.::output >> /dev/null::.

After spending about a year with two huge and bulky CRT's in my office, I decided to spend about $700 to get a new 24 inch widescreen display from DELL. It wasn't only the physical size of the CRT but also its blurriness that annoyed me. Here's a picture to show what my desk looked like before:

Both CRTs are Dell M993s. Surprisingly those monitors could display 1600x1200 pixels! However, that comes at the expense of blurriness and eye-ache after a couple of hours.

Here's a picture to show what my desk looks like with the new monitor:

The Dell 2408WFP monitor connects to my MacBook Pro. The other smaller monitor connects to my Windows machine. I share the mouse and keyboard using Synergy.
The smaller monitor is borrowed from my colleague's table since he won't be around until Fall 2008.

Using a large monitor is not without its challenges and problems. The main problem on the Mac (and possibly Windows and Linux) is that it becomes rather troublesome to resize the windows. Here's why: all windows manager that I know have three buttons on each window: close, maximize(expand) and minimize. On a small monitor, clicking the maximize button expands the window to fill your small screen -- usually a desired behavior so you can see more of the contents in the window. On a large monitor, clicking the maximize button, expands the window to fill your large screen -- usually an undesired behavior since you are wasting screen space.

Unfortunately, I have not found a nice way to resize the windows yet. I do have a trick though. Since my external display is powered by a MacBook Pro, I can always move the window over to the MacBook Pro's smaller screen, maximize it and then move it back to the external display! It's cumbersome but it works. And I get uniformly sized windows -- I am rather particular about having my windows be about the same size.

Fortunately things are better with my browser since I can just rely on javascript bookmarklets:

Pimp My Safari: bookmarklets:

"Resize to 1024x768"
javascript:void(window.resizeTo(1024,768))

So I discovered that my web host just upgraded to Rails 2. How did I make the discovery? Well, both my blogs were malfunctioning. And when a rails web application malfunctions, it is usually a good idea to check if they had upgraded it. Previous experience with Typo should have taught me that but sometimes I forget such things.

I should definitely freeze the rails version right now so that I don't encounter such problems in the future.

Anyway, I grabbed the latest version of Typo and installed it. I must say the latest version really looks slick. I chose to use the same Scribbish theme for this blog but there are two new themes that are pretty nice too.

One caveat is that some of the plug-ins have been removed from the base Typo installation. This caused me some problems as I migrated my blog over. I could have just installed the old plug-ins following the instructions from here but I decided to stay fresh. I am not sure whether there is an easier way to do this, but I basically went into the database and remove the sidebars table:
DELETE from sidebars;

I am going to upgrade the softwareengineering.vazexqi.com blog in the next few hours so it should be back up by tonight.

After delaying for a very long time, I have finally updated the root vazexqi.com site and turned it into something that reflects more of what I am doing as a Ph.D. student. I was only compelled to do it because the CS department demanded a curriculum vitae from each of its students. I wanted to put a web address on my CV so that people can keep up with what I am doing and find. However, I did not feel that it was appropriate to put my blog address directly on it; after all, a website that starts with the word "blog" might not sound professional enough to some academic peers (it should be fine for a developer's blog though).

I was too lazy to actually write everything from scratch so I decided to give RapidWeaver a try. I had used it before for various tasks but I am only needed to use the demo version since I would just borrow (and credit) their templates and then code everything up by hand. But this time, I decided that since vazexqi.com was going to be mostly static content, I needed a convenient way to easily update it using some application. Also, I am not really a web designer so I would like to be able to quickly change the template without having to do too much work on my part.

Overall, I think the new look is pretty decent. There are things that still need updating but overall it's a good start. There are two things now that I must remember to do: constantly update the static pages and upload a picture of myself to the front page....

I don't really subscribe to the idea of putting yourself out there on the web for everyone (like this guy) but I do think that it is important to have a clean web page where your peers can easily find you.

So, I downloaded the free version of the iPhone SDK. It comes in at a whopping 2.1 GB so it took about 20 minutes to download.

After extracting it, the README has this to say:

1. It requires about 5.3 GB for installation.
2. It requires OS X 10.5.2 on intel machines (some claim that it can work on powerpc as well).

There is the option to keep Xcode 3.0 and Xcode 3.1 Beta that comes with the iPhone SDK on the same machine. I did not choose this option so it replaced my original developers tools (meaning that I did not need to sacrifice extra disk space at the expense of a possibly buggy beta version Xcode 3.1).

I tried some of the sample apps from the iPhone developer site (it uses a generic URL of http://developer.apple.com/iphone/samples/index.action which checks to see if you are authenticated).

Here are the ones that I tried:

• Kalimba - Supposed to be a replica of an African thumb piano. We should be able to strike each bar and have a musical note sound. It failed miserably on the iPhone simulator -- sound will not play and the piano refused to rotate to landscape mode. See this thread. Here's a picture to show what I mean:


This is one of the examples for the iPhone SDK. Unfortunately, it does not seem to work properly on the simulator – sound doesn't work and it refuses to rotate into landscape mode.

• Jigsaw - Just a simple jigsaw puzzle. Works fine.


• TheElements - Shows the periodic table with the possibility to view each element's page on wikipedia. When I clicked on the link to wikipedia, the simulator crashed gloriously -- no warnings, no output to console. It just crashed. After some playing around, I discovered that it crashes when you run it immediately after it opens up in the emulator. Instead, if you go to the home screen and then activate TheElements application, then opening a link would work!


• GLGravity - Draws the canonical OpenGL teapot and allows you to rotate it by rotating and tilting your iPhone. This refused to run on the simulator -- claiming that it needs to run on an iPhone.

I have to agree that the iPhone SDK has a lot to offer. If you don't believe me, just watch the video. The demo comes on at about 30 minutes through. It's akin to writing for a mini version of OS X with the addition of an impressive user interface, multi-touch control and internal accelerometers. Games will definitely benefit from this. So it should be easy for most developers to get started once they familiarize themselves with the new human interface guidelines.

Spore on the iPhone. It uses the accelerometer on the iPhone for controls.

However, as impressive as the SDK is, it also has some shortcomings which can't be ignored. Here's why (some of these might change when iPhone 2.0 debuts but I doubt it):

1. No garbage collection.
   Creating an iPhone Application:

   Note: iPhone OS does not support memory management using the garbage collection feature that is in Mac OS X v10.5 and later.

   Maybe most Objective-C developers love doing manual reference counting but this seems like something that should be addressed. After all, Google's Android platform supports this. Moreover, Objective-C 2.0 already supports it so garbage collection could have been enabled from the beginning.
   
   Some might argue that garbage collection adds extra performance overhead. But consider what happens when your app starts leaking memory all over the place. And with all the rich history that garbage collection has, it's really amazing that companies don't really start to take it seriously.
   
   In fact, during the video, they showcased several different developers creating fantastic prototypes for the iPhone in two weeks. I suspect that development and debugging time could have been reduced more if only garbage collection was enabled. =)


2. Crippled simulator
   Not sure if this will change in the future but the current simulator is rather dumb and featureless. You cannot even trigger the hard buttons (like the volume UP/DOWN, silencer, top button). The only button you can activate is the home button -- the one at the bottom of the screen. And no, you can't simulate the features of the accelerometer.
   
   It does however support the two-finger gesture if you hold on the OPTION key on your keyboard.
   
   I suspect that this is a ploy by Apple to get people to i) buy iPhones to test on b) subscribe to the $99/year developer deal to get your app on to the iPhone. After all, how are you going to test your next greatest app that relies on the accelerometer if the simulator cannot even handle it. However, of my three criticisms, this might be the easiest one to fix.
   
   Google's Android emulator is currently better but that could be because there isn't an actual phone to run it on yet!


3. $99/year (yes, it's PER YEAR!)
   Apple Announces iPhone 2.0 Software Beta

   During the beta iPhone SDK program, a limited number of developers will be accepted into Apple’s new iPhone Developer Program and offered the ability to get code onto iPhones for testing. The Standard Program costs $99 (US) per year and gives members an iPhone SDK and development tools; access to pre-release iPhone software; technical support; the ability to get code onto iPhones for testing; and distribution of applications via the new App Store. The Enterprise Program costs $299 (US) per year.

   
   To even get your app for testing onto the iPhone you need the special version of the SDK or a special license. This is weird since that means that I cannot even write an app for MYSELF and install it on my phone just for my own PERSONAL use.
   
   Plus, right now no one can install your app unless you list it on iTunes (which minimally also requires the $99/year contract).
   
   You can argue that this annual fee is not really a problem with the SDK but I think it is. After all, without paying the fee, your SDK basically allows you only to experiment and not actually get anything onto your iPhone.
   
   I think the $99/year (or $299 for Enterprise) fee is somehow used to do code signing which I think is a weird way to guarantee that your program is non-malicious. I could be wrong.
   
   Also, after having to pay $99 would anyone release your app for free??!! I look forward to seeing how many free apps there will be. My prediction is that apps that are somehow tied to a desktop app that costs money (for instance, Transmit, NetNewswire, etc) might be free since the cost is absorbed by the desktop app.
   
   It would be interesting to see how it would compete with Android in terms of interested developers. I am not sure if it is a good idea to actually get developers to pay to actually use the development tools.
   
   I do like the idea of paying the yearly fee to have Apple list your product for you on iTunes but it would be good to offer developers the choice of distributing their own applications if they want. In fact, just being able to install your own app on your own phone would be fantastic!

So while the SDK definitely has a lot to offer, it also has some serious shortcomings that might discourage some developers. But with all things Apple, they certainly won't mind ostracizing some developers in favor of others....

Alan Kay recently gave at talk at TED. You can view his video from here. Like all TED talks, it's about 20 minutes long so it's short and straight to the point. The rest of my post will make references to the video, so reading it without watching the video might not make much sense.

Unsurprisingly, in the video, Kay demonstrated the canonical moving car example for Etoys. The moving car demo is something that most people familiar with Squeak would have seen. It's really simple but it lets kids experience programming in a fun interactive way. Unfortunately, this is something that most modern languages have failed to enable. After all, which is more fun: printing text to the screen or watching your creation actually move on screen?

However, the second part of Kay's demo was even more interesting. He shows what you can do to help illustrate some simple math and physics properties in an insightful manner. It uses all the features of Etoys (or maybe the full Squeak implementation) to let students experiment by themselves.

Experimenting with this would have been so much cleaner than using a tape meter. It's actually even cooler when you watch the animation or code it up yourself in Etoys.

For instance (and this was something that impressed me), you could design a simple car that drop dots along as it moved. So, a car that is accelerating will be dropping dots further and further apart from one another. This is basically the same idea as using a tape meter. However, the animation of the car moving and dropping dots seem so much cleaner to me. You can easily illustrate the concept of velocity and acceleration without having to talk about friction, etc. Something that is unavoidable with a real experiment. This helps especially when you are teaching a younger audience about the basic principles of motion.

Toward the end of the talk Kay showed an example running on the OLPC. So I was curious whether all courseware on the OLPC will be interactive or whether they will be like normal textbooks only in digital format. Either way, it's already hard enough to actually get good content onto the OLPC. As far as I know, there is no group dedicated to creating content for the OLPC yet.

However, I was able to find a couple of interactive learning environments at OLPC Courseware Review but, from the list, it seems that Dr. Geo II is the only one that has been ported to run on the OLPC. It would be interesting to see if there is a Google Summer of Code project for creating/porting an existing interactive learning environment to the OLPC.

Incidentally I was reading "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart which also talks about how to revamp the current K-12 mathematics education. The paper is available from here. Basically, Lockhart says that there is not enough experimentation with math going on in the class rooms. And that most of math is rote memorization with little appreciation for the beauty of math.

The math education back in Malaysia is not much better either. In school, the teachers are more interested in finishing the syllabus. So students either get-it in school or have to rely on paid tutors to teach it to them. There's very little appreciation on the derivation of the proofs of math. Either the derivation is skipped entirely while teaching or it follows the route of the boring derivation on the board that doesn't engage students.

So every student doing a PhD at UIUC (and I think any US university) is expected to pass a qualifying exam. The qualifying exam gauges whether a student is competent enough to continue in the PhD program. However, it's much more than that. I think it's more of a test to see how well you can do a presentation and answer tough questions during the presentation; as well as trying to not sound stupid in front of a very smart audience.

Anyway, I took my exam two weeks ago. It was an oral presentation where I was assigned two papers: The jastadd Extensible Java Compiler and Automatic Test Factoring. Both papers were about tools (something that I interested in as I mentioned in my research statement to the exam committee).

It's interesting to note how the two papers are somehow connected with me. I first saw the JastAdd system while I was at OOPSLA '07. I had even talked to the authors of the paper, attended their poster session and even their demo session. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I did not attend their presentation session so my presentation was not influenced by theirs. I was already interested in studying this paper in-depth because of the system. And having it chosen as my qualifying exam paper gave me even more motivation.

The second paper was interesting because, Danny, one of my colleagues from the same research group is now working under Prof. Michael Ernst. Danny had referenced some of Ernst's work before. So I was familiar with some of the terminology in the paper and was able to use that to my advantage.

It's just interesting to see what a small world it is....

My slides for the presentations are available here: JastAdd.pdf and AutoFactoring.pdf. I am not sure how interesting they would be on their own but they are pretty to look at.

And I just found out that I passed! The committee had this to say:

"The committee were impressed with his performance and background knowledge".

So that's one crucial step toward completing my Ph.D! :)