Kewl hardware stuff

Sun Labs has a neat tradition called the Intellectual Dessert; every Tuesday at 3pm somebody gives an hour-long presentation about their ongoing research. They're usually quite interesting & serve to keep people at the lab in touch with what their collegues are doing. Today's presentation was about an amazing breakthrough that was recently in the news: Proximity Interconnect.

Rob Drost (with a little help from Ivan Sutherland) gave an overview of the technology & followed it with some fairly detailed (and classified) explanations of how this new design is made possible. Rob is an excellent speaker so my rudimentary knowledge of electrical circuits & rusty knowledge of chip design were sufficient for me to follow almost everything he said.

Course selection for the winter

This morning I made my course selection for the upcoming term. After surviving Graphics this summer, I've decided to proceed with my plan of taking Compilers & Programming Languages simultaneously, although I'll be taking only 4 courses this time, instead of the full courseload I bore in the summer. Apparently these 2 courses complement each other extremely well & tend to result in massive Eureka moments during the term; should be a nice finale to my undergrad CS career.

Still pursuing my goal of pulling off a double major with English Rhetoric as the other barrel, I plan to take the 1st-year English course that I still need as well as one of the core 3rd-year Rhetoric offerings. Having a 1st-year course will allow me to expend more time on Compilers, which will probably chew up every minute I can spare. I tried to enroll in Rhetoric: Principles & Practice (Engl 309A) but Quest wouldn't let me because I am missing the prerequisite, which isn't even offered this winter. However, I have been assured by the prof (Michael MacDonald, whom I had for Semiotics last autumn) that he will let me in regardless so I've selected a dummy 1st-year course (to avoid running into trouble with the administration over tuition) & will switch the courses as needed during my 1st week back on campus.

Right now my schedule has all my lectures on Tue & Thurs but once I do the course switcharoo, some of that will be moved to Monday.

Paying the phone bill

I got my cellphone bill a few days ago & it was due tomorrow so I tried to pay it by credit card. However, MetroPCS has the most stringent anti-fraud measure I've ever seen. They even wanted to verify my zip code & street number! Of course, since I was trying to use a Canadian credit card, this failed miserably :-( I had to pay the bill in person at a mall, which cost me an extra $3. On the bright side, I finally received my bank card for the account I opened almost 2 weeks ago.

Squash & philosophy

I cooked some butternut squash today, mashing it & stirring in some maple syrup. It's one of those dishes that I'd never eaten until after I started school at UW. My former landlady Betty Ann introduced me to it & I now try to make it at least once every term. Usually, I use 3-4 squash & it lasts me about a week.

The other event of note for today is that I finished reading Sophie's World, which has taken me about 5 weeks of irregular reading to get through. What a book though! I'm exceedingly glad my sister cajoled me into reading it just before I left TO. I heartily recommend it to anybody with a casual interest in philosophy who also enjoys reading. I recently purchased a book called Barbarians led by Bill Gates from Amazon after reading a glowing appraisal of it on James Gosling's home page. I think I'll read that next.

Wandering around Berkeley

I went to the Berkeley campus with my roommate & 3 other interns yesterday. The trip is a bit under an hour each way. The area surrounding campus has a smorgasbord of ethnic restaurants & a fair number of student-oriented stores, like a bike shop & a skateboard shop. The campus itself is massive (compared to UW) & set on the side of a hill, which meant we had an uphill climb to the other side.

Unlike UW, Berkeley has campus maps all over the place, which allowed us to plot a course that let us see most of the buildings without getting lost & having to revisit landmarks repeatedly. The campus is also very clean, which we attributed to the fact that they probably have enough money to hire a cleanup crew on a regular & frequent basis. We also noticed a surprising number of infants being carried around or pushed along on strollers; another departure from what we're used to at UW.

After our long climb up the hill, we arrived at the football stadium, where a game was in session against Santa Cruz, which is apparently the #3 ranked team in the state. We considered going in to watch the game but sticker shock convinced us otherwise. Instead, we sauntered through the frat district, where we saw hordes of drunken undergrads standing on the roofs & balconies taking to each other loudly. By this time we were in need of a little something so we consulted one of the omnipresent campus maps & headed over to the shopping district on Telegraph st.

Here we were confronted by a veritable bazaar, with aging hippies hawking all manners of trinkets, mostly handmade. There were also a few mainstream stores & eventually found an inviting pizza joint with a deck out front. The place made excellent calzones and even had a hippie sitting on the deck with his large dog. Every so often, he would sing along with the music, which never ceased to amuse us. Having stuffed ourselves silly, we decided it was time to leave as the sun was threatening to set & so we walked back to the car & drove home.

Unofficial intern pub night

I went to a pub in San Jose yesterday with the same crew. What I didn't realize was that the place didn't serve food. I mean, what kind of pub doesn't serve food!? Aware that drinking on an empty stomach isn't such a hot idea, I stayed dry most of the night until we decided to finish off with a round of scotch on the rocks. However, we got a lot more scotch in our glasses than we had been expecting & I was soon plastered.

While I was there, I realized that it wasn't as much fun being at a pub with these people as it had been when I would go to pubs with my friends in Waterloo. Those were more relaxed & friendly experiences. This time I was a bit on edge the whole time, even when I could no longer have walked in a straight line. I guess it could be because I don't know the other interns well enough yet.

A brief excursion to The City for Indian food

Last night 4 other Sun interns & I went to Indian Oven in San Francisco for dinner. The food was wonderful, marred only by the complete lack of parking anywhere remotely near the restaurant.

Today I also visited the post office & found out that they do have special stamps just for Canada. I bought a pack of 20 so I might end up actually sending people snail mail if I run out of reasons to use them before I leave here.

A new project

Warning: this entry is on the geeky side so my nontechnical readers probably won't get much out of it.

Having seen my original project - the semi-complete tree visualizer for Java source code that I inherited - through to completion, I've been given a larger one that should take up the rest of my time here. This time I'll be writing a symbol tree verifier for our source code transformation engine. It looks like I'll be diving deep into the bowels of the Java compiler in the process, which ought to prove very handy when I take the compiler construction course this winter. The first step will be to shadow the syntax analyser, validating the partially reattributed symbol tree for consistency with the existing abstract syntax tree where the stock syntax analyser would normally add nodes to a nascant symbol tree.

Weekend hijinks

On Friday night a bunch of us Sun co-ops checked out the nightlife in San Jose; nothing special. I think I'll stick to The City in future.

Had a water-pistol fight with my cousin Lorraine & her (unrelated to me) cousin Kyle. Spent the rest of the weekend at my uncle's place in Fremont, managing to spin a lot of cycles in a less than completely successful attempt at setting him up with a triple-boot system; damn shortsighted BIOS manufacturers...

Went to a farmer's market, where they had cheap avacadoes; still not as cheap as Ottawa though! My aunt cooked dinner & even gave me some to take home. Nothing quite like home-cooked food :-)

They never learn...

"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the former."

-Albert Einstein

"There's a sucker born every minute."

-David Hannum (not P. T. Barnum)

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What will it take for Windows users to stop using OutLook Express...? Here is the low-down on the nature of the latest little nasty from 3 major experts:

• F-secure
• Symantec
• Sophos

Chapter 3, in which I attend the Accelerating Change Conference

I'm back from the ACC 2003, which lasted all weekend. I met several intriguing people & learned a lot, mostly about AI & nanotech. I also had some interesting experiences while working around the despicable lack of decent public transit in Silicon Valley. Here's my story.

After the weekly Bash on Friday, Mike Godfrey dropped me off at Tressider Union on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, where the conference was being held. I signed in at the registration desk & then proceeded to mingle with the other attendees, all of whom were conveniently wearing name tags. It was during this time that I had a chance to initially meet some of the individuals with whom I had several invigorating conversations over the course of the weekend. At around 9:30 I got a ride to the nearest VTA transit station with Peter Voss, who has been working on an Artificial General Intelligence project for some time now. I caught the 22, which took me to the Santa Clara transit centre, from which I was supposed to get home via the 60. Unfortunately, the last 60 for the night had already left. Stranded, I tried calling my roommate on my cellphone, whose battery was almost dead. Unfortunately, however, he was not in. Next I tried Maria in San Jose, who wasn't sure where the transit centre was but promised to find it & come rescue me, which she did. By the time I finally got home it was well past midnight & the conference was scheduled to resume at 9am the next day. I needed a better travel plan.

By the time I was done with breakfast on Saturday morning I had come to a very useful realization: the transit systems in Silicon Valley made up in bike-friendliness what they lacked in coverage. Inspired by this new perspective, I biked down to El Camino Real, caught the 22, loaded my bike onto the rack at the front, rode it all the way to Stanford & then biked across campus to the conference venue, getting there with minutes to spare.

As it turned out, the begining of the day was plagued by technical difficulties, arising from a last-minute attempt to get a complicated & relatively unproven holographic projection system running in a room filled with EM interference from a panapoly of comunication systems. The keynote by Ray Kurzweil began almost an hour late and we were never able to actually see him. He spoke about the increasingly quickening pace of technological development & what it heralds for the next couple of decades. This was followed by a debate between him & 2 physically present naysayers whose objections he was able to vanquish for the most part.

I spent lunch engaged in a lively discussion about the state of the global economy with a pair of fascinating women from LA whom I'd met the previous evening and an impressively knowledgable elderly gentleman who never actually introduced himself to me. After lunch I attended a talk about genetic programming by a Stanford CS prof. It seems that this approach to programming can trivialize conventional engineering problems, although it does nothing to help with problems that cannot be formally stated or whose potential solutions cannot be automatically verified. Nevertheless, designing new circuits, logic controllers, algorithms and the like can now be done via evolution of randomly generated code.

He was followed by Ben Goertzel, whose talk about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) forced me to begin rethinking my plans for grad school. I had planned to conduct research into the creation of machine intelligence that would be able to learn how to understand & use human languages. However, Ben's talk made me realize that this would be impossible until we have an AGI that has acquired the basic human life experiences of a 2-3 year-old human child, after which picking up language would likely be trivial.

The next few hours consisted of 3 speculative speeches about the origins of the universe, followed by a debate between the 3 speakers about the various theories that are currently prevalent. Some of it was interesting but , as expected, there was no progress on the problem of trying to prove theories that seem to be inherently unprovable. Then we had a dramatic switch of gears as Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos spoke about how networked devices are continuing to change our lives. As expected, he got in a few good digs at the beast of Redmond. He was certainly the most entertaining speaker at the conference, peppering his talk with more than enough hilarity to ensure that everybody stayed awake & paid attention. He even managed to sneak in an allusion to My Big Fat Greek Wedding when he joked that the Greek words for large numbers were much better than the latin ones so beloved by the computer industry.

The dinner tables were tagged with questions to stimulate discussion so I went around looking for the most interesting one. That was when I met the legendary (well, at UW, anyway) Ka Ping Yee, who followed my lead & did the same thing. Apparently he is now pursuing a PhD in CS, exploring software for group discussions. I ended up having dinner with Ben Goertzel & a friend of his from a former AI company as well as a few other students also interested in AI. Oddly enough, we almost ignored our assigned topic & instead talked about all manners of other interesting things, including the nature of human language - one of my favourite topics of late - and Jef Raskin's discovery that aeroplane's do not really fly because of the Bernoulli effect. After dinner John Smart, the conference organizer, gave us a light talk about accelerating change, which was pretty insightful & I wish I hadn't been so sleepy during it. By the time he was done, around 11pm, I had decided that I was in no shape to face the long trip back home & began thinking of alternatives. Fortunately, I had brought along a change of clothes so I wouldn't have to wear the same outfit the next day.

I sauntered over to a nearby student house, where a bunch of Stanford students were chilling on the front porch and hung out with them for a bit, sipping a beer. After hearing about my plight, they offered to let me crash on a couch in their living room, so I did. They explained the Stanford student housing system to me. Apparently frosh live in dorms and then move out into these student houses for the remainder of their undergrad career. However, the student houses there are massive compared to the ones in Waterloo, often holding as many as 60 people. This was one of the smallest, with a capacity of only 30. As expected, the place was a mess, with random junk strewn all over the landing, piles of unused furniture stacked on the far side of the main hall and a dining table that wasn't hired for its looks.

The last day of the conference was pleasantly free from technical disruptions. It began with a moving talk about why treating everybody well is good for business & followed that up with a presentation by the founder of a startup pursuing a software replica of the human cortex before the lunch break. After lunch, the two interesting events were an introductory talk on nanotech by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute and one on social software (like blogs). I had to miss a talk by Tim O'Reilly in order to attend the nanotech one but I did have a chance to meet him briefly after the talk. He's a really friendly guy. Well, unless you happen to work for a company whose legal division is hell bent upon destroying any goodwill that people may have towards them, as a pair of SCO employees found out when they approached him and were met with some vocal vitriol.

I made it home in time to get in on my roommate's weekly trip to the grovery store.

Back with a vengence :-)

I'd been mildly sick with a head cold for the past 3 days so I didn't do much besides work & rest. However, as of this morning I'm back to my usual exhuberant self. I biked in to work again & would have taken some photographs of the scenery but my digicam was out of juice.

My team went out for a lunch buffet at this Indian restaurant called Sue's. OK, so Sue isn't really an authentic-sounding Indian name but neither is Tony. The food was pretty authentic, anyway; some of the best vegetarian food I've ever tasted.

There was a big meeting today so that all the outgoing interns could share their valuable insights with the incoming ones. We planned a few intern activities for the term, shared tips for making the most of the term, compared the previous term with what this one promises to be & generally raised the usual ruckus.

After getting home, I went to the gym with my roommate. There were some random Sun employees playing volleyball outside the gym so, naturally, I joined in & we played until it got dark. Then I went inside & pumped iron until I was exhausted. Quite a busy day.

A real workstation at last!

Frustrated by Suse's refusal to provide an ISO for creating an installation CD, I turned to Debian & spent most of the day installing & configuring it on my PC workstation. The scroll-wheel on my mouse still doesn't work, since it's some obscure brand that Gateway bundles with their systems. But at least I now have Evolution & Mozilla-Firebird :-)

I also had lunch with Mike Godfrey, a UW CS prof whose sabbatical is being spent working on Jackpot. He's quite a personable guy & one of the few professional computer scientists with perfect vision.

What you should never do to your dishwasher

This weekend my roommate made our lives interesting when he accidentally put Tide into the dishwasher. After it had been going for a while, soap suds began to leak all over the kitchen floor. It took several rinses and much scooping of foam before the situation was under control. The dishes are extremely clean now but I would not advise trying this yourself.

Getting to work sans automobile

Yesterday morning I finally got around to exploring a means of getting to the lab via bike and light-rail, for which Sun has provided me with a monthly pass. It turns out that, despite living in a sleepy residential neighbourhood, there is a major transit station (where 3 systems converge) just up the street from my apartment complex. It took me 5 minutes to bike to it. The train stops there every half-hour on weekends, although it will run twice as frequently on weekdays. I boarded the train with my bike & discovered they had a special car for bikes, which was quite heartening.

The train took about 25 minutes to arrive at downtown Mountain View, averaging about 90 seconds between stops. Apparently it works like the GTA's GO in that passengers do not need to use tickets/tokens to board but random spot checks with the threat of heavy fines are conducted to ensure that the honour system is adhered to. I tried to memorize the station names but after a while they all got muddled in my head. I'm sure they'll work their way into my mindwith time.

Once in downtown MV, there's a 5 minute trip to the start of the trail, which would have been faster if not for traffic lights. Unfortunately, I had only been on the trail for a couple of minutes when there was a construction zone that slowed me down a bit since they ask that bikes be walked through it. That took another couple of minutes to get through. However, the next section of the trail is just a long straight path flanked by dense foliage on the right and industrial wasteland on the left. This took me about 5 minutes to whiz through, as I passed many others enjoying the fresh air on foot, bike or rollerblade. Eventually I hit a fork in the path & had to ask for directions, after which I set off down the left prong.

This final section of the trail winds through some of the most picturesque scenery I've ever seen, ekeing out a path between bodies of shimmering blue water and lush natural vegetation;God's country, as it were. Unfortunately, this mesh of paths resulted in me getting lost multiple times before I found the lab. However, the return trip was less confusing by far & allowed me to determine that this leg of the journey constitutes about 10 minutes of biking.

While waiting for the train in downtown MV I wandered around in the annual wine & food festival that was underway. Lots of music, cheery people, attractive trinkets & tantalizing food; your garden-variety festival. I did come across a booth where CDs containing music of the Andes were being sold and, as usual, I had no money with which to purchase one.

My 1st week on the job

I've finally had an opportunity to meet the people with whom I'm to work this term. Michael, my supervisor, teaches middle-school kids how to juggle. He's also a Mac user. Actually, almost everybody on my team uses a TiBook running OS X. The lone Linux user is Tom, my mentor, who is a veritable fountain of fascinating information about Mexican food. The other interesting thing I found out is that both James (Gosling) & Michael grew up in rural settings and consequently have plenty of great stories to tell.

I have a SunRay & a Linux box to work on, although I've been having some issues getting RedHat9 to play nice with the PC that is supposed to be a Linux box. Perhaps Suse 8.2 will fare a little better... The SunRays are kewl because of the way they use a JavaCard to allow roaming sesions. I stick my JavaCard into the SunRay to use it and then take the card with me when I leave. Then I can stick the card into any other SunRay in the lab & my session will pop up onscreen, ready to use.

A few of my coworkers have many plants in their cubicles & one of them was kind enough to lend me a couple of hers to green up my work area. It's always a delight to have rich green foliage to add some life to the artificial indoor environment :-)

My new digs: the good the bad & the ugly

I finally moved into my apartment on Labour day. Each bedroom has its own bathroom & the place is fully furnished, including laundry facilities. I had no desk or phone in my room so I called & asked for those. My roommate Kirill & I walked around to explore the complex. There are 3 heated swimming pools, none of which are very deep. The gym is not very good though, consisting of nothing but stationary bikes & treadmills. We only get a single parking spot but that should not pose a problem, since I don't drive anyway.

The downside is that I live close to the San Jose airport so the sound of an aeroplane either landing or taking off shatters the air every couple of minutes. Fortunately, it hasn't interfered with my sleep. The neighbourhood is very much a suburban one, so the only thing with any semblence of civilization nearby is a tiny shopping centre.

The bike I'd requested was already in the apt. when I got there but the tyres needed an air infusion so I biked over to the closest gas station last night. There's nothing quite like biking the wrong way on a highway in the dark to get that adrenaline flowing ;-)

I finally caved in & got a cellphone

I'd been ruminating about jumping on the cellphone bandwagon for a few years now but the one thing that held me back was the lack of an unlimited all-day plan, since I tend to talk a lot. Well, there's a company in NorCal called MetroPCS that offers exactly such a plan so I now have a cellphone. It lets me call anywhere in Northern Cali any time of day and talk as much as I want, all for just $35/mo. I think I'm allowed to recieve long-distance calls at no extra charge so I'll publish my number here in case anybody needs to get a hold of me: 408-849-9673.

Chapter 2, in which I hang out in Sacramento

The 1^st time I was in Sacramento - before I found out that I'd have to return to SF to visit the INS inspection office - I walked over to the Capitol building, where I had an opportunity to watch the state assembly in session. Everybody was walking around & chatting with each other while individual politicians delivered eloquent speeches to them. On the way back I walked through this amazing park filled with trees that had trunks too wide for me to get my arms around.

The day after I got my I-94, I took the Greyhound back to Sacramento. Even before I got on the bus, I recieved the distinct impression that Greyhound in the US is a somewhat different beast than the one in the great white North. There is no Greyhound stop in Fremont, where my uncle lives, so we drove to the nearest one, which was in the next town. Apparently, Fremont used to have a Greyhound stop but the city forced Greyhound to shut it down because they didn't want people coming there on the Greyhound!

The bus was late so we struck up a conversation with the only other person at the stop, the lone Greyhound employee. Judging from what she told us, it seemed that driving between Fremont & Oakland so as to catch a bus that travelled between Oakland & Sacramento would save a fair bit of time, since there was a long layover at Oakland otherwise. My uncle offered to collect me from the Oakland stop when I returned. We were on the verge of driving to Oakland to catch the connecting bus when the bus finally deigned to make an appearence. The ride to Sacramento, layover & all, was fairly uneventful, since I just read through a chunk of Sophie's World en route.

Once I got to Sacramento, I explored the big mall near David's office. The kewlest feature of this mall is a giant sand sculpture depicting The Little Mermaid. A few spots had been disrupted by little birds but it was still a breathtaking sight. I wish my camera hadn't been indisposed at the time :-(

Later on, while I was chilling in David's office, the office gardener dropped by to water his plant for him. There was a plant in her little trolley so I asked her about it & she ended up letting me have it to replace the one I was forced to leave behind in Canada.

The next day, Renata & Matt picked me up from David's office in the morning and we went to Renata's friend Juli'ene's house, where her brother let me use his air rifle to take shots at random junk in the backyard. Gotta love those American guns... Once I had confirmed that I was lousy shot, we drove to a nearby lake to see if the water was warm enough to swim in. It wasn't. Matt didn't think so, however, so we watched him swim in water that was scarcely above 10 degrees. I told him he should move to Canada ;-)

Afterwards we went to visit Matt's family, who are a fabulous bunch of people. Well, I only met his mom, brother & parakeet but extrapolating my experiences with them would indicate that his sister & dad must be equally fabulous. I didn't take to their dog quite as well but I'm told that nobody ever does. Matt's mom wrote down their phone number for me & said to call them if I ever needed their help while I was here. I was quite bowled over by their friendliness.

The following day David took me to apply for my social security card. Because he needed to pick Jane & Josie up from school - they had just returned from a 5-day camping trip - he left me at the social security office. Unfortunately, I soon realized that I needed to know my phone number & address to apply for the card. Not an unreasonable requirement, except that I had no clue what these were, since I hadn't even seen my apartment yet. Fortunately, I still had the piece of paper with Matt's number on it so I convinced the security guard to let me use the phone marked "not for outside calls" to call the number. I got Matt's mom to look my address up in one of my older posts here and Renata looked my number up on her cell phone. Pretty resourceful, eh?

Later that day David's family took me to the state fair. It was a lot like the CNE, although there was a cattle show and an elephant ride. A surprisingly high number of rides required that I be wearing real shoes. At the end of the day, we sat on the golden bears at the park gates. The golden bear is the official mascot of California. We also rejuvenated our tired feet by sitting on these little chairs that massaged feet. The CNE has got to get some of those!

After we left the fair, I met up with Renata & Matt for what was supposed to be a LAN party. However, only 5 of us showed up so I ended up having Matt teach me how to play his favourite RTS while we made & ate guacamole, which everybody around here seems to call 'guac'.

The next morning, David dropped me off at the Greyhound stop so I could catch the 12:30 bus to Oakland. We got there at exactly 12:30 but I already had my ticket & the bus driver hadn't boarded yet so I figured everything would be OK. Boy, was I ever wrong! I used my plant to save a seat on the bus & then informed the driver that I wished to place my suitcases in the cargo compartmnt of the bus. He told me that I couldn't get them onto the bus until they had been tagged. Having no clue as to what he was talking about, I inquired as to the nature of this tagging. He explained that I needed to satnd in line at the ticketing counter to have tags put on my baggage before he would consent to stowing it in the cargo compartment. I rushed off to the counter, stood in line for several minutes, got the suitcases tagged & returned to the bus, only to be informed that it was full. Unlike Greyhound Canada, where they will commission another bus if yours fills up, the US Greyhound made me wait over an hour for the next one.

When I was finally able to board the bus, I realized that my plant had gone on without me. So I inquired as to its potential whereabouts in Oakland. The dude at the lost'n'found desk actually asked me if it was a weed plant! He eventually suggested I check the lost'n'found in SF so I went to SF for the 3rd time. Fortunately, they did have my plant there & were able to return it to me.