Sub Ubi

Sunday I take off for San Fran, and am pretty psyched. Christian, Jon, and I are heading to the AAAI Spring Symposium to talk robotics and concurrency with a bunch of other robotically-minded people; that fills our time between Sunday and Wednesday. Thursday, we’ll be giving a Google TechTalk, which should be very fun—at least, we’re planning on enjoying the talk immensely. Then, we’re thinking (but aren’t committed) to doing a little bit of light camping, as this time of year can be soooo nice in the Bay area.

We don’t have housing nailed down for Palo Alto Sunday/Monday/Tuesday, but I think we might just grab a hotel near Stanford. It will be a bit pricey, but otherwise, we’re dealing with cars, and parking, and commuting, and… that’s not so much fun. We’ll see.

I’ve touched base with a few friends in the area (dbort and Tzu), but I’m wondering if there’s anyone I missed. Is there anyone who reads this blog who is in the Bay area I should try and say ‘hi’ to? Is there anyone who reads this blog who knows anyone in the Bay area I should say ‘hi’ to? (I think that’s one degree of separation; more degrees of separation than that, and I suspect I only want to know them if they’re going to give me money for my ideas on fixing email, or if they want to give us a place to sleep.)

This is very, very exciting. I mean… very. Exciting. Very.

OK, so I just like talking about and playing with robots. What can I say?

I recently started using Yojimbo for managing bookmarks, PDFs, and other things that I find around the net. It seemed like a good choice of tool for the quick archival of websites and data that I’d like to be able to find later.

Unfortunately, my Yojimbo database has already grown to 50MB in size. Now, this is not such a problem—I have a 160GB disk in my MacBook. I could have 3000 of those files on my hard drive, and still have space for… well, a few things. However, my commitment to backup makes me realize that 50MB is really quite substantial when your backups run over a slow broadband connection. By “quite substantial,” I mean it takes 30 minutes and costs 1 US cent.

The problem is, if I add one bookmark to Yojimbo on a given day, it will force the upload of the entire database. This means that adding one bookmark requires me to copy 50MB to Amazon’s servers, and they’ll charge me a penny. If I add one bookmark a day, it will cost me roughly $4 in upload costs over the year (assuming the database doesn’t grow substantially in size, which is a bad assumption).

I dropped a note to Bare Bones Software to see if they would consider storing data in a different way to accommodate this kind of backup pattern. More likely, I’ll just have to create a weekly backup schedule for things like the Yojimbo DB, and accept that if something happens to my machine, I’ll loose a few days worth of data ninjaing.

Poul and I are beating on our ITiCSE paper, which is due on the 15th at 5PM… in Hawaii.

What does that mean?

It means… it’s due Tuesday!

Perhaps we should have let “Intelligent Design” fly by… now, it’s just a frontal assault on science carried out by the USGS.

I wonder when DARPA, DOE, and NSF funded work will fall under similar rules?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, who study everything from caribou mating to global warming, subjecting them to controls on research that might go against official policy.

New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The question is, how many members of the Transterpreter team keep an eye on this weblog?

There are some tips on presentations over at Creating Passionate Users from Kathy Sierra that actually capture a superset of what I think I (subconsciously) strive for in my own presentations. While a keynote is different than a paper presentation at a conference, I think there’s no reason why a good presentation of a paper (or lecture, or …) shouldn’t be entertaining and memorable.

Why?

Because if it isn’t memorable… you won’t be remembered.

While I’m at it, I thought I’d mention S5; all of our presentations, from this point forward, should be S5 presentations. In particular, they are standards based, easy to maintain, easy to distribute (everyone has a web browser), and easy to incorporate into our website (they’re HTML/CSS). No Powerpoint/Keynote/OpenOffice/LaTeX problems, no PDF conversion woes, etc.

I have a small hardware budget. So, I spent some of it.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT

First, a LEGO Mindstorms NXT has arrived. This small platform provides sensor inputs, actuators, and a Bluetooth radio in a lickable plastic shell. It’s excellent for experimenting with, and will become a new flagship environment for the Transterpreter. Yes, it is a toy. But it is an incredibly useful toy in terms of the research that I’m interested in (doing lots of things, safely, apparently at the same time, on small devices). Having robust, well supported hardware to work with is an important part of that work.

Irex Iliad

Second, I ordered an Irex Iliad. This is a light (400g) eInk device, sized to an A5 piece of paper, with 1024×768 resolution. I stole a picture or two from here to give you a sense for what it looks like:

The second picture is to demonstrate that the device can be drawn on. My understanding is that the Iliad will support the annotation of documents with a touch-sensitive stylus. My assumption is that I’ll eventually be able to read PDFs on the reader, annotate them with the stylus, and export the documents again with those annotations intact. This way, I can carry my entire library of research articles (in PDF format) on a compact flash card, and have them always available, along with any notes I choose to make.

Either way, I’m very excited about the reader. So many of the reasons I carry a laptop can be subsumed by an ebook reader capable of handling plain text, HTML, and PDF. “To do” lists, calendars (printed to PDF), RSS feeds (rendered to XHTML or PDF), and more can all be carried around for easy reference, as well as a huge library of work/research related reading material. Taking things further, I can imagine that my teaching workflow can be greatly improved if I’m able to collect electronic documents from students (code, essays), comment on them electronically using the Iliad, and then ship back the annotated document. Portable, easy, and environmentally friendly!

Who knows… maybe the Transterpreter will run on the Iliad as well…

Friday, July 14th, 2006, I defended my thesis “Exploring Novice Compilation Behaviour in BlueJ”. Pending the submission of minor corrections, I will have completed the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.

In other words, I passed, and can now say “Why, yes, I’m a doctor” when people ask the right question.

Today, I played Katamari Damacy.

If you’ve not heard much from this quarter, its because I’ve been keeping busy.

First, I’m in Portugal, at the windy, south-western most point in Europe.

I actually spent more time jogging here than sunning and relaxing…

Carrie nearly blew away from the end of the world!

Most of my last few weeks has been spent bootstrapping 42. You can find out more about that on the newly revamped Transterpreter site. We’ll have a complete source download shortly. (It turns out I had broken the build in the trial release we did… mercy.)

Back to Canterbury tomorrow.

For those interested in computer science education research (generally) and novice compilation behavior (specifically), I’ve placed a PDF of my dissertation (as it will be submitted for examination) online. It is titled An exploration of novice compilation behaviour in BlueJ. This version will eventually be replaced with the final, defended-and-approved version, which I expect will also include acknowledgments.

I’m off to Scotland for a week, and no, it isn’t for holiday time. If you want to reach me, I recommend using Gmail or SMS.

I received my dissertation back from my supervisor Friday. If I wasn’t heading out to Denmark tomorrow, I’d submit on Monday. As it stands, barring disaster, I will submit my dissertation in six days; Christian and I will give our talk, the workshop, I’ll return, make the recommended edits, and I’m done.

Well, done-but-not-done, as there is still the small matter of the defense.

But still. Six… days…