An Extraordinary Bison

This is a title.

2009-07-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

Today I migrated to the grad student area of the lab from the shared desks that the undergrads use - the darker, inner area with less exposure to sunlight (very appropriate), where I get a permanent desk and *gasp* a local account with administrator privileges on a lab computer! Oh, the perks of being a co-term student. :P I have a feeling I'm going to be living at this desk once school begins since I didn't apply for grad housing and I'll be commuting from home. O_O Next week perhaps I shall bring some garish objects to the lab with me to decorate my new living, er, work space.

#52:

Overenthusiastic bison.

2009-07-06T23:44:00.000-07:00

Groaaan...I thought I was on such a roll at work...things seemed to be going so smoothly...TOO smoothly! I think it is a general rule of research that when things are going smoothly, it means there's something terribly wrong that you just haven't caught yet - I recently built models and ran simulations for almost a dozen datasets for a project, only to discover today that the mesh generator hadn't been working the way I thought it was and ALL of the meshes weren't of high enough resolution at the surface! Horrors!!! My work has been set back by weeks!!! I think only a n00b doing finite element simulations would forget to check something like this. Gaaah. *Slams head against monitor* I spent most of today entering numbers into the computer, waiting a few minutes for it to generate a mesh (while annoying people on google chat who were probably working), checking how big the mesh was, and repeating the process if it wasn't satisfactory. Boy, this is going to be a long week...but at least I discovered the mistake before running any pulsatile flow simulations, which are an even bigger time investment... O_O; Imagine if I worked in a lab that did animal testing or something - you can't mess up those experiments or you'd have to order new animals, or even worse, wait for them to grow!!!

THINK POSITIVE THOUGHTS, BISON3!!!

Maybe it's time for some therapeutic shopping. I went to the mall twice recently and didn't return with a single hooded object.

Fifty?

2009-07-03T00:12:00.000-07:00

I think I'm growing increasingly lazy...the 8 minute walk between the parking lot and the Clark Center where I work is starting to feel like a trip around the earth. This is very sad - I used to walk for about 25 minutes from my dorm to the Clark Center when I lived in Lantana and I didn't think it was so bad at the time. Bison3 is turning into a sloth. :(

I'm also too lazy to figure out where these bisoncomics are going. Even though there are like fifty of them now, there hasn't been much character development besides the increasing emo-ness of the rabbit. How do real comic artists churn out so many of these things?!

Despair.

Edit: Hrmm I just realized that the age of that small rabbit is inconsistent. In a previous comic she didn't even know what a bison was, and now she's taking chemistry. Oh well....

Another interesting week.

2009-06-29T00:47:00.000-07:00

Hrm...this summer is turning out to be a lot more exciting than usual. Exciting stuff isn't always good, but this week a lot of interesting things happened. For some reason, my dad suddenly developed a interest in hybrid vehicles and I went to test drive a couple of cars with my mom. Suddenly there is a random new Prius in our driveway and no one's really sure whose idea it was to buy that particular model in the first place!!!

Mom: The salesperson asked your dad why he finally chose the Prius over the other cars we looked at, and he answered that it was because we (Mom and Bison3) wanted it. I told him I wasn't the one who wanted it, but you liked it a lot.
Me: Huh? I didn't say I wanted a Prius specifically...I just thought it was way better than that other car we tried.
Mom: Oh. I guess no one actually wanted the Prius.

Actually I think everyone likes it a lot but no one's admitting that they were the one who wanted it, because it cost way more than my parents were originally planning to spend on a new car. -____-; Anyway, I think it is pretty awesome! It looks very futuristic and it is shaped like a large hamster. Bison3 takes full responsibility for wanting a Prius. I guess I don't get to drive that one, though, I inherit the old car. :P

Umm what else...oh yeah, I submitted THE APPLICATION a few days ago, after obsessing over it for weeks! Now, while it is being processed, there is nothing I can do for a while but WAIT. IN FEAR!!!!

Also, I found some datasets at work that may potentially disprove our hypothesis for the project I'm working on. I guess this makes things more interesting...?

And I finally unpacked my last few boxes from moving out of the dorm, including the box containing my tablet and some old food (eeeew), which means more terrible bisoncomics:

There are some things you can't fight. O_O

Android: simple guide to unit tests

2009-06-25T02:47:00.000-07:00

I couldn't find anything like this when trying to figure out how to write unit tests for my android app, astrid, so I decided to put together something for you! This guide will show you how to

write unit tests for your android app
execute them in eclipse
~~see code coverage results in EMMA~~ (can't figure it out yet...)

So, before we start, I expect that you've installed the Android SDK, have an application that runs, and understand unit testing with JUnit.

First, you need to create a new Android project, because for some reason, your unit tests need to be a separate android application from your main app. For organization purposes, you can put your test project within your main project (or not).

In Eclipse, File => New, Other, Android Project.

Project Name: your-app-tests
Create New Project In Workspace
Location: browse to your main project, and make a tests subfolder. Select it
Package Name: your.package.tests
Uncheck "Create Activity"
Other stuff: up to you

Now that you've created your new project, time to overwrite the AndroidManifest.xml with the following (replace com.example.app with your package):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<!-- package name must be unique so suffix with "tests" so package loader doesn't ignore us -->
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.example.app.tests">
        <uses-sdk minsdkversion="3">

    <!-- We add an application tag here just so that we can indicate that
         this package needs to link against the android.test library,
         which is needed when building test cases. -->   
    <application>
        <uses-library name="android.test.runner">
    </application>

    <!--
    This declares that this app uses the instrumentation test runner targeting
    the package of com.example.android.apis.  To run the tests use the command:
    "adb shell am instrument -w com.example.app.tests/android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner"
    -->
    <instrumentation android:name="android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner"
                     android:targetPackage="com.example.app"
                     android:label="Simple Tests for My App"/>

</manifest>

Next step is to delete everything beneath in the res/ folder, since you won't be needing it. You will also need to set up your build path to depend on your parent project, so you can reference code from it. Right click on your test project, go to "Java Build Path", Projects, and add your main project as a dependency.

Alright! You've created your test environment. Now that you've gotten everything set up, you will find this handy:

Android Javadoc: android.test package summary

I encourage you to read about AndroidTestCase and InstrumentationTestRunner.

Let's write our first unit test. Assuming your package is com.example.app, you need to create two files. First is our test suite that runs all of the tests:

com.example.app.AllTests


package com.example.app;

import junit.framework.Test;
import junit.framework.TestSuite;

import android.test.suitebuilder.TestSuiteBuilder;

/**
 * A test suite containing all tests for my app.
 */
public class AllTests extends TestSuite {

    public static Test suite() {
        return new TestSuiteBuilder(AllTests.class)
                .includeAllPackagesUnderHere()
                .build();
    }
}

Simple enough, right? It's a test suite that includes all tests in the current package (com.example.app) and subpackages. Next is to write an actual test to test the test harness.

com.example.app.test.SanityTest


package com.example.app.test;

import junit.framework.Assert;
import android.test.AndroidTestCase;

public class SanityTest extends AndroidTestCase {
    public void testSimpleAssert() throws Throwable {
        Assert.assertTrue(true);
    }
}

This is a really trivial test that asserts that true == true. A few things to notice here:

Your tests should extend AndroidTestCase or its descendants. Tests extending InstrumentationTestCase won't get run automatically
Notice that the method starts with "test". All your tests must start with this, no JUnit4-style @Test annotations are provided

Shall we give it a run? There are two ways to run Android unit tests: through eclipse, and on the command line. We'll start with eclipse, which gives you a nice JUnit view for looking at stack traces and such. Right-click on your project, Run-As, "Android JUnit Test". If you're looking at your LogCat and Console output, you should see that your test application gets installed, loads your main application, then starts. Something like this:


[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] ------------------------------
[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] Android Launch!
[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] adb is running normally.
[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] Performing android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner JUnit launch
[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] Automatic Target Mode: using existing emulator 'emulator-5554' running compatible AVD 'android-15'
[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] Uploading astrid-tests.apk onto device 'emulator-5554'
[2009-06-25 02:43:49 - astrid-tests] Installing astrid-tests.apk...
[2009-06-25 02:43:52 - astrid-tests] Application already exists. Attempting to re-install instead...
[2009-06-25 02:43:55 - astrid-tests] Success!
[2009-06-25 02:43:55 - astrid-tests] Project dependency found, installing: data-3.0
[2009-06-25 02:43:55 - data-3.0] Uploading data-3.0.apk onto device 'emulator-5554'
[2009-06-25 02:43:56 - data-3.0] Installing data-3.0.apk...
[2009-06-25 02:44:00 - data-3.0] Application already exists. Attempting to re-install instead...
[2009-06-25 02:44:06 - data-3.0] Success!
[2009-06-25 02:44:07 - astrid-tests] Launching instrumentation android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner on device emulator-5554
[2009-06-25 02:44:25 - astrid-tests] Test run complete

While your test runs, the JUnit view should pop up somewhere, and you should be able to see your single test run to completion.

important! if you want to re-run your test, you need to close the JUnit view, then use the "Run" button in the toolbar or right-click on your project again. If the old JUnit view is still open, the tests didn't run for me.

Alternatively, you can run your tests from the command line. I've yet to understand the intricacies of the various command line flags, but you can run something like:

adb shell am instrument -e coverage true -w com.example.app.tests/android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner

Alright! Hopefully that was comprehensive enough to get you started. To see an example of testing code in action (I'm currently using it to test my service layers), you can poke around in Astrid's codebase, for example the data-3.0 branch.

If/Once I figure out EMMA coverage, I'll add it to this page. I love seeing my code turn green =) Currently, I can generate coverage.ec files, but they're empty, which tells me that eclipse isn't instrumenting the .dex file appropriately. Of course there doesn't seem to be a configuration option for it!

Let me know if this was helpful, or if you're stuck, feel free to ask a question and I may respond on the blog.

Bison3's "adventure."

2009-06-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

Apparently nothing worth writing about has happened in my life for over a month. But this week, loads of exciting things happened. Many things were the bad sort of exciting, but I guess they still count....

Monday 6/15 - Day after graduation. Bison3 goes to lab at 8:45 in the morning and spends 9 hours working non-stop making figures for a poster.

Tuesday 6/16 - Leaving for bioengineering conference in Lake Tahoe at 12:55 p.m. Bison3 arrives at the lab at 9:30 in the morning, and scrambles to finish her poster after getting comments from professors. Around12:10 Bison3 scurries into the Clark Center poster printing room, and finds 3 people in line ahead of her, all going to the same conference!!! Poster was printed in time, but wet ink smeared all over table. Takes 10 minutes to clean up. That's what you get for picking the expensive glossy paper. Bison3 leaps into PI's car with the poster's ink still drying. House near Lake Tahoe has a lot of creepy deer antlers. Bison3 looks over her freshly printed poster with lab members, and discovers several mistakes!!! Lab members planning to arrive later are asked to re-print the poster and bring it the next day. That's a waste of, like, $60 or something. >.< In the evening, Bison3 notices a bug bite on her leg beginning to swell.

Wednesday 6/17 - Lots of conference talks. During the evening reception, Bison3 is excited about her drink ticket and greedily guzzles down a concoction of vodka and fruit juice in under 10 minutes. Lab members tell her her face is looking very red and appear concerned. A while later Bison3 is curled up on a couch in the antler house with an enormous headache. Lab meets for poster presentation practice. Later, Bison3 who is still curled up on the same couch gets killed early in a game of Mafia "to put her out of her misery."

Thursday 6/18 - Poster presentation day - wake up at 6:30 to get poster set up. Bison3 notices that the bug bite on her leg has grown much bigger, and hopes the swelling will go down soon. While Bison3 is practicing in front of her poster, an extremeley sketchy grad student inquires sketchily about her school and her project. Sketchy grad student seems to have limited English-speaking abilities, as he refers to stent grafts as "blood tubes." -__-; Bison3 is disturbed, decides to look for lab members. Poster presentation goes okay, after much practice.
Back at the antler house, Bison3 notices her bug bite has swollen to 6 inches in diameter. Lab members are concerned and take her to local hospital. PI jokes that the only hospitals available in the Tahoe area are vetinerary and that they will have to do. In her state of panic, Bison3 *almost* believes this. Bison3 is prescribed some antibiotics at a local hospital. Amputation jokes abound!

Friday 6/19 - Probably the only normal day.

Saturday 6/20 - Bison3 goes with some lab members to a random art fair in the morning, and buys a large, hideous bison-shaped magnet! Cardiovascular growth and remodeling lectures in the afternoon are complicated and full of PDEs. :( Bison3 does not have proper shoes for the evening banquet. Poster presentation winners get a free student edition of Abaqus? Bison3 doesn't know how to use Abaqus. O_O Late at night Bison3 finds herself extremely dehydrated for some reason.

Sunday (today...) - Bison3 gets up at the crack of dawn after sleeping for only 3 hours, feeling extremely sick and still dehydrated. Tries not to look too ill so lab members won't take her to hospital again. On the way home, Bison3 looks at the long list of possible side effects /reactions for her antibiotic prescription...ahhh...this explains everything....

Now Bison3 is at home drinking a lot of Gatorade and trying not to pass out from low blood volume. Hooray!!!

I believe this is enough excitement to last a couple of months. Strangely, going to the conference was one of the most fun things I've done in, like, a year. The rest of summer had better be painfully boring. God, my head feels awful. @_@

Till We Have Faces

2009-06-08T00:18:00.001-07:00

So I just finished "Till We Have Faces", a book by CS Lewis about the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and it was good enough to warrant a blog post. Faces, which was written in 1956 and a few years after the Narnia chronicles, was a book that Lewis reportedly had been thinking about since his doctoral studies. Although I last read Narnia over 10 years ago, I could feel the echoes of Aslan and the world of Narnia as I turned the pages of "Till We Have Faces".

To summarize the story briefly, Till We Have Faces tells the story of three princesses in the lands surrounding Greece, the youngest of whom, Psyche, is the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and forced to be a sacrifice to appease the gods. Psyche is rescued by a mysterious being who Orual, the protagonist of the story and Psyche's older sister, is convinced is a demon. Her subsequent "rescue" causes untold heartbreak for Psyche and takes Orual on a long journey in search of truth.

One of the themes of the book is the strange form that love takes whereby it can cause asphyxiation and death - we see through the eyes of others in the story that the ones Orual loved the most suffered cruelly under her manipulations even as she meant the best. Another theme, and the title for the book, is the idea of obtaining one's own "face", or "voice", instead of living in the voices, ideas, and moralities of others - that the gods will not talk a mortal until she has found her own face. Finally, an undertone of the whole book is the dark, mysterious, awful, bloody, yet comforting idea of holiness, held in contrast to the "Greek" ideals of Nature and Reason. Other ideas explored include womanhood and suffering.

Many consider the book to be one of Lewis's masterpieces, with the New York Herald Tribune proclaiming it "the most significant and triumphant work that Lewis has yet produced". Personally, I really enjoyed the book, which provides an interesting exploration of the spirit world, what it must feel like to hear someone talk of an afterlife you don't believe in, and some great insights on the nature of the hidden God. I found the last two chapters abrupt and jarring, especially compared to the rest of the novel. I ended up reading it in about six hours total.

In general I find Lewis a bit too unsubtle in his symbols, and you may experience the same discomfort, but this book is much different in purpose, scope, and content than the Narnia series. Lewis's descriptions and portrayals are vivid and well wrought and Orual is a deep and interesting main character. I wouldn't characterize this book as life changing, but it was a great read and has given me much to chew on.

---

As an interesting side note, many of my coworkers write blog posts about software engineering. I don't feel that way about my work; it's interesting to think about theory and languages and practices, but for me, at the end of the day, it's a tool for solving problems. I'm much more interested in things like this book that deal with people and their relationships. Go figure.

Abstract submission for Journal of Intelligent Structures and Systems

2009-06-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

Recent developments in wireless sensor networks have led to increased interest in structural health monitoring. There is a need for algorithms that can detect changes in a structure’s response to vibrations and other excitation due to structural damage. This paper presents a unique algorithm based on estimating the structural response parameters such as stiffness and damping using a Kalman filter approach on observed vibration signals: acceleration and displacement. The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the state transition matrix, and an adaptive Kalman filter is used to model the signal.

The Kalman filter derivations presented in this paper demonstrate that this approach optimizes the prediction accuracy. Kalman filters are nice. The mathematics behind them are just plain beautiful. They never tell you that you’re twenty pounds overweight or that your teeth are crooked. Kalman filters will never ask you why you can’t be more like your brother. They don’t keep their eyes open when you kiss them and then when you ask them whether it’s alright between us they say everything’s fine and then quickly look away. Kalman filters simply give you the best linear estimator of the true state of a time history given your observations, the best non-linear estimator if the signal is jointly Gaussian. What more could you ask for? So yeah, Kalman filters are pretty cool, and the results look good.

Re: Data Analyst Position

2009-05-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

To: Human Resources

Greetings. I am writing to you regarding the position for data analyst, as advertised on your website. I believe I would make a valuable contribution to your team. I have enclosed my resume as per your request.

You may notice that there is a large gap in my resume starting immediately after my graduation from college and lasting 5 years. It may seem like I have been doing nothing during this time. On the contrary, I was enrolled in and completed a Ph.D. program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. The reason I chose not to include this information in my resume is that it might cause you to think that I am overqualified for this position. I assure you, I am not in any way overqualified for this position.

At the same time, I had a dilemma, because I did not want you to think that I had been wasting my time, or worse, that I was hiding something awful, for example, being in prison. Or worse, perhaps you might have thought that I was in and out of a mental rehabilitation center for the past 5 years, simply because the judge didn't believe that the drawings and rants in my journal were simply products of my imagination and not intended for public distribution. In any case, I assure you that none of these events happened. I was simply in grad school.

Yours sincerely,
Charles Chan

nothing really new

2009-05-14T21:53:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it takes a long time to realize that there are some things that you've screwed up beyond repair. Try, try again, they say, but sometimes, however much you want it, there's simply no opportunity to try again. Some things are broken so badly that you can't fix them, no matter how hard you try. It's like aging - irreversible damage building up slowly in your cells until enough of them are dead that an organ and then your entire body fails. Maybe you can fight it for a while, with medicine, with machines, but eventually you reach a point where you are beyond help. The soul ages too. Bits of it die off all the time when you disappoint yourself, when people hurt you, when you hurt others, and all the damage accumulates until you're living in an empty shell. You lose your ability to feel happiness the way your tastebuds slowly die out and one day that favorite instant macaroni and cheese from your childhood tastes bland and flavorless. There's no pomegranate juice to stop the free radicals eating away your soul. That stuff tastes awful, anyway.

Indie Artist Alert: Night Prowl Mike Gao!

2009-05-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

If you're into beats, check out my man Mike Gao, PhD student in computer music by day, crazy mad scientist by night. He is wylin' out for real!

Night Prowl Mike Gao

I just moved to San Francisco, and I think I am going to go into event overload. So many things to do, aaaaahh!!! Maybe this is why people move to the suburbs - is there a pleasure to be derived from boredom? Maybe I'm just not wired that way.

The worst idea in the universe.

2009-05-07T03:28:00.000-07:00

Today was probably one of the worst days of the school year so far. I don't even know why. Nothing bad or unusual happened, it was just a normal day - but I can't remember being quite so unhappy and tired before. I had bio lab in the afternoon and when I got back to the dorm I was so exhausted for some reason that I fell asleep and didn't get up until after 9. This made me super depressed because I did nothing productive all day, so I tried really hard to watch a lecture online that I missed and finish some other random stuff but after 2 I just broke down and couldn't work anymore and now I'm...blogging again? :(

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about a terrible idea lately - the worst hypothetical situation in the universe! In middle school I used to think about the concept of hell a lot, due to the influence of Left Behind books, which I probably should not have read. Anyway, I haven't been pondering this eternal punishment stuff for a really long time because my Christian friends have done an excellent job of brainwashing me into focusing on other aspects of the religion. :P But lately I've been thinking about it a lot more often. Suppose that this life that you're currently living is actually your afterlife. You've already lived a previous life and now you've wound up here. What if you're in hell right now?! How would you ever know? You see people around you reaching out to God, communicating with God, people who can sense His presence. And you try really hard to do the same thing but never manage to experience what comes so easily to others. Isn't that exactly what hell is? Being isolated from God? Maybe in a previous life you were already given the chance, but you blew it, and now you can't have that relationship anymore.

Uhhh okay that is super depressing and I don't actually believe that could happen because the whole idea sounds miserable to the point of being outrageous - but then again, isn't that what hell is, by definition?!

I feel very alone these days. I used to talk to my friends about all sorts of stuff but now there are many things that I'd rather just keep to myself because they're too painful for me to bring up in conversation. Talking to God has about the same effect as talking to my water filter and now there are only two things that I bother to pray about, in case my prayers are ever answered. I think if you did an analysis of events that I would categorize as prayer responses to things that I ask for from my water filter vs. God, there would be no statistically significant difference. Don't worry, I haven't actually been talking to my water filter. What do I believe in, that there isn't a God, or that there is a God who seems to be ignoring me? Does it even matter?

Anyway, all of this bottled up emo-ness results in a deluge of crappy, enigmatic blog posts.

Priorities.

2009-05-04T13:16:00.001-07:00

Another. Week. This quarter I have so many random due dates/times for assignments and work-related stuff, it's hard to keep track of them even though I have them all written down and highlighted multiple times in my planner - it gives me the feeling that I'm going through an endless cycle of work, and I spend a lot of time hovering around my computer re-checking assignments before submitting/e-mailing them. (Oh wait, I always do that...) I'm turning something in practically every day of the week, including weekends! Most of it is just boring busywork, but...ughhh...one of these days I'm going to forget something important. D:

Also, that bisoncomic is an example of shading with a pen FAIL.

Different Worlds (2x)

2009-05-04T00:37:00.001-07:00

I live in a lot of worlds. I just came home from an amazing retreat where we talked about being God's beloved, passion, and our calling (maybe the subject of a future post!). What did I come home to?

       RepeatInfo repeatInfo = task.getRepeat();
        if(repeatInfo != null) {
            repeatEveryNSeconds = (int)(repeatInfo.shiftDate(new Date(0)).getTime()/1000);
        }

Programming is (mostly) a self-contained world. You operate on a defined set of inputs and produce outputs. Within your universe, there's nothing but code, and it always works the same way. The real world is so different! I took a break from my code to look at facebook pictures from the retreat, and the context switch was such a jarring event.

I let down my parents again today. My dad was so sick our family almost took him to the hospital (don't worry, it's not you-know-what). I did my usual routine of work, come home, work - and then I went on a retreat. It's not terribly surprising that he didn't feel loved by my actions.

My parents and I have been struggling ever since I graduated high school many years ago about what our relationship should be like. My parents operate with the understanding that their role is to provide me their best, and I would care for them whenever they had need. They have held down their end of the bargain extremely well. However, much of the time, I feel like I am trying to escape their influence - they are not Christian and come from an entirely different culture than the one I find myself in every day - plus, they are much older than I am - so their words of advice cross numerous barriers of skepticism before reaching me. Furthermore, while growing up, my family impressed upon me the importance of following my dreams, essentially instilling in me a self-orientated decision-making paradigm centered around "what's in it for me."

My duty as their son is to honor them. I find this incredibly hard, despite the fact that I love them deeply. As I navigate through life, is it any wonder I prefer the company of the well-socialized, the young, the hip, the career-relevant, over my parents? Is it any wonder that when I spend time with my parents, our mechanical interactions don't help them feel valued and loved?

It's beautiful to see my friends praying with their parents. I would like to become more self-giving in my relationship with my parents.

Leeches...

2009-05-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

Gaaaah...don't you hate it when you learn something new that you think is absolutely awesome, and then when you gleefully share it with your friends, everyone in the room already knows about it, so you just feel kind of lame? -_-;

Anyway, I figured that someone who comes across the blog probably doesn't know about this, so I AM GOING TO WRITE ABOUT IT!!!

Did you know that leeches and maggots are classified as medical devices by the FDA?! :D

It's weird to think of them being in the same category as stuff like...heart valves and pacemakers. O_o But they totally fit within the FDA's definition of medical devices, which, according to wikipedia, is the following:

A medical device, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is an instrument, apparatus, implement, machine, contrivance, implant, in vitro reagent, or other similar or related article, including a component part, or accessory which is:

recognized in the official National Formulary, or the United States Pharmacopoeia, or any supplement to them,

intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, in man or other animals, or

intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals, and which does not achieve any of its primary intended purposes through chemical action within or on the body of man or other animals and which is not dependent upon being metabolized for the achievement of any of its primary intended purposes.

as defined by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 21 United States Code [321] (h). Medical devices are regulated by the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH).

Indeed, a lot of unexpected things are classified as medical devices and under FDA regulation.

This is an interesting article about the uses of leeches:
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2004/504_leech.html

And wikipedia has an interesting article about "maggot therapy":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggot_therapy

Isn't that fascinating. O_O

I hope I'll never need those types of "medical devices"....

Secret History of Silicon Valley

2009-04-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Secret History of Silicon Valley is a talk by Steve Blank (you can watch it here) that chronicles the role the defense industry has played in the rise of Silicon Valley as an entrepreneurship hotbed. Recently, he put up a series of articles on his blog about how he came to be interested in this topic - it's a very enjoyable and informative read about Steve's story and the story of the Valley.

Part 1: If I Told You I'd Have to Kill You

Part 2: Getting B-52's through the Soviet Air Defense System

Part 3: The Most Important Company You've Never Heard Of

Part 4: Library Hours at an Undisclosed Location

Part 5: Happy 100th Birthday Silicon Valley

Part 6: Every World War II Movie was Wrong

Give them a shot - very worth your while! Teaser:

It's not just a story about Silicon Valley, but about my alma mater, Stanford, and specifically, my department, Electrical Engineering. While I was at Stanford, coincidentally, I worked on E & M research funded by the military, so this story is really close to home for me. I had no idea that, for example, the Stanford Dish, which was run by my lab, was built to (secretly) try and locate Soviet radar installations. It's not that surprising, though - research institutions like Stanford are concerned primarily with the academic problems.

Has the Valley outgrown military financing? Can we get green energy without government dough? One implication of the transition to a primarily venture-based financing model is that you have different, and probably shorter, boom-bust cycles. Can innovation be sustained with these shorter turnaround cycles?

Boring introspective stuff.

2009-04-27T03:51:00.001-07:00

Attempting to coordinate TSF letter-writing is an interesting experience. This quarter, because of the increase in number of letters, it became a bit of a frustrating and detail-oriented activity that was quite different from stuff that I usually do. Oh wait, I forgot, I'm in engineering. :P Anyway, this experience has led me to think that there is a big difference between "leadership" and "management." Leading people is sometimes a lot easier than actually managing them. I'm not sure if definition-wise there's actually a distinction, but there is in my brain. I think leadership is more about motivating people to do stuff and coming up with awesome ideas, whereas management is planning details about things and nagging people to get stuff done. Some leaders do managing too but others don't.

Anyway, I don't have a lot of experience managing people so this thing that was a pretty simple task was probably more stressful than it needed to be. My friend who's organized this before for a waaay larger student group would probably find this post incredibly naive and a bit retarded. She gave me a lot of tips on how to do stuff efficiently that I didn't even think of. Now my idea of managing something is to divide up the things that need to be completed in a way that maximizes the amount of work that other people do toward finishing the project, while minimizing the impact (potential damage!) of each individual's work. I'm not even sure if that's possible. It doesn't sound too good. That's why I'm not in management. Anyway, regarding TSF letters, everyone should try it sometime. It reveals much about human nature and the meaning of life, and I'm sure it builds plenty of character. This is what I've learned about human beings in the past couple of weeks:

- A surprising number of people will volunteer to do something that you didn't think anyone would want to do. Bison3's faith in humanity increases! (I'm also thinking this could have been because I didn't outline the exact details of the letter-writing procedure very carefully when I solicited help....)

- Some people who you didn't think really cared about the group actually want to help out.

- Some people write really gushy, effusive thank-you letters to strangers. Proof-reading letters was quite amusing, though frustrating. You'd think that with all the strict guidelines about the content people would come up with really similar letters, but there was an amazing amount of "variety."

- Variety isn't always good.

- Some people have triangular handwriting that looks like ancient runes.

- People have very different ideas of what is aesthetically pleasing. Some people have no idea what is aesthetically pleasing.

- Letter-writing is crazier than you think - it seemed to me that a lot of formatting stuff would be pretty standard, like having margins on the sides of the paper, but apparently margins aren't instinctive for everyone. O_O

- As with all other group projects, everything is completed at the last minute, or later. @_@;

And also, some less-interesing things that I've learned about bison3:

- I laugh at terrible things.

- I have trouble telling people when they are doing a bad job. Well, I already knew this, but when it's something like, your handwriting is dreadful, I can't do it!!! There were some people's letters that I was itching to re-write myself, but I didn't, thank goodness. Those things are a pain.

- I get nervous when people don't meet deadlines.

- There are many areas of grammar in which my knowledge is very, very shady... O_O

- Crappy techno music with a beat faster than my resting heartrate makes me ANGRY at 3 a.m. This is unrelated to the letters but I felt like I needed to mention it.

For some reason, I can't wait to re-do this next quarter - now I know EXACTLY how to make things more efficient!!! D:

An Ordinary Bison

2009-04-24T02:08:00.001-07:00

You know what? These rabbits pretty much look the same in every single comic! They have a very limited number of poses and facial expressions. It's almost always some combination taken from the following: 1) Facing left 2) Facing right 3) Facing forward 4) Looking behind 5) Holding object 6) Ears up 7) Ears down 8) Exasperated 9) Sad 10) Ridiculously gleeful

Why do I even bother to re-draw them every time? Maybe I should just work out a system where I can copy and paste pre-drawn rabbit parts together. The bison is even easier - I don't think I've drawn anything other than his profile. I can just use the reflection of one picture when I need him facing the other direction or something.

Then again, maybe that would take the "fun" out of drawing bison comics. They'd be a less effective tool for procrastination, anyway....

Terrible weather.

2009-04-21T03:21:00.000-07:00

The weather really is terrible. It is much too warm. I think my ideal ambient temperature might be 72 degrees, or lower - probably around 68 or so. Maybe that's why I'm still awake. I hope it cools down tomorrow, or I'll be getting way too much research done in the air-conditioned lab. D:

Is that a bisoncomic I see? Why yes, it is! Apparently I felt bad about not making any new bisoncomics for a long time.

I wonder what on earth I was thinking when I chose the color scheme. Oh wait, I probably wasn't thinking at all.... @_@

Grandma's Hands

2009-04-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

Bill Withers - Grandma's Hands

Incidentally, my grandfather passed away last week - one of the few elderly people in my life and a great man. Most of my grandparents have passed away before their time, and I think he was one of them. At any rate, when this song came up on my computer, it captured my attention from start to finish. I'm not thrilled with this live version, but it's still good.

Also, sometimes I think our culture is moving away from the more soulful & acoustic sides of life.

List Plan Execute

2009-04-16T16:11:00.001-07:00

This is a topic that I'd like to talk about more in the future, but I thought I'd quickly share my workflow for productivity. I've found this method to be fairly simple and work well for my purposes - the hats I wear include personal maintenance and development, my job, my startup(s), my friendships, and my religious commitments.

List - almost every day I make a list of the things that I have to do. Making such a list serves two purposes for me:
1. It allows me to stop trying to remember all of the things I have to do. This frees up my brain to focus on the task at hand.
2. It gives me a visual overview of the things I have to do. From there, I can make strategic decisions like prioritizing different tasks (see next point).
Since I juggle my work and personal lives, I usually make two lists - personal tasks and work tasks. I try to keep my work life separate from my personal life, so while I'm in "work-mode" I deal strictly with my work list, while when I'm in "home-mode", I deal with my home list; this is helpful because I often think about work from home or home from work. My home list is on my laptop and "in the cloud", my work list is on a steno notebook where every day gets a new page.

The lists I create are often hierarchical, divided into projects and components. I find that two levels is usually enough, though three is sometimes necessary. Each list is dated at the top.
Plan - once you have a list of things that need to get done, the next step is to figure out how to do it. If my list is not long, I usually just give each task a number and do things one-at-a-time down the list. I may not finish every task, in which case it ends up on tomorrow's list. Urgent tasks are recognized by this process and given their due priority. This method of daily re-evaluation ensures that while I don't forget about my urgent tasks, I am mindful of the big picture and things that I have been putting off for a while can be given a boost.

If I have too many tasks to finish in a day, I instead create buckets for each day in the upcoming week, for example:

Monday 13 Mon Night Tuesday 14 Tue Night --------- --------- ---------- ---------

I then assign tasks to buckets, which become defacto "goals" for the given period of time.
Execute - once you have a list of things to do, all you have to do is do them. Of course, this isn't as simple as it sounds. From my experience, here are some tips to help you get the engine started:
- Energy - you have to have energy to start a new task. Sugar is my preferred weapon, but I think alternating between sugar and caffeine might help limit caloric intake and avoid caffeine addiction. Or, you could sleep more.
- Avoid Distractions - once you know what you're doing, you should have very little need for outside information input. That means no checking e-mail, browsing the web, etc while you are working. If you need to stay up on your e-mail, this can be a task that you perform in between doing other things.
- Feedback - positive feedback after completing something gives you energy to do more. Let yourself celebrate a little after each minor victory.

As a funny side note, I accidentally switched my spell checker to Australian English, and had a minor crisis of confidence when it told me that I had spelled "prioritizing" wrong and wanted to correct it to "prioritising" - I thought maybe I had been spelling it wrong my whole life! (you indeed have, say all of our English friends....)

Recidivism

2009-04-13T02:00:00.000-07:00

I AM SO GLAD IT WAS EASTER. I just spent, like, an hour on Facebook. I must not have been blinking very much because my eyes are suddenly quite dry. That cannot possibly be good. I should probably get off the computer soon and go to sleep. But it has been so long since I've clicked through people's collections of profile pictures, uploaded useless photo albums that no one looks at, written meaningless comments on people's walls, and changed my profile picture to reflect my current hair length. What insights have I gained from these weeks without Facebook? How have I grown spiritually?

*Crickets chirping*

Um...well, in addition to numerous House episodes, I watched a lot of YouTube videos. D:

I guess I had a *tiny* Easter miracle this weekend. After staring at this dreadful program I've been working on for days, I discovered that the reason that it wasn't working was because of some weird rounding of floating-point numbers, so when I used the == operator it didn't work. That probably sounds a bit stupid and lame, but the miracle is that the algorithm I wrote wasn't the part that was messed up! I was looking for the wrong type of mistake. O_o; Anyway I am quite happy about this and hope that I do not discover more bugs right before the due date....

Easter is... awesome!

2009-04-13T00:02:00.000-07:00

I'm going to remember this Easter for years to come. I'll start off with a set of quixotic yet insightful quotes from a book I am reading, Either/Or by Søren Kirkegaard:

No one comes back from the dead, no one has entered the world without crying; no one is asked when he wishes to enter life, nor when he wishes to leave.

What the philosophers say about reality is often as deceptive as when you see a sign in a second-hand store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed you would be fooled; the sign is for sale.

Whatever can be the meaning of this life? If we divide mankind into two large classes, we can say that one works for a living, the other has no need to. But working for one's living can't be the meaning of life; to suppose that constantly procuring the conditions of life should be the answer to the question of the meaning of what they make possible is a contradiction. Usually the lives of the other class have no meaning either, beyond that of consuming the said conditions. To say that the meaning of life is to die seems again to be a contradiction

This book is pretty great. I had never heard of it and bought it because I needed to spend $15 to get free shipping at Amazon, and I have no regrets at all. I'm also reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader, but I must say, the book by Kierkegaard is the more intriguing for now. Both books are over 600 pages, but I am quite enjoying the fruits of my indiscretion .

What else happened this weekend? The Seattle Mariners are hot, I met someone I admire greatly, I lost & regained a friendship, made two new acquaintances, moved out of my apartment and got to spend time with another dear friend at the same time, had a delicious burrito, Jesus rose from the dead, I fixed a computer, discovered a new (for me) style of playing bass, and had a few great conversations about the future of my church & churches in general. And that's not even all I did! Plus my sister got into colleges woo!

Spring is a time for new life & new optimism. I love that baseball season follows life in that way. Hope you had a good weekend too.

I'm feeling generous, so here are two more snippets from Either/Or. Borrow the book from me if you like.

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world's follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world's follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world's follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom

My misfortune is this: an angel of death always walks by my side, and it is not the doors of the elect that I am to sprinkle with blood, as a sign that he is to pass them by; no, it is precisely their doors that he enters - for only the love that lives in memory is happy.

On that somber note.... =)

My recursive algorithm doesn't work, so...

2009-04-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

Today I will write about my latest obsession - HOUSE, M.D. What, bison3?! You have only recently discovered the awesomeness of House?! I know, I know...everyone has been telling me to watch this show for ages, but I thought it was just a typical medical drama! Who knew that I would become addicted to a story about an unhappy, unshaven, misanthropic old man who oozes sarcasm through his pores? Um...apparently eveyone except me. I am now trying to watch all the episodes starting from season 1!

House is such an intriguing character, whoever came up with the idea is a genius!!! I'm sure fangirls have already gushed over/analyzed his personality to pieces but I feel like putting in my two cents as well. :D This show is really creative...it does a good job of causing you to temporarily realign your values as you're watching it, through House's crazy antics and cruel remarks. Hrm...how much do I really believe a human life is worth? Not sure if this is a good show for pre-meds...might get too many "ideas." :P House looks down upon practically everything that normal people would consider the most meaningful elements of, well, human existence - compassion, trust, the ability to empathize, friendships, relationships, faith...and yet his main purpose in life is to preserve human lives! Sometimes it seems that human life (other people's, as well as his own) has no real meaning or importance to him - yet he will stop at nothing to save these people that he doesn't even want to see in person, trying out the most insane treatments he can think of when nothing else works, often angering others and jeopardizing his career - and his career is everything to him, because having emotionally distanced himself from others, he doesn't really have anything else to live for. Strangely, because of this, even though he tries to isolate himself from his patients and everyone else by appearing aloof and emotionally detached, each case that he takes on is actually a deeply personal struggle. His existence is defined by the fact that he is a medical genius, and he can't fail! He has to be right, every time, and if no one else can solve the problem, he has to be the one who figures it out. (I'm only on the first season and House hasn't failed to figure out a case yet...I'm sure something tragic will eventually happen in later episodes, but don't tell me what happens!) What an enormous pressure!!! THE DRAMA!!!!!

I think in real life, people would hate a doctor like House, a doctor who doesn't see the patient as a human who needs to be healed, but an interesting problem needing to be solved. He doesn't like going to the clinic and treating "normal" cases, he only wants to do the weird ones. One of the most memorable lines for me was when House said that he treated the illness, not the patient...yikes! D: But I often find myself rooting for House, even when he does awful, selfish, and questionable things in attempts to save people (sometimes when they don't even want to be saved anymore...). Why do I sympathize with a character whose actions I totally don't agree with? Because saving patients' lives is what House does. It is what keeps him going in life, when he has rejected everything else - and I want to believe that it's possible for a human being to have something in him that keeps him going even when everything else has failed or disappointed him. The idea of House failing at the one thing he does is very depressing, and I want him to be right every time!

The character House is almost super-human or something...he doesn't abide by any of the rules/conventions of normal people, and he gets away with it because of his brilliance. But in a creepy way I also think he embodies what eventually happens to every human being, which is why his character is so appealing. Even when people think that they've found a purpose in life, there is often still an emptiness that they're constantly trying to fill. Then maybe one day, something happens that makes them give up, and instead of spending their energy trying to fill the emptiness, they focus their energy on just learning to endure it. That is extremely emo. House is extremely emo. He has always been in pain since his leg incident, but I think the show makes it pretty clear that the pain is mostly psychological. He has filled the emptiness of his existence with pain of the greatest emo-ness that a human can endure. His pain is like his significant other. He introduces it to everyone he meets and makes sure that they know they're a couple. He is not very open about anything else, but he is open about his pain. He crunches on Vicodin tablets in front of anyone who's watching. Public displays of affection for his emo pain. His pain keeps him human, the only weakness that he'll reveal to others - as misanthropic and cynical as he is, no one really wants to suffer alone...IT IS SO EPICALLY TRAGIC...*screams*

Ummmm okay why did I write all that random stuff when I could have spent the time watching another House episode?!!! Or perhaps fixing my program which I've spent hours staring blankly at?!!!!!

Too much coffee.

D:

Build Subversion 1.6 & javahl on Ubuntu 8.10

2009-04-10T13:44:00.001-07:00

Here's how I installed Subversion 1.6 client on Ubuntu with https support. I'm using an AMD 64-bit distribution, but it shouldn't matter.

1. First, install the right dependencies. I'm pretty sure this is all you need, but I could be wrong.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev libneon27-dev

2. Download svn archive from here. For example,

cd /tmp
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.1.tar.bz2
tar xjf subversion-1.6.1.tar.bz2
cd subversion-1.6.1

3. Configure, make, install! ./configure will complain about libaprutil not being compiled with bdb support. This is a known issue, but if you just want the subversion client, shouldn't matter to you.

If you've installed Sun's Java 6 JDK / JRE, and want JavaHL, do the following:

./configure --with-ssl --enable-javahl --with-jdk=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
make
make javahl
sudo make install install-javahl

If you haven't installed Java 6 and don't want JavaHL, do the following:

./configure --with-ssl
make
sudo make install

If you haven't installed Java 6 and want JavaHL, you have to install it first:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

4. Confirm

which svn (should output /usr/local/bin/svn)
svn --version (should be 1.6.x and have 3 modules: ra_neon, ra_svn, ra_local)

edit! If you're like me and use Eclipse with Subclipse, you're going to have to do some hacking to make that work as well. Here are the steps to make that work. I assume that you have installed JavaHL as described above, which dumps files to /usr/local/lib.

1. From Eclipse, uninstall any old versions of Subclipse, and install Subclipse 1.6 with JavaHL bindings. Here is the update site:

http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x

2. Create a new script to launch Eclipse that contains the following. Obviously replace the last line with the location to your eclipse binary.

#!/bin/sh
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/local/lib/svn-javahl/svn-javahl.jar
/opt/eclipse/eclipse

3. Start your new script, and you should be able to select JavaHL (1.6.1) from the Window -> Preferences -> Team -> SVN menu.

Happy Good Friday!