The last few months I’ve been working on a simulation and visualization changes in plant abundance from the Concord, MA area. The project is especially interested in looking a the phylogenetic patterns that emerge as the floras handle temperature changes in their environment. The project is still under major development (read: I’m coding around the clock to finish things up and add some extra polish), but I wanted to give a seek peek of one of the interfaces for the visualization/simulation. Here’s a preview:

This interface is designed for use on a Microsoft Surface multi-touch digital tabletop.

OK, now back to work!

Saw The Prodigy tonight here in Boston. The rawness of Firestarter [video] and Smack My Bitch Up has been replaced by impotentence and conspicuous cheesiness in the 12 years since the album, Fat of the Land, was first released. Regardless of the fact that much of the authentic (or at least believable) angst is missing, the music was obnoxiously loud and I had a fun time with some good company.

Oh, and by the way, what’s with the xenophobic mantra of the latest album, Invaders Must Die?

Today, Wolfram Alpha told me my life expectancy is 78.91 years as a 25 year old Canadian male.

Earlier last week, on May 4th, 2009, I released version 1.0 of Elm4J on the University of Calgary’s InnoVis Lab site. Elm4J is a Java library for representing hierarchically structured data, also known as tree data structures. It makes use of generics, provided in Java 5, to enable the creation of trees of arbitrary vertex and edge types. The library also comes with a handy Newick file parser. The project is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Elm4J is a Java port of an Elm, a C++ library I wrote in earlier 2008 as part of my master’s thesis project. Interestingly enough, I haven’t had the chance to release the original C++ project, though the progenitor should be released into the wild at some point in the next few months.

Today I updated Elm4J to version 1.0.3, after stamping out a bunch of bugs in the Newick file parser and extending the robustness of the tree traversal API. To this date, I’ve had one known user (thanks Darryl for the bug reports), so I’m already counting this as a win.

If you were to ask me how the last few weeks have been, I’d have to let you that things are ok and this pretty much sums it up:

From FFFFOUND, posted by Shaz Madani.

My most anticipated movie of the summer is Moon staring Sam Rockwell, directed by Duncan Jones. I’ve been reading about it over at io9, so it’s been on my radar, but now after watching the trailer, Moon is has my complete attention. Let’s hope it doesn’t disappoint.

The film comes out in theaters on June 12, 2009.

I took this picture in a subway tunnel last weekend while in New York. It reminds me of the architecture from Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!

Tired on a pair of Kicking Mule Workshop ‘Rocker’ jeans today, and damn do they fit well. Consistently snug from thigh to calf, these are the new evil jeans. {Capital E} is second best to this raw selvedge denim, made in Okayama, Japan.

My new favourite t-shit, care of McSweeney’s:

Web syndication is great, because instead of monitoring a publisher’s site for new updates, you can have something do the monitoring for you. Even better still, then something new comes along, well, it’ll let you know.

These systems tend to work best for publishers who update sporadically, yet where nonetheless, these updates are important; and for high throughput publishers, where utilizing a centralized feed reader can keep track of what you’ve read and what you haven’t. (It’s not quite as effective for ultra-high frequency sites, like FFFFOUND!, where you really don’t have much hope of looking at everything.)

An example of the former–infrequent yet important updates–are academic conference websites. Instead of trolling these sites for new information about paper submission guidelines or student volunteer sign ups (how many people have received the “SV Sign Up Now Available” email, only to discover that sign up has been opened for only a few hours and you’re number 241 on the waiting list), it would be far more productive to sign up to RSS feed and let those updates come to you.

One of the research projects that I’m involved with at the Scientists Discovery Room, is a visualization of biological classification, primarily the traditional Linnaean taxonomy (this is what you would have learnt in high school biology: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) and the modern phylogenetics (a classification model which groups species based on relatedness). Speaking on the history of biotic classification, The Tree of Life makes an interesting point about why the general public still clings on to Linnaean classification, despite it being a scientifically antiquated concept:

The ideas underlying the concept of the Great Chain of Being were overwhelmed by the concept and consequences of descent with modification. However, this idea of a linear ordering to nature explains why, among the essential concepts of modern science, those linked with phylogenetics are the least assimilated by the general public. Indeed, if the biological basis of a concept is difficult to grasp, it is often easier on our self-esteem to avoid learning it and to replace it by some nonscientific icon from the past.

Earlier this month, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a six month research fellowship at Harvard University. Needless to say, it was a tremendously busy semester leading up to the move, as I tried to complete as much of my thesis research as humanly possible so that I could switch to working on it part time for the next six months. Despite the frantic (and no doubt unsustainable) pace, it was easily the most productive time of my graduate degree. Having a concrete deadline was exceptionally motivating and in the end, it proved to be a hectic but rewarding time.

Here in Cambridge, things are in transition. It’s a bit of a leap to go from working full time (and then some) on a project that is nearing its auspicous finale, to a pristine and unrelated project, in a new work environment. With that said, you pick up things quickly. As the end of my third week at Harvard draws to a close, I’m beginning to feel acclimatized. I’m not totally there yet, but it’s coming.

I think a part of me is still holding on to the naïve idea that the “next thing” is going to be so much better and easier then what I am currently doing. As if all the stresses and challenges of the current day will be just a mere memory in this not-to-distant, consolatory future, where everything is conducted with grace and ease. (Forgive the hyperbole, as it is merely for illustrative purposes. And I shamelessly enjoy the dramatic flourish.) While I do believe that the future will be better, I’m beginning to learn that with these new affordances are not without their own cost; that there is an eternal struggle, who’s ante is continually increased.

Before coming here, my early ideas of this Ivy League school were tainted with this puerile idea. Papers don’t write themselves, but the potential for interacting and working with some truly remarkable researchers is termendous. The amount of effort to realize those collaborations is still non-trival, but the difference is the abundance of opportunity. That’s the real advantage, and that’s why in my mind things are better.

As an aside, if I was looking for a school where papers write themselves, I really should have gone to MIT:  SCIgen truly does write the paper for you.  Albeit, this is old news, but it still puts a smile on my face. And with any luck, I should be going on a tour of the Media Lab in the next little bit. I’m looking forward to that.

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 television series (meh) and the notable comic book series Rising Stars (alright) and Midnight Nation (most excellent), is slated to direct a sequal of Wilcox’s 1956 cult classic film Forbidden Planet.

Keep your eye out for this one, it could be AMAZING!

Earlier this year, after much deliberation, I decided to upgrade my headphone audio system with the hope of pushing it into the audiophile realm. At the time, I had a pair of Ultrasone PROline 750 headphones that I had had for about six month, and I was driving these directly from my computer, a MacBook Pro.

When I started researching about headphone systems, it became clear I would need to augment my existing system with two main components: an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and a headphone amplifier. I decided on a headphone amplifier first: HeadAmp’s Gilmore Lite headphone amp with a dedicated power supply. From reading a bunch of detailed reviews [one, two, three, four] on this amp, it looked like this was the one for me. I placed my order and in mere three weeks, I would be set!

A respectable DAC was next. Working within my budget, I looked around to see what the audiophile community over at Head-Fi would suggest. By far the DAC that was most offent suggested was the EMU 0202 USB. Based on the reviews, it looked pretty good. I was decided on a 0202, but when I went down to Long & McQuade and I held one in my hands, I wasn’t impressed. The 0202 has a cheap, plastic case that says everything but high-end audio–which is to be expected, as EMU’s parent company is Creative. Cough, cough. Long & McQuade has a score of other possibilities, and in the end I picked up M-Audio’s FireWire Solo.

I was almost there! The next item to sort out was how to connect the FireWire Solo to the Gilmore Lite. WIth a little help, I determined that to connect the DAC to the amp, I would need a dual 1/4″ TS to dual RCA interconnect. (The FireWire Solo has TSR outputs on the back, but it turns out when you plug in a unbalanced 1/4″ TS to the FireWire Solo’s TRS, the balanced TRS jack will run in unbalanced mode. This was confirmed by M-Audio.) In the audiophile world, interconnects are a big deal. People spend a huge proportion of their system budget on cabling, well beyond the point of absurdity (e.g. $500 headphones, $222 headphone cable upgrade). I wasn’t prepared to do that, so I picked up my 1/4″ TS to RCA cable from the fine folks at Blue Jean Cable, which arrived at my door in no time.

The new audio system was almost there, I had a DAC and interconnects, but I was still waiting for the amp. A few months passed, and I hadn’t heard anything from HeapAmp regarding the status of my order. Now I’m a patient individual, so I waited. And waited. And waited. I started poking around on the forums, to see if long order delivery times was typical when dealing with HeadAmp. Turn out it is and people have been complaining about it for a while. There was a strange sense of solace in this information, as long as I wasn’t the exception, I could wait.

As the months rolled by, I started doing some more research about what kind of headphones would nicely match with the infamous Gilmore Lite. There was a lot of different suggestions from Gilmore Lite owners, but the two that stuck out were Grado SR225 and, the big daddy, Sennheiser HD 650. I had heard a pair of Sennheiser 600’s a few years ago (needless-to-say, I thought they were amazing) and I always wondered how my Ultrasone PROline 750’s would hold up against Sennheiser. You can probably see where this is going, but I picked up a pair of 650’s. The Sennheiser HD 650’s are by far, the best headphone I have ever heard (even driven by the under-powered FireWire Solo). They have such a rich sound, it is absolutely delicious. And to think what they will sound like with an amp…

In the mean time, I was still waiting for my amp. I finally got HeadAmp on the phone, and asked what was going on. HeadAmp, or Justin (who runs the whole company, from sales to amp construction), said there was a hold up on the DSP enclosure and assured me that they would have my order shipped out in a few weeks. Well, a few weeks came and went, and still no amp.

This morning I received an email from HeadAmp saying my order has shipped. It has been 231 days since I placed my order, exactly 33 weeks ago.

While it is mildly disappointing to have to wait for so long, looking at it now, I really didn’t mind the wait. After all this time, I’m never more excited to hear this amp, and I know I’ll appreciate it even more.

A jetpack t-shirt. Enough said.

When I heard about the new MacBook Pro a few Tuesdays ago, with dual GPUs, I was pretty pumped. A fancy new discrete graphics chip running along side an integrated graphics clip, married with hybrid SLI. It’s pretty impressive for a notebook computer. But it turns out it’s not so much of a marriage, but rather a messy divorce: little Billy has to a decide who he’s going to spend the weekend with, Mommy or Daddy, but not both. In the end, you save on power consumption, but it isn’t the nuclear family it first appeared to be.

Twistori: “an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.” Included in the Art Exhibit at InfoVis ‘08.

Working computer in a multitasking, time restricted setting offen means to you need to be very aware of when it’s time to switch tasks. Maybe you need to catch the bus in fifteen minutes, or got to a meeting in an hour. Keeping close tabs on the time can often be very distracting from the task at hand, but at the same time you can’t afford to miss the bus or that meeting. A very simple tool which can really help in these situations, are timers. While there are a bunch of fancy (and complex) timers out there, I often find that the best timer for a I-need-to-catch-the-bus-in-fifteen-minutes situation is the simpliest one. After trying out a few, the best timer that I could find is Minutes. It’s elegantly simple and just the thing to remind you about catching that bus. Check it.

I’ve been quietly adding some more photographs to my account, so it was about time I made note of it on the blog.

Public Notice: New photographs are now online. And this one is my favourite: