Bradley Farnsworth Online

Office 2007 SP3 now includes an IEEE XSL Style Sheet

2012-01-23T19:26:00.002-05:00

Good news! Office 2007 SP3 now includes an IEEE XSL style sheet built-in! You can download Office 2007 SP3 here or use Windows update, and read the Office 2007 SP3 release notes here.

Over the past few years, I have had a steady stream of folks stop by to grab my IEEE XSL Style Sheet which I put together for myself in an afternoon to support my thesis writing process. It's good to know that by sharing it, I've helped hundreds of grad students and academic paper writers save a little bit of time, effort, and frustration. Thanks to all of you who downloaded my version over the past few years and left feedback, it's been fun!

Hi, a real human interface

2009-05-28T00:21:00.003-04:00

Hello, friends! As you may know, I am working on a multi-touch table in my copious spare time (heh). If you haven't seen this already, it's definitely worth a look and a laugh. A true multi-touch "human" interface!

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

Jobs Lost / Gained Visualization

2009-04-30T16:37:00.002-04:00

Here are some interesting interactive figures regarding recent unemployment trends in the US:

The Geography of Jobs
When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear?

To Be

2009-04-19T10:49:00.001-04:00

Just a little lighthearted fun concerning the continuity of existence.

Some more reading on consciousness and cyborgs here... (Thanks, Reddit)!

Magnetic Fields are All Around Us

2009-04-08T22:31:00.006-04:00

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Quote:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

More info on their website.

Organ and Cell Regeneration

2009-03-27T15:08:00.000-04:00

Check it out, engineered organs.

2008 Books in Review

2009-03-26T22:42:00.003-04:00

Books read in 2008:

Stephen King - Dark Tower Book I: The Gunslinger
This series has been around for a while so I decided to sink my teeth into it. It's sort of a post-apocalyptic / western / sci-fi / adventure / fantasy. It somehow reminds me of the Trigun anime. It's not like most of King's other novels. I enjoyed it well enough to read the next in the series. (4/5)

Stephen King - Dark Tower Book II: The Drawing of the Three
Book two isn't quite as exciting to read, but it definitely takes another big step into the weird with some time travel thrown in. Still a fun read. (3.5/5)

William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
This was a fun book about a person who is attuned to memes and is tasked with tracking down an Anonymous who is posting videos online. A fun and interesting read tracking the main character around the globe, but I wasn't very satisfied with the ending. (4/5)

Brandon Sanderson - Elantris
How often can you find a fantasy that is good AND fits in one reasonable sized novel? Not too often, but here is a great example of an interesting story woven and completed in six hundred and some odd pages. Check it out while you're waiting for the end to Wheel of Time. (4.5/5)

Nick Sagan - Idlewild
Carl Sagan's son wrote this novel about kids living in a virtual reality training school and their struggles against the system and the machine. It was fun to read, but do yourself a favor and read Ender's Game instead. :) (3.5/5)

China Mieville - Iron Council
I really like China Mieville's world and people. They're so interesting and colorful you can't help but want to turn the page. The plot of this one is a bit odd (a group of vagabonds hijack a train and build and remove the tracks as they go to escape civilization... and then return) and the ending is a bit depressing, but that's par for the course. If you liked Perdido Street Station (a better book, and one you should read first), then check this out.

Aimee Mullins: Super-Power Legs

2009-03-14T20:00:00.002-04:00

Aimee Mullins has an amazing story about how her prosthetic legs maker her not disabled but super-abled. Below is her talk from the TED conference.

Happy New Year for Zune Owners

2009-01-01T21:28:00.006-05:00

Here's an exercise for you. What happens when days = 366 in the code below? Maybe the better question is what happens when programmers skip their morning coffee when they reinvent the wheel and write a "simple" date parser with leap year detection? This code was loaded on every 30 GB Zune. Check out the offending module and read the coverage on Engadget. This presents a great case for unit testing!


 
while (days > 365)
{
    if (IsLeapYear(year))
    {
        if (days > 366)
        {
            days -= 366;
            year += 1;
        }
        //else?? 
    }
    else
    {
        days -= 365;
        year += 1;
    }
}

What's in your firmware??

Write-up in Case Daily

2008-12-05T14:54:00.003-05:00

If you are clicking through from Case Daily, welcome! There was a nice write-up about my award at IEEE Sensors Conference in Friday's issue. Here's the text below with some additional hyperlinks and clarification:

Bradley Farnsworth, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, won first place in the Best Student Paper competition as part of the 2008 IEEE Sensors Conference in Lecce, Italy, in October. The award included a prize of 750 euros. Farnsworth, who is part of Professor Darrin Young's Wireless Microsystems research group, is working on the paper for his thesis topic and is collaborating on this project with the Advanced Platform Technology (APT) Center at the Cleveland Louis Stokes VA Medical Center. The full citation for Farnsworth's paper is B. D. Farnsworth, R. J. Triolo, and D. J. Young, "Wireless Implantable EMG Sensing Microsystem." In addition, he received a top prize at the 2008 Research ShowCASE for the poster about his research; the award included a $1,000 account for research activities and a $250 check. He used a portion of these funds to attend the conference in Italy, along with assistance from the APT Center and ENSCO, Inc.

IEEE Sensors Conference

2008-11-01T22:39:00.009-04:00

I recently attended the IEEE Sensors Conference in Lecce, Italy and had a wonderful time learning about technology and meeting colleagues from around the world. The area was very beautiful, especially visiting the coastline and seeing all the architecture. I also ate some really wonderful local food!

I am honored to announce that I won the First Prize in the Best Student Paper competition. It feels very nice to have my thesis work noticed and appreciated. Below, you can see a photo of me accepting the award.

It was my first time out of the U.S. and was very enjoyable. I don't know if I'll ever go back to Lecce, but I can't wait to travel some more!

SICK LMS 291 LabView LIDAR Driver

2008-09-03T10:22:00.006-04:00

Hello! As you probably know, I worked on sensors for DEXTER in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The first software I worked on was a LabView driver for the LMS 291 LIDAR laser scanner along with Amaury Rolin. We cleaned up and submitted our driver to National Instruments, and you can now download it from the NI Developer Zone. Hopefully this program will be useful to others! Good luck! :)

Open Source IEEE Bibliography XSL Style Sheet for Word 2007 Available

2008-08-14T18:19:00.006-04:00

Thanks to everyone who downloaded, commented upon, and helped improve my IEEE style sheet for Office 2007! Reader Wesley Allen has pointed out that there is a free, more fully-featured, open-source IEEE style sheet available on CodePlex. It supports more reference formats than my version and seems to be getting feature improvements. Please go check it out, and thanks for all your support and comments.

Update: Good news! Office 2007 SP3 now includes an IEEE XSL style sheet built-in! You can download Office 2007 SP3 here or use Windows update, and read the Office 2007 release notes here. Thanks to all of you who downloaded my version over the past few years, it's been fun!

Missing Money - Unclaimed Funds

2008-08-01T11:21:00.002-04:00

Do yourself a favor and search for your name (and friends and relatives) here on Missing Money and directly with your state from a link on unclaimed.org. Apparently state governments can capture funds from "inactive" accounts through a process called escheatment. I heard about this from my bank, ING Direct (highly recommended, btw). Your grandparents will thank you when you find that long-lost bank account money for them.

Team Case on Robocars

2008-07-21T19:02:00.002-04:00

Tonight is the big night for Team Case on The Science Channel. Episode 2 of Robocars is tonight and Case is one of the featured teams. I should have a bit of airtime too! I'll be watching it with Scott in Baltimore and many Case folks will be gathered at Johnny Malloy's in Coventry for a Case Alumni Association sponsored event. So, if you have digital cable, tune it to the Science Channel tonight at 10 PM. See you there!

Scott and Erin's Wedding

2008-06-14T22:46:00.007-04:00

Hello, faithful readers! I just got back to Cleveland from Scott and Erin's wedding in Cincy. I was a groomsman and had a great time! I also got to help Nick write his best man's speech, which was a lot of fun. Nick delivered it brilliantly... if he doesn't make it as a MD-PhD, BME, or artist... maybe he can be a stand-up comic.

I also got a chance to put my new Canon EOS 40D digital SLR with 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens to the test. I took about half as many pictures as the professional photographer (who had a Nikon 200D with various lenses and a nice external flash). The image stabilization in my lens helped me get a lot of non-blurry shots inside that would have otherwise been hard to get. It's clear to me that the next accessory I should get is an external flash. The built-in flash in my camera has a slow recycle rate and casts unnatural shadows behind the subjects. I did manage to get some great photos, though! You can click on any of them to view them in full (printable) resolution. I haven't done any post processing on them, so feel free to touch them up if you're interested.

Here is Scott and Erin's first dance as husband and wife:

All the bridesmaids wanted a piece of the action:

Erin was the center of attention and looked beautiful in her wedding dress:

And here's a picture of me in my tux:

I'll be posting a lot more pictures to my Facebook, so feel free to add me. Bye for now!

Research Showcase 2008 - Grand Prize!

2008-04-17T16:47:00.004-04:00

Howdy folks! Yesterday was the 2008 Research Showcase at Case Western Reserve University. I presented a poster on my M.S. research topic, Wireless Implantable EMG Sensing Microsystem. Out of about 600 posters from across the university, I was one of 10 grand prize winners, which includes a cash stipend for me and some additional funding to support my research. Next stop, graduation (hopefully)!

Quicksilver.

2008-03-25T20:49:00.002-04:00

I've been using LaunchBar on my Macs for a long time now... maybe 5 years. I've always heard rumblings about that other keyboard shortcut program, Quicksilver. Well, a CIM Mac-using student came in to tech support on Saturday with his Mac tricked out with QS. I installed it today, and it is totally sweet. Especially by turning on "proxy actions," enabling access for assistive devices in the Universal Access control panel, and creating a short "trigger," I now have a keystroke (option-space) that gives me keyboard access to all the menu items of the application in focus.

For example. I'm in Safari and I want to open the downloads window. I don't remember the keystroke (it's cmd-opt-L, by the way). So, I hit opt-space, do, enter and viola! The downloads window appears. I also have access to all my bookmarks since they are in the bookmarks menu.

This is so cool. If you have a Mac and want to speed up your computer usage and/or reduce your mousing time, try this out!

Uploading some DEXTER Videos

2008-02-29T20:05:00.003-05:00

More to come soon! Here are some DEXTER videos that I uploaded to YouTube.

IEEE Bibliography XSL Style Sheet for Word 2007

2008-02-28T00:06:00.006-05:00

Please read the updates at the end of this post!

I spent about 4-5 hours this afternoon making an IEEE style bibliography XML / XSL file for Office 2007 for my thesis. That means you can use Word's built in reference tracker and IEEE style references! It looks good for journal and book references but I haven't tried anything else yet. I built it by modifying Word's built-in ISO 690 Numerical format. Also, don't blame me if it shreds your thesis... make a backup first! :)

Just ~~unpack this file~~ to:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style\

Here are the references I used to get started:
Bibliography & Citations 1011
Word 2007 citations, should be simple, but... (solved)

If you have any interest in refining this further, or if you find any bugs / inconsistencies / areas for improvement, please let me know (or even better, fix it and send me the updated version).

Enjoy!

Update: There is another IEEE style sheet available on CodePlex from another developer with some additional formatting support. Good luck!

Update 2: Good news! Office 2007 SP3 now includes an IEEE XSL style sheet built-in! You can download Office 2007 SP3 here or use Windows update, and read the Office 2007 release notes here. Thanks to all of you who downloaded my version over the past few years, it's been fun!

Caption this photo...

2008-02-26T08:02:00.005-05:00

If you're in Ohio or Texas, remember to vote March 4th!

New DARPA Arm Video

2008-02-05T18:50:00.000-05:00

Howdy folks! I have more than a passing interest in the DARPA arm project since it's related to my research. DEKA Research (Dean Kamen's company) is one of the primary developers. They just posted a new video, so check it out! They are using a combination of myoelectric (EMG) control from residual limb and other sites, plus tactile inputs from toes and wherever they can get a signal, really. Luke Skywalker, watch out!

Kubuntu on SPARC II

2008-01-24T11:52:00.000-05:00

Well, I got Ubuntu installed on my Ultra 5! I had some confusion at first about why I didn't have a desktop environment, as I had selected the "SPARC-Desktop" download ISO. Of course, after some head scratching, I realized that whether you choose "Desktop" or "Server" for SPARC, you get the server ISO (I couldn't find a SPARC desktop ISO). So, this gave me a choice... Gnome (standard Ubuntu) or KDE (Kubuntu)? I've used both in the past and somewhat preferred KDE. So, I ran sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, worked on something else for an hour, and viola! Desktop Linux on my old Sun. Woot!

Linux fun

2008-01-23T16:22:00.001-05:00

I'm feeling a bit masochistic today, so I thought I'd have a second go with Linux. My first experience was a dual-boot of Debian on my Athlon XP 2 GHz machine at home a few years ago. I had some help getting it started but I had some issues getting it to talk to my Apple Cinema Display at 1920 x 1200 and I never got sound or 3D graphics working properly (my help bailed on me once I got it booting to the desktop -- "check the forums!"). So, I just use XP on that machine these days.

I also have this Sun Ultra 5 workstation (400 MHz 64-bit UltraSPARC with 128 MB RAM) that I got for free with Solaris installed... and I don't think it's worth my time to learn Solaris (ugh). Since I have some famailarity with Debian, and I've heard good things about Ubuntu playing nicely with Sun machines, I figured I'd give that a shot. Right now, I'm in the middle of the install process and it seems to be going pretty smoothly. Wish me luck!

2007 Books in Review

2007-12-14T11:31:00.000-05:00

Howdy all! I thought there might be some interest in seeing the books I read this year. So! Here's the list and my brief comments.

William Gibson - Neuromancer

My first exposure to the cyberpunk genre was Stephenson's Snow Crash (thanks Jessica!) and The Diamond Age. I really enjoyed Neuromancer, especially considering it's as old as I am (published in 1984), and some of its predictions were pretty close to the mark. (4/5)

George Orwell - Animal Farm

I didn't get to read this one in high school, and I'm glad I picked it up. Definitely a reminder of the dangers of those who would deny our freedoms. (4.5/5)

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

Kara suggested I check out Vonnegut. This was a great read and was a cross between science fiction and satire with an anti-war theme. Definitely check it out. (4.5/5)

Dan Simmons - Hyperion

Several travelers seemingly independent stories about the mysterious Shrike of Hyperion come together to form a well-woven SF tale. The only downside is there's no ending... so it's really (secretly) part 1 of 2! But, I'm sufficiently hooked that I'll be picking up The Fall of Hyperion to finish the story. (3.5/5)

Issac Isamov - I, Robot

A novel by the SF master, I, Robot shares some themes with the recent movie, but it's really a different story. It's really a collection of short stories that share a moral theme of the three laws of robotics. Definitely a classic. (4.5/5)

Orson Scott Card - Shadow of the Giant

A story about Bean and his adventures as the Hegemon of Earth. If you've read all the Ender series books up to this one, go ahead and read it. It does advance the Earth-bound plot (and Card's political views) while being a fun read. But it's nothing compared to Ender of Speaker for the Dead. (3/5)

China Mieville - Perdido Street Station

Erin suggested this "steampunk" novel and I'm glad she introduced me to the genre! Mieville reminds me a lot of Gaiman in his writing style, and that's a good thing. Reading this adventure made me feel like I could see every detail in New Crobuzon without feeling like I'm reading pages of description. This one has elements of SF and fantasy with magic and strange creatures. Mieville has a great command of the language and a skill for weaving a story. Check this one out! (4/5)

Roger Zelany - Lord of Light

I really enjoyed Zelany's Amber series. Zelany wrote this book first and has been out of print for some time. I saw it on the shelf with a pull-quote from Gaiman on the front cover and I couldn't resist. This is definitely an interesting story based on another world where the original settlers from Earth have set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. We follow our protagonist Mahasamatman (Sam), Binder of Demons, Lord of Light, against those who would deny humanity the technology and science of Earth. (4/5)

Back from Victorville

2007-11-10T18:44:00.000-05:00

Hello all! I'm back from the 2007 Urban Challenge. We had a great time in Victorville and DEXTER had a great showing to become a national semifinalist in the competition. I posted detailed updates to the Team Case blog so in case you missed it, you can read about our experience there. There's a story about Team Case in this week's Observer, there is some video of DEXTER posted to TG Daily's blog, and there's an article in Wired about DEXTER's organ transplant during the national qualifying exam.

Film crews working for the Discovery Channel were also on hand to film our progress in the Urban Challenge. Team Case and DEXTER will be featured in a Discovery Channel special airing in Feb. 2008.

For now, it's time to put my nose to the grind-stone again to finish up my Master's thesis. I'm also starting my career search in earnest, so if you know of any companies looking to hire a fresh graduate with a background in analog microelectronics, sensing systems, and autonomous robotics in the May 2008 timeframe, please point them to my website and resume. Thanks!

1st Day in Victorville

2007-10-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

We all made it out with our luggage intact to Victorville on a pleasant flight. The hotel is fine. We also have a super awesome RV that would make Robin Williams envious. We will be working on unloading DEXTER and setting up base camp today. I have the illustrious task of making sure all the computers and sensors on DEXTER and in the "lab" are set up and working. Joy!

We can see the wildfires from our hotel up on the hillside maybe 10 miles away. When we came up through the valley, there was smoke everywhere. There were also maybe 5-10 overturned tractor trailers on the highway from high winds. It's a pretty awesome sight.

The weather is great. 80 degrees, dry, and sunny during the day, and down to maybe 50 degrees at night. I'll post more soon with pictures!

Packed and Ready for Victorville

2007-10-22T21:14:00.000-04:00

Well the time is finally here! DEXTER is already in Victorville, CA for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge and Team Case will be joining him tomorrow. We'll be traveling with a menagerie of computers, sensors, cabling, and electronic gizmos. Plus, what's more fun than getting up at 4 AM?

I will be blogging the event for Case at the official Team Case Blog.

For tonight, I still need to pack my bags and try to get some sleep - but I will check in when I get to California! Wish us luck...

-Bradley

Dexter is on the move!

2007-09-20T23:19:00.000-04:00

We ran a demo of Dexter on the Case Quad last week. There are some great photos posted on Flickr. Go check it out!

Another project wrapped up!

2007-09-06T18:03:00.000-04:00

I can really feel the end of my stay at Case approaching now. Just yesterday, I got the software I have been writing for the Motion Studies Lab of the Cleveland FES Center to a feature-complete state. I still need to deliver some additional documentation and some final touches, but for the most part it's finished. The software will control Copley Xenus linear actuators to provide stance perturbations to subjects standing on a force plate and being monitored by a VICON motion capture system. Their goal is to create a model of standing perturbation response for use in a closed-loop FES (functional electrical stimulation) or prosthetic standing system. The goal of my software is to make it easy for technicians to run the experiments and collect the resulting data for further analysis.

Getting this project done is great - I am winding down my commitments at Case as we move towards end-game, that is, graduation. It feels good to have done it right and let them move on with their research too! And by the way - I'm glad I wrote it in LabView. It's really the best environment out there for serial communication interfaces and data collection!

Dexter is In!

2007-08-09T17:07:00.000-04:00

It's official! DEXTER and Team Case has been selected by DARPA as one of 36 semi-finalists in the 2007 Urban Challenge (PDF). DARPA Director Dr. Tony Tether made the announcement via an online webcast today.

We did some testing with Dexter today at an abandoned parking lot in Highland Heights between thunderstorms today. A Discovery Channel film crew joined us to capture our reaction to the good news.

In other exciting news, Matt LeVan also managed to get Didi stuck in a big ditch / hole at the testing site. Fortunately we extricated her just before a huge downpour!

I also took a few shots of the clouds rolling in. It was actually a beautiful scene before the rain started.

Good Times

2007-07-15T20:42:00.001-04:00

This past week has been pretty intense. The highlight is that a film crew from the Discovery Channel spent three days with Team Case and our robot car, Dexter. We got a lot accomplished during the time they were here and hopefully I will get some airtime when the show airs in February! It will be a 6-episode special featuring 10 teams and the actual competition which takes place in November. The next big milestone is August 10th - that's when we find out if we passed the DARPA site visit.

Then, yesterday I hosted a fun party with a lot of the guys from college - Gerv, Vanv, Steve, Scott, Nitin, Paul, Jack, Jamie, and Nick all showed up for a day of Texas Hold Em, Munchkin, Guitar Hero, Second Option and Smash Bros Melee. It was great to get (almost) the whole group back together for some nerdly good fun.

I've got a lot to take care of this week. My chip should be coming in soon, so I need to make sure everything is ready for testing. I will also be working on my linear actuator controller for the Motion Studies Lab at the VA, bringing the new SICK LMS FAST LIDAR unit on-line for Team Case with streaming distance and reflectivity data, working on my thesis, and keeping up my PerceptIS (tech support) and ENGR 210 Circuits TA responsibilities. Well, you can say one thing about me -- I'm used to working hard!

Also... I emulated my sister and dropped my oldish Kodak digital camera... I attempted repair and thought I was successful... until I tore a little data ribbon cable (d'oh). So I bought a Canon Powershot SD1000 to replace it. I looked at DSLRS also (like the Canon Rebel XTI and EOS 30D) but I decided to put off the $1000 camera until I have a steady job. Go me!

Fly Guy

2007-05-23T21:22:00.001-04:00

Howdy folks. Check out this cute flash game/novelty : Fly Guy. It was a much needed 10 minute distraction for me today!

IC Tape-Out Joy

2007-05-21T23:23:00.001-04:00

Hey folks! Sorry for the post embargo recently. I've been working on my IC tape-out. Oh yeahhh L-Edit. I'm looking forward to a much-needed break this weekend: a trip to Colorado Springs for my step-brother's graduation from the US Air Force Academy. Dr. Robert Gates, the U.S. Secretary of Defense is the keynote speaker. Kara's coming too so we'll have some fun exploring. Pikes Peak and The Garden of the Gods are on the itinerary.

Ok. Back to HSPICE!

Dexter Video and Article in the PD

2007-04-16T13:10:00.000-04:00

Heya folks! Check out the article in the Plain Dealer: Robotic automobile's driving skills put to test. We've recently completed a video shot of Dexter passing static obstacles and navigating a closed course using GPS and LIDAR, available in mov, wmv, or mpeg-1 formats. Enjoy!

Synergy and Spanning Sync

2007-03-20T13:32:00.000-04:00

Here's a hot tip I read about over at PVP Online: it's called Synergy and it lets you share your keyboard and mouse with two (or many!) computers. It works with just about any platform (Mac, Windows, or UNIX) over the network! It's great for my desk at work where my MacBook sits to the left of my dual-monitor PC workstation. This way I can treat the Mac screen like a 3rd monitor in terms of keyboard and mouse, but it is still running Mac OS X locally. There is a system preference GUI wrapper for Synergy on Mac available as well called SynergyKM. It also gives you a menu bar item so you can see its status at a glance. The configuration is a little clunky, but you only need to do it once.

On another note, a program that I have been beta-testing for quite some time is finally ready to rock an roll! It's called Spanning Sync and it allows you to do 2-way syncing between iCal on your Mac(s) and your Google Calendar account! Changes made either in GC or in iCal show up in both. It takes advantage of Apple's built-in sync services. A 15-day trial is available and they are charging $25 for a 1-year subscription or $65 for unlimited usage. I've become addicted to it from the long beta period, so it looks like I will be buying this one - it's too darn useful!

Scott Adams and Brain Remapping / Alternate Feedback

2007-03-10T18:32:00.000-05:00

Good afternoon folks! I've got an inspirational story to share with you. Scott Adams, author of the famous Dilbert comic strip, lost his ability to speak conversationally due to a condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia about 2 years ago. NB: This is the same disorder that Diane Rehm of NPR has. He retained the ability to speak in front of crowds and in presentations, but could barely say anything at all off-stage and when there is a lot of background noise.

About 6 months ago, he regained his speech by repeating a rhyme at a higher pitch, but later relapsed after coming down with a cold. A more recent posting details his progress with two routes: botox and another form of therapy with which he has had more success. Basically the issue is that Scott feels like he is speaking much louder than he actually is so his brain turns down the output volume. The therapy he went through trained him to hum at a certain pitch to get going on words, and feel for facial bone vibrations to get his volume correct.

The brain is an amazing thing... read his article and be inspired (or at least amused!).

Telekinetic Contest

2007-02-27T18:45:00.000-05:00

I found this today while Stumbling (friend me as bradleycwru). It's a stop-motion film featuring Tony vs. Paul. in a telekinetic battle.

Dexter at the Auto Show, in the News

2007-02-25T20:48:00.000-05:00

Hello all! It's a busy week for Dexter, the Case Urban Challenge Team's autonomous robot! Dexter has made it all the way to the I-X Center for the Cleveland Auto Show! I had the pleasure of speaking with nice Clevelanders about Dexter at the show today, as you can see in the pictures below.

Dexter also got some great publicity this weekend - we made the front page of the Plain Dealer! The article, Case's Dexter (the robot car) steers toward fame, fortune is available online in its entirity and I recommend you read it! It's very well-written and factual. Big props to John Mangels, the PD's Science Writer for getting it right! They also made some killer graphics for the article, including a beautiful depicting my LIDAR scanners:

Also, a video about Dexter, narrated by our own Andy Allen and featuring Dexter in the snow, is also up on the PD's web site [direct link]. All in all, a fun day in Cleveland for the Case UC Team and Dexter!

And, in case you missed it, the Observer wrote a nice article on Dexter back in November, Case enters DARPA challenge.

Transparent Screens

2007-02-24T17:34:00.000-05:00

This is very cool: Transparent Screens! I am going to try to make one and post it here.

Domains and Hosting

2007-02-03T16:07:00.000-05:00

I got my yearly web hosting renewal message today, and it reminded me how good a service DreamHost is. With the basic service you start out with nearly 200 GB of space and almost 2 TB of bandwidth, which increases weekly. I use it to host my site and my dad's company's site, Farnsworth Engineering. Also lots of other goodies for free like PHP, a unix shell, CGI, SSI, CVS, subversion, WebDav, and more.

Also, I created a referral code, BRADLEYCWRU1. Enter it at checkout if you decide to try it for $5 off any package. Enjoy :)

Bradwii

2007-01-24T23:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I finally got my hands on a Nintendo Wii! If you aren't familiar with the system, it's cool because of its slick user interface. I've always been a fan of good UI design (go figure, I am a Mac user after all...), but Nintendo really got it right with this one. The litmus test? Mom and Al play Tennis, Bowling, and Golf on it all the time! I never thought my mom would become a gamer. Of course, I should have taken the hint when she started playing DDR with me...

Anyway, the Wii Remote, or "Wiimote," has a three-axis accelerometer built-in, as well as absolute positioning on-screen as a pointer thanks to a light bar and IR communications. The remote also speaks Bluetooth, so there's no messy wires to get in the way. That is, unless you bring in your other hand with the Nunchaku controller. Not all games use it, but it adds a D-stick, two triggers, and another gyro. Zelda makes pretty good use of it, and it's integral to Boxing.

Oh, and it has 802.11g to connect to my home network and has a decent web browser based on Opera.

Now if only we can teach Al not to charge the TV when he wants his Mii to charge the net in Tennis!

Happy Holidays!

2006-12-26T17:00:00.000-05:00

I'd like to wish everyone safe and happy holidays, and a joyful and productive new year!

There's a lot to do in 2007. I anticipate building my first integrated circuit for my thesis project, watching Dexter's AI and sensor systems come together, and having good time in general.

Cheers!

Don't worry!

2006-11-12T11:24:00.000-05:00

Tech support kitty is too cute.

Got my laptop back!

2006-11-10T17:00:00.000-05:00

It was returned to me this morning along with the rest of my stuff. Oh, happy day!

In other news...

2006-11-10T00:49:00.000-05:00

I'm in the Observer this week! (But Dexter is the real star...)

Case enters DARPA challenge

My laptop walked away

2006-11-10T00:42:00.000-05:00

Sigh, it's been a long day. Here is the post that went out to the department, it pretty much sums it up.

-Bradley

-----

I am asking everyone to please keep watch for a black leather bag which was left in Olin 314 about 11am this morning (11/9/06). The bag contained several notebooks, a USB thumb drive, a laptop, a digitial camera, and some other things. The most important thing is the notebooks which contained all Bradley Farnsworth's research data for his Master's thesis!!!

Please keep watch for this black bag and the contents in case they have been dumped somewhere around the department or anywhere on campus. If you have any information about the location of the bag or its contents (ESPECIALLY THE LAB NOTEBOOKS!!! ) please contact Bradley Farnsworth or campus security. If anyone has the bag, it or any of its contents may be dropped off in the EECS Department's central office in Glennan 321, no questions asked!

Thanks,

Dr. M.

Dexter - DARPA Urban Challenge

2006-10-04T16:59:00.000-04:00

Who's that sexy beast? Why, it's Dexter, the representative of Team Case in the DARPA Urban Challenge (Wiki with nice Dexter pics)! Check out some Nova footage (look for Team ENSCO). He's come all the way from Ensco in Virginia to come live in the Bingham building at Case! I'm working on Dexter's image processing and computer vision systems (along with the normal research fun...) It's a neat project and I'm glad I can get involved. If you'd like to meet Dexter up close and personal, let me know... or come to Case's Almni Week!

"Regular" Expression

2006-09-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

Ah, I love Case. The controversy never ends! Case has erected a new "expression" wall near Thwing, without any fanfare or even much more than murmuring. (Because Cleveland doesn't have enough graffiti already, duh!) Well, now it has a "regular" expression on it. Yeah Case --errr, CWRU-- email!

But seriously. We are just ripping off CMU. Maybe it has something to do with a certain Provost who was a former Dean of Engineering there. Or maybe we just think we're being original... something like the teenager who plagiarizes an author she read in elementary school, but now thinks the ideas are her own. Who knows?

If you want even more nitty gritty, we have a Wiki entry, a Forum thread (or two), and press!

Well, I guess all there is to say is... RIP Steve Irwin!

What if Dubya's serches were leaked with the AOL DB?

2006-09-26T21:38:00.000-04:00

This is satire... but it's FUNNY. Enjoy:

Slate Discovers Another AOL Search Record.

Thanks to fark for the link.

For real AOL searches, some of which are funnier and/or scarier... check out this Something Awful link. The ones you want are the "AOL Search Log Specials."

Some new photos posted

2006-08-27T23:43:00.000-04:00

Check out my photos on the Case Screensaver site. I posted a few pleasant ones tonight. And if you're at Case, enjoy your first day of class tomorrow! (And I'll see you if you're taking Dr. Mohseni's EECS 600 class).

Case Crime Map

2006-08-23T12:51:00.000-04:00

I was speaking to Brian Beck the other day and asked what he's been working on. It turns out, he's writing a web application that uses Google Maps to display locations of crime incidents on the Case campus. He parses the information on the campus security website and pulls down geocoded GPS information from the Case Wiki. It turns out that he spent the better part of a day recently logging the GPS location of the center of every parking lot on campus. Well, somebody has to do it!

What are the nitty gritties? Here's what Brian has to say:

First it tries to grab the wiki page by the location name. This is desirable over grabbing markers.php because the location is often abbreviated (the BRB, for example) and our wiki has lots of redirects for such abbreviations.

If the wiki page doesn't exist or isn't geocoded, it uses a regular expression to search for a street address (or even just a street name). If found, it queries Google's geocoder and only uses the return value if it's an exact match.

So there are a lot of locations missing coordinates from these two methods. I'm going to geocode more locations on the wiki, and probably manually do the rest (things that wouldn't be useful as wiki pages). Or let users give coordinates to the missing ones.

So, there you have it!

SoaP Fun

2006-08-22T17:43:00.000-04:00

On Friday night, I saw Snakes on a Plane. I would call it the polar opposite of a "chick flick." My favorite line?

-Remember the first thing you told me?
-What the $#!@ does that have to do with anything?!

Yeah, can't beat that. Plus we all got free posters in exchange for them taking our picture with them. I wonder where those pictures will end up...

It's funny that it only made $13.8M in the box office this weekend. The movie had great Internet hype... but only Internet hype. It was definitely pure fanservice for the 16-30 year old male audience. It was almost as good as Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter.

Going to WWDC!

2006-08-03T08:20:00.001-04:00

This weekend, I am heading off to San Francisco with Kara to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for the second year in a row. I've been fortunate enough to receive a scholarship from Apple to attend. I'm looking forward to unlimited geek-out moments, a glimpse of Apple's new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and hopefully some new Apple hardware (Core-derivative Xeon processors on high-end machines, and possibly Core 2 Duo (Merom) upgrades for iMac or PowerBook. I'm crossing my fingers for built-in virtualization in Leopard, but I will be at least satisfied if Apple finishes its Windows drivers and adds NTFS read/write for Mac OS.

Anyway, wish me safe travels...

Universal Binary Keyserver Available

2006-07-13T12:10:00.000-04:00

Hello! If you use the keyserver on an Intel Mac to access Case software center programs (or other keyed applications), you might be interested in this news...

The universal binary version of Keyaccess has shipped:
http://www.sassafras.com/pr/k261ships.html

You can download the new client here:
http://www.sassafras.com/links/clientdownloads.html

Thanks to David Carlin for pointing this out!

Gamedev 2006

2006-06-22T11:52:00.000-04:00

Last night I partied with the Case Gamedev 2006 team. I found out that in an alternate world, I am a "death protein." Go figure... anyway, we went to Aladdins for dinner and partied like the old days at Scott's apartment afterwards. We took a nice group photo too, hopefully I'll get that uploaded once I get my hands on it.

My MacBook is Sweet

2006-06-15T16:37:00.000-04:00

I've been using my MacBook for a couple of weeks so far... here are my feelings on it. Note: I am pretty critical in this review because I am focusing on the negative aspects of the machine. Overall it is an exceptional notebook, and most of the problems have to do with running Windows on it. It is a sad Mac any day of the week when it has to run Windows... anyway:

1. Dual-Boot is very useful.
I was booted into WinXP for most of the IGVC competition (see below post) for all the robot vision work. The code was written in C++ using Visual Studio 2003 with support utilities written in MATLAB. The MacBook handled some harsh development conditions in stride, even in the WinXP environment. However there are some problems with dual-boot...

2. WinXP is not quite right on the MacBook...
Where should I start? First, Apple hasn't written a trackpad driver for the MacBook under WinXP yet. So, the trackpad is jerky and unresponsive. Wonderful! I'm sure this will get fixed in time, but for now, it is pretty annoying.

Also, the network connection seems to be flaky under Windows. When connecting to a network gateway via one of its wired connections, sometimes after waking from stand-by in Windows, I couldn't reconnect to any of the machines on the network until I not only rebooted, but rebooted into MacOS X and then back to Windows! Argh...

To get the keyboard and mouse working as expected, I highly recommend Input Remapper to get the brightness, eject, and other keys working, as well as a right-click option.

Otherwise, Windows seems to be pretty happy. Of course, the built-in camera doesn't work, but again, that's just a drivers issue.

3. Glossy screen is OK
I had my doubts when I first heard that the MacBook had a glossy (read: reflective) screen as opposed to the matte-type LCDs used on all other models. The screen is pretty nice, actually. There are only a few circumstances where I see distracting reflections in the screen, and those can usually be fixed by adjusting my seating position or changing the angle of the screen. I can also see the screen pretty well outside (probably better than on a matte screen) so that is cool too.

Overall I'm happy with my purchase and would recommend it to anyone who wants a lightweight, powerful, versitile and inexpensive laptop. Of course, if you are getting one, make sure you try out MacSaber. Thank me later.

Intellegent Ground Vehicle Competition

2006-06-15T16:22:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, I went to Michigan with the rest of the IGVC Team from Case with our robot, Roberto. We had high hopes of bringing it all together after a month's worth of long days (and nights) trying to get all the robot's systems integrated for our first showing at the competition. We made it so far as to qualify our robot for competition, and we also won $500 for implementing their wireless robot control protocol over UDP. Unfortunately, the USB cable connected to our hub dangled into the chassis of the robot and touched the +24V terminal of the lead-acid battery, which toasted our NI DAQ's, serial-to-USB adapters, digital compass, and the hub itself. We stayed up all night rebuilding, got it to the point where we completed the wireless command challenge, but a subsequent electrical failure killed our replacement DAQ and ended our bid to compete.

Going into next year, we have a much better idea of what challenges we must overcome, as well as a lot of the work already being done. As of Sunday morning, all sensor systems were functional and data was being integrated and logged - we were just nailing down final bugs... with a year to rebuild, we will definitely have a strong showing next year.

I worked with Scott McMichael on the vision system for the robot. I was primarially responsible for integrating vision with the rest of the robot, making sure the vision data was being used properly for mapping and planning, and providing as much functionality as possible given our vision data. Also, since Scott couldn't make it to the competition, I was the resident vision "expert" in case anything went wrong (of course things went wrong!). Vision was up and running well for the competition, but we never got to run the full challenge due to the electrical problems we encountered. Hopefully this summer, we will be able to test robot vision more thoroughly.

MacBook Ordered

2006-05-18T21:41:00.000-04:00

Well, I decided to order a new 13.3" widescreen MacBook computer. It should be in next week. Here are the specs:

Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz

1 GB RAM

80 GB Hard Drive

SuperDrive (Slot-loading DVD Burner)

Gigabit Ethernet

802.11b/g AirPort

Bluetooth 2.0+EDR

Integrated Webcam

It will be able to drive my Apple Cinema Display as well, so that's pretty awesome. I'll post more when I get my hands on it - especially my thoughts on the new glossy screen.

Trip to Put-In-Bay

2006-05-15T14:05:00.000-04:00

Above is a picture of me and Jamie in front of Perry's Monument, which recognizes Oliver Hazard Perry's victory over the British in a naval battle in 1813, located in Put-In-Bay, Ohio on South Bass Island in Lake Erie, west of Sandusky and north of Port Clinton. We got to experience the humming lightning rods on top of the monument (time to get off the platform!) and see an awesome view of the whole island - the monument is taller than the Statue of Liberty! The Case senior class of 2006 went en masse to Put-In-Bay on Saturday. Lots of fun! I also got to tour the Heineman's Winery which is located on the island. It was definitely a fun trip!

Mobile Autonomous Soccer-Playing Robots

2006-05-15T13:48:00.000-04:00

Mobile Robot Team Alpha: from top center, going clockwise, is me, James, Scott, and Mark. Our robot, Robbie, is in the center. We are sitting in the middle of the autonomous robot soccer playing field. The image is taken from Gort the web-enabled camera we used to recognize the state of the soccer field during the competition. Robbie was completely autonomous and performed really well, scoring many goals on his oppnents, and even making one (intentional) save as a goalie! Robbie's brains were on a PC in the lab, which connected to a HP iPaq strapped to Robbie's back via 802.11g, which issued commands to a Lego RCX brick via a stereo-to-IR adapter and custom-generated audio command files. The class, EECS 396L: Special Topic on Mobile Robots, led by Dr. Wyatt Newman, was very interesting and a lot of fun.

Next on the agenda is to complete Case's submission to the IGVC (Intellegent Ground Vehicle Competition). We are using a lot of the image processing and object recognition code from our soccer-playing robot for this other project.

Research Showcase, Ollie Lobby

2006-04-07T01:25:00.000-04:00

Today was a really interesting day. To get things started, I got to visit Dr. Hardin's Motion Studies Lab at the Wade Park VA. Her grad students demonstrated how to fit a subject with the little reflector balls used by their 7-camera motion capture system to record body movement for gait analysis. Neat.

Next, it was off to Research Showcase to present my poster. I had some really good questions from folks passing by, and it was fun to see what everyone else is working on too. If you're interested in reading more about my research, I'll be keeping that page updated as I make progress.

After that, I had the privilege of attending the Case School of Engineering Dean's Advisory Council Dinner as a member of the 1st annual Case School of Engineering Senior Class Gift Committee. The dinner was really quite nice and I met some very interesting people.

Dean Savinell congratulated several faculty who were nominated undergraduate teaching and mentoring awards. He also dedicated the new "Ollie Lobby" on the 5th floor of Nord, named for 1959 CIT graduate Oliver Poppenberg. Mr. Poppenberg is a long-time supporter of the CSE and plays a big role in the Pittsburgh-area alumni association chapter, helping to steer smart kids towards Case instead of That Other School. Ollie will be involved with picking new, comfortable furniture for the lobby to make it a nice place for CSE students to study, socialize and relax.

Ollie's family was there to support him in full force:

Ollie and his wife are on the right in the next photo:

Ben takes nice photos!

2006-03-31T03:58:00.000-05:00

I was browsing through Ben Chodroff's image gallery and found a nice photo of myself from the Engineer's Week Banquet posing with Dean Savinell of the School of Engineering. I'm rehosting it on my site so I don't steal his bandwidth.

Blogger Dashboard Widget

2006-03-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

I just downloaded the Blogger Dashboard Widget for my Mac. Very convenient! I guess it works if you're reading this.

Sad Laptop

2006-02-23T10:55:00.000-05:00

Last week, my iBook stopped booting. I bought it used a few months ago, and the 1-year warranty expired in December. One day, it simply wouldn't wake from sleep. After resetting the power, the fan comes on, but that's it. It's a classic symptom that the CPU isn't coming online, so there is a problem with the motherboard or CPU. I took it to the Apple Store and they quoted me $800 on the repair (more than I paid for the unit!). So, eBay it is. It was a nice machine, hopefully someone has the parts on hand to bring it back to life. I'll likely wait to buy a new machine until the 12" MacBooks come out later this year.

Pac-Man on the Quad

2006-02-20T21:10:00.000-05:00

I don't know who did this, but it's brilliant! Yea Case.

Three Great Birthdays

2006-02-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

Count 'em, three. Abe Lincoln, Bradley Farnsworth, and FARK.COM. What would the world be like without Feb. 12??

Multi-Touch Interaction Experiments

2006-02-11T23:25:00.000-05:00

Coolest. Thing. Ever. I want one. And I want it to be from Apple.

"21" Came and Went all too Quickly

2006-02-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

Well, hello! First and foremost, TGIF. I've got a lot to do this weekend - but that's okay! I am going to feel a lot better when I can scrub a few things off my to-do list. Plus, I will be celebrating my 22nd birthday on Sunday. I'm going to have a little party with my family and maybe go out to dinner with some friends from Case. (Want to come?)

In one of the projects I'm working on, I'm almost to the point of testing something we've been talking about for a long time. It's pretty exciting, and I may even be able to publish something this semester *crosses fingers*! However, it's frustrating that I can't just "get it done" due to all the other things I have going on, most notably my classes. I think I took a step in the right direction though - I mentioned in my previous posting that I was considering not going to Japanese 301 anymore. I thought it might come to this from the start, so was just sitting in on the course all along. Well, I decided to drop it. It was a tough decision to come to, but the 10-15 hours a week it freed up are invaluable to my research (and my sanity) right now.

After this semester, my schedule is definitely looking up. First of all, I'm graduating in May, so I won't have to worry about undergraduate requirements anymore. Secondly, I will have 8 credits of thesis and 12 credits of grad-level coursework (4 courses) by the end of this semester. That means that I'll only have to take two more grad courses plus 1 credit of thesis per semester to graduate with my MS degree. That leaves a lot of time open for getting research taken care of! It will certainly be nice.

We're having our SIGMAC meeting on Wednesday at the Apple Store in Legacy Village. We've done this once before and it was a great success last time. Hopefully it will be fun again! The folks at the Store are going to demo some of the new Apple applications like PhotoBooth and FrontRow, and maybe Aperture if we ask nicely.

The EECS Graduate Student Town Hall meeting was today. I heard some encouraging words from Dr. Tien, our new Department Chair and Fearless Leader. He's very excited about the future of the Department, and that's pretty refreshing. He is planning to expand the department from about 35 faculty to 50. Also, he pledged financial support for an EECS grad student organization. I think that's just spiffy - and I'm going to try to get involved. I'm already on the ECE Curriculum Committee - and doing this stuff will be even more fun!

Kara is coming to town to visit next weekend, and I can't wait! Our two year dating anniversary is this month (can you believe it?). We're going out to dinner on Saturday night with my aunt and uncle - where should we go? I've never been to the Barking Spider, and I hear that's a pretty cool place. Or maybe I should just take Kara there and go out to dinner elsewhere. Any experiences or suggestions? I have a few places in mind, but what are your favorite places to go around Cleveland? Post in the comments, por favor.

Is it really Spring 06?

2006-01-20T18:53:00.000-05:00

Well, the first week of classes for my last semester as an undergrad is behind me. Some finality is starting to set in about this being my last undergrad semester, and the prospect of graduating in May is very real, indeed. I met with Dean Cawley yesterday to go over my graduation requirements - mostly as a CYA to make sure I am not doing anything to break the system with my aggressive BS-MS scheduling. It turns out I will have exactly the number of credit hours needed to graduate after subtracting off my four grad-level courses that won't count towards my BS graduation requirements (but do count towards my undergrad GPA!). Anyway, I basically have the green light to walk in May, which is pretty nifty. And, better yet, I will only need to register for two more grad courses next year to fufill my MS graduation requirements (not including my thesis, of course). I may not graduate any earlier by doing BS-MS, depending on how the research goes, but it will definitely be cheaper than paying for all those credit hours!

I have tentatively decided to sit in on JAPN 302 this semester. I took a one-year Japanese hiatus after taking JAPN 301 in Fall '04 due to a scheduling conflict in Spring '05, so I'm a little bit rusty. I'm really torn about this decision because I realize that I will need to invest a lot of energy to bring my Japanese level back up to speed to participate in class. The problem is exacerbated because there are only 4 people registered for the class (and I am the 5th), so I will need to participate actively in class on a daily basis - it's not like sitting in on an engineering lecture. So, even though I'm not registered for it, it is still a large time commitment, and I don't know how well it's going to mesh with my other responsibilities. Anyway, I am going to try it for now, and see how it goes. It would be really sad to pass up this opportunity, but it may be unrealistic. We'll see.

In more chipper news, I'm going to the Senior class party at the new Johnny Malloy's in Conventry (in the remodeled Centrum Theater) tonight. Their grand opening is next month so it will be neat to check it out. It sounds like it will be fun, and it will definitely be a nice end to this first week of class.

Over break, I went to visit Kara at her parent's house in St. Louis for a few days. I got to tour the Anheuser Busch brewery (earning the title of Honorary Beermaster in a taste testing event), go to the top of the Gateway Arch at sunset, fix Kara's cable TV distribution, and generally have a good, relaxing time. Below is a picture of me at the base of the arch.

Mmkay, that's it for now. Toodles.

Merry Christmas!

2005-12-25T22:57:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas! I wish all of you a happy, healthy holiday and new year!

It is indeed merry for me - my 4.0 GPA continues for another semester! If I can hold on for one more semester, then I won't have gotten anything other than an A since some time before high school, all the way through college, since I'll be graduating with my BS in electrical engineering in May. Isn't that just sick? I guess I work too hard.

Here's a New Picture

2005-12-15T21:53:00.000-05:00

I'm wearing my new shirt, what do you think? :)

Auto-Save, Purchases and Randomness

2005-12-15T18:11:00.000-05:00

First of all, Blogger is a Google company, right? How difficult would it be for them to implement the same auto-save features that Gmail has, then? I spent about twenty minutes writing this post when my web browser decided to die. Ah well. I guess I'll just post a shorter version of my original ranting. Plus, I'm writing this in TextEdit before copying and pasting to the web interface this time. In the eternal words of George W. Bush, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

So, first the purchases! Yesterday I picked up a couple new books - Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Unfortunately, they will get added to the ever-growing queue of books-to-read. I keep telling myself that I will get to pleasure reading eventually - if only I could believe myself! Right now, I'm reading Gene Wolfe's Shadow & Claw. I'm really enjoying the style of the book, but I'm just getting started. I also bought a t-shirt for myself and some gifts for the fam.

I'll also mention briefly that it turns out I ranked EECS 426, MOS integrated circuit design, this semester. I had the high score on the homework, second exam, second design project, and the high score overall. I attribute this fact to the volume of material we covered in Dr. Young's EECS 344, integrated circuit analysis and design, last year. Having taken 344 definitely put Case undergrads at an advantage over the grad students from other schools.

And one more thing... it turns out that Dr. Tabib-Azar won't be teaching EECS 422, solid-state electronics II, in the spring because he has to develop a SAGES course, instead. Thanks, SAGES.

So, here's my (tuesday-thursday only!) schedule for the spring:

For MS:
EBME 427 Movement Biomechanics & Rehab 3CR Dr. Kirsch
EECS 434 Microfabrication 3CR Dr. Mehregany

EECS 651 Thesis MS 4CR
EECS 500 Colloquium 0CR

For BS:
EECS 396L Mobile Robots 4CR Dr. Newman
EECS 314 Computer Architecture 3CR Dr. Swarup Bhunia

With these courses, I will be on track to graduate with my BS in May - heck yeah. I will also only need to register two grad-level courses after next semester to count towards my MS degree. Grad school might actually be affordable! We'll see.

Anyway, that's it for now. Check here again soon (or subscribe to my RSS feed) for my next rant - and overall semester grade results (hopefully)!

::end transmission::

Half Way There!

2005-12-13T15:11:00.000-05:00

Phew! My two grad-level courses are done, and I got A's in both of them! Two more classes to go - my ENGR 200 Statics & Materials midterm is tomorrow morning, and then I have the rest of the week to work on the take-home exam for EECS 351 Communication Systems. This has been a long semester, but it's almost over.

Which means... lots of time to work on research over "break." I ordered some parts from Digi-Key for my project yesterday. Thank goodness for Digi-Key. This week, I need to design and fab a PCB for my test circuit, take some measurements (I get to learn how to use the laser vibrometer - sweet!), and keep on chuggin'. I can't post about the details of what I'm working on, but I think it's really neat stuff. If When it works, it will make for an interesting paper, as well (exciting!).

Of course, I have several projects going on simultaneously, so keeping everything straight is making me crazy. It's a good thing I have my dry erase board to help me make sense of it all -- but I think I need a bigger board. ::grin::

In other news, I'll be visiting Kara at her parents' house in St. Louis in early January for a few days. I'm looking forward to it, and I'm sure we'll have a good time. Kara has her finals this week at UIUC as well, so good luck Kara!!

Oh, yeah! I do have a blog, don't I.

2005-12-10T01:37:00.000-05:00

Last post: October. Not very timely, eh? Well, things have been crazy! Today was the last day of class, and the fabled Case finals gauntlet begins tomorrow, Saturday, at high noon. The showdown: me versus the EECS 600 (RF Integrated Circuits) final worth 50% of my grade. Of course, it might as well be worth 100% of my grade - if I do well, I will get an A. If I perform poorly... well... it depends on how poorly! I studied for this bad boy over 20 hours this week (about 10 hours today) and I feel pretty prepared for it. Hopefully I will be able to pick up on the tricks and nuances of the problems before the end of the test period.

After tomorrow, things are looking up. I have a take home exam for EECS 351 (Signal Processing for Communications) and the ENGR 200 (Statics and Strength of Materials) exam should be a cakewalk. I have a lot of research work to accomplish over break, but I know what I have to do, and it's a lot less stressful than 3-hour exams. EECS 426 (MOS IC Design) is totally done. I am reasonably confident I got an A in the course, but I won't know for sure until the second exam scores are posted. As long as I got a 75 or higher, I'm golden (and I think I did really well on it).

One thing I would like to mention... I think Case has forgotten how to clear sidewalks this year! In years past, the sidewalks were always shoveled and salted by the time I went to class. Now, some of them have 2" of ice for days after a snow storm. It's really unacceptable! I know several people who have fallen on the slick surfaces. Hopefully they'll get their act together again soon.

Okay, I need to get some sleep so I can attack this exam head-on tomorrow. I'll post the casualty report when I know the outcome!

--Bradley

Site Changes & Improvements (I Hope!)

2005-10-28T02:09:00.000-04:00

Hello! Please take a moment to check out my new webpage! It might be a bit rough around the edges at the moment since I basically generated the whole thing this evening, but it has some nifty content. I hope to use that site for static content - my research interests, short personal biography and so on, while posting more timely comments here. This new layout has also been designed to compliment the layout of this blog. While they are not identical (it doesn't use CSS or anything fancy), they do share much of the same color palette and layout. I decided to do this to try and keep some visual consistency between the two sites so they don't feel like two totally separate entities.

I also turned off the posting requirement for this blog - you no longer need to have a Blogger account to post. I'll have to see if this opens me up to SPAM posts, but I can take care of that if that is the case. Hopefully what will happen is that more of you will post! Hint: I am more likely to update if it seems like someone is reading this! :-P

I've got more to talk about but for now I need to sleep. Hopefully I'll post more this weekend.

Case Photos

2005-10-21T02:50:00.000-04:00

Check out the Case Screensaver! Case folks can submit photos online to go into the screen saver. You can also browse all the photos on the web page. Quite nifty!

Case 125th Anniversary Weekend

2005-10-15T23:02:00.000-04:00

This weekend is the Case School of Engineering 125th Anniversary. Big deal? Apparently so - since I got to go to all sorts of spiffy events.

First of all, I attended Dean Kamen's lecture on Friday afternoon. Dean Kamen is probably best known as the inventor of the Segway scooter and the iBot wheel chair. He also founded DEKA Research & Development in the early 1980s which has churned out innovative, successful products regularly since its inception. He had some interesting words to say to the CSE - some witty, some acerbic, some insightful, some incredibly funny. But he had one driving message - that not enough Americans are becoming engineers and that this will be the downfall of our nation if not addressed soon.

Dean believes that our failure to produce engineers is not a failure in our educational system, but a failure in American culture. He noted that more degrees were awarded in Sports Management last year in the U.S. than in all engineering fields, combined. He believes that an ignorance of what engineers do and who engineers are in young people keeps them from setting their sights high enough to go to engineering school. To combat this ignorance, he founded a group called FIRST, which runs a large-scale science olympics every year with the goal of getting kids excited about learning. Check it out. All in all, it was a very thought-provoking lecture.

Then, I went to see Dennis Miller Live at Severance Hall on Friday night. I scored some free tickets about 30 minutes before showtime (excllent!) so I went to check him out. I am generally a fan of Dennis Miller, mostly because his comedy is so timely and relevant. However, he must have decided to recycle some old material for us... we heard quite a bit about his opinions of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky... and about global warming. Not very timely, if you ask me. Although he did get some quips in about the constitutional referendum in Iraq and Bush's abysmal approval rating... and even if he wasn't relevant, he was pretty funny. Anyway, for the cost, it was definitely worthwhile. :)

Finally, tonight, I went to the CSE Banquet downtown. The picture at the top of the post is of one of the banners at the event. Check out that hot girl at the bottom right. I could totally date her... Anyway, there were a lot of Case celebrities at the reception so it was a good time with some excellent conversation. The dinner speeches were not the best, but the food was delicious! Now, if only I had done some homework today...

Binary Walkway

2005-10-15T22:50:00.000-04:00

The fruits of the Baker building's destruction are about to come to pass with the new Binary Walkway. I submit to you that the walkway is not nearly as obnoxious as many have made it out to be (usually after only hearing about it second-hand). Although it is covered with ones and zeros (the language of love!), it is to be noted that it is tastefully covered with ones and zeros in muted shades of grey. Of course, as an EECS student, I may be slightly biased - but I think it's quite aesthetically pleasing. The green space makes the quad just that much more inviting as well. You be the judge!

Oh, and yes, that is my bike in the picture there. Yea bike!

Hundert's Fireside Chat

2005-10-15T22:27:00.000-04:00

On Thursday, President Hundert visited us in the great room of House 4 of the Village at 115 to talk about the upper class experience and the future of the university. We broke the ice with him by discussing the bad acting in the Star Wars prequels - which I though was immensely entertaining.

At the very least, Dr. Hundert definitely has a vision for the University, which is a Good Thing (TM). He totally believes in SAGES (Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship) as the future of undergraduate education, at least at Case. As for me, I am in with the last of the old-timers and I've never had a SAGES class, so I can't pass judgement on the program, specifically. However, I am a staunch supporter of learning by doing -- and interacting with others. It remains to be seen how well Case will implement this new style of teaching and learning (especially for the upper-level departmental SAGES courses that don't exist yet), but the motivation is good.

Of course, SAGES wasn't the only topic du jour. Some notable notes:

- Case is putting out request for proposals for developing the quardangle and the parking lot at Ford and Euclid next month. He envisions a Case "University Town" that is par for the course at most other universities. Embedded in the RFP - the proposal must include plans for a grocery store and a drug store. Right on.

- Case will be getting a new student center some time in the indefinite future. Currently, the plan is to put it on Freiberger Field (near KSL and Thwing). Specifically the center will include a huge tower that will be a beacon and orienting point for all of the Case Campus and University Circle. Well, OK. But, will it have an arcade? :)

- Case planned to bring in about 900-950 freshmen this year - the >1100 who showed up was totally unexpected. One of the primary goals of the enlarged enrollment was to fill more seats in the humanities and undergraduate management departments. Of course, a horde of new BMEs came along for the ride.

- Glenn Nicholls, V.P. of Student Affairs projected that we will need to put students on the top of the hill South Side next fall. He also predicted that there will be undergraduate students on South Side for at least 5-7 more years. So much for the unified undergraduate housing plan...

- Case is entertaining the notion of a smoke-free campus. The Medical quad is already implementing this. All I can say is it's about time.

In general, Dr. Hundert was really down-to-earth and listened attentively to the questions posed by the students in attendance. Surely a good sign.

Oh, and one more thing. Dr. Hundert does in fact read the Athenian - he even shows some of the caricatures depicting him in the Athenian to his kid. One of the reps of the Athenian was present at the event and asked Dr. Hundert to be the next Athenian faculty advisor. Unfortunately, he declined. C'est la vie.

A Decent Weekend at 115th St.

2005-10-02T23:50:00.000-04:00

Heya! I took the above picture this weekend after the Spartans Football game. I had a great seat to watch the fireworks show from my apartment. I took a bunch more pictures as well, but that one was particularly nice.

I got a lot of homework accomplished, although not as much as I would have liked. But, I am in pretty good position to start the week.

I bought a used iBook this week from another student here at Case. It's less than a year old and in great condition, so I'm pretty pleased with it. The specs are decent too - 60 GB HD, 768 MB RAM, CD-RW / DVD drive, 14" display, 1.2 GHz G4. It's very similar to the PowerBook I was using as Apple Campus Rep, except for 14" instead of 12." I have to say that I prefer the 12" model for portability, but the 14" is much easier to look at.

What else is new? I got a nearly perfect score on my Statics test. I missed points due to a stupid mistake, but that is nothing new for me. I imagine the next test will be more difficult since this one had an average of 85 and covered difficult topics like vectors - ooohh. No tests this week, but lots of homework to turn in and lots to get done in the lab, so I'll be busy. OH! I guess that's not entirely true - I have a CPR test tomorrow. :)

Guess that's about it for now. I'll post again soon, hopefully with more pretty pictures.

Case Spartans Football Fun

2005-09-24T00:22:00.000-04:00

This weekend is Family Weekend at Case. My Mom, Nana and Mom's boyfriend are coming over to visit me tomorrow. We're going to make quesadillas, have tasty snacks, and watch the Case Spartans Football game against Wooster from our suite window:

Case is 3-0 so far this season, which doesn't happen very often. It should be a fun day! I also need to get some work done on my EECS 426 homework and I definitely need to put in some lab time this weekend. I've got a big list of things to accomplish, and it won't happen if I hang out in the dorm all weekend. :) Oh, and I have a statics test on Monday. I guess I ought to study for it... meh...

Today was also the EECS Welcome Back Picnic on the Quad. That's always a good time. I got Quiznos with Jamie tonight, too. We used some of the $2 off coupons that they flood the Case campus with all the time. I tried the new Cabo Chicken sub and that's a DANG good sub. I'll have to do that again soon!

Gosh, I Hate Cisco VPN!

2005-09-24T00:03:00.000-04:00

Hey all! I am on a roll this week for fixing my own computer problems! You would think that a PerceptIS tech would have his computers running in tip-top, perfect condition at all times. Heh, I thought so too. But, I think I finally have everything in order.

So, here's the background on this one. Last year, I used Remote Desktop on my PC pretty often. Since we have such an insanely fast gigabit LAN here at Case, it is trivial to go to a computer lab on campus, RDC to my PC in my room, and use it as if I were connected locally. This is nice because I now have all of my settings, programs, bookmarks, and so on available to me wherever I go. I also don't leave a trail of websites I visit on the public machine I'm logged in to. In general, it's a Good Thing (TM).

Over the summer, I was on a cable modem at home with a dynamic IP address, so I didn't use RDC at all. When I got back to Case this fall, I tried to use RDC and it wouldn't work. Strange, but surely I could fix it easily. Well, it gets weirder. From the PC, I can connect to any Internet resource that I want, be it web sites, file transfers, our local DC hub, and so on. But -- I can't connect to my PC on any port remotely. No ping, no response to port scanning, no WinShares... you get the picture. And the best part is that it was still "invisible" even when the WinXP firewall was turned completely off. I tried all the usual (and unusual) tricks to get it working again, including rebuilding the TCP/IP stack, reinstalling all the network software components, changing hardware NICs, repair-install of Windows, and about 10 other things that the other techs and I thought up. Nadda.

I eventually lugged my box in to the local PerceptIS walk-in-center to see if a bunch of us nerds could all poke at it together to get it fixed. Two hours later, we decided that it would have to be formatted, because there was no hope. We verified that it was a software problem since booting from XPE allowed the machine to be pinged. But was there no other option?

On a whim, the next evening, I uninstalled VPN, which I had installed over the summer to connect to the Case network remotely. Viola! It was working. So, yeah. Cisco VPN is not my friend. Apparently, a lot of people have incredibly strange problems with it. I just wish I'd tried uninstalling it a month ago!

Live Like Doc

2005-09-16T16:20:00.000-04:00

Anyone who had a class with Doc Oc knows just too well what a world-class guy he was. Unfortunately, he passed way this summer from a sudden heart attack. Case students can now remember Doc with Live Like Doc memorial bands. I think it's a nice gesture. Doc's memorial is coming up on Saturday, Oct. 8. You can register to attend online. It'll be in Amassa Stone Chapel, so seating will be limited.

Video Game Pianist

2005-09-16T15:51:00.000-04:00

I went to see the Video Game Pianist perform last night at the Rough Rider Room here at Case. It was an excellent show! I captured the whole thing on tape with my new-ish Sony DV Handycam DVR-HC20. Once I get it edited, I'll try to get it posted somewhere, possibly with as a Torrent file. You can see several other videos on Martin's website linked above. I'll try to encode this one in a higher quality format (maybe Xvid or MPEG-4). I might also extract just the audio from the recording as an MP3. This all as time permits, of course. If you want to help with editing and have a fast connection to grab the uncompressed DV files, let me know and we can work on it together.

This is also a good opportunity to plug the Freedman Center in KSL at Case. It's free to all Case students, staff and faculty - and they have everything you need to put together a mean multimedia presentation. It's almost as nice as owning your own Mac!

Life without a calendar...

2005-09-16T15:23:00.000-04:00

The last two weeks have been an unintentional experiment. Ever since coming to Case waaaay back in 2002, I've use Apple's calendaring program, iCal to plan out just about every day of my life. This is not just classes, assignment due dates, meetings and club events. No, I actually allot time for studying for each of my classes, completing homework and reading assignments, time to eat, time to go grocery shopping and numerous other things that most people wouldn't put in a calendar. It's also a very nice interface because I can drag and drop entries -- so if something takes shorter than expected, I can shrink down that entry's time and bump everything else up - it's very dynamic in that respect. This way, I actually get free time (with a free conscience!) from time to time.

Well, for the past two or so weeks, iCal has been crashing immediately after being launched. This resulted in deleted entries, duplicate calendars, blank entry titles, and numerous other annoying problems. So, I found myself not using it at all. I have been incredibly inefficient during this time. If I don't have all the things I need to do plotted out in great detail, I find myself wasting time because I think that I don't need to be doing anything. Then, when deadlines approach, I am not prepared and I go into panic mode. I'm not used to operating this way. So, I needed to do something about it.

I tried all the usual fixes for misbehaving Mac software - deleted the application's preferences, disabled 3rd party system extensions, and even rebuilt the calendar files by purging out all my old entries. Nothing did the trick. Until yesterday -- I discovered that the problem was related to Apple's online synching program, iSync. I used to sync via .Mac but I had some problems with data corruption and discontinued using it to sync between my desktop and the Campus Rep PowerBook. Anyway, the problem must have been more severe than I thought. I disabled all syncing via the iSync application (this in addition to already disabling it in the .Mac control panel - apparently two independent controls), and reset all sync data from the iSync preferences window. This finally did the trick! Now I can use iCal again.

This was a very abnormal experience for a long-time Mac user. Generally, Apple's software works wonderfully together... but I've had nothing but problems with iSync. Of course, I've had much worse experiences troubleshooting the Palm Desktop sync system - maybe syncing data is just an inherently difficult task. Whatever the case, it has cost me a lot of time and energy to get straightened out. But now -- I'm on the path to success with my trusty iCal up and running again!

Hello!

2005-09-11T19:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a picture of me taken recently by my friend Dan. Hello!

Bradley, September 2005

First Post - Woot!

2005-09-11T19:08:00.000-04:00

Hello! I'm going to start posting to this site in the future instead of my old webpage that's currently hosted on my computer, Brad Farnsworth on the Web. Hopefully this will work out well for me. If it's a lot easier to post, I might update more often. For now, I'm just getting this site in place and not really publicizing its existence. What do you think, should I switch to this format?