Some forewarning: this post is going to be somewhat awkward. Okay, more awkward than normal. I’m not really announcing anything (it’s been around a week since I could’ve announced anything) and nothing is coming up (at least, nothing planned). However, it’s been 2 weeks since I’ve written anything, so I figured I should post something.

First, a note about my latest project: Notesoble! Or something else. I haven’t exactly nailed down a name, since I lifted Notesoble from a similar project that just didn’t work out around a year ago, and it doesn’t quite reflect the character any more. So what’s it do, you ask? Well, it’s a documentation system meant to ease comprehension by harnessing the power of the computer. I think it makes much more sense when one looks at the motivation: currently, ebooks don’t use the malleability of computing power: sure, maybe they offer search, or easy dictionary look ups, or a fancy little applet with which to investigate Newtonian forces, but those are peanuts compared to the meat of the text, which is mostly unchanged from the normal prose filled tree-books of yore.

For instance, why doesn’t anyone highlight things listed in a line of prose? The content is obviously not important enough to break out into a list, but we can draw the eye immediately to the discrete elements of the list with a subtle impression. Likewise, why do we all read the same prose? On a second reading, one either wants less detail, or more. Heck, on a first reading people read for different levels of detail: why do we insist on bringing them the same level of detail?

Of course, the obvious answer is that that’s what good readers do; they don’t need these silly aids with which to read at whatever level they wish. However, I am arguing that it’s not about what one eventually figures out, but how fast one can learn it. If the structure of the page aids comprehension such that people do not have to think as much to learn the same amount… well, that’s my goal.

Such is the state of Notesoble after working on it for a weekend and then letting it ferment. I’ll get back to you guys once there are more better baked ideas, better propaganda, and better prototypes.

Jeez, has it really been a week since Devfest ended? Looking at my wrist, I discover that yes indeed, it has been a week since the end of Devfest (I’ll have to do a post-mortem post on Devfest 2011 sometime). And yet, my life is still hectic and fluffy, fluffy as expanding foam that fills every crack of the world with suffocating lemon smells. Some of it is due to the fact that I’m trying to catch up with reading that I neglected during Devfest, but I have a sneaking suspicion that much of it is due to the fact that yes, school is just this time consuming, especially since I’m not in classes where I already know everything.

I know I said I would, but I haven’t gotten my hands on a book on Bayesian Data Analysis: instead, I put out a warrant for a book on Visualizing Data. Hopefully, it provides some counterpoint to Tufte; ever since I read a stinging indictment on his work, I haven’t trusted my opinion on data visualizations. Since I don’t have a dead-tree book at the moment, I’m reading Pro Git in my spare time.

In random news, I found one of my really, really early attempts at creating a web site on Google Sites. It was pretty pathetic, and I had to euthanize it. Rest in bits, work of my past self. Hopefully, my future work won’t deprecate as quickly. Or maybe I should be hoping it will. Hmm.

And when the hell does Github turn over it’s commit counter for the week? This week of commits on Notesoble is making the rest of my projects look bad.

So why haven’t I been updating? I like to think that the MCM has irrevocably killed my schedule, but it really ain’t that: life’s just catching up to me over and over again. It’s really annoying. I’ve had viral gastroenteritis (using the power of google, you too can self-diagnose when things go horribly wrong with yourself!), otherwise known as stomach flu, for the last few days, and that just killed my productivity on Wednesday. Shoopdoowap, so that just means I stay up for a night or two. I’m over it now, thought, so that’s one good thing.

Another good thing is the fact that we’ve finally cut our first aluminum reprap part. I finally found an extended period of time when one of the profs and I were both relatively free, and whacked out a z-axis bracket.  It is very rewarding, since I’ve been trying very hard to get to this moment for more than 2 weeks (maybe more like 4). First tutorial in the metal shop was enlightening. If I can help it, we’ll whack out parts at a faster rate. I might have to wake up earlier to do so consistently, which might be an very difficult thing to do. But nonetheless, an exciting moment in the history of UPS’s reprap project.

And one bad thing to wrap up the first half of my Friday: well, I’ve gotten my first D on a math test in a very long time, dare I say ever? Really, if I can’t do math, then I might as well get myself a lobotomy or something. The cloud cover is made of mile-thick lead while the sun is going supernova, I think is a very apt description of these things.

The MCM went alright. We better do well, or we’re gonna have a disowned team mate.

More later tonight.

Hi. The MCM starts in 2 days.

I have to finish a paper and a bunch of lab questions before then, and I want to do at least one run through with my talk on maglev trains (as well as hacking S5 to auto-advance ala ignite), run at least one reprap part into existence, find if we can do etching cheaply, start the E/M test, and talk to a prof about what sort of equation I should use in a feedback loop.

Whew.

So with all of this to do, I took 3.5 hours off and coded up a framework for a problem posed by my prof that could have been a potential summer research topic: looking at the bottleneck assignment problem, what’s the relationship of n and the probability distribution used to assign weights to the assignments? If you are terribly lost, and I manage to do some work on this after the MCM, then I’ll post an update. Point is, I’m code deprived or something, and I just finished something I thought would take me at least a week, which shows me just how good my estimation abilities are (off).

And updating wordpress isn’t such a lark: I gotta do backups? Hell, gotta wrap this stuff up into a script

So, quick status report before I sleep. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, so I’m kind of wiped out right now.  My day went like this: school, talk to professor, eat, school, work on next iteration of coilgun, break an ott light, eat greasy food, go to a concert, made a smoothie, and tried to hack a quickie robot before realizing that I am an idiot and have no place on this earth. So.

School was fine: day on which nothing is due, which is good. Talking to a professor, I now have a smaller chance of being rejected outright by USC. Next iteration of the coilgun will have multiple stages, and we almost have it all set up, but the charging system we’re using seems to have broken over winter break. However, we got the arduino-controlled firing system working, and have a separate 328 chip on a breadboard acting as our arduino, since we fried our last one. Great fun. There were more than a few instances in which I had an LED plugged in the wrong way, so I had no idea it was working.

After we found out that we were hungry as heck and needed to eat, my fellow hacker left, and since I couldn’t figure out how the ott stand was screwing with wall power, I just plugged the bulb directly into the wall. Of course that was a bad idea, and now everyone should know that while the stand doesn’t screw with the voltage, it almost definitely tamps down the current available, probably through the inductor-looking thing. Fortunately, it did not blow up, which was my realistic worst-case scenario fear. It does have a crack in it, and who knows what’s in the lamp, so I might wake up tomorrow morning as some horribly mutated thing. If that happens, I recommend ceasing all attempts to hack such lamps; don’t worry about me, I’ll have done it FOR SCIENCE. Right.

Since that lamp is gone, I’ll probably have to mash up a system of LEDs to aleviate my current lighting situation. Maybe. LEDs can be not so great for lighting, so I guess I’ll try it and see how it turns out.

Friday cafeteria food has a theme of greasiness, which is unfortunate. I’m already pretty unhealthy, which I will have to rectify. Talked to fellow humans, and saw a pianist play some pieces I have not heard before. He was pretty good, but not quick kick-ass.

After the concert, I tried to stick together a very simple robot. It’s a differential drive, that derives obstacle avoidance through 2 dpst switches that switch the polarity of the motor when switched. It’s pretty simple in theory, and should’ve been simple in practice, but I have no working robot that can scuttle around and keep me happy. After 1.5 hours of working on that, I decided to switch to my pre-amp, but I looked at the schematics, the bottom of my perf-board, and now I’m here to tell you all that I need more solder. I’ll have to find if there’s a radioshack nearby.

Basically, nothing got done. Some groundwork got laid, but I have nothing to show. Yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next week. Yet.

Good things: I’m done (kind of, depending on whether I’ll apply tweaks to the final or before) with the animatric for anim3, I hacked a light (more on this, perhaps tomorrow), and I found another webcomic (dresdencodak.com, filled with all sorts of cool art, interesting stories, and thinking material. It’s a wonder I hadn’t found it sooner. However, the update rate is horrendous, although I suppose he has to do other things for a living scratch that, he does it for a living. Also, I’ll have to remedy the ‘cute girls as avatar’ syndrome that seems to overrun every webcomic I see, someday). I also may have a lead on that mystery component in the ott light stand, and parts are arriving. Yay!

Food for thought: having stayed out for New Years (playing Mario Kart and guitar hero, in addition to hanging out), I started driving home at around 2:30 AM. It was a pretty miserable night: not only did I have to watch out for drunks, the heavens decided to piss all over the place. It’s amazing I only passed on accident. I wonder what people think when they pass an accident, how close my thoughts are to the norm. Anyways, I’m pretty tired, so I’ll close here.

I’ve been wondering how to apply agile-esque methodologies to things outside of programming, especially since I’m not that great of a programmer. To recap, agile (or what agile means to me) is the mindset that releasing content early and frequently yields better results than finishing and polishing something you release/perform once in a great while. It would seem like this sort of methodology would work with something like the performing arts, since performers are always in a state of flux: one continually gets better. (The discrete nature of traditionally infrequent performances mask that fact, at least to myself.). For instance, last year a visiting violin professor reorganized studio class so everyone would perform at least bimonthly, instead of only three times in a semester. Once you’ve accepted an unmovable release schedule, then one adapts and progress is more apparent through the frequent performances. So that’s my previous experience with an agile-methodology with music performance: where do we go from here?

Well, we do it. Here are some recordings that I made today, about half a month from juries.

To kick things off, here’s mostly chaos. I just overlaid everything on top of each other when I was recording, and here’s a few seconds of the end result.

Now, some Bach: eventually, I’ll overlay the Sarabande and the Double, which works since Bach wrote the two to be harmonically isomorphic (or whatever music theory people say when they mean equivalence).

bach-sarabande-27-11-09_1

A second try at the Bach Sarabande: bach-sarabande-27-11-09_2

I just started the Double, so no, I don’t suck that badly. Really: bach-double-27-11-09_1

And have some Mozart:

A quick run-through of the Mozart. Maybe I’ll add some piano overlay sometime. mozart-concerto-4-I-27-11-09_1

Cadenza: mozart-concerto-4-cadenza-27-11-09_1

And a less gimpy run of the Cadenza: mozart-concerto-4-cadenza-27-11-09_2

Have fun: remember, all content is under cc-by-nc-sa. The lead in/out times are there if you want to do your own trimming/noise removal.