Sub Ubi

A friend and colleague from Olin is starting her epic drive from Boston to Seattle soon, and will be stopping here in NE Ohio for a break. Having not lived here for some time, I needed to find a place that we could have some tasty treats before sending her on her way. So, I did a Google search for “restaurants strongsville ohio.”

This turned up a list of restaurants on some page or another; I naturally clicked on The Brew Kettle, simply because I couldn’t believe that there was a brew pub in Strongsville. It just didn’t jive with my view of the place. I mean, Strongsville is overrun by chains and suburban sprawl, not tasty brewpubs, right?

The Brew Kettle’s decor. Clean, and with a clear theme.

Wrong. Christian, Carrie, and I went there on Friday to check it out. (Dr. Jacobsen is visiting for the month while we do some Transterpreter hacking; more on that in a later post.) We drove over, and the outside of the restaurant is nothing special; it’s in a little strip with a bakery outlet and a dentist’s office. Inside, the decor was clean. The beer list on a large chalkboard was reasonably impressive, but we started by requesting a taster of their own brews.

The food was great. Christian and I split the “Backyard Sampler,” which gave us a 1/4 rack of ribs, some BBQ wings, and some pulled pork. Everything showed signs of having been prepared fresh, and prepared well. The pulled pork, for example, was nicely done, with their own seasonings; likewise, the wings were real chicken wings, and the sauce used in all cases was their own. The fries were good, too.

The thing that makes the Brew Kettle special, though, is that they will let you brew your own beer. Currently, they’re booked until March 2009, but we got very lucky. I inquired if they might have any cancellations, and they said “no”. However, a half-hour later, someone stopped by our table and said that they have an opening right now if we’re still interested in brewing. Apparently, they were already 30 minutes into a brewing slot, weren’t able to get anyone off the top of their cancellation list.

So, we said yes!

Christian adding the flavor hops half-way through the brewing process.

The brewing process took around 2.5 hours; we opted to produce an IPA, as we’re reasonably fond of hoppy beers around here. The recipe we were given had us using American Cascade hops for each stage in our brewing process; we were excited to be using whole-leaf hops as opposed to some compressed, pelletized form. (Not that we know the difference, but they were fun to work with.) In the future, we’ll have to do some research and experimentation. My primary goal will likely be to strive to recreate the glory that is a good pint of Incubus. Or Skrimshander. Or, really, anything Tonie brews at Hopdeamon Brewery, but sadly does not export.

The Brew Kettle takes care of fermenting, and in two weeks, we get to come back for bottling and labeling. As it turns out, we get to design our own label! Naturally, it will involve the Transterpreter, somehow.

I forgot that there are entire weblogs dedicated to ripping old, out-of-print LPs.

That said, I was amazed by what happens when you order pizza online:

Dominoes has a live page that, as you watch, it updates with the status of your pizza. Now, why did we order pizza? Because we have reduced our store of food at home to the bare minimum as we prepare to leave. That, and we failed to buy fresh vegetables today before the store closed. So, we had nothing in the fridge.

Again, I’m amazed by technology. I can order a pizza online, and have live updates in my browser. Crazy.

I’m easily amused lately. It must be the stress of the move. And I’m posting a lot of random poo.

I have no idea what I’m doing with my camera.

Robin points out that I should put the thing on P, ISO 100, and go outside and learn how to compose photos. I’ll get around to this. For the moment, I’ve had the camera for about two days, and I’ve had limited opportunity to use it. I did take it to dinner last night; a bunch (like, twenty) of Olin students gathered for dinner at Vinnie T’s, and I joined. It was tasty, and it was fun to see so many people I knew.

What amazed me about shooting at 8MP RAW was what could be done after the picture was taken. Vinnie T’s was very orange. Everything had a yellow/orange/red cast to it.

Last night, I downloaded a beta of Adobe’s Lightroom 2.0. This is kinda like iPhoto on steroids. The above picture was taken by Nik while he was poking around with the camera; nothing he did on the shot could have compensated for the lighting in the restaurant. (At least, I don’t think you can easily compensate for that kind of lighting at the moment that you want to take the picture.)

After playing with the hue, saturation, and luminosity across the entire color space, I came up with something vaguely human looking:

To me, this kind of technology is freaking magic. Of course, I have no idea what I’m actually doing. I mean, I have a rough understanding of color theory, and can make some sense of what the color curves in Lightroom mean, but mostly, I’m just looking at the photo, looking at the sliders, and moving them to reflect where I think I want that particular color to “go.” I assume someone who really knows what they’re doing could look at the “before” picture and see a path through the color space to a more natural coloration—but I don’t have that ability at this point.

Back to packing.

Tree sweater.

Not crazy. Not awesome. Crazyawesome.

I’ve had a marvelous year at Olin College. And this week, that year is coming to a close. Finals are over, and only EXPO and graduation remain.

Last week, my students threw at surprise going away party for me. By “surprise,” I mean “I had no idea it was coming.” By “my students,” I guess I mean “all the students at Olin I’ve interacted with in some significant way.” They came from Software Design in the fall, to HFID and Robotics in the spring, to SCOPE and independent research and projects… and even just a few who don’t fall into any particular category at all. For the time being, the blog’s header is a slightly larger version of our group photo:

This was a wonderful, wonderful surprise. They baked cakes (absolutely amazingly tasty), and all signed a huge card. The front of the card read “You’ve been an amazing teacher, mentor, and friend to all of us.” As teaching awards go, I think it counts as one of the best. I will say, however, that I had some incredible material to work with; every one of my students made my first year as a full-time faculty member an absolutely joy. These people were the reasons I wanted to go to work every day.

Thank you.

You know who you are…

Last Saturday, I ran with the Olin track team in the Jim Sheehan Memorial Track and Field Invitational at Fitsburg State College. I ran a 6:47, which was about 30 seconds faster than my time trial the Wednesday before the meet. I was surprised at the time, and all of us wondered if they had forgotten one of my laps.

Today, we ran in in the Northeastern Solomon Husky Invitational which was just down the road from Olin. The week before I went out fast, and finished weak. Today, my primary goal was to pace myself better in the first two laps and finish the race strong. As it turned out, I did just that: I was able to stride out and finish hard in the last lap, which is what I wanted. As a result, I managed a 6:38. Yes, I was almost two full minutes slower than all of the other runners… I even ran part of my race in the second lane just so they could blow by me.

(Apparently, I now have an overview page that tracks my performance as an athlete at meets or something… however, I don’t think we have any more meets this year…)

Overall, I’m incredibly pleased. I bought a pair of good running shoes back in October, and didn’t really do that much running during the autumn. In January, I committed to running with the track team a few times a week, and managed that pretty consistently. As a result, I’ve gotten myself into good enough shape that I could go out and compete in a 1500m race! Well, compete might be a bit too strong a word… but I went out on a track, took off running with the gun, and did pretty well for a guy who never really was much of a runner.

Interestingly, the loop I depicted in that blog post from October is the loop I ran this Wednesday. I ran it at near competition pace, and other than a 20 second break, I ran the whole thing at pace. Considering that, in October, I could barely shuffle that 2 mile distance… I’m pretty damn impressed.

BUT! Not as impressed as I am with Phillip “CRaZyMan!” Chung, who is a first-year student at Olin College. He ran (get this) the 10,000m, the 3,000m steeplechase, and the 5000m today… all in the same meet. The first event of the day was the 10K, which was immediately followed by the 3K steeplechase. I’m not kidding here: he finished the 10K, jogged over to the start of the steeplechase, stretched for a minute, and they started the race. It was the first time he had run the steeplechase. Later in the meet, he asked for permission to run the 5K (he hadn’t been registered in advance), and the meet official decided that anyone who ran the 10K and steeplechase should be allowed to run the 5K if they wanted to.

Absolutely crazy.

I may write a followup post about the meet; I will say it was certainly a lot of fun, and I had an excellent time just being outside, enjoying the weather, and cheering teammates on. It… well, it felt right. I think I always enjoyed track and field, and it was great to be part of a team again. Perhaps that’s just one more tick mark in the column labeled “Why Olin College is special.”

I was trolling through YouTube, and found a few fun videos.

Here’s one of the Gas House Gang and a women’s quartet doing the 8-part barbershop arrangement of Lida Rose. The video quality isn’t so good, and it isn’t a perfect performance, but it’s fun to hear it as a 2×4x arrangement. (Ah. Here’s a higher-quality version with the women’s quartet Showtime.)

In the realm of barbershop comedy is 50 champs to get Osama. You have to know a fair bit about the barbershop community to find this funny.

The Acoustix was a trend-setting quartet; I believe two of the four were classically trained and sang with the Dallas opera (although that’s based on old memory cells). Tonight, Tonight is a marvelous arrangement, with the melody passing through all four voices, and the tag (or ending) is one of the more mind-bending chord progressions I’ve encountered in a tag. An interesting video is this one of the Acoustix jamming in an airport tram-car…

I also wandered through some videos of Rockapella… for example, their jam on Under the Boardwalk with True Image is fun, and Zombie Jamboree in concert is also cute. I think this came from a concert somewhere in Pennsylvania… their rendition of Tempted by Squeeze. (And, for comparison, the original.)

Which might as well drag me all the way back to collegiate a cappella. Here’s the UNC Achordants doing Wayward Son, which they’ve really done a nice job with. They also do a nice job with MacPhearson’s Rant, if that’s what the song is actually called…

Well. Firefox crashed. Who knew.

So, no, we don’t have TV. And I don’t usually spend an evening poking around YouTube. But it’s fun being able to wander around the world of a cappella music with no particular direction in mind, and enjoy the music found along the way.

As seen here. Students left to their own devices on spring break are a funny bunch.

Jon and Carl have really pulled out all the stops on this one. It could make you weep it’s so beautiful. What you see here is a screenshot of the typical jEdit interface. We use jEdit because it is open source, lightweight, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux without too much fuss. The code in the window is actually a near-copy of the original Surveyor firmware, translated into occam-pi. (Click on the images to see big versions…)

The first thing we need to do is fire up the occPlug. This is our plugin for compiling and running occam programs on a number of different platforms. Currently, the Windows release supports the desktop, the Mindstorms RCX, and the Surveyor SRV-1.

Once the occPlug is started, we can hit the compile button, and as you can see, our code is compiled for the Surveyor SRV-1 target. This isn’t the real magic, though…

When I run this code after compiling it, it is uploaded to the Surveyor and kicked off. Note that this is how all user programs are treated; we’ve turned what used to be the only firmware on the Surveyor into just another program. This is important, because it means it is easy for users to extend the default firmware (so to speak) to work with existing tools on the market, as well as incorporate their own algorithms for processing images, or navigation, and so on.

When I hit run, I get connected up to the Surveyor automatically. You see that “Command” area down below? I can type messages in and send them to my SRV-1 with no fuss whatsoever. Type, hit return (or the “Send” button), and my characters are whisked away into the aether through the magic of 802.11g. One of the commands I can send is the I command (meaning, I typed the letter I and hit return). Why “I”? I don’t know; we’d have to ask Howard. The important thing is that the I command sends me an image. And Jon and Carl have done a wonderful job here; when the terminal catches the header for the JPEG-compressed image coming back, it opens up an image pane, and displays what the Surveyor sees. We don’t have to do anything!

Here, I’ve sent the a command followed by I, and the image pane automatically resizes. Because the a command is interpreted to mean to set the image size to 160 x 128, I get a smaller image back. I then sent an A followed by an I…

And you can’t tell exactly, but that’s a really big picture of my kitchen floor in the background. It took a little longer to send than the tiny image, but we love those big pictures for their general awesomeness. The last thing I did was dial the size of the image back, and fired up my laser cannons. Those things are awesome.

How long does it take to compile that firmware? Let me see… I’m running Windows as a VMWare virtual machine on my MacBook Amateur (2×2GHz, 2GB RAM), and it takes roughly “one Mississippi.” How long does it take to upload the program? About as long. That alone has made developing on the Surveyor under occam-pi an absolute joy: no JTAG, no long compilation, just edit, compile, run, explore, tweak, try again… nice and easy.

Now that things are falling into place, we can start doing some very cool things, I believe. Earlier today, I was exploring the YUV colorspace, and wondering how hard it was to see an orange. Well, my first attempt was pretty lame:

As you can see, I’m highlighting pixels that I believe should be orange-colored. Oops. Well, given that I was squinting at a two-dimensional YUV colorspace plot, it wasn’t a bad guestimate. Note that I apparently have a better orange detector than a baseball detector:

Don’t read too much into this, though. I mean, I was mostly figuring out what Carl and Jon had done, and taking the occasional screenshot.

So, what’s the punchline? Jon and Carl have assembled an excellent IDE for exploring occam-pi and robotics on the Surveyor SRV-1. We’re going to be releasing this to students this weekend, and it goes live for laboratories in the Robotics class at Olin on Monday. We’re using the Surveyor to explore challenges of vision-based navigation in conjunction with simple state machines and behavior engines. What’s more, they’ll be learning how to architect these solutions in parallel-safe ways from day one. I think this laboratory (this is only one 2-week lab of four) is part of what makes Olin’s robotics class completely unique in the world today.

And yeah, I’m pretty jazzed that the software that we’ve all worked on for so long is being put to use for the purposes it was intended. That, really, is the awesome part.

Update: Does it work over the wireless? Yes. This is part of what we like about the Blackfin Surveyor—no wires. You write your code, hit compile, hit run, and the code goes through the air to your robot. You can then talk back and forth completely over the WiFi. And to answer the second qusetion: does it work on the Mac?

You tell me? Because everything in the IDE is WiFi and Java, there’s no real platform dependency. We’ve done a Windows build that will be distributed to Olin students momentarily, and want to discover any obvious problems. Once we’ve done that, we’ll do Mac and Linux builds. Doing releases is not a process that we’ve sufficiently streamlined—something that perhaps needs to be improved.

Regardless, yes, the Mac is a full-peer in this enterprise. Given that the Transterpreter was written entirely on Macs, we’re happy to support it.

(That’s a shot from Jon’s Surveyor, which lives in England and gets nice views out over Canterbury.)