Glimpses

In mid July 2010 I defended my thesis. The defense was followed by a rush to get my thesis revised and submitted by July 31. After the mad dash, a committee member that had more revisions than all the other four combined, and barely getting that member to sign in time, I finally printed my thesis and had it submitted to the graduate college. And yes, you read that correctly, I had five committee members on my ms committee.

Today I was trying to work on a project in XCode (which I'm very unfamiliar with) and it refused to open the project giving the following error:

Internal Error  
File:  /SourceCache/DevToolsBase/.../XCPlatformSpecification.m  
Line:  438  
Object:    
Method:  loadAllPlatforms  
The Mac OS X platform is missing - cannot set a default platform.

This little program lets you create a bargraph of the number of results returned by a google search when replacing a small part each time. For example if you use
Google Query: how to get better at <x>
Search Terms: starcarft 2; kissing; cooking; robbing a bank; becoming cowboy neal

It will plot the number of results returned by a google search when <x> is replaced by each search term. This means it would plot the number of results for each of "how to get better at starcraft 2", "how to get better at kissing", "how to get better at cooking" ....

This was inspired by several XKCD comic strips like Numbers and Dangers. Of course, the numbers don't quite match up with the comics.

Occasionally one has to jump through a lot of hoops and do some pretty bizzare and unorthadox things when coding. Especially when working with multiple versions of libraries. At work all of our iMacs were recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and Python 2.6 and libraries isntalled (all in 64-bit). Its nice to upgrade . . . when it doesn't break things. Unfortunately during the upgrade numpy 1.4 was installed. Now this was only unfortunate because the super computer we also need to run on has numpy 1.3 which won't unpickle objects pickled with numpy 1.4.

 I use matplotlib fairly frequently in my research, it rocks. However, the fact that the MacOSX backed doesn't let me use 'Cmd-Q' to close things down is annoying. So my solution is a combination of pycario and preview with a little AppleScript through in for fun. I program in Eclipse with PyDev, however I run my python programs exclusively from iTerm. Hence, I'm used to cmd-tabbing back and forth between iterm and eclipse. However, when I run a program that opens up a gui, such doing "pylab.show()" things get annoying.

In my work I ended up needing to know the minimum volume bounding box (MVBB) of a given of points in 3d. This is also called the oriented bounding box (OBB). Finding the axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) is a simple task, however it can have a volume much larger than needed. Come to find out, finding the minimum volume bounding box is a very difficult problem with several techniques for finding it. However, I didn't find any useful code for finding the MVBB.

 So I needed to bind a lambda function to an object. I've been writing code that needs to run faster than it currently does and I've traced some slow-downs to repeated comparisons that are really wasted and things don't change once the object is instantiated. For instance below is an example to show you how one might code something (note this is just an example, not actual code)

 So, my iPhone keeps auto-correcting "me" to "mr" which is really annoying. I finely got fed up and figured I had accidently taught the auto-correct to change me to mr. So I began to dig through my iPhone backup files figuring I could change things there are restore my phone to a backed-up state. Now I know that is an extremely geeky way to approach things, but hey, I'm a geek. And no there is not anyway to view the auto-correct dictionary on the iPhone. Well, after figuring out which file it actually was, it was a dead end.

Today I started working the lab as opposed to from home which has made me use a new mac pro. I love mac, I own a MacBook and it works great. But mac desktops are a different question. The macbooks trackpad works great, has the sensitivity I want, I can move my finger from one side of the pad to the other and get all the way across the screen, perfect! On the mac pro with the might mouse its as slow as a dog and the accelration is driving me nuts. So I started off on a google trek to find a solution.