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I graduated from Bowdoin on Saturday.
Posted at lunch time on Sunday, May 27th, 2007We got a new male Weimaraner puppy. No name yet.
He's already becoming quite a character.
Posted Monday afternoon, December 25th, 2006I got back up to Bowdoin a while ago and have been busy.
In terms of my summer fellowship, I've been working with our RoboCup soccer team. Bowdoin has a team that competes in the four-legged league and did very well at the world championships a few weeks back. So far I've been working on improving the walk and updating the development toolchain.
Walking is an important fundamental skill, and while we currently have a decent walk, it could be a lot better. Speed and accuracy are obvious concerns, but also important is stability. The less the view moves while the dog is walking the better it is able to detect objects and keep a good idea of where it is on the field.
I'm implementing a reinforcement learning system based on policy gradient reinforcement. The robot will walk back and forth between two objects, each time changing slightly something about its walk, and will determine if that change improved its gait. Over many iterations, it should discover an improved if not optimal way to walk.
In terms of the toolchain, I am updating the version of the Python programming language we use on the robots and the compiler and libraries we use to cross-compile source code for the robots.
In terms of Python, we have been using the version ported by the rUNSWift team; it isn't the latest version and doesn't contain all the modules we want, however. I've been porting rUNSWift's patches to python-2.4 and have almost got it compiling; we'll see if it actually runs later!
In terms of the compilers and libraries, we're still using gcc-3.3.2 to cross-compile for the Aibos. Cross-compiling is building the code on a different type of CPU than the code is meant to run on. Unfortunately, the gcc-3 series doesn't compile with the gcc-4 one that is now standard among GNU/Linux distributions like Debian and will likely be standard with newer versions of OS X. This means that as we upgrade computers and move to new ones it will be more difficult to keep our toolchain working. gcc-4 also provides more optimized code than gcc-3, and we can always use more speed!
The difficulty with moving to gcc-4 is that it is not ABI-compatible with gcc-3; that is, software that's been compiled with gcc-3 can't directly interface with software compiled with gcc-4. This would be an easy problem to resolve if Sony had released the Aibo code as free software, but instead that have kept it proprietary, and now that they don't want to sell Aibos there's little hope they will release a gcc-4 compatible version. Luckily, someone has pointed me to a gcc-4 option that seems to produce gcc-3 compatible code; I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
Outside of the lab I've also been investigating how best to upgrade Network Operation's wiki. A wiki is a collaborative documentation system that makes it easy for people to record, share, and update knowledge. Since most of our employees are students, we only have them for a few years and are constantly training new people. The wiki has been a great help since I set it up a few years ago, but it is showing its age.
I have been taken with ikiwiki. The traditional wiki is implemented as a web application that stores changes in a database and dynamically creates the page for each viewer; ikiwiki stands that idea on its head. It keeps all files in Markdown-formatted plain text, uses Subversion to keep revision history, and rebuilds the wiki into static HTML on each check-in. There's an optional CGI attachment to allow web-based editing. This non-web-orient, Subversion-backed approach fits in with our general workflow at Network Operations. Unfortunately, I'll need to write a program to convert our old wiki to the new format and one to use Bowdoin's account information, but that's just a Small Matter of Programming.
Posted Saturday evening, July 1st, 2006I returned to Nashville today after going through parts of the UK and France with Ali. We had a fantastic trip, and as soon as I sort through all the photos and notes they'll be posted.
I'm in Nashville until the 20th, when I return to Bowdoin for the summer.
Posted late Sunday night, June 12th, 2006I'm staying in St Salvators Hall, which is on one of the main streets in town and very close to everything except my classroom buildings. My desk is at the window and I look out over part of the ruins of St Andrews Castle and the ocean - it is a fantastic view. I walked around part of the Old Course and down the beach yesterday, and it's beautiful. The students I've met have been fantastic and interesting. The maze of bureaucracy is driving me absolutely nuts, though.
Most of the students here use MSN Messenger as their instant messenger of choice, so I went and signed up using my email address at this domain. When I told my friends my new MSN screenname, they laughed and explained to me that a NED is a "non-educated delinquite," and that perhaps it would give others a bad impression of me - highly derrogatory. I am not happy.
I'm mostly registered for my classes. I'm going to be taking two Computer Science courses, "Operating Systems" and "Computer Graphics", both of which will be interesting, and one History class on how Scottish historians have percieved their history.
Posted terribly early Monday morning, February 6th, 2006Got back from Korea Saturday morning. I spent the night in Dallas after a runaway baggage cart damaged to the plane I was on from San Francisco and caused me to miss my connecting flight to Nashville by ten minutes. Arg! And on top of it, I'm now sick again.
Photos from the trip are slowly appearing in the galleryappearing in the gallery. More will come as I get photos from the other guys. Highlights and impressions to come.
Posted Sunday night, January 22nd, 2006So the wisdom teeth removal went better than I expected. I envisioned moaning in pain for several diays, bedridden, but things went much better.
I awoke at around 7 AM Friday morning and was pleasntly surprised to see that Rachel had slept the night in my bed. I got to the doctor's office a little before 8:30 and they hooked me up to a bunch of beeping equipment. Don't get me wrong - I like shiny blinking lights - but hearing the beeping was a little disconcerting. To add to my discomfort they nurse hooked me up to laughing gas, and so I asked, "Isn't laughing gas a local sedative whereas I had requested to be put to sleep?"
"Oh. One of our charts says local and one of them says to put you to sleep. Which one did you want?"
Not a good start. And she wondered why I was a little more agitated than normal.
I was out shortly afterwards, though - I knew I was going out because I started answering the nurse's questions with something more than 'yes', 'no', and 'a little'. The last thing I remember saying was "You put the needle in before you said you did, and you missed a little, because I could feel some escaping pressure like I was bleeding. It didn't hurt, though."
I actually didn't see the doctor who (I assume) performed the operation while I was there. The next thing I knew I was being woken up and woozily helped by my father and a nurse to the car. I don't remember much about the car ride home, and I appear to have walked in, eaten something, drugged myself up, and slept for 6-8 hours. Wohoo!
When I woke up I felt like I was a snake with two poison pouches in my cheeks - not because I was cool and could spit poison, but because it was a bit swollen. Not particularly bad, though. I managed to watch more TV than I usually do in a semester - The Freshman, two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, an episode each of Family Guy, Futurama, and Stargate: SG1. I also watched a film my dad got, Robot Stories, which were four wierd, slightly underdeveloped Japanese short films ostensibly about robots. Not too bad, but not many robots.
So today my dad and I went out to see the Fantastic Four, which wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. I had never heard of most of the actors, which is usually good because then the actors play the role instead of making the role suit their established style, but I had heard of the actor playing Sue Storm, which is bad because she was horrible in Sin City. The movie turned out to be OK - not as good as X-Men or Spider-Man, but not like Daredevil.
So anyway, as we were coming out of the movie theater, it struck me that only where my lower teeth were taken out was there any swelling or discomfort. I thought I had all four of the teeth taken out, and my dad confirmed this, so I was quite worried until I got home and confirmed that there were four teeth in the bag. That would have been bad. On the upside, I can't even tell that the upper to teeth were taken out. If only the lower two had gone so well.
Posted Saturday afternoon, July 9th, 2005Good purchase: 5 lbs. bag of pasta
Bad purchase: Two cans of baked beans with the words "with maple syrup" written in small, easily-overlooked letters
Good purchase: Extraordinarily cheap maccaroni and cheese
Bad purchase: Not purchasing the requisite milk and butter to make the above