David Shippy Talk

Posted on 2009-09-26 by pappp

The David Shippy talk in my last post was quite good; it featured a solid mix of business politics, and computer architecture, which drew a room-filling audience. That said, a LARGE portion of the audience was made up of EE280 students, who were apparently there in place of class. This is not a bad thing; conditioning the underclassmen to pay attention to seminars is an worthy goal. It also means the level of the talk was very well suited, if the audience had been a bunch of specialists on the topic (and a non-trivial portion of it was) it would have been inappropriately general, but for the spectrum of people in the room I would say it was pretty spot on.
I hung around afterwards, both to ask a question and because there were some very interesting conversations going on among the stragglers. As for the question, I wanted to know about the relationship of the PPC based Cell PPE and Xenon cores, to the things Nintendo uses…He was also in charge of the Gecko and Broadway chips that IBM makes for Nintendo to use in the GameCube and Wii respectively as well; and they share a common lineage but not a common design. Some of the straggler conversation was the expected material about computer architecture (especially historical stuff) which was informative, but there was one about engineering education that I found VERY interesting. I’m not sure that I should be quoting it, but suffice to say there are apparently solid numbers that confirm the suspicion that a high GPA (in high school or college) or SAT/ACT scores are not strongly correlated with success in EE/ECE programs at UK.
All in all, a cool talk, with lots of encouraging side factors.

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Decent Seminars!

Posted on 2009-09-24 by pappp

UK (and the college of engineering in particular) is surprising me with the quality of seminar speakers this semester, Bruce Schneier last week, and tomorrow David Shippy , chief architect for of IBM’s microprocessor team for games (the people who designed the Broadway, Cell, and Xenon processors inside all three of the major game consoles at the moment), and co-author of The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 will be speaking. His hand is on so much of the buzz in the tech news it should be really interesting to hear from him first hand, especially if we get a seminar-appropriate highly technical version. I’ve seen reviews of the book that gripe about lack of technical detail (and writing style); hopefully an in-person presentation to a known technical audience will take care of both problems and get things up to good material + good presentation.

The seminar is at 1:00PM in CRMS (I forget the room number) which brings me to the other thought…
folks need to work on their seminar announcement system. No email (to the seminars list). No updated websites (there is a seminars link on the department website …which is about 6mo out of date), just some posters hanging on the walls around Engineering. There were regular, highly visible announcements for the uninspiring dreck last year, why isn’t there publicity for the good stuff now?

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Chicken Paprikash

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

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Another “look what I made” format food post, chicken paprikash made with what was once this recipe, but has habituated and drifted over time. Served over rice ( I’ve never been terribly found of Spätzle, and rice is more my habit than noodles) and sugar snap peas, which make an amazing if slightly improbable combination. Also a glass of Moroccan-esque iced tea: it is brewed at unusually high temperature from gunpowder tea and fresh mint leaves, and it is sweetened beyond all reason, but I feel wrong calling it Moroccan tea because it isn’t pulled and is served cold. I love having time to cook, even when I know it is just a lull in the standard semester storm.

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Khorshteh Mosamma

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

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(This picture is after one reheating. I failed to take a picture right after I made it. The structure of the eggplant and a lot of the color were eaten by a night in the fridge and a trip through the microwave. It’s still delicious.)

I made Khorshteh Mosamma (an Iranian beef and vegetable stew) a few days ago, and it is delicious in that classic rich, slightly spicy middle-eastern way. What was unusual about it is I actually (mostly) followed a recipe, instead of my usual browse similar recipes -> freehand it to what I want technique. The recipe came from the last issue of the Penzeys Spices catalog. The only real decisions I made not specified by the recipe were using a 50:50 mix of sweet and hot curry powders (it just says “curry powder”), and a little bit of scale adjustment.

For the spice-deprived, Penzeys Spices is a chain of very, very good spice stores, and is one of my favorite little specialty shops. A visit there will make you poor, and it’s not because they charge a big premium or only sell in large quantities; it’s just because they have every spice you could imagine, and I’ve never bought something that disappointed (although I still haven’t figured out how to handle a couple things, I’m definitely still figuring out how to work the bottle of ajwain seed I picked up a few visits ago.) While I’m always sad there isn’t a nearby location, it’s probably a good thing… I usually end up dropping at least $50 when I visit one.

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Foodblogging

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

Foodblogging has always straddled the line between awesome and pretentious in my mind, but I’ve been feeling the urge to try of late. I tossed up one meal picture not too long ago, and I’m going to go ahead and add a category for food-related blogging to the primitive little tagging system Flatpress supports. I’m really not sure if it’s going to be an occasional “Look what I did!” picture or something more diverse and/or useful, but I fully intend to do whatever I feel like with it and find out. Food post to follow.

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Apple’s Flatland Asthetic

Posted on 2009-09-21 by pappp

I’ve found something very offputting about Apple’s much touted UI design since around 2001 (the advent of OS X), and have never quite been able to put my finger on what the issue is, until I came across this series of articles by Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, the founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group and one of the Distinguished Older Persons of the HCI world. He calls the problem the “Flatland Asthetic”, which he patly describes as “The new Apple seems to subscribe to the the belief that visual simplicity equals actual simplicity.” To put this more aggressively, Apple designs interfaces that are elegant until you use them in non-trivial ways. The biggest way in which this is offensive is where they have actively re-introduced problems long solved by hierarchy in computing, usually by taking away directories (folders. Whatever nomenclature you prefer) in places a consistent interface would allow them. I would also say the problem extends further back that Tog is giving credit for; even the much maligned one button mouse can be explained as an instance of the same ethos.

For some real-world examples, a few days ago I was watching my father use his G5 Tower (OS 10.4), trying to shuffle through a pile of icons which automagically piled themselves one on top of the other in the upper right hand corner of the (shockingly full) desktop, a behavior broken in exactly the same way as Windows 95. He then went to find an application in the dock… which had “elegantly” scaled down to near-illegibility because he had a non-trivial number of applications open or pinned (side-gripe: I still don’t like the confusing commingling of running applications and shortcuts, but with it being in Windows 7 as well now, it looks like I’m in the minority). Generally, any place where the UNIX-derived presumption “Everything is a File, and all files can be manipulated in the same way” is violated, I get unhappy (which explains my contempt for iTunes/iPhoto style “manager” programs as well).

I concede that some of the problems have been remedied, at least a little bit, in the most recent versions of OS X, with features like the the drawers (to use the CDE phrase, I have no idea what Apple calls them) in the dock. I would say these are band-aid solutions over a festering problem with mentality.
I’ve had my (obviously not entirely solitary) rant, now I’ll go back to my customized, bewildering to all others XFCE environment…

* a phrase I’m found of, borrowed from Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose’s White Mars, the first half (or so) of which is excellent.

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Dorkbotlex #6 – Results

Posted on 2009-09-20 by pappp

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It was, as always, a great show, with lots of inspiring local projects and an engaged audience. Hopefully sometime in the not TOO distant future I’ll actually get one of the hobby projects (the ones that are not so technical as to make non-engineers’ eye’s glaze over) done enough to show.

The usual, photos from the event are up on my flickr stream.

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Preaching to the Choir

Posted on 2009-09-18 by pappp

The Bruce Schneier talk in the previous post was quite good; he is an excellent and entertaining speaker (an hour without any sort of slides or visual aids!), but was a little disappointing because he was very much preaching to the choir. Most of the (nearly auditorium-filling) audience was made up of upper-level CS students, and CS/EE faculty who are for the most part well versed (especially the many attendees with cognitive science background) in the high level conception of the perceived security/actual security/security model paradigm he discussed. The talk would have been excellent for a less focused audience, but I would have enjoyed hearing his thoughts on some interesting specific topic, either technical (his work on Skein?), or high profile (Chemically improbable liquid bomb plots? C6H12O6 + H2O2 ===> 6CO2 + 18H2O does not an airliner-destroying bomb make…), or a topic which he has not thoroughly saturated the geek news channels with his thoughts on. Several of the other attendees I spoke with afterward felt the same way. This is just a particularly strong instance of a general problem; the people who would get the most from a high-generality talk don’t know to come, and the people who do know to come already know the material. I have no idea what the solution is, finding and engaging the potentially interested on campus is nearly impossible (the noise levels are too high), and offering only highly technical seminars seems to violate the egalitarian ideal of public talks.

In other announcements, DorkbotLex#6 will be this Saturday (2009-09-18) at 4PM in room 101 of the Reynolds Building (349 Scott Street), with the following topics:
* “Twitter Cutups” Patrick Morissey
* “Propoganda Machine” Aaron Miller
* “Biofeedback software” Matt Ward
as always, it should be cool.

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Bruce Schneier Lecture at UK

Posted on 2009-09-16 by pappp

To quote the announcement that went out to the mailing lists:
September 17th, 2009 at 5:30p.m
W.T. Young Library Auditorium

“Reconceptualizing Security”
Bruce Schneier
Chief Security Technology Officer, BT.

In a startling change of pace from the usual uninspiring speakers UK tends to bring in, Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost security experts, will be giving a lecture tomorrow night. It sounds like it will be about the perceived security/actual security idea (this is the person who coined the phrase “Security Theater”) he often talks about, and it should should be VERY cool.

I’m definitely going to be there, and there is some talk that it will fill up quickly, so I would suggest showing up early if you plan to come.

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Haiku!

Posted on 2009-09-14 by pappp

The Haiku project to reimplement BeOS just released their first alpha, and despite having less than no time to do so, I took a few minutes to play with it, and it is bringing back some great memories. BeOS was a really spectacular operating system which was floating around the edges of the market in the late 90s, with some truly revolutionary features, some of which are still not widely adopted. Remember WinFS, that Microsoft has been failing to deliver since 2003? Be had almost all the amazing indexeng/medatdata/journaling features (basically everything but encryption) in it’s BeFS in 1997. And that “new” Grand Central Dispatch thread model in the most recent version of OS X? BeOS had something analogous from the beginning (around 1995). It was, in many ways, a perfect, highly responsive desktop OS, which (if not for the anticompetitive practices of Apple and Microsoft) could have owned a large portion of the market. Probably my favorite memory of BeOS was running the classic “BeOS is more responsive” demonstration: bringing up dozens of instances of the built in media player, each playing a different mp3, on pathetic (I did it on a Pentium MMX @ 233Mhz with 192Mb of RAM) hardware… and having them all play smoothly and mix together. I’m not sure my current machine could do that under Linux OR Win7, and it is (roughly) ten times as powerful.
This OSNews Article has a good history and perspective; the quick version is that Be, Inc. was formed largely from disenchanted former Apple employees (including Joseph Palmer, an electrical engineer/ industrial designer who I’ve always looked up to), designed themselves a revolutionary platform (hardware and software), moved to a software-only model because they couldn’t afford to maintain their hardware buisness, and were actively pushed out of the market by Apple (who took action to keep BeOS from running on new Macs, and killed the clone business, ruining the market for PPC hardware) and Microsoft (who bullied PC vendors into refusing to bundle BeOS). Before Be imploded, and had their assets bought by Palm, Apple almost bought Be as the core for the “post-classic” Mac after the Copland project failed. Instead they bought NeXT (also made up mostly ex-Apple people) for roughly Be’s asking price, and that eventually became OS X.
Best of luck to the Haiku team, a big part of me hopes that progress will continue, and sometime in the not too distant future my everyday use machine will be a Haiku box.

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