Photon Reflection Pond

New city, new bike

2010-09-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

A few facts. In May, I moved to Seattle. Since May, I have used my bicycle twice. As of this fall, I will be using a bike pretty much every day. Read on for an explanation regarding the last two facts.

Why didn't I ever use my bike during the sunny season in Seattle? Well, I had to commute to Microsoft from Capitol Hill. This is a very inconvenient task regardless of the weather for a number of reasons. There is no direct cycling-only option to get from the north half of Seattle to the SR-520 corridor. The options were as follows:

Bike to the Montlake Flyer Stop, a final eastbound west-side stop for congested bus routes such as the ST 545. From there, ride the bus across the bridge, disembark at the first stop and ride to Microsoft for 20 minutes along the SR-520 corridor multiuse trail. This is a huge pain because you must wait for an empty bike rack on a bus, which could take half an hour or more after 8am.
Bike all the way up the Burke-Gilman trail and then on roads through Kirkland to Redmond. This adds at least 45 minutes to the commute.
Bike south to I-90 and use the bike lane attached to the interstate. This is the nicest way to cross the lake, but it is quite out of the way unless you live in or south of Central District. You also have to deal with the Bellevue's traffic and its general abundance of jerks with cars while going north to Redmond. This detour adds a minimum of 30 minutes to the commute each way.

All of these were way too much hassle for myself, especially considering my tendency to keep long hours at my internship. As I've been too tired/busy to go out on long rides on the weekend, the racing bike has sat on the porch most of the summer. My daily commute was a 20-45 minute one-way exercise in sitting my rear on a nominally soft Sound Transit coach seat.

Now that the internship is done, I feel at liberty to realistically consider commuting by bike to UW* every day, including rainy and dreary days. The main considerations are the different weather conditions (rain, mist, fog, slog, and Seattle's other precipitation variants), a significant hill climb when going back home, and suitability for commuting.

The aforementioned "racing bike" is a Felt Racing 2008 Z80 (sized 54cm, a tad too big for me). I inherited it from Steph ever since she started her romance with her fixed-gear bike. Since it is explicitly a "racing" bike, it does not have clearance for tires much larger than 700x24, and fitting a rack is out of the question. The frame geometry is a bit compact, which isn't great for touring or commuting. It does well on hills with three chainrings (50/39/30) and a Shimano 9-speed cassette (12-25T), but the Shimano Tiagra STI shifters are really not my style. The derailleurs/cogs frequently get confused for no apparent reason, and perform very poorly with chain tension (say, going uphill and gearing down is somewhat risky).

On advice from several other bikers, I started my search for a commuter bike with the Surly Cross Check. It's a steel-frame bike designed for maximum flexibility, and commonly employed as a commuter, cyclocross, touring, and "whatever" bike. I was initially skeptical that it would be much different from the Felt bike, but good geometry and steel can make a world of difference.

Over the past two weeks, I tested a 50cm Cross Check (at REI Seattle), a 52cm Surly Long Haul Trucker, 50cm Aurora, and finally, a 52cm Cross Check. I'm planning to go back and buy it on Monday from Counterbalance U Village, and then take it to FreeRange Cycles in Fremont for some adjustments. The most important adjustment will be the addition of a 3rd chainring. This will enable me to get up hills.. something that is not really possible with the 2 chainrings (36, 48) x 9 (12-25) that come standard on a built up Cross Check.

The next part in getting commute ready will be to shell out for fenders, a rack, and panniers. I'm not completely settled on the brand of panniers that I want, but at the least they have to be waterproof and able to fit a 15" macbook pro inside a case :) I will update with pictures once the goods are purchased come Monday.

PLDI 2010: Day 0 and 1

2010-06-08T07:59:00.000-07:00

As I write this, I'm at the Fairmont Royal York hotel in downtown Toronto, the location of the PLDI 2010 conference. Our paper from Purdue ("An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs") was the first paper of the opening session of the conference. Though I am not a presenter this year, I felt that it was important to come to this conference for networking and to see what's going on elsewhere.

So far, Toronto has been good. I found some very cheap lodging at the University of Toronto. Apparently they operate their dorms as short or long-term hostels during the summer, and I was able to stay at $37 CAD a night. Compared to the conference hotel (a 4 star hotel), it's a great steal and has allowed me to rationalize the exorbitant price of dining in Toronto. Transit in Toronto is much more institutionalized than in Seattle, so the subways are often packed in the morning and streetcars go between the most important subway stations and offer free transfers to the subway. Though I have gotten lost a few times in the subway, it is much more convenient than being lost on a bus system or on foot.

I arrived here on Sunday via a non-stop Air Canada flight from Seattle. Transport from the Toronto Pearson airport is a simple connector bus and 15 subway stops, for a grand total of $3 CAD. The price of food has a great deal to do with its proximity to 4-star hotels; A half-dozen blocks from the conference hotel, I was able to get decent coffee for $1.50. Within the hotel, coffee is over $3 and a simple Heineken at the hotel bar will run you a sweet $8 CAD.

Downtown Toronto also has a sprawling network of underground shopping plazas and walkways. According to the marketing copy, it is the largest underground network in the world. Personally the city seems like Montreal, but much more British than French (opposite of Montreal). Montreal also has a substantial covered/underground tunnel system, but I never used the subway there. The French influence in Montreal is almost like the Chinese and Vietnamese influence present outside of the downtown core of Toronto. On Sunday I walked through Chinatown, and it is at least 30 blocks in size. It makes the International District in Seattle seem quaint and cozy by comparison.

Later I'll write about the actual research presentation program. Now, I will be off to lunch.

Covered bicycle parking at Purdue University's West Lafayette campus

2010-04-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

Purdue has very little biking culture. Thus, the poor state of affairs when it comes to bike lanes and bike racks is not surprising. Bike lanes deserve their own post entirely, because there are so many ways that they could be improved.

It seems that the vast, vast majority of bikes on campus were bought during freshman year by mommy and daddy at WalMart, and have never been serviced since. Rusted-out bikes are common, and the relevant groundskeeping/police people only remove abandoned bikes twice per year (at the end of Autumn and Spring semesters). Also, there does not seem to be any coherent approach to bike racks: some are long racks, some are upside-down U's cemented into the ground, and there are a few truly eccentric bike racks in the older parts of campus.

By far the biggest gripe that I had was the lack of covered bike parking, especially outside of residence halls. For those poor souls in Owen, Tarkington, and other dorms without elevators, it is not even possible to bring your bike into your tiny room. Even in halls with elevators, there is no place to securely store your bike besides your room. Without covered parking, bikes both cheap and expensive will quickly deteriorate and become unusable without a new chain and other parts. Since replacing such parts on a Walmart bike is not usually possible, these bikes are abandoned, taking valuable space in heavily used locations (like dining courts, lecture halls, and dorms).

In my four years at Purdue, I have only come to discover a few places where one can reliably park their bike at a bike rack with shelter from the elements. If anyone knows of more, please let me know and I'll add it to this list. I do not spend much time in dorm-land or Engineering parts of campus, so it is likely that I have forgotten a few places.

Beneath the elevated building spanning Wetherill and Brown. There are at least four bike racks, but they can be crowded at times. Similar to the Math building breezeway, rain/snow can fairly easily blow through and still get bikes wet.
In the Hawkins Hall underground parking ramp. Just to the right upon going down the entrance, there are two bike racks that are a decent distance away from the outside of the garage. This place seems popular with old commuters (saw lots of bikes with 2+ panniers).
There is some marginal covered parking for bikes in front of Krannert. There is an overhang about 8-10 feet up in the air and some load-bearing pillars. Amongst this are some bike racks. A bike parked there would probably get wet with much wind, though. Another minus is it's proximity to the campus bars; left for too many nights, it would be a likely victim of drunken destruction.

It would be an easy fix to add more covered parking near campus: simply remove a few parking spaces in each of the parking garages, and add modern bike racks. While this would remove about a thousand dollars a year in A parking revenue, I'm sure that the cost of removing and disposing of hundreds of bike frames and kicked-in wheels. Simple awnings are inexpensive, and can be used at several existing large bike rack areas without making the landscape substantially uglier. I'd much rather see awnings than rusted, abandoned bikes.

Slowly improving my ergonomic-ness

2010-04-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

One of my coworkers in the lab recently decided to start back up on his piano-playing. Naturally, I was jealous (why did I never learn to play piano?). However, within a week he came into the lab bearing wrist braces and a grimace. Between learning Chopin and coding for 8+ hours a day on a 13" MacBook, all of the finger work finally did him in. He was unable to bend his wrists at all while wearing the braces, so he had to buy an ergonomic keyboard that doesn't require bending of the wrists.

I have always been slightly curious about exotic keyboard layouts and ergonomic ways of working, starting with my learning of Dvorak layout last year and continuing when I saw several people at UW with fancy Kinesis keyboards. Since that visit I have been debating whether or not I need to worry about ergonomics, and if I do, what to do to alleviate this worrying.

For starters, I have tried various different ways of using my MacBook. Despite being the midsize model (15"), it is very hard on your wrists to use the cramped keyboard for extended periods of time. This is compounded by the abundance of chairs and tables on Purdue's campus that make good posture difficult or impossible. The first experiment was to try sitting up straight. This only is comfortable in a small number of chairs on campus, so my tried an entirely different approach to typing posture: standing up while typing. This is also hard on campus because most tables are quite short. This has only worked at home, where my dinner table is designed for high chairs.

The next step, one which I am currently in, is experimenting with keyboard and monitor height. My other main gripe about laptops (besides cramped keyboards) is that they force you to look downwards at the screen. This makes it very difficult to maintain a good posture while typing, since your neck is bent forward and head downward. My first attempt at fixing this is to buy a somewhat cheap ergonomic keyboard (the bog-standard, entry-level Microsoft ergo keyboard). With this, I can adjust the height of they keyboard and the laptop screen independently. It will take me a few days to get used to using an external keyboard again, as I never use a mouse these days.

I'm wondering what the long-term, optimal configuration will be. This is important to consider before I spend a lot of money on other equipment, and before I start graduate school and set up my student office. Does the split keyboard/screen necessitate having a desktop for long-term work and a laptop for short-term work? Is it worth it to have ergonomic setups at both work and home? It's fully possible to drive two external monitors with my MacBook Pro's video card, but all of the setup and takedown is a barrier to starting work easily. At the same time, I don't know if i'll be able to get a nice monitor and a decent Mac Pro or iMac in the graduate student offices.

I suppose time will tell. In the meantime, i'm going to continue improving my standing-while-typing posture, and hope that someday down the road I will not have to deal with the occupational hazards of hacker/programmer (as my poor coworker must deal with now).

A new way to handle email

2010-04-15T11:06:00.001-07:00

For the past four years, every day has brought a stream of emails to my inbox. Some days, this stream resembles a trickle (such as on break, or on the weekend). On the weekdays, it often approximates a torrent. My strategies for diverting and handling this torrent of obligations, requests, and information has changed every so often. My goals in these incremental changes of process are to 1) minimize the time needed to find past emails 2) minimize the mental overhead of keeping track of the status of emails, and 3) minimize the time needed to maintain the system to make 1) and 2) possible.

In the past, I had a low volume of email to deal with, so I had a boring method of handling email: upon new mail arriving, I either replied to it or left it alone. After a few days or weeks, I would get tired of scrolling through my inbox. Some of the emails could be easily deleted or archived in a folder, but there were always some emails that were not yet "done". Perhaps they merited a long and thoughtful response that was yet short and ill-conceived; perhaps they gave details of an upcoming event. The easiest thing to do was to use the inbox as a holding pen until these messages became 'resolved'. This strategy worked well until senior year, when I became wrapped up into so many different events, ideas, and mailing lists that my inbox would still be at 30 messages full after being "cleaned".

I've decided to use this new approach, called the Trusted Trio.

Basically, you segment your email into three categories which explicitly model the lifecycle of an email. I'll call these categories "TODO", "In Progress", and "Archive". The first category is for emails that can't be responded to in a minute or two and need more time to be dealt with. This includes emails requiring long responses, some (external of the mailbox) action, or otherwise require me to do something.

The second category, In Progress, contains messages that require a later follow-up, pertain to a future event, or are no longer TODO but not quite dead yet. If you were to have an exchange with someone to set up a lunch, and were awaiting a reply of their preferred times, the entire thread would go into "In Progress".

The final category is for emails that are done, dead, or most likely no longer alive. Depending on the email client, you can organize this however you like: with a tagging-based email client (i.e. GMail), adding subject tags is a sufficient amount of organization. I use Mail.app and MobileMe right now, so I use folders based on what part of my life the email pertains to. The current subfolders include Research, Personal, Shopping, Class.

My main problem with this new approach is that it gets messy with several different email accounts. Right now I have a half-dozen emails and many more redirection addresses (such as @mac.com, @acm.org, and so on). It is difficult for me to funnel all of these into a single IMAP email account, especially when i'm not in front of my laptop. Hopefully when I start at UW, most of my emails will slowly come by just one or two accounts.

Concert Review: Miguel Zenón's Esta Plena

2010-04-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

NOTE: this review was written as part of MUS 378 Jazz History, taught by Don Seybold.

Miguel Zenón’s Esta Plena. To me, it sounds like the name of a Spanish ballet. I have listened to music from Cuba, Mexico, South America, but plena is none of these: it is the traditional music of Puerto Rico. Still, knowing just this did not meaningfully inform my expectations of the concert. I discerned it was something unfamiliar and different, on account of the unusual number of young people packed into the ground floor of Loeb Playhouse. My seat was towards the rear, and behind me were perhaps a half-dozen young Puerto Ricans. To my left and right were more college students. There was a buzz in the air. It induced students to text and tweet at a furious pace, which added yet more energy and tension with every character pecked.

After the obligatory Todd Wetzel introduction, the band quickly deployed to their instruments and began playing without hesitation or introduction. Hans Glawischnig, the bass player, set up a boisterous Latin beat that enunciated the frenetic energy buzzing in the hall. The six seated behind me possessed the voices of a dozen, whooping, yelling, and otherwise emulating the soundtrack of a dance party in Spanish. As the theme of the first song was repeated, the younger subset of the audience met the beat with a steady clap. This was my favorite style played during the night: raucous, fast, and a distinctly “concert” sound (as opposed to upper-case Concert).

The concert’s theme was an exploration of plena – a music influenced by Spanish and African musical traditions. The main instigators of this sound were the three plenera (hand drums) of various sizes and their players: Héctor Matos (requinto, the smallest drum), Obanilú Allende (vocals and segundo, the middle drum), and Juan Gutiérrez (seguidor, the largest drum). The ensemble providing a jazz counterpoint to this trio consisted of Miguel Zenón (Alto Saxophone), Hans (bass), Luis Perdomo (piano), and Henry Cole (drums).

Merging plena and jazz is a nice idea in theory (on this basis Zenón was awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur grants), but it is a very ephemeral and fleeting moment in practice. On some of the numbers, the two styles were intermixed; others were more theme-oriented, with some themes played by the plenera and some by the piano or saxophone. The height of the concert was the long drum solo that traded attacks with the plenera, yet mostly sidestepped reusing tedious drum solo clichés. The main problem I sensed was that the drum rhythms are fixed and the folkloric quality of the music is much more structured than the floating-in-space harmonic aesthetic I often imagine while listening to modern jazz.

Regardless of the style, all performers were drenched in energy, whether improvising a solo or beating the living crap out of their hand drums in hard-to-imitate polyrhythms. Not since I saw Thom Yorke of Radiohead live have I seen a band’s frontman dance so wildly and without restraint while singing and playing. Miguel’s solos are plain as day to understand: just watch his body wobble about the stage, and match the motions and emotions to the movement in the music. The band’s energy was infectious, and throughout the concert it provoked yelling, clapping, and other concert-worthy (lowercase-c concert) forms of participation.

Unfortunately, only a small percentage of the audience was interested “experiencing” the groove, so most members just sat calmly (as if watching a YouTube video, or in a master’s clinic). Part of this is Purdue’s concert culture: when most of the concerts are sponsored by the local retirement home megacomplex, you shouldn’t expect many people to dance in the aisles. I would have much rather seen Zenón’s septet in a club with a dance floor, as plena music (and Latin-sounding beats in general) are undeniably designed to induce dancing.

To balance out the plena, several more typical jazz songs were also presented. The most pleasing segments of these were the improvisations of the piano and saxophone. None of these songs were terribly memorable for me, and I felt that they bored the P.R. audience as much as the plenera-wielding musicians who didn’t have a single note in some pieces. One exception was a ballad piece, which was quite haunting. It began with a simple riff by Hans on bass, and slowly added in complexity. With each new chorus, Miguel dug just a bit deeper into the theme, and by the climax was dancing passionately with his horn. It reminded me instantly of Bolero – but translated into the context of a jazz ballad. Rarely have I felt more compelled to stand up and clap after the final bars.

The concert was a blast. I’m looking forward to new works by Zenón, and am especially interested to see if he can further integrate plena tradition into the improvisations of jazz.

Quick tip: disabling iPhoto sync

2010-04-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

I've always wondered why iPhoto always opens when I plug in my iPhone. It seems counterintuitive, considering Apple's obsession with minimizing options and optimizing for the common case. Chances are high that I don't want to import any photos from my phone when the battery is low, there are no new pictures, or it is way past my bedtime. If I wanted to import photos, I would open iPhoto myself! This has led to constant frustration and interruption of my flow.

It turns out that there is a setting which induces this behavior. It's tucked away into a small application called Image Capture.app. This application is ostensibly some sort of image importing application, but i've never seen it before. Among other things, it allows you to change the action to be performed when a "camera" device is plugged in. The setting is per-device, and you can opt to use any application (or no application). In theory you can even write your own complicated program to decide when to import, but for me the options iPhoto.app and "No Application" are sufficient.

(Note: this is on Snow Leopard. If you don't have Snow Leopard, YMMV)

Facebook Vacation

2010-04-04T17:14:00.000-07:00

As has become customary this year, I'm going on a Facebook vacation for a month or so. This will last until the school year is done.

The point of this is twofold: increased productivity, and a test of willpower. While many people argue to the contrary, Facebook, Twitter, video games, and television are all addictive to some extent, depending on the person. As a test, I stopped using Facebook for a month last semester (November-December) to see if I was a Facebook-addict. Turns out, it was a lot harder to not use it than I thought, but I also became a lot more productive than I had ever imagined (we even submitted a paper that got published!). I concluded that I had been addicted, and since that month of going completely without Facebook, I realized that I was just as happy and had a lot more time. Since then I have made it a goal to limit my use of the service. Unfortunately, that goal has slowly slipped away; traveling for a whole month, while exciting, does horrible things to your productivity and focus.

This time around, I have just as many, if not more, demands on my time. It is harder logistically to go to the library after dinner because I live in Lafayette. I have class all day Tuesday/Thursday, with two 90 minute breaks interspersed. While it is tempting to waste those breaks on Facebook or Google Reader, I can no longer afford to throw away that time. In a little over a month, I will have my final exam, and my Programming Languages project (which is already behind) will be due. Not to mention, I have tens of other things to worry about (research, moving, summer jobs, research, and weekend trips).

I will continue to blog sporadically, perhaps at the same rate I have been in March. Surprisingly, writing a blog post and creating new content is much more interesting than reading about friend's awesome night out drinking, or seeing the latest dumb youtube clip. It also doesn't take as much time, either.

UPDATE: I've decided to keep on using Twitter, because it is much less likely to consume large amounts of my time. That said, I'm trying out a new approach to reading news and Twitter: work first, then relax. I'll only use Twitter after i've already done some work, and refrain from sending tweets during my working periods. I already try to use a similar strategy for email and IM, and it seems to work pretty well. At least, when I don't get urgent emails :).

Visit to University of Washington

2010-03-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Over spring break, Steph and I were in Seattle doing a variety of fun things to fill our time. Most importantly, the official graduate school visit days for UW Computer Science (from now on, UW refers to University of Washington, not any strange institutions in the Midwest).

I haven't really written much about the other visit days because I haven't had the time to come up with something coherent to say. All of the visits are of the same form: on the first day, spend your time alternating between short (20-30 minute) meetings with graduate students and potential advisors, and sitting through fire-hose presentations that are not terribly useful if you've read up about the department and school beforehand. The template for the second day (if there is one) is to do more "fun" tourist-like things in the city, and get to know the current graduate students or professors in a less formal context. Some of the things done to this end have included frisbee golf, drinking, snowshoeing, drinking, eating, and drinking.

So, when one gets to the third such visit, everything falls into a familiar pattern, and it can be at times difficult to put on a mask of sheer excitement when watching the 20th powerpoint presentation in as many days. Another familiar pattern was the faces and archetypes of other prospective students: by the third visit, I had already seen quite a few of them at other visit weekends. One such student is Shaddi Hasan, whom with I went drinking for two consecutive weekends in two different cities (Boulder, Seattle). After three weekends, you can pick up the differences between east-coast and west-coast students, who's trying to show off, and who is absolutely mortified to interact with strangers.

Day 1

In the first day, I met with lots and lots and lots of people. Of these people, two were professors (Prof. Ernst and Prof. Notkin) and the rest were graduate students. Interspersed with these half-hour meetings were various powerpoint presentations that showed the current research of a few professors. For lunch, I went with a group to a nice El Salvador-themed restaurant off The Ave. In the afternoon were some more meetings, and then finally after all this, there was a fancy dinner and graduate student party in the HUB (Husky/Student Union Building).

The dinner and reception were probably the better parts of the night; Steph was with me, and was able to socialize with some of the graduate students and get a better feel for who the department is in a social sense. We both sat near Dan Grossman for dinner and listened to his stories of hiking for an entire summer, among other interesting bits. One of the funnier parts of the evening was the CSE Band, which made alternate lyrics for pop and oldies songs and performed them live at the grad student party. I don't remember many other details from the party, but it was a terribly long day and I had been through a bit of beer by that point.

Day 2

The second day, as explained above, tends to be less hectic and more personal. At CSE, I actually spent most of the morning doing yet more meetings with people. This actually isn't so bad, since I was still running internally on Eastern Standard Time (hence, a 9am meeting was actually a noon meeting for me, and all was good). It was at this time that I met with Luis Ceze and Dan Grossman formally. Doing all of these formal meetings can sometimes be awkward, especially if you do not have a bunch of questions in your clip to use as ammunition. At this point, I had already talked to both professors the night previous, and of course have read every scrap of available information on the website.

After these last few meetings, Steph and I went to Hank Levy's house with the Security/Systems group for a nice lunch. His house is at Sand Point, between the Burke-Gilman trail and the water. I was able to speak with Alexei Czeskis, a Purdue CS graduate and one of the star undergraduates that my cohort looked up to as little freshmen and sophomores. After eating, I hung out on the dock and talked to some people about my JavaScript work, and about the challenges of JavaScript security. Later, I returned to the house where Steph was talking to none-other than Mark Zbikowski, employee #55 of Microsoft and architect of NTFS, Cairo, the MSDOS executable format, and other things. Apparently he's returning to graduate school ^_^ He had some interesting advice and stories to relate, and it is interesting to hear advice to a new hire at Microsoft from someone who has been there since the near-beginning.

After this lunch, we went back to the Paul Allen Center and went back out for some fun with the PL/SE groups (Notkin, Grossman, Ernst) for some [indoor] beach volleyball. This was way more fun than I thought it would be: professors diving face-first to make a save, trading jokes with potential advisors, and getting some exercise at the same time. While neither Steph nor me are much good at volleyball, we had a good time getting to know the personalities of the group a bit better. Afterwards, we killed some time in the park throwing around frisbees, and then headed home.

We were way too tired to go out after another full day, so we grabbed some quick food at Thai 65, tried out the hot tub at the hotel, and went to bed quite early.

Overall the visit went very well. I learned a lot about the department, the people whom I may be working with, and the current things that are going on research-wise. I was also able to get a sense for what projects will be available next fall, and possibly even in the summer if an internship never comes through. I still have a while before I'll feel as comfortable talking to new professors who don't know me as well, but I'm confident i'll fit right in with the people in Seattle.

In the next post, i'll talk about why Chicago was especially green, the pros and cons of using Amtrak vs. flying, and the rest of our spring break in Seattle.

MSR Video: Research Perspectives on JavaScript

2010-03-26T08:26:00.001-07:00

Just today, Channel 9 (the MSDN channel that covers Microsoft Research) posted a video about "Research Perspectives on JavaScript", featuring Eric Meijer as interviewer and the Bens (Ben Livshits and Ben Zorn) as interviewees. This video is particularly interesting to me, because their JSMeter project is highly related to our PLDI paper this June (we even get several mentions in the video). I'll summarize some of the main points of conversation, but will omit some details as the video is quite long (50 mins). My comments/opinions will be interspersed and emboldened.

Eric begins by asking about the names. How do they always come up with funny names like Gatekeeper, JSMeter, and so on? Ben Zorn explains that it is important to pick a good name, because they tend to stick in people's minds better than paper titles (unless authored by Phil Wadler). I agree. That said, I would much rather have a boring paper title than a ridiculous backronym project name, the likes of which are way too common on large projects in the sciences.

Next, the JSMeter project is discussed. The project goal is to find out what exactly JavaScript code in the wild is doing, and how it compares to C, Java, or other languages. They instrument Internet Explorer's interpreter, and aim to measure the behavior of *real* applications that end-users visit every day.

As far as their methodology (as in, what data is actually recorded), it is very similar to what we did in our research. There are some differences: they measure physical heap usage of the DOM vs JavaScript whereas we only measure the objects on JavaScript heap (without respect to physical size of objects), and they measure callbacks and events explicitly. As far as analysis of the data, our approaches diverge according to our goals, but cover many of the same statistics.

The first point Ben Livshits talks about (and their main conclusion in the paper) is their observation that SunSpider and other JavaScript benchmarks do not have much in common with real-world applications such as GMail, Facebook, Bing Maps, etc. The second observation is that function callbacks are typically very short on sites that need high responsiveness. SunSpider is called out for having a few event handlers with very long execution times, which biases against interpreters that handle small functions well (such interpreter behavior is desirable in the real world).

I'm not objectively sure what "short" is, but we did see in our work that function size was fairly consistent with respect to static code size and dynamic bytecode stream length. We could not distinguish function invocations which were callbacks though, unfortunately. I also wonder if opportunities for method-level JIT'ing are overrepresented in SunSpider and (especially) V8 benchmarks.

There was some discussion of whether JavaScript as a language will evolve to be better, and also the tricky questions of what would one add or remove to the language. Ben Zorn points out that JavaScript, unlike Java or C, is usually part of a complex ecosystem in the browser. This means that ultimately, it may evolve, but only slowly and in lockstep with other complementary languages. He also calls it a "glue" language as opposed to a general purpose language, one that mainly deals with making strings and gluing together DOM and other technologies.

I agree that it is bounded by other technologies, but it can also be a general-purpose scripting language (see for instance its use in writing large parts of Firefox, and as a scripting plugin for many environments and games). I think the issue of poorly designed semantics (the root of all trickiness in efficient implementation) is orthogonal to the issue of whether it's a generally expressive and useful language. PHP is another language in this vein (apparently useful, but horrible semantics).

Erik asks about the use of dynamic features of JavaScript by developers. Ben Livshits immediately concedes that many people use eval, and while some of its uses are easy to constrain/replace with safe behavior (JSON parsing, for example), some are "more difficult". But, he does not see this as a very big problem because a lot of contemporary JavaScript code is written by code generators. Ben Zorn explains that with results from JSMeter and our work, researchers and implementors can gauge the impact of certain restrictions (such as saying "no eval" or "no with").

We actually approached it from the other end in an effort to investigate the implications of assumptions already made in JavaScript research. Since our sources and data are freely available on the project webpage, it's possible to go in the other direction as well by tinkering with our framework and replaying executions on an interpreter simulator with different semantics.

Our conclusions are a bit different in this area, as well. You can read the paper for more details, but shortly, we think static typing and static analyses for JavaScript will either be too brittle, too expensive (due to code size), or too flexible to make any useful guarantees. That said, we see lots of room for heuristic-based optimizations, which have already made inroads into implementations of Chrome and Firefox.

We learn that there is a dichotomy between sites that use frameworks and libraries, and sites that use handwritten code. We saw about half of the top 100 sites used an identifiable libary. Script size is also seen to be very large. Erik asks about the functional nature of JavaScript- do scripts often use higher order functions? They defer to our study for quantitative numbers (thanks for the mention) and say that usually it is frameworks and translators that use HOF's (for example, JQuery's extensive use of map/reduce patterns and chaining). Of course, callbacks and event handlers are one ubiquitous use of closures. Ben Livshits talks a bit about library clashes (i.e., different libraries may change built-in objects in incompatible ways), which they did some work to detect statically in other research. I know that Benjamin Lerner at UW has done some work in this space, in the context of Firefox plugins and how to make them play nicely together. He makes an anonymous jab at some news sites that sidestep such incompatibilities by loading separate widgets in their iframes (at the expense of horrible page load times).

Erik returns to the issue of language design: what would you like to remove or add to the language? Ben Livshits talks about subsets of JavaScript, and their usefulness for writing safe and limited code (such as in ads). This approach has been used in several papers, but does not yet seem to have much traction with browser vendors. It would be nice, though. In general, it is agreed that JavaScript needs fewer features, not more. I would start with removing the 'with' operator. Ben Zorn says that nothing needs to be added, because things like classes or other language features can be built on top of prototypes. That said, he is not convinced either way as to the usefulness of a prototype-based vs a class-based object system. Yeah, me neither. He then explains prototype-based objects and ways to optimize programs in this paradigm, such as V8's "hidden classes".

Ben Livshits says that the big strength and weakness of the Web are the same thing: being able to load code and data from disparate servers, and combine them fairly arbitrarily via very late binding. Predictably, the two Bens are at odds over whether this is a good thing or bad thing for the web in the large. On the one hand, having no rules makes it easy for a 12 year old (or a developer with the same skill level) to hack something together because the platform is so tolerant to broken code. On the other hand, this flexibility invites a lot of security problems and ties the hands of those more proficient developers who want more invariants and guarantees about their code. This lack of discipline and control is probably what drives companies to translate large programs into JavaScript from some other language like C# or Java.

One lesson of JSMeter that Ben Livshits talks about is the possible benefits of more integration between the language and the platform. Many times, browsers load the same page over and over, but do not learn anything about how that page actually behaved. Ben's example is that if code only runs for a few seconds, then it is not useful to run the garbage collector (as opposed to other methods, such as mass freeing by killing a process or using arena/slab allocation). Right now, browsers are utterly amnesic about what happened the last time (or 10, or 1000 times) they loaded a page, and only cache the source text on the browser (as opposed to the parsed AST). This is something that jumped out at me as well. Sounds like an interesting thing to look at. They talk about this again near the end.

Erik asks whether the parallel but separate specifications and implementations of JavaScript and complementary technologies like the DOM are necessary. Why not just make one specification to rule them all? Both Bens say that the border is fairly arbitrary, and increasingly applications pay a large price when they cross that boundary frequently. Ben Livshits also says that going forward, it is a bad idea to ignore these other technologies when thinking about analyses and optimizations. They did not suggest any specific methods for such cross-border optimizations, though.

This is a huge problem with tracing JIT's like TraceMonkey, because they have to end a trace whenever it leaves JavaScript for native DOM methods (usually implemented in C++). V8 (Google Chrome's JavaScript engine) tries to minimize the number of such exits by implementing most of the standard library of JavaScript in JavaScript, and using only a small number of stubs. Another approach may be to compile the browser with the same compiler that does the JIT'ing (say, with LLVM) and then there is less penalty for crossing the DOM/JavaScript execution boundary in machine code.

Ben Zorn goes as far to claim that JIT's can only go so far to improve JavaScript performance, and DOM interactions are lower-hanging fruit right now. He bases this on the fact that most scripts are not computation-heavy, either because they are interactive and wait on the user to create events, or spend most of the CPU time inside of native DOM methods. Ben Livshits thinks that one of the biggest challenges is that JavaScript (and web applications in general) are network-bound, instead of CPU or memory-bound. Essentially, download time and network latency dominate any other sources of delay.

I agree on the 'being interactive' part, but disagree on the compute-heavy part. Especially with things like games, the canvas element, and animations in JavaScript, numerical computation is starting to become significant. Furthermore, as JavaScript becomes more and more the 'assembly of the web', I would guess that the CPU time will tilt towards general-purpose computation, and away from DOM calls (which most significantly are used for the V in MVC).

It's great to hear at length from some of the other folks doing research work around JavaScript. I'm looking forward to seeing the final version of the JSMeter paper at USENIX Webapps, and also am looking forward to our paper being presented at PLDI in June. Every time our work is presented, we get lots of new and diverse feedback, which raises ideas we have not yet considered and forces us to dig deeper into our understanding and data.

A tale of three bikes

2010-03-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

Spring is (nearly) here, and in Indiana that means it's time to dust off the bike saddle and begin the time-consuming process of tuning, upgrading, and repairing bicycles. Wait, bicycles is plural, right? Let me review the three bicycles that Steph and I share:

The fixie: Steph rides a red fixed-gear bike mostly around town. I confess to not knowing it's particular details, as I'm not a fixed-gear enthusiast. All I know is that it would not serve me well on Chauncey and 9th St hills.
The frankenbike: My father had an old Trek bike (circa early 90's) hanging up in the garage, so I was allowed to borrow this bike for the school year. I've done some good rides on it (20-40 miles) in the past semester, but it lay largely unused during the winter months due to Purdue's propensity for poor road maintenance.
The Felt: Steph bought a Felt Z80 two years ago on a whim after her just-purchased-that-day bike was totalled in a car-bike accident. Unfortunately for her, she didn't know much about bikes and picked one that she no longer enjoys riding. So, I may end up using it as my main road bike.

All three bikes have required some service prior to use this season:

The fixie had a flat tire, which needed to be patched. Thankfully, Steph is very good at patching tubes, so this was not a big problem. The chain was also cleaned a bit. It is remarkable how little maintenance this bike needs compared to the other two geared bikes!
The frankenbike needed a lot of cleaning: aside from the chain, I doubt that any part of the frame or the components had been cleaned since Bill Clinton was trying to pass health care reform. Of course the chain needed cleaning too, but that is because I rode several hundred miles in the fall semester with minimal cleaning. Beyond last semester's slight upgrades (new handlebar tape and front/back lights), I bought 2 new tire treads and had both wheels trued at Hodson's Bay.
The Felt bike has not really been used for substantial road biking, so I have decided to try it out on longer rides to see if I like it. Aside from the dirty chain that I had to clean, there was little to be done to make the bike rideable.

For Christmas this year, I received some more biking gear as a gift from Dad: a pair of biking shoes, and some very nice clipless pedals. At first, I was planning to put these on the frankenbike, but realized that I might as well put them onto the Felt bike if I was going to only use the Felt bike for long rides. (For those who don't know, clipless pedals and shoes work similarly to ski bindings. The main purpose is to keep your foot attached to the pedals for better efficiency.)

It took me the better part of 3 hours to assemble my shoes, remove pedals from the Felt bike and frankenbike, and install the new pedals. For now, I put the cheapo plastic $3 pedals on the frankenbike, but might change back to the old, dirty, metal pedals that used to be on it. Perhaps next time I want to take off old dirty pedals, I should buy a pedal spanner wrench, because it took an unbelievable amount of force to remove the damn pedals with a US 5/8 wrench (not metric 15mm as it's supposed to be).

Once assembled, I went out for a short (16mi) ride up S. River Road in West Lafayette, taking the huge hill on N 500 W (11% grade for about 1200 ft), and returning by Lindberg Rd/Salisbury. Overall, using the Felt bike is much more fun than the frankenbike: it is much lighter, has a larger cassette and 3 chain rings instead of 2, and has a Shimano STI shifter (indexed shifting), wheras the frankenbike has old-school knobs (friction shifting) that you have to manually move up and down and hope the derailer has moved to the correct position.

If you don't know what these terms mean, imagine the difference between fretted and notfretted string instruments. With a violin, you must know exactly where to place your fingers on the string to make the correct noise- this is like how shifting on the frankenbike works. On the Felt bike, distance between gears is fixed (like the distance between frets on a guitar).

My goal for the rest of the semester is to do some sort of exercise at least 3 days a week, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If the weather permits, I'd like to do short (20-30mi) rides. If it does not permit, I can go to the pool for a while instead. Eventually, I'd like to be able to do a 50 or 100 mile ride; most of those are in May or later, so I have a lot of time to train and work up on my mileage. I never got much beyond 35 miles in one ride last semester, but I have a lot more time in my schedule for long rides now. Or so I hope.

Our WebKit instrumentation and PLDI dataset has been released!

2010-03-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

In preparation for the PLDI camera-ready deadline later this week, Gregor and I have finally gotten around to packaging and uploading the files we used in our experiments.

The first set of files is the raw sources of the instrumented WebKit branch, the trace analyzer and static analyzer, as well as the database generation and graphing infrastructure.

The second and third downloads are the traces that we used as our raw data set in the PLDI paper, as well as the resulting database when these traces are analyzed and inserted into a sqlite3 database. These files are fairly large, but we feel that it is important to allow your experiments to be recreated by 3rd parties. One frustration of working in the programming languages research field is that all too often, if a technique or analysis is tested by an implementation, the corresponding sources and datasets used are not made publicly available. This makes it impossible to verify results, look for possible improvements, or find inaccuracies in papers. We want to do our part to combat this trend by providing everything that we used in the development of our work's conclusions.

The files are hosted at Gregor's Purdue website: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/gkrichar/js/

For those keenly interested in building and running the project themselves, there is a somewhat useful README in the top-level directory of the source tarball. Happy hacking!

Code Bubbles (aka super-Eclipse)

2010-03-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

This post begins a hopefully-weekly blog post about research that I have recently read or found out about. Posts may be written sporadically, but hopefully can be posted on a regular schedule.

Over in software engineering-land, a new paper at ICSE 2010 (May 2-8, Capetown, S. Africa) unveils the idea of Code Bubbles.

If you go to the site, there is a 1080p YouTube demo of the idea. Code Bubbles is an IDE where related bits of context can all be viewed together spatially, regardless of source file or class. These independent code snippets are graphically in separate "bubbles", and can be grouped together according to task. Additionally, things like emails, notes, Javadocs, and other assorted content can be loaded into a "bubble" and grouped with related content. The whole system seems to take the concept of "working sets" to its logical conclusion.

One common task in Java IDE's such as Eclipse is to read some code, recursively look up some declarations of types or methods, and then write some new code that incorporates all of these different types and methods. A similar process happens when a developer tries to find and fix a bug: starting from a stack trace or error message, one must trace through the execution of the program, possibly through many disparate classes, methods, and so on. In Eclipse and similar IDE's, this task involves opening many files as tabs in the same workspace; after trying one particular program trace, the windows must be closed individually, and if one finds a good combination of views that expose the bug, there is no way to serialize it so that others can also use the view.

Code Bubbles could potentially make the above situation much nicer: it has debugger support, which can automatically open relevant code snippets from the call stack at any point during execution. One of the best features in my mind is the ability to import and export working sets (groups of bubbles) by email. Coupled with some design explanations, a bunch of pre-determined snippets of code could go a long way towards documenting the architecture and important parts of a complex program. Other cool features I noticed include

Traditional class/method browser- from which, any method can be pulled out into its own bubble.
User queries- I didn't get a good idea of how this worked, but it seemed to be a fulltext search on method, variable, class, type names (similar to the Awesome Bar in Firefox).
Labeling of bubble groups and workspace areas
Zoom in/out for rearranging groups

Just looking from the video, i'm quite impressed by the amount of polish present (for a research work). Their framework is built on top of Eclipse, and uses its backends for the dirty work (parsing/syntax highlighting, static analysis, editor UI). I'm interested in the details as well- they will post a PDF after the conference is over in May.

• • •

I think there are plenty of exciting directions to go from this work. For one, it would be useful to find out through practical experience when this sort of interface is useful and when it is not. My guess is that this will be great for discovering a new codebase or hunting for bugs, but not as useful for writing new code. It also seems to require a 24"+ monitor to really shine (which is fine, because there is no other practical use for such large desktop monitors).

One idea that struck me is that since the workspace is so large, what would happen if multiple people could simultaneously share the workspace and see each other's changes in real-time? I don't know if such a scheme would work as well in an Eclipse-based application (cf. web-based collaborative editing such as CodeCollab and collabedit, or systems like SubEthaEdit built from the ground-up to support distributed/collaborative editing). It would also pose interesting (read: nontrivial) questions about the integration of version control into such a system, especially if there is no notion of who "owns" a certain version of a file.

The last point I want to address is the interesting yet puzzling response to the project on the rest of the Internet. On a Slashdot story about the project, the overall responses were neutral to negative. On a similar LTU story, almost all the responses were positive. This is surprising to me, because it is usually the reverse: LTU'ers complain about IDE's reinventing Smalltalk, while Slashdotters coo over pretty graphics. I guess the one thing that helps to explain the discrepancy is the use of Eclipse and Java, which (somehow) has a better reception at a programming languages research blog.

Graduate School Accepts and Visits

2010-02-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Accepted by Maryland today. Haven't decided whether to go on the visit (weekend after spring break ends)

In the past few weeks, I have heard back from all but two graduate schools: I'm accepted at University of Washington, University of Texas-Austin, University of Colorado-Boulder, and UCLA. I have yet to hear back from University of Maryland and Cambridge (to which I applied for the 1 year master's program in conjunction with the Churchill and/or other fellowships).

This is a huge relief; no longer do I need to worry about what my choices are, just which to choose. To that end, I will be visiting the first three schools mentioned above in the next month.

UT-Austin: February 26-28
Boulder: March 4-7
UW: March 13-21*

*Okay, that last date may look a bit strange. In truth, I will be spending all of spring break in Seattle with Steph, and the visit days happen to fall over Purdue's spring break. We'll be taking out the Amtrak to Seattle, so we'll actually only be in town from Monday-Saturday.

Unfortunately, UCLA's visit day falls on the same time at Boulder's, and Boulder has a 3 day visit (vs. 1 day at UCLA). I still haven't heard back from Maryland for whatever reason (still snowed in?) so I can't really commit either way to visiting their school. And Cambridge.. I don't think they even have a visit day.

During/after each trip, I will write up a trip summary and present some information about the graduate schools I visit. Bon voyage!

Project website, and MobileMe testing

2010-02-13T09:28:00.000-08:00

Today I decided to try out MobileMe, Apple's in-the-cloud syncing and webspace hosting service. I get two months for free, and will probably subscribe at the end of that time. This is mostly out of convenience: perhaps days after my graduation from Purdue, my CS account (and my email accounts at Purdue) will be zapped. I figure it is better to start transferring now to a university-neutral host for my website and non-school-related emails.

As part of this, I moved my iWeb-backed research webpage over to www.brrian.net. Over the next month i'll slowly start moving files off of the CS account's public folder to my public iDisk (aka cloud-based storage).

I've also finally gotten around to making a website for my CS 565 project, now located at www.brrian.net/js/. I will be keeping all news related to that project on a mini-blog specific to the project. I don't anticipate making more than a dozen entries over the semester, so it is not worth the work to set up a new Blogger blog, or to write such blog posts on this blog and try to link them each individually.

Finally, you can access this blog via the shortcut blog.brrian.net. I plan to use this brrian alias more often, since I do not know what my username will be at my graduate school.

I'm published!

2010-02-08T08:23:00.000-08:00

Last week, I found out that my paper was accepted at PLDI 2010. This was a joint work with several others at Purdue last semester, including Jan Vitek, Gregor Richards, and Sylvain Lebresne (who has since returned to France and found employment). The paper itself was submitted almost 3 months ago, in mid-November. We received our first round of reviews in the second week of this semester, and now things are wrapped up. The conference itself is June 5-10 in Toronto, which is dangerously close to the beginning of internships; hopefully I'll find a way to fly out there for a week.

PLDI was extremely rough terrain this year: out of 200 papers submitted, only 40 were accepted. Though 40 is a relatively high number of papers, this still results in a measly 5% acceptance rate for the conference. Two papers from Purdue were accepted. This is significantly above the overall 5% accept rate, but still many did not make the cut. That said, I'm really excited about some of the papers that have been accepted this year. I'm especially excited to see some of the new papers on verified compilers (Jean Yang, Zach Tatlock) and the profiler analysis work from Amer Diwan's group.

This is a major milestone for me: my first publication! I'm relieved that I actually finished a project, after a year of having no focus and research direction in Japan. Besides the ins and outs of research, I learned a lot about writing papers, moving fast, and gleaned at least some insight on the tricky problem of finding (and answering) the interesting questions of research. Unfortunately, most of the fellowship foundations and graduate schools have already looked and decided on my applications, so they will not be able to see my updated CV. At least I can update my website after applying... :)

Just as a preview, our paper "An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs" is somewhat of a meta-analysis. Over the past few years, many people have published papers about JavaScript. These generally are add-on type systems or static/dynamic analyses that try to make JavaScript a safer (or at least more predictable) language. JavaScript shares a number of similarities with object-oriented and C-family languages, but it also has a number of crucial differences. These include prototype-based inheritance (like Self), closures, and objects with flexible sets of fields. Many of the published analyses for JavaScript assume its behavior is similar to other languages with class-based inheritance; similarly, other papers assumed that language features such as `eval` and field deletion were rarely used. By tracing the execution of real-world JavaScript applications (Gmail, Facebook, etc), we show that these assumptions are often violated. We also produce some data that may be useful for JavaScript implementors.

Over the next few weeks we have some minor editing to do, and i'll be busy with some other project. Not to mention interviews for internships, grad school visits, and classes!

Engagement, and my dislike of Facebook

2010-01-18T13:10:00.000-08:00

A month or two ago, Stephanie and I decided to get engaged. I am not a fan of tradition for its own sake, so there was no grand gesture on one knee by either of us; instead we came to the consensus over time that we were both expecting to follow the other indefinitely. I was not sure at first that this was wise because of the many unknowns involved in applying to graduate school; once we discovered that the other was willing to compromise regardless of admissions outcomes, the deal was sealed. We are getting married. To my surprise, that has been the easiest decision yet.

The particulars of when, where and how of a wedding happens can be the subject of much debate; even the step of announcing an engagement can be done in many different ways. I tend towards being quiet and unscripted about such attention-grabbing announcements, while Steph has many more ideas of what should and shouldn’t happen. Initially we planned out a surprise announcement- this was axed on the grounds that Steph’s roommates were able to easily figure out something was up. Her best friends mostly knew, but we were able to keep it off Facebook (lest the whole world know before our relatives, or worse, that relatives learn of the engagement via the impersonal HTTP protocol). So, rings patiently waiting in their leather boxes, we tried to come up with a more timely and practical way of "breaking the news".

Next was telling friends and family; we planned to do this at Steph’s graduation reception, but weren’t sure whether my family could make the trip around the lake so close to finals week at university. At the same time, we didn’t want to tell my family at Thanksgiving in person and face driving to Wisconsin for the sole purpose of telling Steph’s parents, or worse, telling one set of parents well before the other. Such a lag would be sure to stir resentment or feelings of favoritism. Steph informed her parents by herself. She outright told her father while driving, and delivered a rose to her mother at work. Once Steph’s parents (mother, in particular) knew, we had limited time until it was tweeted, facebooked, and blogged (okay, maybe not) around the world. With this in mind, we had a Skype battle royale featuring Brian+Steph vs Brian’s Parents. They were very happy for us; over the remainder of the semester we began telling nearly everyone about our engagement.

Except a certain Mr. Facebook. Before about 5 years ago, one did not have to worry about an engagement being disseminated over the internet equally to your relatives and distant acquaintances (unless you are of substantial celebrity, which does not apply). In the present, one must be extremely careful to mitigate the embarrassing situation where your uncle, cousins, former BFF’s and others learn of an engagement in the [re-contextualized with extra thumbs, blue boxes, and inane comments] setting of Facebook. While it is somewhat nervewracking for me to tell people about being engaged, at least I have some control over the message. Some people scarcely remember whom I was dating, the gender of my partner, or that I was dating at all. Others are intimate about our love story and inquire regularly. It’s just better to have control (or at least blunt the impact) of your message, especially when its one you will [hopefully] only deliver once. Recall the last time you heard about an old friend’s death over Facebook. That guilt of lost communication and of being a lame friend is something that I want to escape. Perhaps the only solution is to exit Facebook, and I have considered it several times.

--

Epilogue.

Steph is now working this semester at Purdue, and we have moved into a new apartment together. Planning for the wedding is mostly deferred for later, because I don’t yet know what university (or country) I’ll be at in a year’s time. In the meantime, I am finishing my final semester at Purdue, and we are slowly merging our formerly separate ways of life into a single household. It’s harder than it would seem, but nonetheless enjoyable.

New personal webpage

2009-12-14T18:23:00.000-08:00

I've finally gotten around to remaking my personal/academic webpage. The previous version was made around the time that I applied for the Goldwater scholarship, but it has since worn my eyes down. The current version is basically a carbon-copy of Tony Hosking's homepage, minus the rugby, professional service, and other meat and potatoes. The template is actually trivial to use in iWeb, so i'm not sure why I didn't do it earlier.

The content is about the same, but I am now able to fill in some of the vague paragraphs with actual projects. Of course, it will still be a while before I can pick and choose what projects to list.. but it will come soon enough. I'm not keen on the old-style personal page. My hobbies are probably none of your business online, unless i'm on a hobby-specific website or you've met me online.

I should write a post about my changing views of facebook publicity-cum-voyeurism, but it won't come out right tonight. Hopefully I can do some writing over the holiday season.

Application Extravaganza

2009-12-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

Just a short update.

I was not picked as one of this year's CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award winners, runners-up, or anything honorable to mention. Apparently less experience is better? I admittedly had a weak application, but that was largely not my fault.

As duly noted in my previous post, I planned to apply to five graduate schools. In fact, I applied to five graduate schools (though I substituted UCLA for Purdue), and almost all parts of my application are submitted and out of sight. Most of the hard work of applying was done mid-November, with GRE scores and transcripts handled right after Thanksgiving break. All that's left now is to finish the NDSEG (due first week of January), and shoo the remaining letter-writers towards the letter-collecting website before Wednesday.

I remain fairly confident about my chances of admittance to these graduate schools. For the Cambridge-related things, I have no clue as to the strength of my applications and nominations, but should hear back some sort of news within a months' time.

Graduate School Applications

2009-11-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

Well, after the two month-plus ordeal of getting off my Churchill and Cambridge applications, I have to start all over again. Most Computer Science graduate school applications are due in roughly 1 month, so now is prime time for making sure that everything will get turned in on time.

The past few days I have been spending most of my time on the Statement of Purpose. While I have already written more than 6 drafts for my Personal Statement (for fellowships), these two documents are completely different entities. While recommendations, transcripts, and GRE scores are common to both fellowship applications and graduate school applications, the personal statement serves two very different purposes.

For fellowships, the Personal Statement is a motivational essay about how you enjoy research, how it's your only goal in life, and to present the air of having your whole life and research direction planned out. In this way, it is a contest to have the most appealing story, and it shouldn't be surprising that these are more airy and idealistic. This is not helped at all by competitions like the NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), which demands that in every section that you demonstrate how your research proposal, personal statement, etc. has "broader impacts" on society beyond Computer Science. This may be easy if you work in a cancer lab ("I want to cure cancer!"), an oceanography lab ("i want to save the whales!"), or a climate lab ("I want to stop global warming!"), but invites foolish writing. How can you tie researching process calculi to saving humanity?

For graduate school applications, the statement of purpose is much simpler: you only need to say what research interests you and why, explain why you would be a good graduate student, and why you should attend school X. In this way it is more of a written interview for a research job. Phillip Guo makes the same distinction in his useful writing on fellowship applications. I have also found Jean Yang's series of posts about applying to graduate school as a useful measuring stick, as she applied to the same caliber of schools that I intend to apply to (and in the same field approximately).

Speaking of schools, here's my preliminary list of schools to which I'll be applying. I hope to have the list finalized by the end of the week, because GRE scores and such need to start moving to the schools soon.

1. University of Washington
2. University of Maryland
3. University of Texas-Austin
4. University of Colorado-Boulder
5. Purdue University

UW is the overwhelming first choice, because Steph has a full time position in Redmond. There are also several professors at UW whose research I like (Grossman, Ernst, Notkin, Eggers, Ceze, to name a few). In the event I don't get accepted there, I would still find research at any of the other institutions to be interesting, but would not like the living situation very much.

There are two remaining hurdles before my applications are made: transcripts, and GRE scores. I have yet to get my Tohoku classes transferred to my Purdue transcript due to a series of frustrating delays. Hopefully the last of those will be a meeting on November 20. I also have yet to receive my GRE score report, since it was lost in a mailbox malfunction a few months ago, apparently. Should be receiving it this week or next.

Cross-compiling backwards

2009-10-19T14:05:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been working on some Safari/webkit hacking, which means that I've become somewhat familiar with Xcode, C++, and vaguely familiar with the Webkit codebase.

As part of our research (to be detailed later) we forked a random nightly of Safari 3.2-era WebKit, and made some various modifications. A few months ago Snow Leopard came out, which is OS X 10.6 for those of you not keeping track. This new OS version only uses Safari 4.0; this led to several difficulties in trying to compile and run Safari 3.2 against OS X 10.6 SDK.

Eventually, I found out that you can retarget development against specific OS SDK's. Thus the solution to the problem was in effect to cross-compile downwards to 10.5 on my 10.6 machine. After most of yesterday spent recompiling WebKit with various combinations of flags, I can finally run our research project on my personal machine.

New Music

2009-10-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

Lately i've been getting into some fairly underground electronic music. Here's some pointers:

soma.fm has some really nice radio stations, especially Groove Salad (chill, downtempo) and Beat Blender (downtempo, minimal, ambient)
Dublab also has a good radio station, but tends to have a lot more variety in programming
Pipedown. is a nice music blog that seems to cover downtempo, bass, and dubstep. Sort of like Mary Ann Hobbs. They also have pointers to other blogs, lots of shorter mixes, podcasts, etc. if you want to explore new artists and sounds.

I'll blog about specific new artists sometimes, since I know lots of people are too lazy to go find artists themselves (or for some reason think I have any shred of authority over what is cool).

De facto blogging hiatus

2009-09-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

Since I've landed in America and started the old flow of things, I'm been extremely busy. In fact, I've scarcely had time to read the New York Times, Metafilter, or any other pleasure reading in the past few weeks. If not for my deathly boring Abstract Algebra class, I doubt even my diary would keep (mostly) updated.

This month, I'm taking a light credit load (Operating Systems, Astronomy, Abstract Algebra, and an Honors Project). Despite this, I'm at least as crunched for time as the infamous semester from hell when I had 20 credit hours and a job. Part of this is the honors project: it is a lot of work, but in the end I will be proud to be one of the few to submit a report describing a non-trivial development. More important to the formula is my jumble of applications that are being assembled and spat out like foam out of a nerf gun.

This month, I'm preparing my applications for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Winston Churchill Fellowship, Gates Cambridge Fellowship, and an application to study at Cambridge for an MPhil (like a Master's). Next month, I will be working on the NSF fellowship and going to OOPSLA conference in Orlando, and in November it will be crunch time not only for 5+ graduate school applications, but also paper writing. At least i've gotten the GRE out of the way (that was last week).

For all these reasons I seldom have time to write interesting posts here. I'm not entirely certain this will change, at least until the end of application season (next semester). For now, you can follow my Twitter microblog.

Brian

Why I am alone at ChoCo Cro

2009-08-03T09:22:00.001-07:00

Japanese culture never ceases to amaze me. There is always some new idiosyncrasy that sneaks up behind me, giggles a little bit, whacks me in the head and runs away. Other times, these visibly small but deep cultural differences are like a flickering monitor, too inherent to notice if you are staring too directly, but easy to discern if you are looking less intently. In a country with unwritten social codes, polite service, and leniency towards foreigners, many interesting cultural quirks go unexplained or unnoticed.

Today I decided to do some writing in one of the many trendy ‘coffee shops’ in downtown Sendai. Trendy because, independent of the taste of the product, they are almost always crowded with yapping women. While this is almost the same as McDonalds in Japan, there is a much more specific crowd for coffee shops. Simply, Japanese patronize coffee shops for one of two reasons: to feel ‘Western’ by drinking Starbucks or Tullys, or to partake in sweet pastries.

In my current location, it is mainly the sweets that drive business. ChoCo Cro is a store whose namesake is their chocolate croissants, and whose origin and flagship store resides in the ever-trendy Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. To be fair, the chocolate croissants are very delicious in their own right, and are much better than croissants I’ve eaten in America. With such tasty food, you would expect the tables to be full of caffeine-addled young professionals working on their laptops and the occasional boisterous conversation. However, in this shop I am the only member of the former, and everyone else in the cafe is in the latter group. To make matters worse, I’m the only one in this section not wearing high heels.

In Japan, sweet pastries have only one target audience: women, ladies, and girls. It is seen as a sign of weakness or indulgence for a male to eat sweets past childhood; ironically enough, wearing skin-tight, circulation-restricting jeans, or spending an hour on your man-hairdo, has much less of feminine connotation here than chowing down on a dainty donut or flaky chocolate croissant. Struggling to understand this state of affairs, I consulted a female Japanese friend. According to her, the pressure for women to be unhealthily thin and prim does not conflict with their consumption of sugar-laden snacks; on the contrary many of them simply substitute a balanced meal for a sweet treat and a brisk walk between clothing stores.

Of course there are some men who sit in this store, but they are invariably conversing with one of the opposite gender. It would seem that they are punishing themselves with over-steeped black coffee (or some drink darker than their partner’s) as penance for their presence in a sweets store. The rules of sweets consumption are not quite as black (and white) at a Starbucks, because nearly every drink sold there has a week’s worth of sugar. That said, I’ve never seen any Japanese men pick out a chocolate chip scone from the glass case.

All of this complicated posturing is par for the course in Japan- I’d have to write for a few days to scratch the surface of Japanese psyche concerning gender stereotypes. Needless to say, its no surprise I’ve had little success independently breaking into the underground queer scene in Sendai: if it is common to put so much social judgement into something as simple as eating a chocolate croissant, then I can’t begin to fathom how elaborate and layered the Japanese gaydar must be.

Thoughts on persuasive writing

2009-06-24T20:11:00.001-07:00

[This is an edited version of a discussion required for my technical writing class. As I rather like my own analogy, I thought I would crosspost here as well]

As a full-time student, I do lots of persuasive writing on a nearly daily basis: I complete my work for class.

Of course, this is more or less expected of most such students, but do not be fooled by the myriad topics of your homework- in the end, they are all just variations on persuasive communication. The trick is that you have to correctly identify whom you are persuading, their attitude, take into account their likely reactions just as you would in any other form of persuasive communication (say, as in writing a business memo). As I'm sure all of you are intimately familiar with homework, let me review a few key concepts of persuasive writing, interpreted through the analogy of homework.

Being cooperative: If you want a good grade from your teacher or grader, being cooperative is always important for setting the tone of the interaction. This is especially important in writing assignments, because whoever ends up reading your assignments likely would rather be doing more interesting things (as opposed to figuring out why you didn't follow instructions). If you complete the assignment in the incorrect format, or submit it to the wrong place or in the wrong manner, you are being uncooperative. This gives the impression that you do not value the time of those who read your writing, and you are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt.

On modesty: Invariably, once in a while you think that you deserve exception. In school, this can take many forms- I deserve an extension, I deserve reconsideration, I deserve leniency, and so on. However, stating that you deserve any of these things to your teacher is a quick way to be ignored or worse. The best way to compromise on a potentially troublesome request, idea, or argument is to express yourself with modesty. Explicitly adding that “you may be asking quite a bit” to your exceptional requests acknowledges that you may be inconveniencing someone else, and have the thoughts of others under consideration.

Exemplifying fair-mindedness: Chances are very good that your teacher has been studying the topic of your coursework for much longer than you have. Thus, when making arguments it may be helpful to show that your line of thought has considered alternative opinions and viewpoints. To do otherwise insults the intelligence and background of your teacher by doing nothing to allay their likely questions and concerns. More importantly, relating your idea to other ideas demonstrates that you have a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. In the same vein as being cooperative, avoiding logical fallacies and disingenuous arguments also demonstrates the fair-mindedness of the student.

As one moves in either direction between school and work, keep in mind that the rules for communicating persuasively are largely the same, but the environment and audience differ.

Figuring out how to complicate my semester

2009-06-10T19:47:00.001-07:00

Over the past week or two i've been getting serious about narrowing down the fellowships I plan to apply for later this year. I started off looking at quite a handful:

Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship ('the Hertz')
Marshall Scholarship ('the Marshall')
Churchill Scholarship ('the Churchill')
Rhodes Scholarship ('the Rhodes')
Gates Cambridge Scholarship

and all the acronyms like

'the NDSEG' (National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship)
'the NSF' (National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program)

Of course, I cannot possibly apply to all of these programs and still have time for eating/sleeping/homework, so I have to narrow them down a bit.

Fellowships for study in the UK

Of these, many of them are for 1-2 year tenure of study in United Kingdom institutions. To narrow down the field, I looked at departments to see who has the greatest number of possible advisors, and surprisingly Oxford does not have a computer science department quite nearly as impressive as my two top picks, Imperial College London and Cambridge University. This rules out the Rhodes, which is specifically for study at Oxford. Similarly, while the Marshall fellowship recipient can study at many tenable universities in the United Kingdom, sadly Imperial College is not one among them. Thus, I am left with a choice between the Churchill, Gates Cambridge, and the Marshall scholarship; since the Marshall does not have as good of a stipend as either of the other fellowships, I might as well not apply (since there will be much competition among Marshall applicants to attend schools other than Oxford/Cambridge).

At this point I'm going to concentrate on the Churchill Scholarship; explicitly concentrating on the Gates Cambridge is not possible, as it is part of the normal application to Cambridge graduate programs. There are only 10-15 Churchill Scholars per year, but I think I have a decent chance, considering my attempts at research thus far and the awards it begot; at least half of the Churchill scholars have previously received the Goldwater scholarship. Moreover, it is definitely time for a Computer Science major to recieve- the last time it happened was in 2003.

Were I to be awarded either distinction, it would fund up to 2 years of graduate study in a MPhil program (like a Master's degree), plus a decent stipend for living. The likely plan of study is split into two options: the first option is 10 classes and a small report/thesis, and the second is 6 classes plus a substantial research project. There is also the advantage of being at one of the best institutions in the world, and being in very close proximity to Microsoft Research Cambridge. Without the award, the chances of studying at Cambridge for a year are slim due to financial considerations (especially if someone is coming with me).

Fellowships for the United States (Doctoral)

The considerations for normal doctoral graduate fellowships are not completely understood yet, due to the inherent uncertainty involved in concurrently considering a PhD program in the United States and a MPhil program abroad (followed presumably by the PhD program in the United States). Many doctoral fellowships cannot be taken abroad, nor can they be deferred for a year as many graduate admissions can be. This will require a lot of flow-chart diagrams and tough decisions, but as the deadlines are in the later half of fall semester, I have some time to figure out my options.

While almost all doctoral students in Computer Science receive tuition waivers and research or teaching assistantships, recieving a graduate fellowship can significantly increase your options. I have heard many stories of automatic grad-school acceptance following the announcement that the applicant has a multi-year fellowship funded by an external agency. Furthermore, you are not limited by the availability of grant funds in choosing your advisor or thesis/research interests. Probably most exciting is the permanent honor of listing a fellowship on your CV :)

At the outset, there is the Hertz, the NDSEG, and the NSF fellowships, which are listed here left to right according to prestige. The Hertz is an ultra-competitive national fellowship similar to the Churchill, Rhodes, and other non-acronym fellowships; however, it has an infamous reputation for a grueling and masochistic 2-round interview process. I believe my application is probably quantatively similar to others who would apply for the Hertz, but it may not be in my best interests to pursue it. For one, it would be extremely stressful to apply for the Hertz and the Churchill (and others) at the same time, and if I do end up going to Cambridge for a year, then I cannot use the Hertz there.

The NDSEG and NSF are still quite competitive (about 100 and 2000 awardees a year, respectively) but may be a better probabilistic use of my time. Furthermore, they are due in November and January, so by that point I will have my personal statement polished to a diamond, my GRE scores satisfied (hopefully), and I will be nearly done with my graduate school applications anyway.

Any way you look at it, I still have a mountain of application work to do this coming fall, so I am already in June beginning to plan and triage all of the myriad statements, prompts, reference letters, and so on. Here's my top-level list so far:

Churchill Scholarship Application
Cambridge Graduate Studies Application (required for Churchill and Gates Cambridge)
NDSEG Application
NSF Application
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Application (again)
Senior Awards at Purdue
(tentatively) 5 Graduate school applications

Each of the above involves a personal statement (of varying lengths and foci), at least 3 letters of reference, mundane form-filling, official transcripts, statement of research plan, and in some cases GRE scores.

...I suppose I should start thinking about how I can thank my recommendation-writers if I actually win any of these things :)

These shoes rule, these shoes suck!

2009-05-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

I have only worn the new shoes for a week as of this writing, so these are only my first impressions.

So far, I have had a lot of fun wearing my VFF KSO's for only a minor amount of pain and inconvenience. As i'm breaking them in (as well as my feet), I have tried to wear them wherever possible. My favorite places to wear them in the second half of my American vacation:

-running up the lawn part of The Gorge amphitheatre
-driving the car (basically barefoot)
-jumping up/down banks near a river

Places that didn't work as well:

-long distance walking on pavement/sidewalk (although it's probably just that i'm not used to it yet)
-airport security
-carrying heavy things in dicey places
-while dancing

In general they work great for me on slopes or places where I need good, lightweight footing. They are not the best idea when carrying or lifting heavy objects in uncontrolled environments; in other words, they would work fine for weight lifting in a gym, but not for lugging around 50lb suitcases through public transit. This is mostly because of the damage 50 lbs can do when landing on a single toe with less than a centimeter of material between luggage and toe.

Unfortunately, the story for TSA is not terribly clear; while I have read reports of TSA screeners waving off the shoes as harmless or not shoes, that was not the assessment I was given at Sea-Tac Airport earier today. I actually went through the scanner with them on, then as I was collecting my bag and laptop another screener got curious about my wierd looking shoes. It wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that I was not wearing socks and I haven't washed my shoes (yes, you can and should wash them) since buying them a week ago.

While dancing, bouncing, raving, or otherwise gyrating, it is unnerving to have no 'bounce' or cushion on your heels, and doing all your ups and downs on the balls of your feet is very tiring. Just as with luggage on public transit, wearing these shoes on a crowded dance floor is not recommended. Especially in the presence of intoxicated or otherwise mentally altered people, playing chance with someone stepping on you toes is not something I would advocate any more than walking through a city sidewalk (or festival campsite!) without any protection.

We'll see in the next few weeks how the shoes (and the wearer) fare up in more normalized everyday use. I also hope to try some short runs in them to see whether it works or not.

How to buy wierd shoes

2009-05-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

I've had my eyes on these shoes for quite a few months (hat tip to some reply in an Ask Metafilter post). Unfortunately, they are neither marketed nor sold in Japan, at least according to manufacturer's website. Luckily, Michigan had the most retailers of any state I was planning to visit, so I was feeling lucky about my chances of snagging a pair.

Until I remembered that I was visiting WEST Michigan, where everything is closed early on Saturday and all day on Sunday. Unfortunately, we were about 30 minutes too late to get fitted at The Outpost of Holland, so the next day we drove to the Gazelle Sports location on the east side of Grand Rapids (where stuff is kinda-open on Sundays). I got my size fitted and everything, but they unfortunately only carry the classic model, and I want the KSO (keep stuff out) model.

And now, a brief aside on classic versus KSO models of the FiveFinger shoes. The choice between the two is mostly a matter of taste: ostensibly the KSO, with a covered mesh shoe-top can keep stuff out (that's where the KSO name comes from), but I mainly avoided the classic model because it looks like a ballerina slipper. Judging by how much attention my muted solid black KSO's attract, the constant sideshow afforded by classic model may be just too distracting to get used to.

Still determined to get shoes while in a country where they retail, I returned to the Outpost on my way out of Michigan and they thankfully carried the exact color and model I wanted. Unfortunately they did not carry size 43 (which is probably my real size) so I got a 44 instead. This would be a huge problem for classic model, since there is no strap to keep the shoe from flying off your feet. Fortunately, the slightly too big size has not been too much of a hassle yet, aside from more frequent friction (more on that later).

If you live in America but your nearest store does not carry the exact model that you like, I recommend fitting for a classic model and then ordering online direct from the manufacturer. This way, you can be sure that it will fit fine without extra-tight straps, and Vibram (manufacturers of the shoe) has a generous return and exchange policy should you find that the sizes do not work out to your favor.

If you live in a country without an official retailer, your options are a bit more limited. Over at Birthday Shoes, there is an effort to collect data on VFF shoe size and how it correlates to actual foot length and US/UK "normal" shoe sizes. Also, used pairs of shoes do show up on Ebay from time to time, so that is another option which may work out in different countries.

Above all, make absolutely sure that you have the right size, because it may be difficult to exchange them later. After using them for a few days, they will begin to mold to the shape of your foot, and whoever sold them to you may be hesitant to take them back after they adopt the shape and smell of your feet.

Shoes Experience Update: DDR

2009-05-28T15:59:00.000-07:00

Last night I attempted a round of DDR while wearing my KSO's. At first, there are a number of things which take some adjusting to. Since there is basically no shoe sole, the timing of the note hits is slightly later. This is due to it taking less time to move my foot and depress the direction arrow. I'm still not sure if this makes the hit timing closer or further away from the actual beats in the music, since I was playing on a new machine. Next week, I'll try again on a machine I am well-acquainted with (the DDR X machine at 仙台駅 Taito Station).

Another change that I noticed (again, may just be machine peculiarities) is that I have to push down fairly hard on the floor buttons in order for them to register in the correct instant. If I step lightly like I normally would while wearing FiveFingers, the pad hits register late or not at all. I think this is just engineering by the pad designers to compensate for people wearing heavy shoes (and slamming the pad way too hard).

Introducing my new shoes

2009-05-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

Near the midpoint of my vacation in America, I began to seek out a new and exquisite shoe: the Vibram FiveFingers. Unlike most shoes which help to pad your feet and dampen any vibrations from locomotion, these shoes are a far reach in the other direction. In fact, there is very little difference between these shoes and walking around barefoot, except for the protective rubber sole. Essentially it is a glorified watershoe, with a better rubber sole and articulated toes and heel (a la the toe socks of yesteryear).

Maybe I should say that more bluntly: it looks like a rubber foot. This is the aspect which probably matters the least in the functionality of the shoe, but is most noticed by anyone else. In both America and Japan (even as i'm riding back to Sendai on the Tohoku Shinkansen as I write this), total strangers and friends alike manage to work up the courage to talk to me about my shoes. The little attention whore inside of me just loves all the excitement aimed near the lower half of my body.

The more important aspect of these shoes from a functionality standpoint (pun intended) is that there is no support at all. None, nada, zilch, zero. Neither is there any padding to speak of: while wearing the shoe, I can quite readily tell apart whether i'm walking on concrete, pavement, marble, or a grooved escalator step. This is intentional, and the only thing you are paying for with this shoe is a protective glove around your foot. Things that make barefoot walking dangerous, such as metal scraps, nails, broken glass, and so on are not able to penetrate the rubber sole. Like normal shoes, stepping on a big nail or sharp rock may very well bruise your foot, but at least you won't bleed to death or get an emergency tetanus shot.

Speaking of bruising.. that is what will happen to your heel if you walk heel-toe barefoot. Accordingly, the new wearer of the FiveFingers shoe will need to adjust (and probably unlearn) their ambulating style and gait to be appropriate for barefoot walking. In general, the strategy is to use the ball of your foot as the main impact absorber, since that is how your foot is designed to work in the first place. Walking only on the balls of your feet is basically tiptoe-ing, and is not sustainable for long distances unless you have extremely well-conditioned feet/legs. For a smoother gait, I roll through with all of my toes (its much more productive when your foot is wearing a glove instead of a mitten).

Next.. how does one buy such exotic footwear?

Shipping luggage to/from the airport in Japan

2009-05-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: added headers, more details on picking up at the airport, and how to find the booths

On my travels involving luggage in Japan, I am acutely reminded just how crowded the country can be (and how big the foreigners are in comparison to everyone else). It is nearly impossible to take any non-carryon luggage in the subway or highway buses, and difficult to carry more than one checked baggage on the Shinkansen. Many people utilize various delivery services which can deliver luggage directly to or from an airport.

For airport delivery, you can both send and receive your luggage at the airport.

Sending Airport to Home (or other destination)

When I fly into Narita International Airport, I eventually work my way through customs, and end up on the first floor arrivals lobby. From here, at the end of the large hallway are the booths of various delivery companies (look for signs indicating delivery companies or 荷物宅配サービス). One of the most well-known companies is Kuroneko Yamato, which has the trademark black-cat-on-yellow logo; I have used this company several times. At the booth, you fill out a little delivery form, decide what time the next day you would like your luggage delivered, hand over 1500-2000 yen per bag, and leave the airport much lighter. For much of Kanto (near Tokyo), same day deliveries are possible for luggage received in the morning; next day delivery is standard to most other areas of Japan (some parts of Hokkaido and islands like Okinawa take longer). Now you can proceed lightly to your destination!

Sending to the Airport

Shipping to the airport is a bit more involved and requires more planning, because the bags must be sent two days prior to departure. In my case, I sent my bags on a Thursday for my Monday flight. Collection is also varied; in general you can call a delivery driver to make a pick up at a specific time and place, or you can take your luggage to a store that deals with the delivery company. For Kuroneko, most Seven-Eleven stores are able to send and receive packages and luggage, along with a smattering of other (usually smaller, independent) stores and shops. The forms can be obtained from participating stores before you hand over money and send the bags, which is helpful if you know the store from which you want to send but are unsure of other details (or want some time to pick apart the kanji on the form).

On the airport end, you pick up your luggage in the departures check-in lobby of the appropriate terminal and wing. After that, you can walk across the floor to your appropriate airline check-in station, and only end up carrying all your bags at once for the 5-10 minutes it takes to traverse the huge departures lobby. Also, you can stuff anything into your bags at this time that you forgot/deferred from shipping; for example, toiletries, おみやげ (souvenirs) that you forgot, or evening out the load between checked and carryon luggage.

I have found this service invaluable, especially if you have more than one piece of luggage or are travelling to the airport by bus. Even with the roughly $16-20 per piece of luggage, it is still cheaper to take an overnight bus and pay for luggage than take the shinkansen. Even with the shinkansen, the lightened burden may make your travels more relaxed and stress-free. After a neverending day of travel and a flight covering a dozen timezones, shelling out a few bills is often a very tempting proposition. Since my flight departed at 10:45, I would be traveling through Tokyo around rush hour; the thought of swimming through the sea of commuters with 100lb of deadweight was enough motivation for me to figure out how to ship my bags to the airport.

Helpful links
Yamato Transport (Kuroneko) - Airport Takkyubin (English)

Dvorak experiment update

2009-04-30T19:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't written much lately, because I've been learning a new keyboard layout since the last post. While that alone shouldn't forbid more blog posts, my hands are tired and out of shape. I believe it is mostly related to breaking old bad typing habits, such as not touch typing properly with all fingers.

According to this morning's drill, I have gotten up to 42wpm on a full keyboard drill. I seem to be speeding up about 5wpm per week, and i'm guessing that my speed will top out around 80-90wpm. Of course, that is mostly a function of what I am typing: while programming, speeds above 30-40wpm are only useful in languages that are painful to the hands to begin with (Java, i'm looking at you..). Furthermore, while hard to quantify, my actual typing speed is a bit lower than that in the drills. The reason for this is that only a limited number of common letter combinations are included in the particular typing program I use; it is fairly light on latinates which does not bode well for anyone in academia.

Overall I think the switch to Dvorak is going well, and a lot more certain now that I can use the whole keyboard fairly proficiently. The biggest sticking points so far are Japanese input and keyboard shortcuts. I have not yet found a way to make the mac Japanese IME use the alternate layout, but this is not too big of a problem right now because I do not type much Japanese text these days (no homework..). Keyboard shortcuts are a bit bigger of a problem. I use a modified dvorak layout that reverts to querty when using the command key for shortcuts, but not all applications seem to play along with this option.

Pretty soon, nobody will be able to tell i'm using a different layout, as long as I am speedboosted by coffee.

My latest learning project: it's all in the hands

2009-04-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

So in the past few days, I have been spending much of my idle time researching the various opportunities at graduate schools. During this perusal of various blogs and talks, I realized that the path ahead of me will invariably include many hours banging away on a keyboard. Also, I remember how my hands would get very angry at me during my semester of freshman composition. I would often spend hours at the computer, painfully typing up some horrid essay.

Surely, there are more comfortable ways to type; over the years, countless nerds (myself included) have attempted and failed to successfully adopt to more ergonomic keyboard layouts such as Dvorak. However, in today's always-on hyperactive internet culture, it is ridiculously hard to switch to an alternate keyboard layout: not only is there the improbability that all of your QWERTY-based devices can change to alternate layouts, but more importantly the initial productivity drop associated with plunging to sub-30 wpm typing speeds.

Thankfully (?) here in Japan I have a much lower typing burden than back in the USA, so I've used this weekend to stop typing the old way and conduct this experiment. Judging from the fact that this blog entry was typed up in about 15-20 minutes, I may have a rough few weeks ahead of me.

Programming-related posts have moved

2009-04-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

I have created a new blog for programming, design, and technical posts so as not to bore the target audience of this blog. Such posts can be accessed at the new blog address:

http://mutedalarm.blogspot.com

Gay news for the straight public

2009-04-08T05:50:00.001-07:00

Lots of gay stuff in the news lately. The New York Times almost looks like the Advocate these days.

In Iowa (of all places!) same-sex marriage was upheld by the Supreme Court.

In Vermont, the legislature (!) voted to override (!) the governor's veto of a law legalizing same-sex marriage.

And finally, the NYT ran a story about violence against gays in Iraq, concentrating on Sadr City. I think the saddest part in this reporting is the quote below:

“Our investigation has found that these incidents are being committed by relatives of the gays — not just because of the militias,” he said. “They are killing them because it is a shame on the family.”
He said families typically refused to cooperate with the investigation or even to claim the bodies. No arrests have been made in the killings.

Meanwhile at said families' mosques, sadist clerics preach about the evils of homosexuality, and how it is destroying the fabric of society, (and wocka wocka). I'm not sure whether to be amused or alarmed that Iraqi institutions of faith have "risen" to the same level of stupidity as many homophobic denominations in the United States.

I look forward to returning to the United States and arguing with those who oppose such marriages. Slowly, their lines of reasoning and mock outrage over "activist judges" seem to be less and less effective. Perhaps the United States can be a symbol of hope for those unfortunate gays in Iraq, or at least 4/50'ths of the United States can be.

Who says static typing has to be ceremonious?

2009-04-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

I refer you to a blog post by Ikai Lan.

When you combine pattern matching, extractors, lazy file streams, and other sugar, things can get pretty silly pretty fast :)

Types are to Python as animals are to ___

2009-04-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking clouds in the sky in the above one. Which is why the following StackOverflow thread is infinitely ironic. What it really comes down to is, the type of an object in Python may or may not correspond to the method interface it implements.

When in Rome, do as the Romans. Thus, when in Python you should only care about method interfaces. If you need to know whether something is a duck and the quack isn't enough, you are doing something wrong (or expecting too much from the poor duck)!

I have been named a Goldwater Scholar!

2009-03-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

(BULLETIN: drop your papers and coffee!)

The Goldwater Foundation finally released its list of 2009 Goldwater Scholars, and I am very honored to be on the list!

Official Press Release
2009 Scholars

As I only woke up a few hours ago, it has yet to really sink in that after more than a year and a half of applying, all of that work has finally come to fruition. From here, I am not sure what will happen; at the least, I suppose I will be recognized at the university-wide honors convocation, as well as the College of Science and Computer Science equivalents. My house representative Carl Levin is on the Goldwater committee, so I may be hearing from my congressman soon. *nervous chuckle*

A sincere thanks to all of the letter writers, advisers, admin staff, and most importantly the professors who have been patient with me in my short academic career.

(we now return to the regularly scheduled programming of paper reading)

EDIT: Posted on the homepage of CS Department. Yes I know my hair looks silly, get over it.

Making sense of the (functional) world

2009-03-30T01:35:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across the original "Lambda the Ultimate" papers by Sussman and Steele and the effect produced from reading them is profound. It is as if someone suddenly lit a huge halogen floodlight into an enormous black cavern. :)

More seriously, several topics such as continuations, continuation-passing-style (CPS) and the compilation of functional languages make about 100 times more sense now. Hopefully I can get back on track and read what I was *supposed* to be reading before the research meeting on Wednesday..

Lack of updates

2009-03-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

Still no word on the Goldwater application. I would have guessed that it would come by end of day Friday, but apparently not.

Expect a research post in the next week.

Awaiting awards..

2009-03-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have received notification that I will be receiving an award (likely a corporate partner-sponsored scholarship) at the Purdue CS Awards Banquet in early April.

Also, by that time, I will have definitely learned my Goldwater award status.

Picking a Research Topic

2009-02-25T03:51:00.000-08:00

(Illegible graffiti in Ura-Harajuku)

..is hard!

For the last month or so at least, I've been trying to pick out a specific topic and project. This is as part of my research in the Kobayashi-Sumii lab. Most of the reason that it is going so slow is that I am only a Junior. I spent the better part of last semester catching up to a grad-level understanding of type systems, programming languages, and paper-reading ability. Even so, there are so many topics out there that I do not yet have the slightest understanding about (effect systems, static analyses, ownership, dependent types, module systems, monads, ...).

Recently we've been trying to find some research topics that tie the Kobayashi lab's specialty (process calculi and static analysis) into mainstream languages and real-world applications. At first we looked at bringing more powerful pi calculus usages to a Java extension, but Java is not well-suited to the message-passing style that process calculi model. Furthermore, a pi calculus library for Scala has been implemented (pilib) but it seems to be a dead end due to lack of practical application.

While looking at PiLib, I found out that it is implemented entirely as a library using Scala Actors (which in turn are entirely implemented as a library). This week it occurred to me that Actors and process calculi must be related, as they are both models of concurrency. I found a few papers today that seek to show the link between Actors and Pi-calculus, so this may be a possible lead for something interesting.

Oscars awarded for Milk

2009-02-24T04:13:00.000-08:00

The Oasis reports:

Dustin Lance Black, the young openly gay writer of Milk, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, with Sean Penn taking the trophy home for his amazing transformation into Harvey Milk.

Good to know that i'm not biased in my selections for movie of the year. And now I can make my friends watch it without coming off as campy. If you haven't seen this movie, then by all means go to the theatre, or find it in the rental store when it comes out. It may change your perspective a bit.

Metacritic reviews: Milk

Why cellphones in the US suck

2009-02-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

(Doc Martens store in Harajuku)

NYT: More Customers Give Up the Cellphone Contract

From the article:

The savings can be considerable. An AT&T customer with an Apple iPhone on a traditional plan pays at least $130 a month, excluding taxes and fees, for unlimited calls and Web use. Compared with the $50-a-month, all-inclusive prepaid plans, the iPhone owner pays nearly $1,000 more over the course of a year.

That's great, but you are still paying $50 a month for a (likely terrible) phone, which (likely) can't get 3G outside of a population center. iPhones are even worse: you could buy a new phone every month for the monthly cost of the contract.

The reason that cellphones suck in the US is simply, there is no real competition. Every cellular company is happy to make 1000%+ profit margin on text messages and internet access while providing terrible 3G coverage and Faustian contract bargains.

Compare to Japan: I bought my phone for ~$100, I regularly access the internet, and use the phone for calling and texting. My monthly bill has yet to exceed $30 a month. I can get 3G basically anywhere but in the subway and the elevator (some carriers such as AU have special infrastructure to retransmit signals in subway tunnels; I use Softbank which doesn't).

In the age of netbooks and free Skype, cellphone companies in the US need to stop pumping out crappy phone models, do some infrastructure building, and make contracts that do not resemble slave ownership agreements.

Fiction

2009-02-21T04:53:00.000-08:00

(Big list of people who gave money to the temple. This is near Harajuku park in Tokyo)

In the last few days I read the book Eragon. Much like Harry Potter and Dan Brown, it is a fantasy book which draws mainly young adults and mothers into its pages and thoroughly pisses off authors and people who take books way too seriously. While it is no Tolkien, it was fun to have some guilty-pleasure reading where I could forget about the current surroundings.

Too bad there is no english language library here, or i'd probably be reading The Count of Monte Cristo right now. Although I haven't read it in years, it remains one of my favorite adventure/hero books (right beside Lord of the Rings). I wish I would have dedicated more time to reading in the States, because although I have much time to read in Japan there are few English books to be had.

Reading Japanese books is still yet frustrating to me; I can slowly grok through the pages with a dictionary close by, but it is hard to become immersed in the plot and action when you need to extricate yourself once a paragraph to look up some frivolous adjective or colloquial pattern. I always say that I do not like manga- part of the reason is that I cannot get through the pages quick enough to build any plot momentum, and then get bored.

Safflower and Snow Monsters

2009-02-19T03:02:00.000-08:00

(Waiting in line at Zao Ropeway)

Last weekend I went on a trip to Yamagata with a bunch of other international students. It was sponsored by the Engineering school's international department, which subsidized most of the costs of the trip, so for students the end cost was only 1500 yen (around USD $15). The main focus of the trip was to visit the Safflower (紅花、べにはな）museum, and to see the snow monsters on Mt. Zao on the Yamagata prefecture side.

We rendezvous'd with the buses next to the station in downtown Sendai. With some scary black clouds off in the distance, it looked as if it might turn out to be a volatile day of weather. After two hours or so, we arrived at the first stop: the Zao Rope Way, a ski area in the Mt. Zao area.

We rode up two separate ropeways (which were more like gondolas) to the top of the mountain. One of the main attractions in this area are the so called snow monsters (樹氷、じゅひょう）. They are trees that have been sprayed with moist Siberian wind and snowed on repeatedly, accumulating enough snow and ice to be completely white, unrecognizable, and spooky. On the day we went, there was a very powerful storm system that was just leaving, so we could not see anything at the top of the mountain. I'd estimate that the winds were at a constant 40-50mph, which made riding the upper gondola quite an adventure.

Apparently, the snow monsters melted overnight due to unexpected rain and heavy winds. According to the locals this has never happened before, so I guess we just got really unlucky. You can see some pictures I randomly found on this flickr set, or just by googling "yamagata snow monster".

Next, we went to Sagae for lunch. This city is the center of the cherry-growing industry in Japan, and their cherry product sells for incredibly high prices, in excess of $30/lb (why this is, I could not find out). The lunch was decent and we picked up ice cream on the way back to the bus.

Our last stop was the Safflower museum (Japanese link warning). Safflower (which at first, I believe they were saying sunflower) is a flower used for its red-pink dye, which was very important in the days of kimonos and hand-made clothing in Japan.

The museum trip was divided into two groups; my group began with the hands-on dying of a handkerchief. Similar to tie-die, we used short sticks and rubber bands beforehand to create undyed patterns in the dyed product. This took quite a long time, because the dye had to be worked into the material, be set, and then dry off.

The second part was a series of buildings belonging to an important Safflower trader who lived in the Meiji era. Except for the meeting and living rooms, all the buildings had been converted into museum space featuring safflower-dyed kimonos, dolls, as well as period artifacts and some effects of the trader's family.

Overall it was a very fun trip which got everyone out of Sendai for a day of fun while only spending relatively little money. I am very much hoping to go back for a day of skiing sometime in the next few weeks if possible, pending gear rentals and figuring out transportation.

How I use Anki, part 1

2009-02-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

(Shot from the median of Jozenji-dori during the Pageant of Starlight in Sendai)

As some of my Japanese-studying friends know, I am a huge fan of the Anki spaced repetition software. If you are not familiar with the idea of spaced repetition software, please check out the Wikipedia page. In addition to the basic software, I also sync my deck to the free web server, and occasionally review by using my cellphone.

I started using Anki less than a year ago. Previously, I had tried using other similar software but it was not mature enough for serious use (or didn't work with Linux). At the beginning of the summer of 2008 while on my internship at Amazon, I started learning all of the Japanese kanji through the Heisig method. Anki is a big help in learning by Heisig method; the spaced repetitions keep most of your time focused on new cards and troublesome cards. Since the Heisig method relies on creating imaginative stories to remember kanji, this had the effect of refining only those stories for kanji that are difficult to remember.

Through this (and a lot of hard work!) I got through Remembering the Kanji. Near the end, I was becoming so adapted to memorizing kanji that I was learning around 40-50 new kanji meanings per day. This made my daily load stable at around 300 cards per day, which typically took at least 2-3 hours to clear (plus time to add new cards, which was almost just as time intensive. If I weren't planning to study abroad starting in October, I could have slowed down this rate to a more comfortable 20 new cards per day or so. I was also slowed down in the last month by a new relationship, but that was a tradeoff that I understood and accepted up-front.

Coming next: what do you do once you have "learned" all of the kanji?

Goldwater Update

2009-02-08T03:58:00.000-08:00

Another pretty building in/near Roppongi mall.

A few weeks ago, I was notified that I am one of the nominees from Purdue for the Goldwater scholarship. For those who have not been following, the Goldwater scholarship is the most prestigious national undergraduate scholarship for STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) students. It was established in honor of Mr. Conservative, Sen. Barry Goldwater. Previously, I wrote about compiling my application for this scholarship.

What is the meaning of this new news? This means essentially that I move on to the next round of competition for the national scholarship. Typically, about 1200 students are nominated each year by their respective universities, and of those up to 400 receive the scholarship. In other words, I have a 1/4 chance at a nice scholarship.

Typically once one is notified of their university-level nomination, much rewriting and fretting over essays happens. Anticipating this, I set aside a good block of time to rewrite my essays from scratch if need be. I had a phone call with Assoc. Dean Sahley, the faculty in charge of the selection committee for Purdue University. I was slightly shocked to find out that there were no comments on my essays or short answer questions, so I did not need to change them at all. I must have really spent a lot of time on them the first time!

Of course, there was still work to do. Usually, students that progress this far are able get an updated transcript with the most recent semester's exam results included. Since at that point exams were still several weeks away, and Tohoku University doesn't release final grades until mid-March, I had to fill in that gap.

This was trickier than I thought: the letter has to state that I'm a student and doing well, but also look official enough that the search committee would not suspect its integrity. I tried at first to have a professor in the lab write such a letter on "official letterhead" and send it to Purdue in a PDF. Apparently "official letterhead" isn't used here, so that didn't work. We tried to get some letterhead from the administration, but they balked at the idea. Eventually I just ended up getting a 在学証明書 (certificate of enrollment) and faxing it homeward. I could have mailed it (it has various security features) but with only 3-4 days until submission, it would have not gotten there in time without an exhorbitant amount of money spent.

I'm supposed to hear the award decision sometime in March or April. On to the next application.. College of Science scholarships.

Teaching Computer Science at all costs

2009-01-31T17:22:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the Roppongi mall in Tokyo, looking out at the city

The Manga Guide to Databases, Mana Takahashi.

I just saw a pointer to this book over at Bruce Eckel's blog.. and i'm not sure what to think about it. Apparently it is a book with a storyline, with bits of juicy database knowledge used throughout to solve plot problems. I can barely get through mangas without left joins and replication, but this would be a whole different ballgame!

On one hand, it is good to get otherwise uninterested students reading about technical subjects. But on the other hand, how much cartooning and dumbing down do we need for people to find Computer Science digestible? To my young eyes, it just seems like a replacement for teachers that work hard for their students.

Snowed In, In Sendai

2009-01-31T07:51:00.000-08:00

(Yes, thank you sign-maker for explaining 回転すし. Found in Asakusa, Tokyo near the subway station)

Last night, I went to Zaiki's birthday party. I don't remember many of the details, except that we rented out a bar called Zen for a nomihoudai, and then went to Ageha for (overpriced!) karaoke.

All yesterday, it was raining fairly hard for Sendai. I actually had to ride the bus to the party, with an umbrella and a waterproof parka. Eventually it slowed down by midnight, and for much of my stumble home I didn't use an umbrella at all.

...

When I finally awoke today with a moderate hangover, all was WHITE. I stumbled around for my glasses to confirm. There was a full-blown blizzard outside, with snow colliding horizontally into the dorm. By the time I went outside for dinner at 屋名亭満天 (the ramen place), there was at least 4 inches of heavy, slushy snow on the ground.

Most of the roads looked passable, at least the ones patrolled by taxis. In fact, about every 4 of 5 cars I saw out tonight were taxis, which is a bit higher than the 3 of 4 during the day in Sendai. I have three or four rants about taxis that I could put here, but I'll try to distill into maybe just one or two.

It almost made me miss Michigan and the 4 feet of snow.. until I realized that I couldn't walk to a ramen shop at 9:30PM on a Saturday in Michigan. Tradeoffs, I guess.

Say it, O B A M A

2009-01-16T20:49:00.000-08:00

(Don't worry, the reflection pond hasn't frozen over (yet!). The holidays struck again, and brought my lovely girlfriend to Japan as well as my new lovely MacBook, among other fun.)

EDIT: I did eventually stay up till 3:30AM watching the inauguration. Totally worth the broken sleep schedule the rest of the week.

I am seriously doubting that I will be able to stream the inauguration, since it's going to be in the middle of the night Tuesday. :( But, the following video is even more trippy than the inauguration will be, so I guess i'll just watch the news on Wednesday.

Daft Punk vs. Adam Freeland - "Aer OBAMA" from Gold Greendot on Vimeo.

東京行き

2008-12-26T00:56:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving to go to Tokyo right now. I take the overnight sleeper bus from Sendai, and it gets to Tokyo at 6am. Then, Stephanie's plane tentatively gets in around 3:30pm, if all goes well.

Of course, don't bother emailing me with the expectation that i'll read it before January 5th. It's possible but I can think of a million and one more exciting things to do in Tokyo and Kyoto. :)

Missing the snow

2008-12-20T04:13:00.000-08:00

(Very near the Bansui Sodo 晩翠草堂 in mid-late November)

As all my friends in the midwest IM in or facebook chat me to complain or celebrate snow delays, I slightly realize that I miss the snow. It's pretty, and especially since I am not driving, there isn't much danger element to it. Sendai rarely gets below freezing, typically hovering between 0-10 C for most of the winter. The city is on the dry side of a mountain range (in Yamagata Prefecture), so there is rarely any of the terrible snow storms that affect the western parts of upper Japan.

At least we get a Pageant of Starlight. I'll have pictures of that up tomorrow.

Top 60 Japanese words of 2008

2008-12-17T03:20:00.000-08:00

Found this via Neojaponisme:

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/11/top-60-popular-japanese-words-phrases-of-2008/

If you want a peek into how the twisted gears of 和製英語 (japanized english) and the Japanese mass media work, look no further. I found some of the ones near the bottom to be particularly funny.

A difference of paper

2008-12-15T22:36:00.001-08:00

(A line of trees on the north side of the Kawauchi campus classroom laboratory building)

...And the paper reading continues. Lately i've been reading about Jikes RVM to gauge my interest in virtual machine/compilers research. While I've had a vague interest, I haven't exactly been hacking around in the code. I thought I would read some of the papers, and see how they compare to Programming language/type theory papers.

So far, they are a bit easier to understand on a first reading. Unlike many type theory papers, a typical breadth-first reading of compiler/VM papers seems to work, and I can selectively choose what parts to skim and what parts to digest. Unfortunately, many PL theory papers prevent this at a meaningful level, because they are highly linear. You won't understand the proofs if you haven't read the introduction and development thoroughly.

There are some similar things in VM papers. For example you won't know how to evaluate the graphs near the end until you can look at the algorithm and see what may be the cause of differences. But in general, an illustration representing a dependency graph is more readily understood than a page full of small-step semantics and judgements full of greek (which may or may not be greek to you).

I'll start hacking into the code probably tomorrow or on Thursday, and see what it's like to hack in a JVM written in Java.

In other news, the 忘年会　(bounenkai, or end of year party) is in a few hours, so I had better get ready.

Resumption of pictures

2008-12-12T23:40:00.000-08:00

(Tohoku University Kawauchi Campus; behind Lecture Hall B, looking southward)

I updated to Picasa 3 on Linux, and while it is still bug-ridden (aka, can't use BlogThis to directly launch blogger on a picture), I can actually use it now. After I did my last dist-upgrade, the japanese localization got corrupted somehow for Picasa, rendering all of the menus and buttons blank. From here on, you get at least one picture per post.

Why do Japanese clubs cost so much?

2008-12-12T04:10:00.000-08:00

So finally, after a few months of waiting, there's an act worth going to a club for:

【AFTER DARK presents 2008 KITSUNE MAISON 6 Japan Tour in Sendai】

In other words, the owners of the Kitsune label are DJ'ing in Sendai tonight. The Kitsune label has brought bands like Digitalism, Simian Mobile Disco, Hot Chip, etc to the forefront of electro, so I was really looking forward to going to this.

Unfortunately, I lost track of the days, and its on TONIGHT. And, I've spent a few hundred dollars on discretionary stuff in the past few weeks. And nobody else wants to go, because it costs THIRTY FIVE dollars to get a DOS (day-of sale) ticket. This wouldn't be so bad, except that it almost always costs this much, whether or not they have resident (shitty) DJ's, or they have some of the best talent from France and Japan.

Disappointing.. I will not be going, and instead probably drinking with Adam&co. I want to test this new Miyagikyo whisky (non-vintage) that I finally managed to find today at Daiei. I'd explain the intricacies of Japanese whiskys later, as I would rather get to the task now instead of talking about it.

The ropes of paper reading

2008-12-11T01:05:00.000-08:00

I'm getting a good feel for how the first few years of graduate school will be like: carrying around 5-10 papers at any given time, having a bag full of highlighters, pencils, and pens, and computing dependency graphs for paper references. Well, maybe not so much on the last one, but especially at the beginning, it feels like I'm always performing a depth first search on CiteSeer and other sites.

Recently i've gotten really interested in gradual typing and (dynamic) contract checking as potential research topics. It seems that Suenaga-san's research on statically preventing deadlocks and other things with types (the APLAS talk he's giving this week) will not be further researched. This puts me in the position where I need to be bored out of my mind (the option where I join someone else's project in the lab here), waste a few months (the option where I wait for US exams and holidays to blow over before the Purdue project to get back to speed), or make up something on my own (the option where I get lost in papers, and have no support from anyone else).

The sheer joy of living in Japan (part 1)

2008-12-04T19:58:00.000-08:00

11時51分19秒) Brian Burg: has anyone ever told you how fucking aggravating it is to pay bills in japan
(11時52分14秒) Emily Minnette: no, but like everything else in japan i would imagine it's unneccessarily complicated
(11時54分30秒) Brian Burg: for example..
(11時54分44秒) Brian Burg: i turned in an automatic withdrawl for paying the cell phone bill
(11時54分58秒) Brian Burg: and i initialed in the inkan circle instead of full sign
(11時55分12秒) Brian Burg: so i got a letter in the mail saying it was rejected because the sign was different
(11時55分44秒) Brian Burg: even though i EXPLICITLY signed a bank waiver saying that i accept any consequences of fraud of my signature
(11時55分51秒) Brian Burg: aka, they have no basis to judge whether its right or wrong
(11時56分51秒) Emily Minnette: wow, that sounds really dumb and tedious
(11時58分47秒) Brian Burg: then u have to mail the hagaki back to softbank in japan
(11時58分54秒) Brian Burg: they mail it back to the bank in sendai to get it approved
(11時59分02秒) Brian Burg: then maybe a month later i'll find out if it worked it not
(11時59分15秒) Brian Burg: i just got this back and i submitted it on 10-6

About CRA Outstanding Undergrad Award

2008-12-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

Late last night, I received word that I have been selected as an Honorable Mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award! Wohoo! I wasn't expecting that really, since it's a competition against the wunderchild seniors at Princeton, MIT, CMU, UCB, Harvard etc. Luckily every school can only nominate 2 male and 2 females :)

Also, congratulations to Rob Gevers, the other honorable mention from Purdue CS. Rob and I were the lone CS presenters at last year's Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium, and he won an award there as well. It is a strange coincidence that our advisors are married and got two honorable mentions.

Here's the email. The full list will be posted on the CRA website later this week.

TO: Brian Burg

FROM: CRA Undergraduate Award Selection Committee 2009
Dick Waters, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (Chair)
Geoff Keunning (Harvey Mudd College)
Clement Lam (Concordia University)
David Novick (University of Texas, El Paso)
Lynn Stein (Olin College)

CC: Department Chair and Nominators

We are very pleased to inform you that you have been selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition for 2009. Congratulations! Your award will be forwarded to you early in the New Year.

This year's nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected for Honorable Mention from this group.

A list of the winners, runners-up, finalists, and honorable mentions appears below. A copy of the announcement as it will appear in the January 2009 issue of Computing Research News will be posted on CRA's website (www.cra.org) later this week.

On behalf of the Computing Research Association, we are pleased to have you as a member of the computing research community, and wish you the best for the future.

Today is World Aids Day

2008-12-01T06:44:00.000-08:00

November school and research review

2008-11-30T02:45:00.000-08:00

(I've decided to write a month in review for every month, to chart my progress in research and learning)

This month has been the month where I have really gotten down and dirty in the canon of programming language theory readings. Starting off with fairly little background in formal theory, i've worked up through Chapter 23 in TAPL which is approximately through the basics of pure System F (parametric polymorphism, or "generics" for you object oriented people). I'm no longer scared of small-step derivation rules in papers, although my chance of understanding everything is still fairly low.

Along the research front, things have rotated a bit, but overall little has been accomplished. We have decided to use a XMPP client library and application as a simple demo of the programming style, but it's not as simple as I thought at first. This requires we have XML parsing (since all XMPP communications are XML-based), and it requires sockets (which have not yet been implemented). This is concurrent to a new implementation of message-passing and isolation in the component model, so going too far down the sockets road may lead to a lot of debugging of the underlying component primitives and will have to rewrite a lot.

I started to write a DOM library wrapper for XML for the standard library, but I have run into a number of roadblocks as to the best way to implement things beyond the ECMA standard DOM. We would like to use extractors to simplify the syntax for matching on XPath, and dealing with nodes abstractly- but this requires some hard architecture decisions on the interaction between Thorn code and Java code. This has been complicated by hard-to-find bugs in the existing pattern-matching/extractor implementation.

Ideally, we'd like to have integrated XPath/regex support as described in Matchete: Paths through the Pattern Matching Jungle. I think for now though, actually having literals is something that can be deferred until more important things (like sockets!) are in a usable state.

As far as a project in the Kobayashi-Sumii lab, I have yet to really make any firm decisions as far as what project i'll be working on. I do not have many choices (between things that look both interesting and comprehensible). Early on, this indecision was compounded by the fact that I didn't know any basic type theory, which is what most of their research builds on top of. Lately, I've just been too busy with Thorn stuff and other classes to lay down a judgement.

---

On the Japanese front, I have nearly conquered the Kanji/Vocabulary book (40 lessons, 10 kanji and ~40 vocab per chapter). This has given me and average Anki load of 300 cards per day, roughly 40-80 new per day, which in total takes usually two to three hours to pound out. The rewards, however, make this a very good use of time. While I certainly have come a long way in my ears being able to keep up with fast native speakers (primarily, undergraduates and researchers), the injection of over a thousand explicitly studied vocabulary has made it a lot easier for my brain to parse all that my ear is hearing.

On the whole, my weekly classes have been frustrating. I had a poor showing for my Coding theory midterm, mostly because the midterm's questions were asked in a highly matrix/linear algebra style, while most of the lectures focused on the intuitive meaning of hamming codes and such. Worse, since the exam is done, the teacher is now teaching the more common way of approaching coding theory, through linear algebra and encode/decode.

Fortunately, most of the rest are only frustrating and have good grades to offset that. Listening class in particular has one of the most vindictive, petty teachers I've had since high school. The other day, I got chewed out in the front of class for writing too long of answers on the dictation quiz.

---

In the last month, i've also applied for several scholarships, such as the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award and the Goldwater Scholarship. The CRA is more of a practice run for next year, but I am very anxious to find out how the Goldwater selection goes. I felt that I had a very strong application this year (especially compared to last year), and my advisors seemed likewise optimistic.

In preparation for applying to graduate school and marketing myself once again, I've started to update my resume, begin work on a CV, and fill in a new web page design. None of these have been uploaded yet, but I think it's important to have an informative and timely homepage, neither of which describes the current incarnation.

---

As I write this post next month, I will be on my first vacation in a year with Steph. We will be spending the new year in Tokyo, followed by a few days in Kyoto then a week in the Sendai area. I hope to get through the remainder of the TAPL book and some graduate typing papers, and be able to begin the second volume. On the research side, my goal is to have a clear role in one of the lab's projects, and to be improving on a basic implementation of an XMPP client library.

Musical homelands and journeys

2008-11-29T22:19:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me today that everyone has a musical homeland. Whenever you want to be comforted by the known, familiar songs, you can always refer back to these tunes. As they flow out of the headphone, you catch yourself banging the drum lines on the desk, bobbing your head in the fashion of a rocker, and feel at home.

Musical journeys are when you venture out from this comfortable, known and defined canon of songs. Perhaps you are venturing to the dark, incognito sounds of a grime/dubstep rave in the seedy corners of south London, without any bearings around you and a steady sharp hiss of the pirate radio. Time travel, alternate lifestyles, or sublime moods can define other musical voyages.

For me, the homeland has always been bands such as Radiohead, and other formative music from the long and cold years of high school senior year. Lately, my voyages have taken me all over the world, from hip-hop, dubs, breaks, jazz, soul, funk, and many uncategorizable but beautiful musical modes. Along with my geographic journeys in Japan, I hope to detail on my blog some of the musical journeys I've made.

Simple explanation of gradual typing

2008-11-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

I found a page on Jeremy Siek's website that simply explains the basics of gradual type systems. So if you know just a little bit about programming, you can get an idea of what I may be working on in the next few months.

http://ece-www.colorado.edu/~siek/gradualtyping.html

Equality March Roundup

2008-11-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

Here's some of my favorites from the nationwide marriage equality pool on Flickr. (Sadly, such things are not relevant in Japan so I couldn't hold signs- I rather spent my November 15 drinking and bowling)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/intrinsicchaos/3033164375/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/intrinsicchaos/3033141835/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/intrinsicchaos/3033135337/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriannelacy/3033162321/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriannelacy/3033990662/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/edensembers/3033948698/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/edensembers/3033943652/

Opted to link to the pages, since I don't own the photos and this blog has enough embedded already.

Traversal in the wrong order

2008-11-11T05:49:00.000-08:00

Lately, i've been pounding away at Types and Programming Languages, the canonical textbook for a grad-level programming languages class. While it is very thick and a bit of a challenge for independent study, it is definitely easier than trying to learn the content in Japanese. It occurred to me on the way home today that students at Purdue had to be learning this stuff too, since it is the basis for PL research, right?

Turns out Prof. Vitek (my research advisor at Purdue) is teaching the graduate-level programming langauges class at Purdue this semester. If only I could have taken that before coming over here, I wouldn't be dawdling in the dark with the finer points of the typed lambda calculus! I suppose I can still use the class slides, but without accompanying lecture it is sometimes hard to make heads or tails of the more tricky parts. Also, that class only goes halfway through the book, and has a more practical bent with topics such as concurrency and garbage collection (the latter no doubt a result of Filip Pizlo being the TA for the class).

Lately, i've being pushed by lab members at Tohoku to see what everyone else is doing and find a project. The problems are twofold: aside from the extroverts (who talk about their work all of the time!), its very hard to approach/interrupt other students for an impromptu presentation. This is complicated by the fact that I am at a total loss when you combine type theory and Japanese. Secondly, many of the projects just do not look that interesting. Either they are doing things which have already been done to death (timing attack prevention by types? check. safe deallocation in single-thread programs? check), things which seem purely academic, or are well beyond the scope of my current (limited) grasp of theory (higher-order recursion schemes, multi-stage calculi).

If I could simply postpone doing any real work for another month or two and catch up on System F, Pi Calculus, and similar base theory, I might actually have a chance to make some contribution (or at least have an intelligent if awkward conversation). Even if I join someone else's project, without such base theory, I won't really know what's going on anyway. Similarly, I need to be able to read and understand papers on gradual typing (and the long line of literature such papers stand upon) if I want to have a realistic chance of adapting it to Thorn's type system at Purdue.

Time for catching up on Japanese (especially technical and speaking experience) is similar, although it's a shame I can't stop the world from spinning away so I can catch up.

Scholarly Update

2008-11-08T06:02:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last week or two putting together my application for the Goldwater scholarship, and as of Friday 1PM EST, it was submitted through CS Advising office. This time around, I was a bit more stressed to finish the essay in time, but I actually had some good ideas.

The essay part of the Goldwater application is 2 pages, 11pt font or larger, with the purpose of you telling the reviewers something that you would like to research. Typically in this spot, you are supposed to implicitly talk about the research you've already done, the people you've collaborated with, and a new project you want to undertake. I simply wrote about Gradual Typing for Thorn, added a handful of references, and had a well-researched essay done! The best part is that this "research proposal in an essay" can also serve as a blueprint for my research projects this semester (and perhaps beyond?).

Some people may wonder if the irony is lost on me, for a queer liberal to be applying for the Goldwater scholarship, the namesake of which is after Senator Barry Goldwater, "Mr Conservative" and the hero of the modern conservative movement. Why would I have the audacity to list "Queer Student Union" in my leadership and community section?

Well, last year I was afraid of this too. Then I discovered this old-school gem. No more worries, because Goldwater predates the religious right, and is more of a libertarian. He went so far as to be a gay rights activist in 1994 (he left public life in 1996 after a massive stroke). I guess I can fit into this scholarship foundation's ideals after all :)

How do Japanese classes compare?

2008-11-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

When I was just a mere Sophomore, I had heard many differing rumors as to the structure and difficulty of the major curriculum courses in Japan. Advisors were afraid of me bombing out, and people who had been there were telling me it was the longest vacation I'll ever have. Here's my take, a month into the semester.

The typical course format at Tohoku University is a 90-minute lecture, which meets once a week. Typically the division of grades is along the lines of 20% attendance, participation, and reports, and 80% decided by the final exam. The idea of a report here is that you write an essay near the end of the semester to summarize what you had learned. In many classes, there is little to no homework, and textbooks are almost always optional in classes that do not involve reading comprehension.

The lecture style is more similar to that of Purdue; technical classes are dominated by Powerpoint presentations and overheads, while language classes and the like are very handout/worksheet-oriented. Unlike at Purdue, I appreciate presentation slides here because it is much easier for me to decipher a slide with kanji than to struggle to decode high-velocity Japanese lecturing. There is also a very minimal amount of interaction; most of it takes form of randomly calling out students to answer quick comprehension check questions.

As for the individual classes, i'll summarize quickly here.

Japanese grammar class (level 3): Almost entirely review, so I do not have to pay much attention in this class. There's a weekly worksheet, which I can easily do over coffee the morning its due while half asleep. Still, they cover more variations and subleties than grammar class at Purdue, and it forces you to learn the boring parts. Nobody likes to study alone out of a grammar book.
Japanese listening/dictation class (level 3): The teacher in this class is a huge drama queen, and routinely fusses about tiny mistakes and gets annoyed when students don't know the answer. Thankfully there is no homework, and the reward is also good: almost every class I walk out, muttering "so THAT'S what they said that one time.."
Japanese reading class (level 3): I went to this class one time, and it was not a very good use of my time. They used a lower-level reading book, and spent the whole 90 minute lecture on a passage that I could read on my own in 5-10 minutes, at the most.
Technical Japanese III: This is among my favorite classes, mostly because there is no attendance, grades, or even registration. It is held by the Engineering school's international office, and covers technical Japanese. The best part is the class size: the most that have ever been in this class at once is 5 students including myself. Essentially, a 90 minute free tutoring session.
Artificial Intelligence: Very slow, so I usually just doodle in my notebook, study kanji on my phone, or similar things. I even have the option to take the final in English, so as long as I keep up in the english textbook I'll be totally fine.
Coding Theory: This class is the wildcard, because I have no background at all in it. Okay, that's a lie: I haven't learned anything yet, because all of it was covered in the ECE270 (Digital Design) textbook's first two chapters. I think eventually though it will get hard, as I'll have to parse the Japanese to get further ahead in the material. Thankfully the slides are online and free :)

One thing I noticed in the Computer Science classes is that it takes a lot more words to explain technical concepts in Japanese. Probably on the order of 1.5x as many. This is to my advantage, because I have about 5 chances to understand what they are explaining due to the repetition. (Perhaps it doesn't actually take that long, but they have to repeat themselves to wake up the ever-sleepy undergraduate students).

All in all, I'm able to concentrate on more important things (like research! and foundation reading!) to a much greater extent than at Purdue. I think I will enjoy this "intellectual vacation".. in that I will be freed from the enormous time sink that i'm strapped into at Purdue.

日本に慣れるについて　(About Adjusting to Japan)

2008-10-21T05:27:00.000-07:00

Culture shock is a common feeling when studying abroad. It can manifest in any number of ways, for any number of reasons: perhaps everyone maintains a different personal distance, the food is different, or just the way of thinking is very perpendicular to wherever you came from. The study abroad office at Purdue goes to great lengths to prepare students for abrupt changes to their lifestyle and culture, but all too often I see many exchange students who passively or actively fight the new environment.

I'll admit, there have been a few things that took a while for me to get used to, and still another laundry list of things that will confuse me for a while. Some representative examples: the roads are gyaku (reverse - drive on the left!), people think ~$2.20 for a 15 minute bus ride is cheap, the abundance of temples and shrines in the most unusual of places, no sidewalks on roads with less than 4 lanes, and so on.

In general though, I'm letting go of my cultural inhibitions and fitting in. Some of the other exchange students are not faring so well; many of the cliques already formed are not innately for friendship, but to stick together and resist adopting a more Japanese lifestyle. By my valuation, this is especially prevalent within the English language program. Many of these program participants revel in the fact that they know nearly nothing about the country or language they are being immersed in, and actively avoid interaction with natives, or solo expeditions to explore close-by temples.

A related issue is that most other American exchange students have a Japanese proficiency below that of mine, so they get intimidated and almost always defer to speaking in English even if the Japanese phrases and words are easily availed. Hans, Ryoichi, and I actually discussed this while we visited Purdue in late September. We came to the conclusion that Americans are embarrassed to speak Japanese in front of each other, and Japanese are embarrassed to speak English in front of each other.

Even though i'm doing well as far as fitting in is concerned, I still have a long ways to go to develop real rapport and friendships with Japanese people my age. Spoken in Japanese or not, being able to order food or introduce yourself in 3 sentences amongst Japanese people is much easier than engaging on a personal level. I suppose as I get more comfortable with the city and my conversational abilities and limits, this will be dissipate. I suppose it also motivates me to actually pay attention in Japanese Listening/Speech classes.

Imoni in Sendai

2008-10-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I had one of my first "real" cultural experiences in Sendai. Imoni (芋煮) is a regional food very specific to the Sendai and Yamagata areas. Typically once a year in the month of October, groups will traditionally meet under a specific bridge, and enjoy the Imoni dish as a late lunch.

This year, I went with my research group, the Kobayashi-Sumii Lab (小林・住井研究室）. There were at least a dozen grad students and assistants there, as well as me and the other DEEP student. I think his nickname was Dion, but I have yet to meet him since. On the whole, most graduate students in the lab are very shy, but once the shochu (焼酎, distilled rice spirit very similar to scotch/whiskey) was opened a few of us lightened up and had fun. The main perpetrators were myself, Prof. Kobayashi, and Suenaga, the post-doc (and if you are wondering, I rarely remember given names).

Other notable members of the party included Prof. Sumii's little kid, who was extremely adorable, and a few circles away, the rest of the exchange student population at a (entry fee) Imoni hosted by the @Home student group. I stopped by to talk to Hans for a while, but did not feel terribly inclined to try socializing with the rest of them. I was inebriated enough that I probably would have come off sort of silly (or fall on the rocks trying to).

Broadcasting from Japan

2008-10-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm finally in Japan. Things are moving along well, though classes are yet to be finalized. Over the next few weeks in my spare time, I will detail my new life here, and if I remember anything from the trip over here, perhaps that can be detailed too. There is plenty to write about, the trouble is finding time, and then finding something intelligent to say.

Pictures are worth more than words, especially in a place like Japan where your visual senses are overwhelmed constantly. As I (serendipitously) take some nice photographs, I will share them here, and also share the story or anecdote that they inspire. This tends to keep entries focused, on the shorter side, and also gives me motivation to take pictures (and of course, sort them afterwards with Picasa).

All photos and text on this blog are hereafter licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (USA). In normal-ese, that means you can copy, redistribute, or modify site contents for a noncommercial purpose as long as attribution to me is given.

Until the next photo...

First-ever visit to Madison, WI

2008-09-25T17:56:00.001-07:00

After a looooooong weekend visiting folks and giving my goodbyes at Purdue, I muscled my way up the nasty I-65 > 80/94 > 294 > 290 > 90 highway tollbooth hell to the lovely place I'm told is the capital of Wisconsin.

I'm here with Steph, and didn't realize just how much I missed her! This is my second day here and just now starting to see some of the campus. I'm extremely jealous; unlike the uniform brick-a-brack ugliness of Purdue's campus, UW-Madison is overflowing with energy, bikes, mopeds, and pretty buildings.

Today is Steph's birthday incidentally, so I got her a few presents and paid for lunch today. The main birthday present was the knife set I bought in Seattle; she previously had a motley collection of dangerously dull knives. Although I could have used the knives myself, i'd rather not ship a 10lb set of knives to Japan, rising-sun-of-nice-cutlery.

Tonight is the birthday dinner... maybe we'll go to the piano bar (match that, Purdue!).

Admissions also snoop on Facebook, apparently

2008-09-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-facebook-college-20-sep20,0,2460681.story

According to the above article, 10% of "prestigious university" admissions officials look on social networking sites to get information about a student. While i've heard that some employers do this, I think admissions officials doing likewise is a bit silly.

For some, getting into college is a by-any-means competition, so in order to avoid a disadvantage they delete their Facebook or Myspace profiles, or whitewash them. In recent times, Facebook has wisened up to this extra screening and added sufficient privacy controls so that content can be restricted to a certain subset of people you authorize.

So essentially it is more a screening of who has a better understanding of privacy settings, and by extension, who has more technological savvy. Perhaps there are better ways for colleges to judge such proficiency, like ... AP test scores! Personally i'd use external achievements (open source contributions, competitions, pro bono help) as a better indicator of initiative and technological whizbang.

Packing up and rolling out

2008-09-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

Wohoo! I'm finally done with my internship, which means that more blog posts are now possible.

The last two days of work were a bit of a misnomer. By that I mean that no work was done at all... Much of Thursday was spent on Salon, NYT, and HuffPost, while Friday was consumed with exit interviews, lunch at Pike Place Brewery (which is a horrible place to eat if you are paying), and acquiring undeserved schwag from the College Recruiters.

Today I'm wandering my favorite spots, and just wasting time. Later I will be giving up my food to Jon Micklos, bless his heart and car.

There has been a lot of random stuff this summer, so as I feel like it maybe i'll write a memoir post once in a while.

Kanji and Life Update, Steven's Birthday Edition

2008-08-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a crazy summer!

Today is Steven's birthday, and I feel slightly guilty for not getting him anything yet. I may be trading/selling in my current laptop as a birthday present, but not sure of the financials until my parents get back from their fabulous anniversary vacation. In any case, I'm looking forward to snatching up a late-model macbook pro once the new models are released and retailers try to dump old models.

Life in Seattle is well, and too complicated to explain simply in a single blog entry. I've been hammering away on kanji study, despite some very worthy distractions. Currently i'm adding roughly 30-40 kanji a day, which leaves me with a daily load of about 120 review + 30-40 new. It takes a few hours every night which is a drag, but it's worth it. I already play the nerd gig while in Chinatown, and crudely translating the Chinese (Wow, its the beauty-taste-store! Look, Oasis sells fruit-soup-type drink)!

Rapid response boat flipping

2008-06-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

So i'm just chilling out in Seattle, you know.. yesterday about 100 interns went white water rafting on the company dime. There's nothing quite like Class 5 rapids with a bunch of indian interns who don't know how to swim.

At least the follow instructions. :)

I wanna fly away, yeah

2008-04-13T18:26:00.000-07:00

I started peeking around at flight reservations to Japan. My thinking was that the easiest, most pain-free trip would be non-stop from Chicago (ORD) to 成田国際空港 (Narita Int'l Airport, NRT). It seems I will need to find $650-1000 dollars for a one way ticket, or play around with a round-trip (and rescheduling the return).

I'm not sure which is better, a one-way or round trip. Considering that i'm leaving nearly a year after I get there, a round-trip ticket shouldn't be any cheaper than two one-way tickets. Invariably there are fees to move around the return date, which will probably be similar to the higher cost from inflation/devalued currency. Either way, I'm going to be out a lot of money.

Right now i'm considering 3 options: JTB (Japan Traveler's Bureau) is a gigantic Japanese travel agency which mainly does business in Japan (http://www.jtbusa.com/enhome/s-chi1.asp). They have some good deals, but I'm unsure about their level of flexibility. I'm pretty sure I'm not eligible for a rail pass, either :(

Second option is Orbitz, Travelocity, or something like that. Prices are generally more expensive than a travel agent. Third choice is STA Travel, which I've heard has reasonable rates and easy rescheduling.

Computer Science Awards Banquet

2008-04-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

Last night was the annual awards banquet, wherein money is doled out from Corporate Sponsors to undergraduates. They also announce other awards and so on, and this year they even had entertainment. Some guy did a hilarious stage act of Thomas Edison, and helped to give out awards.

This year, I actually got a scholarship! Well I did last year too, but it was not announced at the ceremony. My sincere thanks to FactSet Inc. for a $1000 scholarship. Although, I have my doubts whether or not I'd ever want to work there. They do mostly concurrent programming in C++, which sends shivers of pain down my back.

Undergraduate Research and Poster Symposium

2008-04-07T18:51:00.001-07:00

A week ago, I presented a poster at the Undergraduate Research and Poster Symposium 2008 (link). The poster that I made (link) details some high-level ideas from the research I am involved with. I spent a great deal of time working on it, and learned a lot of about the direction of my project. And naturally, learned how to use Adobe InDesign pretty well :)

Perhaps in the future I will post some more discussion of the poster material, but for now I am too busy for such a writing.

Stuff White People Like

2008-03-23T13:20:00.000-07:00

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/91-san-francisco/

In the past few years, the speed at which a meme can be generated, popularized and overused has gotten only faster. Take Stuff White People Like: a blog about "white people", in the context of the white people you might find in Hyde Park, San Francisco, or more well-to-do parts of midsize cities. What of the white people you might find at say, my hometown (western Michigan), or those mostly white people in fraternities and sororities on campus? According to the blog, those are the "wrong kind" of white people.

Overall, I enjoy this blog for the deadpan humor, but for the most part (based on my limited exposure) this is a good portrait of white yuppie-dom. Even I fall to many of the categorizations on the site (Like coffee? check. Hate corporations? check. Like having black friends? check. Barack Obama? check. Don't have a TV? check). Okay, this parenthesized checklist isn't working, so let's go full-form:

*** #91 San Francisco
*** #90 Dinner Parties
#89 St. Patrick’s Day
*** #88 Having Gay Friends
#87 Outdoor Performance Clothes
#86 Shorts
#85 The Wire
*** #84 T-Shirts
*** #83 Bad Memories of High School
*** #82 Hating Corporations
*** #81 Graduate School
*** #80 The Idea of Soccer
#79 Modern Furniture
*** #78 Multilingual Children
#77 Musical Comedy
#76 Bottles of Water
*** #75 Threatening to Move to Canada
#74 Oscar Parties
#73 Gentrification
*** #72 Study Abroad
#71 Being the only white person around
#70 Difficult Breakups
#69 Mos Def
#68 Michel Gondry
#67 Standing Still at Concerts
#66 Divorce
*** #65 Co-Ed Sports
*** #64 Recycling
*** #63 Expensive Sandwiches
*** #62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People
*** #61 Bicycles
#60 Toyota Prius
#59 Natural Medicine
*** #58 Japan
#57 Juno
#56 Lawyers
#55 Apologies
#54 Kitchen Gadgets
*** #53 Dogs
#52 Sarah Silverman
#51 Living by the Water
*** #50 Irony
*** #49 Vintage
*** #48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
#47 Arts Degrees
*** #46 The Sunday New York Times
*** #45 Asian Fusion Food
*** #44 Public Radio
*** #43 Plays
*** #42 Sushi
*** #41 Indie Music
*** #40 Apple Products
#39 Netflix
#38 Arrested Development
#37 Renovations
*** #36 Breakfast Places
*** #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
#34 Architecture
#33 Marijuana
#32 Vegan/Vegetarianism
#31 Snowboarding
#30 Wrigley Field
#29 80s Night
*** #28 Not having a TV
#27 Marathons
#26 Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!)
*** #25 David Sedaris
*** #24 Wine
*** #23 Microbreweries
#22 Having Two Last Names
#21 Writers Workshops
*** #20 Being an expert on YOUR culture
*** #19 Traveling
*** #18 Awareness
*** #17 Hating their Parents
*** #16 Gifted Children
#15 Yoga
*** #14 Having Black Friends
*** #13 Tea
*** #12 Non-Profit Organizations
*** #11 Asian Girls
#10 Wes Anderson Movies
#9 Making you feel bad about not going outside
*** #8 Barack Obama
*** #7 Diversity
*** #6 Organic Food
*** #5 Farmer’s Markets
#4 Assists
#3 Film Festivals
*** #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to
*** #1 Coffee

Yea.. maybe I should move to a more suitable place. Purdue is great for getting drunk, and examining the intricate structure of brick.

A critique of the much-touted B.A.P

2008-02-27T20:05:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks, the B.A.P. (Boiler Advancement Proposal, http://www.boileradvancement.com) proposal has come to the forefront of campus politics and discussion. At first I was slightly off-put by the obnoxious and dubious flyering practices, but I decided to give the proposal a fair look. Here is a thorough compendium of my thoughts regarding the proposal.

My main reservations are not concerning the fee part or the overall goal; they are about the proposal itself.

The proposal is very poorly written, imprecise and ambiguous in its wording throughout, and often lacks a clear direction or purpose. I suppose this is too general for any useful debate, so let's elaborate, section by section:

1. Why is there a list of organizations in support? Is this even relevant to the proposal aside from political reasons? Does it directly affect how the plan is structured or administered? I see no purpose for this except to impress cursory readers.

In the few weeks since the marketing campaign (as it were) was launched, I have had few substantiative debates of the merits of the proposal. Grandstanding tactics like listing supporters before explaining what it is that enlisting their support for is probably contributing to the vague notions of the program proposal's (good and bad) points.

2. The mission statement is slightly confounded, in my opinion. Isn't the quality of life enhanced by co-curricular activities? Which is the cause and effect here? Next phrasing difficulty: "exploration of funding" sounds like the work of some sub-committee meeting at a random time on the weekend, groveling over audit logs and mundane details.

With all of the current Purdue Strategic Plan activity going on, wouldn't it make sense to align the language of the proposal (especially Mission and Vision) to the language and focus areas of the new strategic plan? I have been involved in other proposal-writing ventures this strategic planning cycle, and it was made very clear the imperative nature that the document cling closely to previously-outlined strategic planning goals. Here's a short hack at a mission:

"The Boiler Advancement Program strives to enhance the Boilermaker student experience by providing financial support to co-curricular and extra-curricular student activities and programs."

Sure, it could probably be polished a bit more. But as written in the proposal, its almost laughable from an authoring standpoint. Did anyone proofread this document?

3. The "Vision" suffers from similar ailments as the "Mission"; namely, that it does not suit the purpose of the particular section. The vision should move quickly from the current situation to the ideal vision made possible by the implementation of such a program. The "Vision" is not a "Needs" section. First, illuminate why the mission is relevant and important (student experience leads to better recruitment and retention), and how the proposed program will enhance this aspect (more funding leads to better quality events, more events, and so on). Using the word preeminent over and over doesn't really qualify as a vision: it is merely a happy word which any university marketing campaign cannot restrain itself using.

One of the painfully disturbing things about the whole proposal is a complete and utter lack of facts. As we all should have learned in ENGL 106/108, reputable facts come from references, citations, and peer-reviewed material. Maybe the PDF i'm looking at has a bibliography omitted and the citations printed in white, but what is there to convince me that arguments presented in the "Vision" (and throughout the whole proposal) are simply not pulled out of thin air? This is simply ridiculous and cannot be allowed in a proposal with so many implications for student life. If the authoring group is not competent enough to include a SINGLE citation in a $1.6m/year proposal, why should anyone reasonably assume the (presumably) same group of people can competently manage and disburse such a large sum?

4. The "Goals" section, at first glance, seems like a list of goals: "enrichment of campus environment" (how?),
"enhancing the collegiate environment by improving co-curricular opportunities and activities" (okay, a little more concrete, but still vague as to means)
"higher quality of programs and events" (by virtue of...?)
"Service-Learning opportunities" (is this a goal?)
"Collaboration among student organizations" (how is this beneficial, specifically?)

... After this point, it seems to devolve into a Santa-style list of "OMG WANT!" items, and phrases that sound vaguely positive. I'm not saying that some of these are bad goals; i'm asking where is the justification for the goals? I rather think that many of the items enumerated here in the goals section are good examples of activities towards certain goals, not the goals themselves. Should not each goal relate back to the "enhancement of the student experience" which we agreed upon in the mission? Instead of something very concrete like "homecoming", how about generalizing to what Homecoming provides to the entire student population (and probably alumni as well). Something such as "Increased alumni-student interaction and involvement" sounds more like a goal to me, especially if it can be succinctly explained how this relates to an enhanced student experience.

Another example could replace several items: "promote and support activities and programs which increase the cultural, societal, and intellectual awareness of students". Some obvious examples meeting this goal could include campus movie showings, concerts, diversity-related programming, and awareness programs. This can be justified on the grounds that increased student awareness in these areas promotes a more diverse and healthy academic environment, which probably can be correlated to student success and recruitment/retention. Of course, such an assertion must be supported by evidence; the academic literature concerning such issues in a college campus environment is well-developed and must be utilized to support these goals and their relationship to the program mission.

Optimally I think that there should be a half-dozen or so general goals with clearly explained benefits. From these axioms it would be much more straightforward to determine whether a suggested event is consistent with the mission and goals of the program. It would also make it more straightforward for those proposing an event to justify their requests in terms of advancing program goals.

From here, I will address some organizational shortcomings in the remainder of the composition, and defer criticism of the board composition and money distribution for a separate blog post, in the interests of keeping post lengths to merely "long" instead of "epic". I also have some worries about the specific methods outlined for the applying of, reviewing of and awarding of funds. These concerns will also be saved for a later post.

For the description of the board, a more orderly flow would be beneficial. As written, everything from the time of the meeting, to who constitutes the board, to how new board members are selected is jumbled into a single paragraph with no discernible order. Perhaps following the structure and semantics of a constitution, which practically every other valid student organization on campus is required to have, would lead to a more coherent and normalized definition of the roles, responsibilities, and bylaws of the board. On the page following, two different representations of the board structure are presented. They convey the same exact information written in the paragraph, so I am not quite sure why both are included in situ with other parts of the proposal. Also lacking is a description or rationale describing the division of board seats, which I will address in the next blog post more thoroughly.

The page labeled "Funding" has several deficiencies and lacks coherence with the rest of the paper, specifically "Goals" and "Mission". Through the rest of the paper, this disjunction between sections is rampant, and I'm kind of wondering why a mission, vision and goals were set up if they aren't adhered to throughout the rest of the proposal. Finally, there is no detail in the description of the board itself how changes to the program, or the board, are to be considered and implemented. Were there some sort of process laid out for change, I would gladly look past other deficiencies outlined

As I wrap up the first part of my critique, let me recap the main points covered so far:
1. The coherence of the whole proposal is significantly hindered by vaguely written and unfocused statement program mission, program vision, and program goals.
2. There are no citations, references, or uses of external sources for facts in any part of the proposal.
3. The description of the program board, its member composition, its procedures, bylaws, and processes for change are poorly-structured and vague, and do not follow standard formats and conventions applied to other organizations on campus.

I do value the ultimate mission of the Boiler Advancement Program, but I also contend that at an institution of higher learning such as Purdue University, a higher standard of rigor must be set by those who claim to lead and represent the student body. If writes well as one does well, then you can probably deduce the equivalent formula for competence.

Until next time,
Brian