Sunday, February 19, 2012

PHOTOBOMB

7:35am: Wake-up. Blerrrrrgh.

7:40am: Restart the Mahout job that met a premature demise when my desktop locked up. I want to see if I can get results out of this.

7:55am: The Lady picks me up. We’re off to the nearby Frick Park for an easy 5-6 mile run, depending on how her quads  hold up (after a vicious round of jump-squats on Friday. meanwhile, it’s the first time in a week that I’ve run, after a weeklong self-imposed moratorium in preparation for half-marathon training that officially begins tomorrow. just wanted to give my shins/ankles/feet/joints a break).

8:10-9:00am: For me, the run felt good, though since it’d been a week I couldn’t quite get into a rhythm and was pretty much going on pure cardiovascular fitness. I felt bad for The Lady, though: her quads were really giving her problems, and Frick isn’t exactly kind when it comes to changes in elevation. Still, we clocked in five miles. Onward to bagels!

9:25am: The Lady drops me off at my place to get cleaned up while she does the same at her place. She and her mom will be back to pick me up for BAGELS around 10ish.

9:36am: Why has no one answered my Drupal question? It seriously has to be the easiest thing ever.

10:15am: Picked up by The Lady and her mom, off to Bagel Factory!

11:45am: After some awesome bagels, pancakes, home fries, and omlettes–not to mention wonderful company–I’m dropped off at the Cathedral for church while the ladies enjoy a little more time together before The Lady’s mom heads back to Ohio.

2:00pm: Back from mass. Just read this article about the Heartland Institute and practically started banging on things around the apartment. Words cannot describe the despicable bowels of insidiousness these shills will stoop to in order to maintain a backward status quo for the sake of their own pocketbooks. They are liars and bigots of the worst kind and the only reason they have jobs is because of their connections to both money and lawyers.

3:20pm: Watched the mid-season 3 duology of Stargate: Atlantis, guest starring none other than Richard Dean Anderson. He’s freaking fantastic.

5:03pm: I’ve been working the whole time at making my installation of Drupal cooperate. I’m slowly getting the hang of things and of how all the items interact with each other. I know this is ultimately the right decision for deploying this research project–it will give us maximal flexibility and room for growth–but man it’s time-consuming right now to figure out what all the knobs and switches do in concert with one another.

5:17pm: Yeah, just as everything is breaking on the website that was never even functional to begin with, suddenly I’m inundated with requests: one person in CSM is wondering about the homework assignment, another one of my undergraduates is having trouble installing NumPy, and a third person is wondering if I can hang out tonight. All requests I’m happy to help with / acquiesce to, but all of them happening within a 5-minute window makes me somewhat less than receptive.

5:19pm: Professor took the CSM student’s request. Fired back an interrogative to my undergraduate requesting more information on the error. Responded to the friend of mine to see if we could meet tomorrow instead. Rolled back a few customizations on the website and now seem to have broadened my control over its behavior. Deep breath, push forward.

5:36pm: As I work, I’m trying to maintain a minimal footprint and give this beefy Mahout job as much elbow room to operate as I can. Check out how the job is fairing, along with its resource usage:

That’s the result of 4 virtual instances of Ubuntu 11.10 all intercommunicating with one another to analyze the connectivity of a rather large set of Wikipedia pages. It’s all running on my custom-built Win7 screamer of a desktop, Ronon. Yes, the algorithm needs some serious optimization work; it was, after all, written by me 😛

6:30pm: Over the past several hours, I’ve found dozens of ways in which what I’m trying to accomplish won’t work, but exactly 0 in which it will work. Frustrating.

6:35pm: The Lady and I head to Chipotle for some comfort food dinner. Doused mine with Tobasco sauce. Man that stuff is tasty.

7:15-9:45pm: I left the website to work on my presentation for group meeting on Monday. It’s my turn to present, and I’m going over a paper and a Ph.D. thesis on “video input driven animation“, an idea where one analyzes a video of some sort of periodic motion–say, boats bobbing on water, or trees swaying in the wind–and builds a model of the motion in order to reverse-engineer the parameters governing the motion’s impetus. In these examples, that would mean using the motion of the boats (and some prior knowledge) to estimate the speed of the wind, thereby allowing you to add new synthetic objects into the real environment and use the estimated wind speed to make it behave similarly to the other objects in the scene. Pretty neat idea in principle; the math, however, is incredibly dense. It’s all physics, but it’s all backwards: sure you’ve used force to solve for position, but now you’re using position to solve for force…significantly complicated by the fact that you literally cannot know what the mass is.

10:00pm: Cats are so therapeutic. The Lady’s cat, Lily, is adorable. It doesn’t take long for me to completely pass out. G’night!