Monthly Archives: July 2006

Andrew Viterbi Worked At JPL

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Andrew Viterbi, who donated $52 million to the USC School of Engineering, joined a communications research group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) upon graduating from MIT in 1957. It was “the most intriguing job he was offered”. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1962, invented the Viterbi algorithm in 1966, and founded Qualcomm in 1985. I never knew that JPL had played such a crucial role in his success. What an amazing story. The Quiet Genius (PDF).

Last several weeks of Summer

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I’ll be operating at maximum stress level in hopes of accomplishing more that way. On the other hand, I’m naturally not stressed out enough, and I sit back yawning and just staring at the world around me. So it’s time to buckle down. This summer, I’m doing two major things, each of which could easily be full-time. I’m doing a summer internship at JPL and I’m doing a summer of code project with OSAF. Sometimes I think I should have chosen one, but even today I don’t know which I would choose. Each has its merits, and it’s technically feasible to do both. So what’s coming up for what’s left of summer? This week, I have:

  • Von Karmen Lecture on Exploring Saturn’s Moons
  • Enceladus Team Meeting
  • Speaker Series: Cassini-Huygens
  • CADRe Meeting
  • Stanford University Open House

That’s not bad. Only Enceladus and CADRe require any prior preparation. I have contacts and a book for Enceladus and code to write for CADRe. Next week, I have:

  • USC Book List Release
  • OSAF Presentation Dry Run
  • Speaker Series: Mars– my last
  • Last CADRe Meeting– last
  • Enceladus Presentation
  • OSAF Presentation

Here’s where it gets really ugly. I need to prepare for CADRe, Enceladus, and OSAF. Integration and testing for CADRe, organizing and practicing for Enceladus, and coding and presenting for OSAF. My schedule conflicts here. What can I do? Come home early, go back to JPL late– or take the day off? The Enceladus presentation isn’t really important from what I know, but it’s still nice to do well on it. The OSAF presentation’s importance is unknown, but I really want to do well on that, if I can.

Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all

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Watch this Google video from yesterday on Microsoft’s new voice recognition software. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. “Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” It’s drawing a lot of comparisons with All your base are belong to us, which is also what I thought it sounded like. It’s a totally different situation, but funny still.

World’s First Hard Drive

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The 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage is coming up in a little over a month. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first hard disk drive. It was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, stored 5 megabytes on 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks– and cost $250,000 a year in today’s dollars to lease. Newsweek

Butterfly test

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In 1990, we had some brand new HP disks the size of a washing machine. Capacity 650MB.

Some software was written to move the head assembly from end to end. This would cause so much vibration the the whole machine would “walk” around.

The machine room had video cameras, and sometimes if you saw some maintenance people in the machine room, you would launch the “Butterfly test” on all the drives. They would come alive like a bad horror movie, and all walk around. The poor maintenance person would try to run out befor the exit got blocked. (Slashdot comment)

MacSaber and Sudden Motion Sensors

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Some new Apple Mac laptops and IBM Thinkpads have sudden motion sensors inside, which park the hard drive heads in the event of a fall which protects your data from being damaged. It’s being used for all sorts of things, including a way to turn your Mac into a Jedi weapon. It’s surprising how many fun uses for the sensors there are. Why not have an actual input device designed for this sort of thing? The acceleratometers (gyroscopes) can’t be too expensive now that Apple and IBM are including them in nearly all laptops. I guess that’s what Gyration has tried to do, but those are used just as mouse pointers. You need fun apps like these before it’ll take off. This is a good idea from a Slashdot comment.

Maybe we should just start putting in different types of random sensors in laptops that can pull data from the emediate environment and see what the hackers can do with them. Some suggestions:

Gyroscopes for Orientation (pitch,roll,yaw)
More accelerometers
Altimeter
GPS
External temperature,humidity, pressure
Pressure sensors (which determine how hard the user is banging on the keyboard in aggrevation).
Thermal imaging

Summer of Code Status Updates

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I’ve resolved to write at least once a day about my summer of code project. It’s the least I could do, considering all they’ve done for me. I have a presentation coming up on August 10. I need to talk to bcm about it. I don’t have anything to show yet :( I really need to do something. But what?

  • Created a new user account called “Summer of Code” on my computer so I have all my SoC stuff in a separate place
  • Installed the latest OSAF Server Bundle (they gave me major problems just to get started with, but it seems that the problem is just a missing temp directory)
    • It seems like Tomcat should at least be smart enough to create the directory itself, but it doesn’t
    • Bear said he would check into fixing this (remind him Monday)
  • I need to make sure the Sandbox is still working and I can play with Cosmo there

vBulletin Spam

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The “Contact Us” form in vBulletin is highly susceptible to spamming. I’ve received 100% spam from it– no legitimate emails. 32 spam emails so far.. the forum is inactive anyway, so I’m shutting it down.

Update (8/20/2007): Did a Google search for vBulletin Spam and this post came up 4th. Unfortunately, I still get lots of spam on my vBulletin forum. This is very hard to combat.

My computer works

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It’s great when things go according to plan. A few months back, I messed up my computer when playing with the partitions with PartitionMagic (never use it!) Now I have a different open source package that works much better. Anyway, my computer was messed up, so I reinstalled Windows on a second hard drive. From then on, I boot from my D: drive. Now, I want to move everything from my old drives to the new one, and format the old drive so it’s fresh and clean, no paritioning errors or anything. But to make sure my computer doesn’t have any dependencies, I want to disable the drive first to make sure I don’t need it and that I have all the data want. It’s my Master drive, though, and my BIOS will only boot from C:. Windows and other software also assumes C: drive bootup, even if not directly. Your boot manager can be on C: while you actually boot from D: or some other drive.

So I opened up my case, took out the Master drive, switched the Slave to Master, and closed it up.

NTLDR is missing.

So I grab a Windows XP Home SP2 disc, use the Recovery Console, enter my Administrator password (weird, since my computer actually logs on automatically), and do a few things:

copy d:\i386\ntldr c:
copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
bootcfg /rebuild

At this point, bootcfg failed to find any Windows installs, and it looked like we were dead. I ignored it, though, and ran fixboot. Then I restated.

w00t. My computer works.

The only snag? Windows Product Activation wants to take over again, I only have 3 days to do it, and Microsoft says I’ve activated this copy too many times. Darn Microsoft. They make a fine OS, but have to load it up with time-wasting junk like this. Oh well– I’ll call them later. In a couple days, if all is well, I’ll put my other hard drive back in and wipe it clean. I’m thinking about splitting it into 2-3 paritions:

1) Important: data that I want to back up often. Documents that I’m working on now.
2) Videos: huge DV video files from my camcorder or other video sources, for editing or cleaning up.
3) Downloads: copies of installation files, utilities, graphics and media that I want to save in case the online versions go away, get lost, start costing money, etc.