me out from my hyperfocus on projects and into broader, sweeping, humanistic big-picture themes about access and equity and involvement and whatever other buzzwords I’m supposed to insert into this paragraph, and it has given me a number of semi-unique viewpoints on the world that I’m certainly grateful for and all that, but I do occasionally wish I could just… not care
Appreciate your backpack if you have it, especially #43.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
