I realized just now that I have a lot to blog about it, and I haven’t written anything in a while. But I don’t have a lot of time right now though! I have a 6-10 page, single-spaced LaTeX project proposal due tomorrow for 6.142 tomorrow, as well as a 6.041 pset due tomorrow, of which I have done very little so far. Such is MIT!

Here are some blog entries I’ll write  soon:

• Computer adventures – first steps in putting my server, electron-monkey, on my wall (and having it still work!)
• Computer adventures – getting a free laptop, and trying (unsuccessfully) to fix the keyboard
• Walking around Boston (the bridge loop) – took some neat pictures
• Pictures of Head of the Charles, during the snow…!
• Doing fun stuff, like going to Next Formal

Cheers!

Some random thoughts:

• A lot can change in a week
• Catching the flu sucks
• Cheerios are tasty, and so is coconut cake

What makes us happy?

Is it always striving to do better, no matter how “good” we are now? Is it finding new things to do or meeting new friends? Do we have the right to be happy when we know that other people around the world are suffering? If we cured cancer and ended poverty, would we finally be happy? Or is happiness something internal to ourselves – a sort of feeling or pride in one’s hard work ethic? The concept of constant betterment, always trying to make ourselves better in every way. Is it this quest for perfection that brings us joy?

I don’t think that this makes us happy. Continual self-improvement necessarily implies finding fault with oneself, in order to know which direction to travel in to do better. And there will always be fault; no one can ever become perfect. So, those who strive to become perfect will always be focusing on the negative, only seeing how they can do better instead of what they have now. This does not sound happy; it sounds depressing. I think that happiness is quite the opposite of striving for continual self-improvement; it is contentment and appreciation for what one already has. If we forget our aspirations and desires for a moment and take a step back from it all, we’ll realize that we have it pretty damn good. And that’s something to be happy about.

Hey everyone! Well, it’s been over one month since my family cruise to Bermuda, but I’ve finally got around to uploading my pictures. Between my camera and my parent’s cameras, we took over 800 photos! I’ll spare you the agony (and spare the scripts.mit.edu webserver the space) and only show you some of my favorite pictures.

Here are the pictures!

Leaving the port of Boston. Can almost see MIT… if it weren’t for those tall buildings!

Inside the ship, in one of the main dining rooms. Our ship is the “Norwegian Spirit”

On nom nom nom nom…

Circling around Bermuda as we arrive on Sunday morning

Elbow beach – nice and sunny!

Small cars and mopeds were everywhere on the island. Awesome!

The view of the Dockyard from the ship

A beautiful sunset, also from the ship

Check out those sunset-colored crepuscular rays!

A long exposure view of the town by the dockyard, at dusk. One of my favorite pics

A glass bottom boat! These things are pretty awesome. We went on one, and some of the pics are below. The bottom of the boat is made of glass, allowing passengers to look underneath and see coral reefs, fish, and ship wrecks. Floodlights mounted on the underside also allow for a great view at night. These boats are designed to operate in very shallow waters (the boat doesn’t penetrate very deep vertically down into the water), so it can go over coral reefs. Quality engineering!

Getting onto the glass bottom boat, right before dusk.

As the captain put it, “Welcome aboard, everyone! Part of our journey tonight will take us within the Bermuda triangle. Inexplicable anomalies have happened here as recently as several years ago. We’ll be sailing in dangerously shallow waters, where other boats have been destroyed. Also, it’s night time. Also, the bottom of this boat is made of glass, not steel. Sounds like a great idea, no?”

Another great sunset, this time from aboard the glass bottom boat

Looking through the glass! Check out some of that coral. The big black square is a floodlight.

Another glass-bottom boat; they all tend to circulate around the same area. In this case, we’re all checking out an old ship wreck called the Vixen.

We survived!

A lot of houses in Bermuda are painted pastel colors

The town of Georgetown, which has a reputation of being very colonial

British people are so stylish!

When we returned to our stateroom, we were greeted by a friendly towel monkey!

The grand centrum area on the cruise ship. Nice grand piano back there!

The pool deck

The bridge! Lots of cool measurement and navigation equipment in there. At one point, there was a rather extreme fog storm. You couldn’t see out those huge glass windows at all; it was completely white that day! Perhaps it was a storm from the Bermuda triangle, coming to eat us…

A clock in our room. Here’s a fun little science experiment! This is a clock we took with us from home, where it kept perfect time. We noticed however that when plugged in aboard the ship, the clock would consistently gain a few minutes of time each day. Strange, huh? Nope, we weren’t even traveling at relativistic speeds either. An explanation for this is that old digital clocks operate by counting the peaks in AC current, which is supposed to be standardized at 60 Hz. So every 60 cycles, the clock adds one second to the current time; every 3600 cycles the clock adds one minute, etc. Since our clock was gaining time however, that means that ship’s electrical generators systems aren’t operating at exactly 60 Hz; it’s a little bit higher! I measured how far off the clock went (using my watch, which is hopefully accurate), and measured that the ship’s AC runs at 60.148 +/- 0.003 Hz ftw. A bit too fast!

More on nom nom later on that night. There was plenty of this going on throughout the cruise I might add; I just refrained from taking pictures of absolutely everything I ate

A long exposure of the sea, taken at night

The ship’s main deck, on the last day before coming back to Boston.

Overall it was a great trip! We had a fun time, and luckily we didn’t even die in the Bermuda triangle. Cheers!

…or, at least I was on a boat. My family and I just got back from a fun summer vacation! We took a cruise from Boston to Bermuda, and just got back yesterday. We took a plethora of pictures, and I’ll post the best ones soon!

Here are some thoughts for the next school year:

• Linux kernels are cool. Why not have a Linux kernel-building party?
• Typically, I have little free time during the school year because of all of my classes, and lots of free time during the summer. Why not even it out a bit? Lately I’ve been trying to pre-learn as much as I can for some of the classes I’ll be taking next semester through MIT’s OCW (open courseware; MIT puts lecture notes/course materials for a number of courses online). That way, maybe I’ll have more free time next year!

NASA has a really cool website, the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Most of the pictures are absolutely amazing; I have the site in my bookmark toolbar for quick access. I’d highly recommend it!

What have I been doing in my free time this summer? Being a code monkey! Yes, perhaps I’ve been failing quite spectacularly at staying away from my computer, like I mentioned in my last post. Oh well… I have been doing other non-computer stuff, too! Like biking more than I have in my life (16+ miles one day last week).

About a week ago I randomly remembered hearing a cool story about Google Darwinistically selecting the nerdiest and most passionate engineers to hire. Googling around, I found that the company put up a billboard that said “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com”. That’s all the billboard said; no reference whatsoever to google:

Most driver-by’s probably didn’t think twice about the sign. However, it turned out that, once solving the challenge and going to that website, there was a similar puzzle that lead to another website, which in turn was a Google hiring page that encouraged anyone brave, courageous, and geeky enough to find it to submit his/her resume to Google. Awesome sauce!

Having nothing better to do in my copious amounts of free time this summer, I decided to give it a shot and see if I could solve it. This turned out to be quite a fun problem, and in the process I ended up brushing up on my 6.042 and 6.006 from last year. Getting mad digits of e was easy thanks to the internet, and checking for primes wasn’t too bad either with the help of a good old Mathematician buddy, Fermat. Fermat’s primality test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat_primality_test) is a relatively simple probablistic algorithm (compared at least to some other algorithms) that can tell if you a number is probably prime without actually factoring it. Pretty sweet, huh! It uses a lot of modular multiplication, which can be computed efficiently with some tricks from 6.042 and 6.006. My code wasn’t too long (34 lines), and it ran nice and fast, too. Anyways, it turns out the answer is http://7427466391.com, which unfortunately doesn’t work anymore. But, it was still fun finding the answer!

That was my code monkey story of the day. More lately, a friend from high school CL introduced me to a fun, Scrabble-like card game called Quiddler:

http://www.setgame.com/quiddler/puzzle_frame.htm

For such a simple game, there’s actually quite a bit of strategy that one can employ. And it’s computationally intensive, great for a computer AI! I’ve started coding a Quiddler engine, and hopefully I’ll finish it someday and put it on the internet so people can play against it. That would be fun!

I’ve been awe-inspired for as long as I can remember with things that can fly. I was thinking about perhaps building some sort of model RC aircraft this summer because I think it would be really cool. As I googled around, I found this amazing video. A guy from Canada constructed a model RC airplane with a built-in wireless video camera that can move left/right and up/down. The best part, however, is that this camera motion is controlled by a gyroscope mounted to the pilot’s visor; So when the pilot moves his/her head up, the camera moves up as well, etc. It feels like you’re in the plane, check it out:

I would love to build something like this, but it might be difficult for these reasons:

• It’s probably very expensive. RC planes alone aren’t particularly cheap, and a wireless, color, high resolution radio camera almost certainly isn’t cheap!
• The radio video range might not be that great, so that you could lose video (or worse, control of the aircraft) if you fly it too far away. So, you can’t fly long-range missions with the plane

I’ve been trying to think of ways to solve these problems (at least the radio issue). I have an interesting idea; instead of using radio controls to fly the plane, it would be cool to consider leveraging our pre-existing internet and cell-phone network infrastructure. In other words, if we could beam control signals and retrieve video from the plane over the cell-phone network, a plane could fly for much farther. In fact, assuming the plane doesn’t fly into any drop-out zones (which would probably be less of an issue since plane’s are high in the area above obstacles anyways), the plane could potentially go ad infinitum (or at least until the batteries run out )!

Implementing this could be tricky, however. Cell-phones are not designed to transmit arbitrary data (such as flight commands and video data) over the network; they’re designed for low-bandwidth, compressed audio. Hacking a cell phone to get this to work would be tricky, and it may not even be possible due to bandwidth limitations since video typically takes up a lot of space. Another idea I thought of however, would be to make use of relatively newer technologies, such as 3G. First of all, 3G purports to have a much higher bandwidth than a regular cellphone, making the possibility of transmitting video possible. And cellphone carriers let cellphone’s connect to the internet with 3G. Some newer netbooks come equipped with 3G, and can communicate over 3G networks to the internet (requiring a service plan, of course) anywhere there is a cellphone tower nearby.

It would be awesome to build this! Here’s a system architecture for what I’m thinking:

Basically in a nutshell, a human “pilot” sits at the computer, who sends flight commands and views the flight video (in real time). These commands and video travel over the internet, targeting a netbook mounted on the plane. The netbook can control the plane, and is also connected to a video camera (some netbooks even have webcams built in). Both the computer control station and the netbook controlling the plane are in constant communication with a computer server. The computer control station talks to the server via the internet; the netbook talks to the server via some sort of high-speed cellphone network, such as 3G, which in turn acts as a gateway to the internet.

Some advantages to this design:

• Allows the plane to fly just about anywhere, because cell phone coverage is widespread
• Allows for long-distance flights
• Uses pre-existing infrastructure (internet, cellphone towers) instead of relying on ad-hoc RF communication
• Since the netbook is a computer, it is completely programmable. It runs Windows or Linux. So, you can get it to do basically whatever you want, and to transmit whatever data you want.
  • A second board can be connected via serial or USB to the netbook, and this board can actuate motors on the plane (such as aeilerons, etc.) to control the flight. Complete “fly by wire”
  • Since the netbook is completley programmable, it can be made to deal with certain error conditions. For example, what happens if the wireless signal disappears? The plane can have an automated program to turn around or something, so that way  it can get back in range. Very basic flight control can be implemented into the netbook
  • Using a computer instead of a cellphone is a better infrastructure choice, and makes making changes down the road much easier.
• Power is not too much of an issue, since netbooks have built-in batteries, and USB buses are powered from this
• Many netbooks already have built-in 3G cards and webcams for recording video
• No complicated cell phone hacking required
• It’s cool!

Some disadvantages to this design:

• Although it isn’t prohibitively expensive, it isn’t cheap either. At about the time of this writing, a cheap netbook with a 2 year service plan goes for about $200-$250
• It involves better hardware than a simple RF receiver. So if something does go wrong and the plane crashes, you’ve lost more than you would have without such a system
• Possible wireless dead-zones. Although this may not be as much of an issue, since there are less obstacles and a better line-of-sight to cellphone towers when flying high up in the air
• Wireless bandwidth supposedly goes down with increasing speeds. Hopefully it would still be okay in a fast-moving plane; this would need to be researched.

I think it would be awesome to build this! Since it’s complicated, multi-disciplinary, and could be expensive , it would be best as a team project in my opinion (especially when the team gets external funding!). Hmm… perhaps I should suggest this as a Next-Make project for next year?

Any thoughts on the design, or anything else for that matter?

I need stuff to do during my free time this summer. Here are some things that I think it would cool/fun to do. I’m writing this list partly for myself, so I don’t forget

• Build something cool. One idea I have it to put an electric motor on my bicycle (my old, small one, so that way I don’t accidentally destroy my new bicycle ). On a side note, I took my old bike apart a few days ago to try and get a better understanding of the details of how it worked. And surprisingly enough, I was able to put it back together (and it still works)!
• Try and develop perfect pitch, like my friend WS
• Become more familiar with Blender3D, an amazing open-source 3D animation and post-production program
• Read a book about autonomous mobile robots that I got for $7 at MIT!
• SLEEP!
• Catch up on watching TV (such as a show called “Greek”, which I’m perhaps somewhat addicted to)
• Run and bike often
• Learn random interesting stuff

Hmm… that list looks un-ambitiously short. what else should I do? Any ideas?