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2009.12.13 in school
Fall semester is over! That's 5/8; just three to go!
I finished the Programming Languages final at 3:00 or so on Friday, stood up, and walked not only out of the DCC, but out of the semester, too! There's a little bit of cleanup left (a final in AI on Thursday, primarily), but after that I'm homeward bound.
I guess I'll say a few things about each class, since that seems to be the thing to do...
Intro to AI was — unless I'm way off base, which doesn't seem likely — the easiest full-sized class I've taken at RPI. The assignments were easy (and even relatively fun) — straight out of AIMA, implement in whatever language you choose, spend two weeks on it. That gave plenty of time to overdo the assignments, which doesn't seem to have phased/angered the professor. The tests weren't too bad; the first one was a little surprising (I came out of it thinking it was either the easiest test I'd taken here, or that I'd missed something vital and failed it, and ended up with a B), and the second is on Thursday.
Programming Languages is an interesting beast. A bunch of ex-Cary people took it along with me (as well as Mike, who dropped the class a week or two in, and has to take it some other semester); a good number of the ones I've talked to about it since believe (along with myself) that the class as it stands should be scrapped, in its entirety. I'm not sure I can/should totally explain why, just that the class is a mess and needs a rethink. It's a good idea — certainly! — to teach various paradigms and languages; I'm not completely convinced it's a good idea to use the professor's pet language to do so. Drop Erlang in in place of SALSA, a Scheme or a Lisp and/or Haskell in place of Oz, keep Prolog; this would help make the class a lot more real-world useful (I can't believe I'm putting Lisp, Erlang, and Haskell in a sentence about real-world usefulness...) without sacrificing (at all) the various lessons about language design and use (except the ones about how things should not be done, in the last few weeks). The other problems (the real ones)... I'll leave for people who take the class to discover on their own!
Intermediate Video was awesome. Well... there was a lot of strange contained within the videos we watched in class, but I suppose that comes with the territory! The awesome part was two things: a) getting to spend time working on video again (I bought FCS a few years back and have been upgrading it every once in a while since then; I don't get to use it very often these days, though), and b) the class. It was a tiny class; there were only nine of us! The nice part about it was that everybody got along; they made someone who didn't belong (me) feel like he fit right in, even if he sometimes took issue with being asked to find meaning in things which clearly didn't have any (I'm cool with art-for-art's sake, but leave it there, and don't try to make that sort of art have meaning!). And I had a lot of fun with the three projects during the course of the semester.
Quasars and Cosmology doesn't even count. One credit, no work (literally). Sit down for an hour once a week and look at pretty pictures of space. Awesome!
Machine Learning was really tough. It's yet another case of me distinctly lacking math experience (multivar and linear algebra, mostly, in this case, but there was also the fact that most of the calc I've studied has (yay!) rotted out of my brain). It sounds like it's going to have quite the curve, too, which is good! There was a lot of cool stuff in this class; it's the only CS course this semester where you could see something you were writing really work. I now know (and have implemented) a dozen different ways to classify digits from the USPS zipcode database — that's always fun! It was nice to not have any tests to speak of, but the homeworks were killer, and a very large chunk of the book (which is currently being co-written by the professor) never ended up getting posted to the website.
On the slate for next semester: Introductory Biology (YUCK, but that finishes my science requirement), Typography (I love being a fake EMAC), Parallel Programming, Advanced Computer Graphics (Cutler again!), and Intro to Economics (I need to take a bunch of humanities stuff, I figure ECON will go better than PSYC or PHIL).
Today marked the end of a somewhat awesome semester of Intermediate Video; with that, of course, marked the end of our final projects.
I've got a lot of stories to tell about this project, but very little time right now to tell them! There's a big test that I need to do well on tomorrow (the last one was during the week I was out sick; I ended up taking it right after I got better, to not-so-great-effect), as well as a lovely RCOS presentation that I need to prepare. So, stories later.
For now, there's a copy of the video at YouTube (I apologize for the bars and tone; the professor requires them, and I forgot to remove them before uploading; jump to 0:30 to skip them!). Watch it in HD!
Or, if you're adventurous (and have a lot of time), there's a 400+MB H.264@720p version on Jayne. (not currently available)
The music (which I made overnight last night, in Logic, and isn't very good) is around, too.
It was a fun video to make, anyway! I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the data; the RAWs are wayyyyy too big to keep around, but the Apple Intermediate files are only a few gigabytes, so I might (should) keep them.
2009.12.06 in school
Joshua Bell played at RPI tonight; Mike, Nate, Carol, and I all got to attend (we ran into Ryan, Nick, DJ, and Alex there, too, among others). It was without question the best thing I've seen at EMPAC (Mike disagrees, questioning whether it was better than Wynton Marsalis or Per Tengstrand, but I missed both of those). I don't expect that to change.
The music was fantastic. It's obviously impossible to describe, but believe me, it was! He played two pieces (I'm too lazy to grab the program right now to see what they were), then encored two more, then came out after a (rather longwinded) SAJ love-fest to perform "Yankee Doodle" without accompaniment, to everyone's amusement (and amazement).
The fact that he played without amplification made me happy, especially in a space designed exactly for that (most of the other events at EMPAC have left me entirely without hearing for many hours afterwards). I suppose it should have been obvious that it was going to be that way, being a classy classical music concert, but I was initially surprised.
Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of any of us in our suits/dresses, but ... I'm sure it'll happen again, someday!
Afterwards, Mike and I hightailed it out of there because there was music and crowds of people dancing and such. DJ tells me that there was iced coffee in glasses made out of chocolate. I think that's pretty cute :-)
My good friend and roommate Matt Arsenault has just pushed the initial (0.1) release of his Clutter bindings for Haskell. This was his RCOS project for this semester.
Anyway, if you speak Haskell and enjoy Clutter, download them and see what you can do! He's looking for lots of input for the next steps, so please have at it...
Now that you've heard my long diatribe on why I need to take tens of thousands of frames of growing plants (totaling hundreds — or possibly thousands — of gigabytes), I'll explain my process for managing and processing the images (the technical side of things), in case anyone ever wants to do something similar...
I've got two cameras for this project; a D80, and a Coolpix 8700. They're both way beyond the point where quality is a problem when compressing down to my destination format (HD@720p, or @1080p if Nate gets his way). The D80 has an antique 55mm Micro-Nikkor attached (along with a PK-13 extension tube to get to 1:1 if I need it); the 8700 has a reasonable macro feature on the built-in lens.
Both cameras are set on full-manual — shutter speed, aperture, white balance, focus, everything. The D80 is outputting RAWs; the 8700 is only outputting JPEGs (for reasons I'll explain in a minute) — this means that a shot from the D80 is about 8MB, and a shot from the 8700 is about 1MB.
Each camera takes a picture once a minute. To achieve this, the D80 (which doesn't ship with an intervalometer feature, and I have yet to finish my intervalometer project) is tethered (via a nice, standard USB-A-to-USB-mini-B cable) to my EeePC running Ubuntu. The Eee is connected to an external (USB) 160GB "buffer" hard drive.
The general flow of photos from the D80 to Final Cut follows something like the following:
The above process would be more or less the same for the 8700, except that I have no idea where the nonstandard tethering cable that Nikon was using back-in-the-day is, so I have to the 2GB CF card on the camera. This means that RAW is out of the question (sadface), so all of the steps up until e above are unnecessary for this camera (with a significant loss of maneuverability with the images in post, as well as the fact that I then have to take the card out of the camera every few hours — which of course disturbs the timelapse and adds a slight hassle).
I realized recently that I never actually introduced this project; a lot of people around me have already heard about it (or been directly affected by it, by being asked to put up with shutter noise every minute for the last few days or to fill up bowls with water), so I forgot! The basic idea is that I don't like filming people, because schedules are hard to coordinate, it's hard to find people who are convincing actors, etc.; I also don't like the quality of video that comes from the PDX-10s (or, to be honest, the higher-end-but-older-PD-170s) that the school provides for us to use. I don't have access to a video camera at all that would satisfy me, quality-wise, as I come from the super-crisp world of still photography!
Anyway; I decided I wanted to do something completely avoiding both human actors and video cameras for my final video project (after having dealt with both of these things for the first two projects, to reasonable success — but without a lot of comfort). So I proposed a short (~5 minute) video on "the birth and death of things". This elicited a "what!? you have 80 years?!" from one of my classmates; I noted that "things" in this case would be plants, and perhaps insects (molds/fungi have since been added to the list), since they are a) easy to give life to, and b) legal to kill within the timeframe of the project ;-)
So now I have to take video, with my DSLR (and my old Nikon point-'n-shoot; I need lots of video!), of a bunch of plants being born (and, later, dying). I ordered a ton of growing supplies: lights, greenhouse domes, seeds, pots, soilless mix, etc., as well as some fabric and various other supplies.
The initial plan was to fabric-off a chunk of our "porch" (it has walls on all sides, but the glass is missing from two of the windows), in order to make a situation in which I controlled all of the light in the room, so that lighting on the plants would be consistent between day and night. So, once the fabric got here, I set to work. I succeeded in making a blacked out area; unfortunately, plants didn't seem to want to grow in the mid-thirty-degree-F weather that seems to be hanging around Troy. Bummer!
Luckily, I had a set of herbs (basil, dill, and something else which I can never remember even though I look it up every day — it's cilantro!) growing in the warmth of our kitchen windowsill. When I got back to Troy this Sunday, the basil was just starting to pop out, so I decided to put it under the camera. I ended up taking apart my dresser to fabricate a warm completely-enclosed growing space; this is currently the most successful of my growing areas (the third is under my desk; I believe that success is just a few days off there — unfortunately, I'm leaving for Thanksgiving later today!).
So, yeah! That's the plan, anyway!
I'm beginning to see tiny bits of success trying to make plants grow for my final Intermediate Video project... in fact, I already have ~20GB of frames (from two cameras). Some cool video, some crap. It's going to be a long journey!
Basil
Dill
If you're actually *crazy*, you might have noticed that the design of this page changed a bit about a week ago. This isn't because I've been tweaking my WordPress theme — I got sick of that a long time ago. No, instead, I replaced this all with a solution much more amenable to my own mindset; a completely-statically-generated, git-backed, python-based blog. It's not an interesting project in and of itself; every programmer writes blog software at least once in their early life (and this is poorly-written, just like most of them!).
It's really only interesting in that I'll note that only the RSS2 feeds will work from now on; no more Atom/RSS 0.9, because I don't care enough. RSS feeds are the archive page url (for the main archive or any category) + "/feed", just like before.
With that said, this is my first post entirely with the new system, so hopefully everything will go smoothly! I get to test it locally, then 'git push' and whoosh! magic jumps to Jayne and then off to Dreamhost.
Excuses
This post has been stewing for a very long time, as is evidenced by it covering a span of three years. With such a long timeframe comes a terribly scattered and disconnected process of storytelling (for me, at least), so keep that in mind while you notice how long your scrollbar currently is... there is no structure here, only late-night babble.
Also, I apologize in advance for making anyone feel bad over the course of the next few paragraphs...
The Problem
A freshman's eye would peg Rensselaer as a paragon of proprietary software, and they certainly wouldn't be wrong. A majority of the academic portion of campus is heavily entrenched in software like Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, and various CAD packages (or Creative Suite, Max/MSP, and Final Cut Studio, on the other side of campus). I wouldn't blame this on the 'tute, though — many of these packages have no free/open source counterpart even remotely in the same tier. The problem centers more around how much the attitude that comes along with such software is also pervasive here.
Going to RPI — for most people (mainly the engineers and artists, who together comprise way more than half of the student body) — is about spending four years learning how to make lots and lots of money using the tools that you have to use in your particularly overspecialized field; nothing more, nothing less. There's been a recent push for multidisciplinary studies, but I feel like this isn't as serious as it could be, yet — destroying entire departments (foreign language, for example) doesn't lead to much faith in this program...
While this heavily money-and-proprietary-software-driven philosophy might be a little off-putting to someone coming from a background filled with free and open source software (or even a science-for-science's sake background), there is hope!; this is what I want to write about, since it's much more interesting than what's broken...
The Real Problem
I should first clarify that I don't have a problem with proprietary software; I use OS X as my primary operating system, I often resort to Mathematica or Final Cut to do things that can't be easily solved otherwise... I'm very much a right-tool-for-the-job person. My problem is with the attitude; the attitude that says that "everything I create should be mine because there's a chance I can make fame or fortune off of it, and why in the world would I want to share that with other people?"... that is the attitude driven by total immersion in a corporate-academic/closed-source world, and that is what I have a problem with, and it's deeply embedded within both the faculty and a significant portion of the student population.
During freshman year, I spent the whole year doing physics and hiding my disapproval for the overarching RPI philosophy by spending lots of time with my few dozen extremely social floormates. Robb and I often chatted about how we felt about the school, and supported each other as much as we could in terms of not following in everyone else's footsteps.
By the beginning of sophomore year, Robb and I had heard rumors from one of our CS professors (Robert Ingalls, who taught our operating systems course) that there was actually a forming contingent of like-minded folk — people who enjoyed writing software in order to share it with the world, people who believed in the world we believed in.
Finding RCOS
This group turned out to be the Rensselaer Center for Open Software (RCOS, as we semi-lovingly call it). Headed by Moorthy (who was also my data structures professor at the time, though I didn't make the connection until mere minutes before we met him to propose our project), RCOS is an interesting beast. It provides funding, support, and — more importantly, at least in my opinion — a home for people interested in working on or learning about free/open software.
In order to participate, you have to bring a project to the table. It could be something small, as you're just getting started with programming, or something grand, far beyond the scope of a single person project, something you just want to peck away at — as long as there's something to be done, and you're willing to share your code and ideas, you're welcome to stay as long as you'd like.
Three times a semester, the group (or individual) hacking away at each project has to get up in front of the rest of the group — which now numbers somewhere around 30 — and show off what they've done, where they've come from, and where they hope to go; these presentations take place at weekly meetings which form the primary social interaction of the group and provide a place for people to bounce ideas off everyone, show off what they've learned, and get support from the rest of the group when they're having an issue.
Seed
First semester sophomore year — shortly after we discovered RCOS — Robb, Matt, and I proposed the "Orange Window Manager", a next-generation window manager that we were planning to write, utilizing Robb's knowledge from his time working on Compiz, as well as various technologies not then being used in window managers (primarily, Clutter). We wrote Seed, the JavaScriptCore<->GObject-Introspection bridge which we were planning to use for extensibility within our window manager, instead, mostly after realizing that we didn't have the time nor patience to write a window manager. Hearing about Shell and Mutter and friends at GNOME Summit affected that decision a slight bit as well; we had already accidentally duplicated some of the effort in creating Seed alongside GJS, we weren't interested in continuing down that path.
RCOS ended up funding two semesters of Seed development and also provided a place for us to show off what we were working on to a bunch of people from outside of the GNOME developer community — which is really a great thing, and lets you put a little bit of perspective on what you're working on... both semesters we had other overarching projects in mind, but both semesters Seed was the primary target of our development time, because it was something feasible and something potentially useful to others.
Big Picture
Without something like RCOS, Seed almost certainly would not have been written; I would still be sitting here having never gotten my hands dirty in the GNOME world (some would say we'd be better off that way :-D); and, more importantly for the big picture, dozens of undergrads would never have gotten a taste of community in software, nor of writing code out in the open, nor of thinking of themselves second for once when coming up with ideas.
I believe that this is incredibly important, and — shockingly — something relatively unique to our campus (I realize it happens in other places, but not nearly as many as one would initially hope), and that more campuses should take heed and — if at all possible — try to pull off something similar!
The Man with The Plan
It turns out that this is all made possible by one person: Sean O'Sullivan, who graduated from RPI in '85 and went on to help found MapInfo — far from being a model citizen of the free/open-source world, but the timeframe excuses them, without question.
Mr. O'Sullivan apparently believes in our world too — so much that he donated a significant chunk of money in order to initiate and fund RCOS for a few years, as well as to create a annual semester-long course on developing open source software (which Robb is currently enrolled in, and is having a blast with, from what I hear...).
Reasonable social protocol would dictate that Seed contain some sort of "thank you" to both Mr. O'Sullivan and to Moorthy; unfortunately I never quite feel comfortable inserting any sort of message to that effect anywhere, nor bringing it up this late in the game, so this is my thank you: thank you for the last three semesters, and hopefully three more; thank you for believing in our cause and our world; and thank you for showing even just a few new people something they hadn't seen before, and possibly wouldn't have had their paths not crossed yours.
TL;DR
RPI has an awesome-but-underappreciated program for getting people involved in open software, run by Mukkai Krishnamoorthy and created by Sean O'Sullivan, and it gives me the little bit of hope I have for our community...
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