A Weekend Trip

For those of you who don't know already, this past weekend I made a brief cameo in Indiana for about 48 hours before heading back to Texas to finish up my research position. That's right, for just a little sliver of time I was back in the Hoosier state.

This weekend was the celebration of my grandparent's 50th anniversary. I had originally thought I would be around for the party, since I didn't know I was going to be in Texas, but finding that out kind of threw a wrench into things. I put off figuring out what to do about it until recently, though, because I didn't think the REU would be willing to cover the charge of flying home (which is what I would have to do, to make it worth it.) Eventually, we worked things out to where I was able to fly in to Ft. Wayne for the weekend.

The plane ride was relatively uneventful, though a bit cramped. This was the first time I had ever flown by myself before, and also the first time I had ever had a layover (in Cincinnati), so I was slightly nervous and fearful that the process wouldn't go as smoothly as I was hoping it would. Fortunately, everything came off without a hitch, the only inconvenience being that I forgot where I packed my DS, and so I didn't have it for the entire trip up to Indiana. Oh well. That and a bit of a seat mix-up that shouldn't have involved me were all the troubles I encountered on my trip. All in all, not bad.

Once I got to Ft. Wayne, things were very rushed as I stayed at my grandparents house one night, stayed in a hotel the next, and in between I attended my grandparents party, where there were close to probably 200 people. They held the anniversary party in the basement of Anthony Wayne church, which was the church where my Dad used to be youth minister, and long before that my Grandpa was senior pastor. It was like a homecoming for them, getting to see all sorts of people they hadn't seen in many many years, but for a good portion of the party I found myself behind the punch bowl keeping cups filled. It wasn't a bad place to be really, since it gave me an excuse not to have to mingle. It was nice to see all sorts of people I hadn't seen for a while, but it got to be quite tiring after a while.

Anyway, nice trip there, nice trip back, it was a good way to spend a weekend. Now to finish up my Texas time.

Beginning of the End

This past week was interesting. I had a successful presentation, which was good, but then Dr. Makki announced that we needed to have a first draft of our final paper turned in by the end of the day on Friday. Of course, it was a somewhat lax requirement, because I think that often he doesn't remember these deadlines he sets. I still felt like that would be a great deadline and motivation to abide by, however, so I put together a rough draft of the paper by Friday. By Friday, a lot of our group were pretty burnt out and frustrated, but still felt like they had to continue to work on Friday night in order to get more done on the paper. Around 8pm, Justin and I felt like we should come and pull them away to do something else for a while, since they had been working for almost 12 hours at that point.

We decided that it would be kind of fun if we found some sort of LAN game we could all put on our laptops and play together. In the end, we decided that all five of us would have the most fun playing Starcraft; at least, that's what all our computers could handle. We lost track of time and played until about 1:30 in the morning, and a fun time was had by all. We had so much fun, in fact, that we decided to do the same thing on Saturday for the day. Instead of Starcraft, we decided that we wanted to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. So we went into the building where we work, and accessed a lab there that we had administrative rights to, and installed COD4. Since these machines were 2.6GHz Quad-cores, they had no trouble running the game, and we had a great afternoon playing a local LAN game of Call of Duty against each other.

Monday and Tuesday passed pretty uneventfully, but this morning we had to give a visiting professor a brief presentation over our projects. He is actually the Computer Science department head at Texas Tech University, and he was looking to find out more information about our experience because he was looking to apply for a computer science REU at Texas Tech. Actually, those presentations probably were more enlightening as to the real state of people's projects than any of the two presentations before this, because we were forced to summarize our project in our own words and very briefly, which is very tough thing to do if you don't have a firm grasp of the material.

This afternoon, a group of four of us went to the new Harry Potter movie, which was absolutely spectacular. It is as least the best of the Harry Potter movies since the second one, which makes it pretty darn good in my book. That was definitely a worthy way to spend an afternoon.

We're drawing near to the end of the program, and there's not much time left to get things wrapped up before I have to submit and present and then come back home. It's going to be here before any of us here know it, and I'm not sure I'm ready for it to be over.

Opinion: Google Chrome OS

Yesterday, Google announced that they have been working on Chrome OS, a Linux-based operating system centered around getting users up, running and on the internet as fast as possible. Judging from the name, Chrome OS will be built around the same ideas as the identically-named up-and-coming internet browser. Though everyone and their brother saw this move coming, the intertubes are still buzzing with the news, with much speculation as to the future impact of Chrome on Microsoft's death-grip on the operating system market share, on the relative user-unfriendliness of most Linux distributions, and on the way the world currently runs in general. Ironically enough, a friend was just talking about how ubiquitous Google has become in any application it chooses to design, and he said that "If Google designed an operating system, it would kill Microsoft". Well, I like to think I have a legitimate opinion on this issue. Let me try and answer a few questions that are being thrown around the web right now.
r that.

“Does this mean the end for Microsoft”? In short, no, not at all. First, Microsoft has its fingers in a lot of pies: productivity software, game consoles, internet applications, and DirectX. But I think even the Windows market share is safe, at least for now, and here's why:

1. Google has chosen to make Chrome a Linux-based architecture. No matter how user-friendly you make it, its still going to be a UNIX machine, not a DOS machine like most have been using for 20 years. Plus, there are going to be compatibility problems with graphics cards, sound cards, network cards, and more. Ubuntu has been out for years and still hasn't manage to patch up the compability problems, even with a dedicated base of modders out there working valiantly to try and fix them. Google's army might be paid, but its still going to take them a good long bit to sort out the problems. After all, Gmail was in beta for nearly five years; Chrome OS is not even on the Windows challenger horizon yet.
2. Google has stated that it will open-source the source code later this year. Now of course, I am all for open-source movement, but if Google has any chance of competing with Microsoft for any real part of the OS market, they have to start securing government contracts for OS rollout on a U.S. system, and there's no way that the DoD, who already have hacker/security problems up the wazoo, are going to agree to open-sourced OS's on their machines. Same for a lot of major U.S. companies: no matter how much security you stuff into that OS, no company who is trading millions of dollars through their computer is going to trust a machine running off a transparent kernel.
3. Chrome OS is going to be specifically for those who mostly utilize their computers for the internet access and perhaps some word processing. I know there is a good portion of people who do only this, but there is an equal number of people who want to do more than this, whether its gaming, video editing, database management, or software development, an OS whose main focus is embedding the internet into the OS and booting quickly is going to be lightwight and wholly insufficient for any of the pasttimes listed above. Windows has a stranglehold on gaming in particular, with most gaming on Linux machines restricted to running games through a Windows kernel emulation.

My conclusion is that for now Windows is safe. Chrome OS is unlikely to pose any sort of threat to Microsoft. As for the future, I see Chrome OS acting as a springboard to the design of a much larger, expansive OS that can challenge Windows and perhaps even be its successor.... but that's far in the future.

"What does this mean for the future of Linux"? I see two potential futures for Linux post-Chrome release, and there is a chance both could happen. With the amount of cash Google has to sink into this product, they could create a better Linux OS than any of the ones currently on the market. Potentially, this could do, many times over, what Ubuntu has already done; unite the Linux community behind one open-source OS that every can develop for. There might be some stragglers still playing around with their Fedora cores and BSD, but if Google includes much of what draws people to Linux in the first place (easy root access, mod-ability, package installation utilities, etc.) they could make a lot of converts.

Another potential possiblity would be that Chrome OS would win converts from Windows. Not a lot perhaps, but if Google does an especially good job with the web integration (and considering their history, I don't see why they wouldn't), they can expect to win quite a few people over, especially netbook owners frustrated with XP boot times. Even chipset developers who have a vested interest in the field are excited that Google is going to focus effort on Linux developement.

"How is this going to affect the way the world runs?" Again, in short, its not. I think it will definately effect the way Google develops applications; we're going to see a lot more Chrome-centric application appearing in the early part of 2010. I think it will also affect the way Microsoft develops its next OS after Windows 7, because Google is going to do some revolutionary stuff with embedded web that Microsoft will want in on. Looking long term, I think, again, that this may act as a spring-board for Google, giving them experience with OS development without going toe-to-toe with Microsoft, and hopefully a group of dedicated users who will be able to give them feedback on the good and bad of their first attempt. If all goes well, perhaps by 2012 Google will be ready to give Microsoft a run for its money - literally.

Slow Weekend

So, my bad for not getting around to making a post this weekend. It just wasn't something that was high on my priority list. Much much higher on that list were getting a significant amount of work done on my project and playing World of Goo.

This past week and weekend were fairly uneventful. We collectively decided to take the weekend of from doing anything like we have the past few weeks, and so we mostly lounged around and relaxed. We took the opportunity to watch a few movies, and as I stated before, I really got into the game World of Goo, which is a fantastic physics-based game that has you using "Goo balls" to construct bridges across treacherous spike-bottom valleys and towers to the sky (a la the picture above) in an effort to reach the end point and get as many free goo-balls as you can to that end point. It really is the best use for a physics engine I've seen in a while. It's an independently made game, too, which is fantastic to see. If you're interested, head to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Goo for more info, or you can download the game or a demo on Steam.

On Sunday, we decided that we would experience some real Texan cuisine and so we headed to what was supposedly the best BBQ place in Beaumont. It had a very modest appearance, both on the inside and the out, but the BBQ was absolutely fantastic, and highly recommended.
My work is now getting intense. Because it took a while for the Professor and I to come up with a viable research direction, I have only had about two weeks to pound out exactly what needs to happen in the implementation of my theory, and thus I have not yet worked out all the corner cases. Unfortunately, the midway presentation is coming up very soon, and the professor was hoping that we would have actual numerical results by then, so that we could focus on writing our paper for the last few weeks. I don't think is going to happen, but in the last two days of last week, the goal came sharply into focus (as far as what I needed to do to get there), I realized how much work I had to do, and I started working very hard at getting my stuff ready by next Monday. I'll continue to work hard, possibly even over this fourth of July weekend.

Last night (Monday night), the group of us decided that it would be fun to play some board games, but nobody had thought to bring any. So we went out and got Scattergories and Cranium, and had an absolute blast playing those two for about 3 hours.... we all lost track of time.
Ultimately, as I refine my project and I have more and more of a goal for each day in mind, and as I get to know my co-workers better and better, I increasingly enjoy the time I'm having here in Texas, not just in my free time but also in my work. It will be very sad when my time here draws to an end.

Houston Confusion, Pt. 2

As far as work goes, this week was pretty uneventful. Which would be unfortunate, if I hadn't had a spectacular weekend.
On Friday, we found this really seedy bowling alley in Beaumont that was also really cheap, and took about an hour and bowled our hearts out. It ended up being the same five of us hanging out all weekend that went to Houston last week. That was probably the most fun I've had bowling in quite a long time. After bowling, we all decided we were hungry yet again (because they feed us so early here!), and so we went to Chick-Fil-A, where I successfully spilled a peach milkshake all over the place. It was a very fun night.

On Saturday, we took another trip to Houston, to finish out the last of our CityPass tickets. We visited the Houston Health museum in the morning, which was enough entertainment for about an hour, then we went and ate lunch and headed to the Johnson Space Center. We spent the entire afternoon there, as there was a lot to do, such as watch educational movies, see the inside of the cockpit of a space shuttle, and take a tram tour of the actual base, complete with a visit to the current Mission Control room. We even got to see one of the actual Saturn V rockets that took men to the moon (in the picture above). Also, there was a special exhibit at the Space Center, about the films of George Lucas and featuring props from Star Wars and Indiana Jones, so that was interesting.

After going to the Space Center, we ate dinner then headed to the Houston Aquarium, which is actually open until 11. We were expecting a normal aquarium, but the Houston Aquarium is anything but. First, the Aquarium did an excellent job of presenting the exhibits, and showing some unusual animals, such as the Moray Eel, a giant octopus, and even rare white tigers. In addition to this, there is also a Restaurant and a Lounge within the Aquarium, and situated right outside is a perpetual carnival, complete with a carousel, a Ferris Wheel, live music, and carnival games, all affiliated with the Aquarium. It was all very enticing and a good way to get people to go to an Aquarium.

Houston Confusion

So, I'm starting out on my fourth week in and third post from Beaumont, TX. It is a beautiful area, and the weather is always beautiful, and the city is nice, but I have to say: I prefer Houston (skyline to the right). I mean, yes, the mess of roads that go through Houston seems to confuse my GPS more often than not, sending me in the wrong direction half the time. However, the third largest city in the U.S. seems to be a shining example of the success of the American economy in this dark economic time. I have been to quite a few different places in Houston and have not yet seen any slums or even any less than nice areas. Maybe I just haven't been to the right areas, but regardless, there are just way too many huge houses in downtown Houston.

So, as you might have guessed, I have been to Houston several times now. Last Saturday I went to Houston for the evening with a couple of friends from the research program with which I'm involved. We went to The Galleria, the fourth largest mall in the U.S., and it was spectacular. I was more impressed with this mall (its selection, cleanliness, and overall style) than I was with the Mall of America. There seemed to be a store for everything; there was even a Sony store, which I don't think I'd ever seen before. We also found a little coffee shop that was a bit off the beaten track, but it was very unique.

This Saturday we again went to Houston, this time with a more defined plan in mind. We managed to cram five people in my car (a decision later regretted by those in the backseat) and we made the hour trip to Houston. We bought a CityPass for Houston, which allowed us a nine-day window to see 6 different Houston attractions, such as the aquarium or Johnson space center. This Saturday we visited the Houston Zoo, which was good but not the best I've seen, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which had an impressive display on energy and energy sources, such as hydrogen, oil, natural gas, wind power, etc. Those two took up most of the afternoon, though we had to take a bit of a break to catch our breath after the zoo, since it was about 100°F outside, and we'd been walking for quite a while. In the evening, we went to the Alamo Drafthouse Theater, which was a Theater combined with a full-service restaurant, and had dinner while we watched Up (which is an excellent movie, by the way). After such a long day, we were all quite beat, and headed home. Even though it was evening, we went with the top down, because it was 97° outside when we left. Interestingly enough, it had dropped to 81° by the time we reached Beaumont; whether this was because we were out of the city, or because we went north slightly, I'm not sure.

Friday was Scott's birthday, so some of us took him out to play putt-putt and then out to Sonic for an evening semi-meal. The dining halls here are interesting, because lunch lasts from 11-1, but dinner only goes from 4:30-6, which means by the time 9'o'clock rolls around, some of us are hungry again, which explains the half-meal at Sonic. Looking back on it, it seems like a lame way to spend a birthday, but it was really a lot of fun.

I also had to give a presentation on Friday, giving a little background on my research subject and then my direction of research I am going to take and a projected timeline for the remaining weeks. Evidently it went fairly well, or so I was told by others.

Oh, and continuing in my line of thought about ways Texas is different from the Midwest: Whereas doing U-Turns is often frowned upon in many places in the Midwest, here in Texas they have devoted U-Turn lanes. For example, if you get off the highway on an exit, and you get to the intersection, there will be one lane to go straight, one lane to turn right, one to turn left, and then an entire lane devoted to pulling a highway U-Turn; it takes you right through to going the other direction on the road on the other side of the highway, from where you can get right back on the highway going the other way, with only a yield sign in your way, no stoplights. Also, on many non-highway roads, there are devoted U-turn turn lanes that cut into the median. They are specifically posted as "no-left-turn", so they only leave the option of a U-Turn.
Anyway, enough about that. Not much else to report, so... so long from Texas, for now.

P.S. I want to encourage you gamers (and non-gamers too!) out there to try the game Braid. It is a fantastic game that gives a whole new take on the 2-D side-scrolling adventure. The one-man development team took three years of his life to put this project together, and it is one of the best games I have ever played. It was a pure joy to play, much like Portal. It seems short, compared to the fairly large price tag, but it really was worth every penny. Braid can be downloaded for the PC through steam. Here's a Youtube link to the game trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtSKkyJgFM

Where are all the Yellow Roses?

It's my second full weekend here in Texas, and I'm inside, not enjoying the sunshine. To be fair, I took a book and sat outside for a half an hour and tried to read this morning, but after about a half hour i started to break out in a sweat, so I went back inside. I guess I can still enjoy the sunshine from inside, but I love being outside in this weather. Its interesting that they don't provide that many places to just sit outside around here.

While I'm on the subject of the weather around here, its a lot different. In Indiana, thunderstorms roll, rain thunder lighting and do their thing, and then sweep right back out again, and all in about 15 minutes, usually. Here in Texas, I haven't seen that happen. The skies get darker and darker, almost to the point where you think the sun is setting, and then you start to hear the thunder, and then the rain slowly starts, gets harder and harder, etc. It takes like 2 hours for the storm to roll in, and then another 3 for it to end and roll back out again. This has happened several times, so my impression is that that is the norm.

On other subjects: I was able to get a library card and check out some light reading from the library. This is an enormous relief, because I really have had way too much time on my hands some days. I also paid a reasonable amount for a gym membership here at the university. It's based on a per-day, so I hope that because I already paid for every day, I feel compelled to go because the day is already paid for. So... here's hoping.

As far as my research goes, I now have a direction. It turns out that I don't really have to come up with a new theory, just an inventive way to implement an idea he came up with, i.e. write code that performs the semantic caching the old way and his new way, and compare the two. So, shouldn't be too immensely tough, but enough of a challenge to where i won't get bored.

As for everything else, well, at this point there is nothing else. I got paid this week....yup, that's about it.

Summer starts with Texas

I can't believe it's been almost two years since I actually wrote anything on my blog. You would think I would have things to write about, but I guess not. In reality, my life has not changed that much. In the intervening summer, I did another stint at NSWC Crane, working as an engineering intern yet again. I also switched my major from Electrical Engineering to Computer Engineering; that's kind of a fine switch, and there's really only a difference once you get to some of the higher level courses. CompE will let me do more of what I want to do without all the EE classes getting in the way.
I guess the most significant thing to report is this: I am writing this blog post from Beaumont, Texas on the campus of Lamar University. At the moment, I find myself unable to fall asleep, but yet direly in need of sleep, and so I thought that perhaps piddling around facebook and writing a blog post would help calm my nerves enough to fall asleep.
But what am I doing in Texas, you might ask? (Or maybe you don't. Whatever.) The story is this: Earlier this spring I applied for and was accepted into a "Research Experience for Undergraduates" program sponsored by the National Science Foundation that was based out of the computer science department of Lamar University, in Beaumont, TX (about an hour east of Houston, 20 min. west of the Louisiana-Texas border, and half an hour from the Gulf Coast). I really had no idea what I would be doing until I arrived down here on the 24th of May. I actually brought a car down, thinking it might be useful (it is), and I braved a 16 hour drive from Bloomfield to Beaumont in order to get here.
There are 10 of us that were accepted into the program, and 7 of us are not from Lamar University. They put all 7 of us right next to each other in the LU dorms, which is really nice and has led to us becoming an even closer group than we might have. Most of us are from the midwest, with a few exceptions. Now, we are all mostly working on seperate research projects. However, the professor in charge of our program, Dr. Kami Makki, insisted that we be given at least a cursory introduction to every person's project, so that we had some level of understanding about others projects. Everyone has very interesting projects.
My research that I have been assigned delves into semantic caching and query processing in mobile environments. To put that in laymen's terms, I am looking at figuring out how to most effectively temporarily store data in your mobile devices, such as cell phones, that you have downloaded from the internet. The project itself deals with theoretical data in the form of rows from a database, such as a parts database, or an employee database. The part I am working with, semantic query processing, involves taking a request generated by the user "I want to see all employees from list a with a salary over $50k" and seeing if some, any, or all of the information requested can be retreived from temporary storage on the your cell phone, which would happen if you just accessed that same list. That way, the device doesn't have to connect to the internet for as long as it would otherwise.
I have also been able to get out and enjoy Texas and observe just how different this region is than what I am used to. I was able to take some time off on Saturday and cruise around exploring the area with a couple other people, and we even made it down to the Gulf of Mexico. Beaumont is not exactly the nicest town the the whole world, and it is clear that the city is past its prime. It seems to be an oil town thats running out of oil. All in all though, I am glad I took this offer, because I am getting to experience living somewhere else for a while. I am so thankful for this opportunity.
Right now, I'm getting pretty tired, and I can't think of anything else I forgot to post.