End of Semester Review

So it’s been a while. Sorry about that, I’ve been kind of… busy. And not the making-cool-stuff sort of busy, more of the oh-my-god-finals-are-coming-AHHHH-THEY’RE-ALREADY-HERE sort of busy. But now it’s over, and I’m essentially guaranteed all A’s and A minuses in the reported-to-the-registrar sort of way. That was somewhat surprising because I didn’t always get straight A’s at UPS, where the classes weren’t always trying to kill you; but at the same time it’s not surprising at all, because around 80% of the material was old hat to me.

So now that I have some time to actually think back and reflect on my time in New York, the foremost question is how everything panned out, versus how I thought it would pan out at the beginning of the year. But before that, perhaps a comparison and contrast:

• I went from living in a basement to living 7 stories above the street. There was a bit more light reaching my window (curse you, tall buildings that I am not in!) but the size of the window more than made this move a huge gain in the not-being-gollum sector.
• I went from living in a suburb-ish sort of area to a decidely urban area. UPS being in a suburban area really closes off the school and isolates it into its own sort of ecosystem, whereas Columbia being uptown of a huge urban center really... I'd say it doesn't open up the campus, but boy is the ecosystem definitely more of a niche.
• I went from being a junior to being a junior. This is weird because you're taking lower lever classes, but you're *old*. You end up talking to freshmen, because they're the only ones without established groups, and it's striking how they seem so naive and young. Ahh, youth...
• I went from being on a first-name basis with several professors to "oh hello, do you remember my from that one class? I don't have time to do research with you right now, and I'm going to be gone in a year. Opps, year gone, goodbye!" (I really, really hope this sort of thing doesn't happen)
• I went from being a pasty recluse to being a pasty recluse.

So how was I expecting New York to pan out? I was expecting… I’m not sure, anymore. A geek mecca? (Except that would have been obviously not probable, given the relative placements of MIT and Columbia) Now that I think about it, I just went without an agenda and decided to take whatever life threw at me. I didn’t know what New York was like; I based my 3/2 decision on who gave me more financial aid, not on which school would give me the better opportunities or whatever. I had no idea what I was getting myself into; I only was vaguely expecting something big.

So I wasn’t expecting too much, but I had some ideas about the ‘geek mecca’ that I was looking for, and to an extent Columbia has delivered. I will note that the geeks at Columbia are more inclusive of the business side of things, which kind of threw me off: hell, we didn’t have enough geeks at UPS to even talk about doing startups.

It might be because I got involved with the geekiest-sounding group I could find on campus, and while some of the ADI goals are aligned with my own (CODE CODE CODE) some of the others are somewhat different (encourage entrepreneurship!) and the main goal of the ADI (geek herding!) is a nobel one that has to be done to do great things, but it’s… still grunt work (unlike CODE CODE CODE). So what I was trying to say is that since I’m involved with the ADI, I have no idea if my conclusion that Columbia geeks are more business oriented than geeks elsewhere is true or fallen prey to selection effects or not, which reminds me I need to actually do things with the IEEE group on campus, since I managed to miss almost every single meeting/event thrown by IEEE, and there are probably some hardware hackers lurking with them.

Like always, some professors are cool, and some other professors just don’t give a shit. I suppose this is standard for large research institutions, but it’s a definite paradigm shift from UPS, where most of the professors did give a shit about the students. I suppose that the one class where the professor was less than engaging could be explained by the fact it was held in the early evening, and covered some of the mind-numbing basics of the field [FOURIER TRANSFORMS AGAIN??? I MEAN WHEEE], but that’s no excuse for being inaccessible and having the difficulty of the midterms jump all over the place.

I realized (finally) that classes are somewhat of a waste of time: all the material covered, at least in these lower level courses, can be found in the book. However, I need motivation to do the studying, and there’s nothing like locking me in a room for an hour to raise motivation for studying. Also, I’m paying for something, and by golly I’ll be getting something out of it.

Being relatively far away from campus sucks. I used to be able to roll out of bed and get to class in 2 minutes, and now I have to actually plan out my mornings. Well, having structure isn’t a bad thing, but gosh darn it if convenience isn’t swell.

It’s depressing: I sat down and tried to play some piano on the last day of classes, and it’s all gone. My violin is going, too. Have to do something about that…

Out of steam, I’ll do a end-of-year post on New Years Eve or something.

Merry Newtonmas!

Botacon is a robotics conference being held in Brooklyn, happening right now. It consists of a bunch of talks by people from robotics, like some dudes from Makerbot and Make magazine, which I was planning on going to. I say planning, because I’m not in Brooklyn: instead, I’m in my dorm. It’s quite unfortunate: these cool things are happening in my backyard, and I don’t even go to them…

The reason I’m still in my dorm is that I finally screwed up my sleep schedule. Being something of an insomniac, I have been waking up at 9am for the last week or so: except for the last 2 days, it’s been working wonders on my sleep schedule. Waking up at a constant time, instead of whenever I have to wake up, has seemingly cured my insomnia. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not getting 7+ hours of sleep each night, so I’m always tired: that notion lends credence to the thought that without enough sleep, I have to crash sometime. And I think I crashed this morning, right through 9am to 12am.

Staying up to 3am did not help things. Why did I stay up to 3am? My laptop is… less than satisfactory. For the record, the color really does appear differently under different lighting conditions: I have a feeling my friends are going to take one look at it and say something along the lines of “WTH IT’S SILVER FOO WHACHA COMPLAIN’IN ABOUT”. Ah well. At this point, it’s the internals that have really stood out to me: the touchpad is not quite an unusable monstrosity once I got used to it, and removing the fingerprint reader drivers removes that particular annoyance.

Nay, I do believe that the main cause of my troubles is the i7, which I got on a whim after I discovered upgrading to an i7 cost the same as keeping the i5 due to a coupon. The i7 seems to be putting out prodigious amounts of heat, and conversely draining the battery at a prodigious rate. When I cold-boot my laptop, it takes about a minute before a very particular spot under the laptop becomes uncomfortably warm on my lap. Then, battery life takes a dive, and I’m left with about 3 hours of life, max. I spent much of last night trying to figure out if switching to an i5 would help on both counts, which seems like it should help.

At any rate, I should probably change out of my pajamas, and actually get stuff done today. Hopefully Botacon comes back for a botacon 1 next year…

Holy crap am I tired. Suffice it to say that learning to use a laser cutter was pretty awesome: I now have a chassis for my clock, and a broken key chain QR code. Seriously, bass wood will not hold up to hiding in your pocket for half a day.

First time at NYC Resistor, too. Very cool hackerspace, not sure if it’s bigger than A1L or Metrix. Oh well.

I would post a picture of that clock chassis, but wordpress is barfing on me and I don’t want to deal with it right now.

I'm going to try and focus on homework, maybe go to sleep early for once. Going to sleep for 6 hours for 4 days in a row can't be good... On the other hand, always waking up at 9AM seems to have cured my insomnia. Either that, or getting 6 hours of sleep means I'm always tired. Eh.

Oh hi. Since you’re reading this, you probably know that my old laptop died and refused to be resurrected without a bit of magical malarky involving increasingly higher sums of money. Being a good consumer, I decided I’d instead shell out for a bit better laptop, as my friend the lower-end Dell Inspiron was starting to grate at my edges: another budget laptop seemed to be just asking for more of the same. Of course, I didn’t go that much higher: I’m still a student, after all, and I’ll be a cheap bum at heart for a while yet. I sprung for the HP dm4, with a few modifications thrown in to make it palatable to my inner power user.

First impressions: damn, it is pink! I know, I should be above that, but my inner man-child was still unnerved by the unpacking. After seeing my friend’s HP, which was quite definitely silver, I thought those dm4-is-pink haters were just being silly. They aren’t; such a shade of light red can bring burly men to question their masculinity. Of course, being a refined gentleman instead of a burly man-ape means I don’t have to care. Maybe. OH GOD THE COLOR IT BURNS MY EYES

Second impressions: damn, this mouse pad really does suck! I thought the reviewers were being, I don’t know, whiny or something. Surely such a small problem is trivial, right? Especially when the reviewers still suggested the Envy 14 despite the problems with it. Nay, HP’s mouse pad really does suck. It doesn’t pick up gestures, which is one of its selling points (not for me), and the buttons are just not going to see very much use because some UX engineer decided it would be a fantastic idea to extend the capacitive-sensing area into the buttons. I can work around it, but such an integral part of the laptop shouldn’t even be noticeable.

Next impression: this keyboard feels weird. Not such a big problem, but while I’m airing my grievances, I might as well be thorough.

Fingerprint reader is somewhat annoying: I’m probably not going to use this. Disabling it is only 5 minutes away, but really, I don’t feel quite like doing it right now. I will have to do it, though, or the constant accidental swipes across it that pop up a setup wizard are going to drive me insane.

The i7 seems to run a bit hot, even when I’m not pushing it, and the 6GB of RAM is going to be very useful. I haven’t run very rigorous tests on the battery life, but it seems to be draining somewhat quicker than I was hoping (15% in 30 minutes, so a potential total of 3 hours. Not very long when I’m used to going for 6 hours between charges). Video card seems to be so-so so far: it couldn’t handle the stupid HP flash intro very well (a better approach would have been FUCK YOU, USER. YOU’LL LEARN TO USE A COMMAND LINE INTERFACE, AND YOU WILL LIKE IT. Really, that would’ve been the better approach here). Haven’t done any Blender work on it yet, so we’ll see how that goes. The switching mechanism between integrated and discrete graphics is less than perfect, although it seems that it could be solved by software update.

The screen is somewhat small: I guess grabbing snatches of work on 21" monitors makes the 1366x768 resolution seem puny by comparison, but it still irks me that there’s no 1600x900 option for most sub-15" laptops. Definitely shelling out for a higher-res screen in my next laptop iteration. 14" seems like a good form factor, and the weight seems very reasonable (4.4lb).

The metal case is pretty cool, but that review that claimed it was ‘mostly encased in metal’ was wrong. Not that I’m complaining, since the plastic shell of my old laptop picked up all sorts of crap way too easily, which a semi-metal chassis should solve.

A number of my grievances are probably going to be solved tomorrow, when I will probably get the SSD that I ordered and do clean installs of everything, which means all the crappy software that comes with the laptop will be gone and I can install Ubuntu (good idea install Windows 7 and then Ubuntu).

All in all, it’s not an absolutely terrible laptop: I’m guessing most people would be fine with this laptop. I’m fine with it, too, for all it’s shortcomings (or maybe I just don’t want to go another day without my own computer?). I got some pretty nice internals for a pretty good deal (I essentially swapped out an i5 for an i7 for no increase in price), and I’m guessing that once I beat someone to death with this very light-red laptop, no one will question my sexual orientation. Maybe.

I just whipped up a quick flyer generator for the ADI. It kind of works-ish, definitely needs more work/documentation/a github repo, but it’s good enough for a minimal viable product.

Revision 2, the latest version, is over here.

Why’s it named lolhawk? Well, it makes flyers; the first flyer is arguably the Wright flyer, which was launched at Kitty Hawk; everyone knows kitties as lolcats, so if you spin everything around fast enough, you get lolhawk. Also, hawks are fliers, too ;P

EDIT: I still don’t have a computer to call my own, so that was especially painful to write. Ah well, put off homework for a bit, which lessens the net loss (or increases??! STAY TUNED FOR NEXT TIME WHE

EDIT 2: Fantastic, and now there’s a new HPMofR! I like to think it’s a reward for opening myself up to universal ridicule and scorn.

Without a computer to call my own.

I can do this.

Maybe.

So, I’ve been without a personal computer for 5 days now, with at least another 4 days ahead of me, minimum. For someone that thought he lived and died by his computing power, it’s been surprisingly bearable.

For a full accounting, my laptop’s video card fried, and it’s in the repair shop for at least a week. If that doesn’t work (I have a reasonable expectation that it should), then I’ll end up splurging and getting myself a good laptop: at least, not a lower end Dell. There are several shortcomings of my Inspiron 1545 that are annoying, like no numpad (for on the fly blender work), weird keyboard bevel material, weak screen/body joint, and no virtual machine support. So, even though I expect the repairs to work, I’m kind of hoping… they won’t?

Anyways, life without a personal computer. Between having a capable smartphone and plenty of University lab computers, life is pretty manageable. It’s not a big thing, but I managed to hack together a bunch of ADI stuff (custom QR codes, several flyers) without pretty much any of my usual resources. Made me feel badass. Ha.

However, the little things drag down on me. Not having the resources to do my homework on my computer is not so great: I can’t rip through lines of a math proof with LaTeX/Emacs and C-a C-k C-n C-y, and can’t change my intermediate results on the fly (have to erase them when you write it out. Unfortunate). It doesn’t seem like typing out your homework in LaTeX would be faster, but it at least feels like it is. For some reason, though, I finished all my homework early (even when just writing it out), and then lazed around for pretty much an entire day. Bah.

I can’t work on my pet projects the way I want to: for instance, there’s no place for me to pop open Eagle and start designing the clock PCBs I need. That’s annoying.

Wouldn’t want to be this way forever. Only for a few more days, hopefully.

Excuse the incomplete thoughts. Computer withdrawal, you know.

Hey! I wrote a tutorial over at HackCU, ADI’s tech blog for non-tech people. It’s about connecting to IRC. No blog post for a while, time to do homework.

Well, I’ve just had solid 3 days of awesome.

I guess I’ll go to sleep, or something.

But before that, I suppose I should tell you about what actually happened, especially since I didn’t actually tell you blog-followers yet. I was very lucky, and got to attend IROS, the awesome-cool annual IEEE robotics conference. I wasn’t insanely lucky, however, because it wasn’t in NYC like Maker Faire was. Instead, it was in Taipei. Well, I guess I was insanely lucky.

So, first a list of what I learned:

• Sitting down for almost the entire duration of a world-spanning plane ride is hell on your feet.
• Dehydration is a terrible thing.
• Not having any purchasing power because you forgot your credit card pin is a terrible thing.
• I know almost nothing. It's quite pathetic, really.
• Just because you're attending a technical conference does not mean the internet is great at the conference venue.
• Just because you're in Asia does not mean the internet is cheap and fast. Especially at some swanky hotel.
• Knowing that someone on Omegle is 12 hours off from you is one thing: actually moving 12 hours offset from most of the people you know is another.
• The rain there wasn't quite as vicious as the worst NYC rain I've seen, but it definitely made up for it by raining the entire damn time.
• City design should account for the weather. This means making sure there are no slippery tiles of death, especially when it rains all the damn time.
• Willow Garage is the shit.
• ROS is the shit.
• Visual SLAM is the shit.
• Repraps are not intelligent robots
• You can include anime in your talk and get away with it.
• Google does not care if you can't read chinese: it'll serve up ads in chinese if you're in Taiwan. Not a complaint, but it was still funny.
• Brilliant people can give terrible talks.

Ahem

It is really, really, REALLY inspiring to see all this completed work. It makes me think that I can do something with myself. Hell, it has me thinking that grad school is really something I should do at some point in time. Not maybe, but something that I really should do. Failing that, R&D (and who the hell fails to go to grad school? I mean, the USA imports grad students, and the deficit is definitely due to people just not caring enough to try). I suppose the fact they had to squeeze all their work down into 20 minutes makes it seem a whole lot easier that it actually is has something to do with how inspiring it was…

In that vein, I need to check out some books. I’m attending a huge university with a huge library, there’s absolutely no reason why I’m not taking every advantage of my position. First stop: Probabilistic Robotics. I’m still shaky on my Kalman filters, not to mention particle or unscented particle or rosy-smelling car filters. Then, the best non-linear optimization book I can lay my hands on, and then… well, I’ll come up with something. Basically, I need to start I gigantic book orgy until I graduate, which is fine by me: re-reading old Methods of Rationality yields diminishing returns. </geekgasm>

Speaking of being inspired, I want to expand on one of my previous taglines. Namely, the fact that many of the speakers could not present to save their lives. True, not many of the presenters have English as a primary language, but a presentation is still a presentation, and knowing the speaker hasn’t been immersed in an english-speaking culture for 21 years doesn’t magically endow the listener with comprehension.

You would think that academics would be very good at transmitting information: they’ve been on the receiving end of explicit information transmission for most of their academic lives, and surely they’ve picked up (at least by osmosis) what works and what doesn’t. An academic should know how it feels to be on the receiving end of notes being read aloud, and yet many presenters just read their speaker notes. There was very little engagement of the audience: the professor that sponsored me on this trip was the only speaker I saw that came out from behind the podium while speaking (he’s very cool, and his accessible and engaging presentation only cemented that belief. P(coolProf|coolPresentation) = P(coolProf)P(coolProf and coolPresentation)/P(coolPresentation) where P(coolPresentation) > 0.99, yo, definite positive update).

Maybe an ignite presentation style would be good: we wouldn’t have the guys that fumble around with their slides (the usual ‘oops, overshot: lemme go back, oops again’), and squash the 30 minute presentations. We’d have to make it work with the people that finish their presentation right before they present, but it seems like it should be a trivial problem.

Meta-note on the conference: why in the world did they have to go and kill all those trees to make those huge conference books? Smartphone apps and interactive webpages not only fit inside a phone/laptop, they can do things like grep and do interactive planning. I’m sorely tempted to write a conference app framework, at least for android (finally dip my toe into phone development).

Another meta-note on the conference: it was really terrible that we managed to DOS the conference center routers. You couldn’t even connect to the router until Thursday, when people realized the rain wasn’t going to let up before the conference ended, and started to go explore the city anyways. I know the conference center doesn’t live and die by the quality of their IT infrastructure, but it’s an IEEE conference. Surely we could’ve whipped up some wireless links to relieve congestion on the main routers, or something (this thought makes me think that there’s some merit in becoming a conference/meetup hacker: someone that notices things wrong with an event, and hacks something up to remedy it before the event ends. Now, only if there were a job in it…).

On that note, I was able to actually get things down without always-accessible internet. Surprise, surprise. And then, those few times I got an uplink were always frenzied moments of trying to squeeze as much doing into as little time as possible. It adds some weight to the notion that I should not have accessible internet everywhere…

I was not impressed with the night market. It always seems like these things have 95% of merchants selling the same old clothing/shoes/jewelry/electronics (maybe the electronics booth is more of a NYC street fair thing), and the rest are actually doing something that you won’t find in every other street market in the world. Like, the bajillion claw-game parlor: I have no idea how they turn a profit with that many claw-games. We might have been in the wrong market: it was pretty tame compared to what  I thought it would be like, and it seemed like most of the shops were just extensions of the store fronts that are always there. So, my thoughts may very well be moot.

Finally, I noticed that I’m a very bad introvert: I seem to get energy from talking to people, especially helping people. Definitely not traditional introvert behavior. Not sure why that happens, when it started happening, or if I ever really was introverted.

Okay, I think that’s enough for a first mind dump. Time to actually unpack and start getting back into doing hw…

So you should note that I moved the blog root, and I’ve figured out how to get my project documentation into wordpress. Not that I’ve actually done that, it might be a while before I get around to doing that.

Before I lag too much in time, HackNY was pretty awesome. Coded up something semi-useful, although it took me way too long to do it, and it screwed up my internals; this will go up on the projects page once I get that up. The week-long awesome next week is going to be even worse on my stability, and I’m already pretty gosh-darn unstable. I need to finish so many things, and make some more time to do some more things, so I probably will have to drop off the face of the earth for around 2 weeks, optimistically speaking.

See you guys on the other side.