Universal Binary Keyserver Available

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

Sad Laptop

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

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

Three Great Birthdays

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

Multi-Touch Interaction Experiments

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

"21" Came and Went all too Quickly

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?

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!

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

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

Auto-Save, Purchases and Randomness

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!

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!!