Location:

• Megan’s Couch in San Francisco

Today I…

• Checked my U of C email (haven’t since mid last week) and wrote some replies.
• Added my vacation schedule to the Innovis Wiki.
• Listened to some Madonna.
• Wrote my first Spring semester ilab-today post.
• Sync’d iCal to Google Calendar (how-to).
• Downloaded some ADC podcasts.

Links 234:

• Music video of the day: Madonna – Get Together
• Microsoft Silverlight [Wikipedia entry]
• Hashbelt data structure. Thanks Hussein.

Wednesday I…

• Finished my last CPSC 699 seminar review.
• Installed Plot for data plotting in OS X. Also installed Graph Sketcher, but I wasn’t very impressed.
• Used Photoshop Automator Actions v3.0 to automate some image processing workflow.
• Heard about the death of American writer Kurt Vonnegut at age 84.
• Implemented a histogram generator in Book Rdx to get a better idea of the data distribution. A mild amount of stress ensued when I mistakenly thought that my mean/standard deviation calculator was fundamentally wrong–which it wasn’t.
• Told my sister Mary how cool she was… oh wait that is what I should have done but didn’t! [This is what happens when you leave your WP account logged in at home.]

Thursday I…

• Attended Uta’s CSCW 2006 overview presentation–well done!
• Conducted an informal colour survey.
• Went to Peter’s Drive-In for lunch.
• Dramatically improved the data to colour mapping technique–oh, the dynamic range! Too bad this amelioration came after the colour survey….

  

• Planned the next week’s work for AStecs with Amanda.

Friday I…

• Created a super sweet AppleScript in Automator which takes screen shots of od in action. An hour’s worth of work = 3435 images!
• Put together another Automator (man I love Automator!) script to crop the collected screen shots.
• Met with Sheelagh.
• Sorted out my LaTeX template for my AStecs final paper. Went with IEEE’s Vis/InfoVis 2007 template.
• Compiled Qt Mac OpenSource 4.2.3 version.
• Ate a burrito.

Today I…

• Created my slide set for the InfoVis 2006 conference overview presentation I’ll be giving tomorrow.
• Talked to Mark and Min about setting up Visual Studio with Qt and ARToolKit Plus–THANKS Mark + Min!
• Showed Sheelagh my axis aligned video cubism implementation.
• Talked to Mike about using Video Traces for the upcoming performance piece–two weeks away!

Links 234:

• Prison vs. Work
• Keyboard shortcuts in OS X
• ColorBrewer
• Music Video of the day: Modest Mouse – Dashboard

Today I…

• Attended Lori Shyba‘s AStecs lecture.
• Finished reading Georg Apitz and François Guimbretière UIST 2004 paper “CrossY: a crossing-based drawing application“. A video demo is available on the project site.
• Refactored Book Redux. Added more UI components to control image blending and pause durations. Started building necessary framework for transition animations. Read and implemented how to get view coordinates from mouse actions in a subclassed NSView. Haven’t figured out how to do a mouse-drag without dragging the whole window…
• Talked to Sheelagh about all kinds of stuff.
• Sketched out an outline for my final AStecs science paper.
• Attended the AStecs/InfoVis reading group to talk about CrossY. Highest turn out yet!
• Changed the image blending rate from linear to sinusoidal, with a little help on the visual math from OS X’s Grapher.
• Downloaded Visual Studio and Windows Vista from MSDN.

On my To-Do list:

• Finish implementing transition animations and add all the OpenGL picking components so that I can use Mark’s sphere rotation code.
• Write my final AStecs science paper.
• Create a super duper final draft of the equipment manifest for AStecs performance piece.
• Get ARToolKitPlus working.
• Attend my last seminar to satisfy CPSC 699 course requirements.
• Put together my InfoVis 2006 overview slides. Presentation on Tuesday.
• Practice more yoga.

Links 234:

• Trek Bikes + Apple
• Today’s video awesomeness: Viva Pinata + Viva Pinata [extended version]
• Music video of the day: Alanis Morissette – My Humps (a parody of the Black Eyed Peas)

Today I…

• Gave a presentation in my AStecs class that when surprisingly well.
• Had sushi for lunch.
• Discussed Ben Shneiderman’s 1996 paper “The Eyes Have It” with Uta for the AStecs/innovis reading group.
• Bought tickets to see Interpol. who are playing MacHall on Sunday April 22.
• Went to 6:00 pm yoga. Moksha!
• Watched an eposide of Death Note (the Anime)–which I never finished since it just like the manga– that began with a message from Konami which read: Not for Sale, Rent, or Ebay. I thought that was funny.
• Started reading Douglas Coupland’s jPod.

  

Links 234:

• Film: Everything’s Gone Green

Today I…

• Went to 6:30 am Yoga. I miss John’s classes…
• Decided to give Papers a try. Adios, BibDesk.
• Went to M. L. Cummings & Stacey D. Scott’s talk on “Decision and Collaboration Support for Time-Critical Unmanned Vehicle Operations”. Ah, US Department of Defense funded research.
• Over at djdownload.com, picked up Jukebox Buddha–fifteen tracks made using nine samples from a FM3 BUDDHA MACHINE.
• Figured out how to do my fancy PROJECTION / MODELVIEW matrix transformations. Thanks Mark for all your help!!!
• Met with Amanda.
• Watched the final episode of season three of BGS. Enough said.
• Listened to the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Sure it’s a bit over produced, but still pretty good.
• Did my AStecs book review for Sheelagh.
• Stayed up way too late.

Links 234:

• Music video of the day: Muse – Knights of Cydonia
• The Peer Review
• Normal Room
• IET Circuit

Today I…

• Had pizza for breakfast. And dinner.
• Work on Book:
  • Tried in vain to determine the cause of the segfault.
  • Removed the Core Video Display Link and replaced it with a NSTimer, which is by far the poorer solution. The NSTimer that is. But hey, when you have no idea on why Objective-C is behaving the why it is, one has to resort to drastic measures.
  • After two weeks of fighting with the same issue, decided that Objective-C is all well and good, but it isn’t getting me anywhere. So I started porting the problematic components from Obj-C to C++. So Book++ was born.
  • Started using STL. Tim, you would be proud.
  • Replaced all the model components of Book‘s model-view-controller architecture with C++ code.
  • Plugged all the Book++ components back into Book. Crossed my figures and pressed “Build and Run”. And… IT WORKS. IT ACTUALLY WORKS!!1
  • Tar’d up some backups and called it a night.
• Music video of the day: Dr. Octagon – Trees

Today I…

• Sorted out the double instantiation of MyOpenGLView. I should really write a Cocoa tutorial one of these days…
• Went to ACAD.
• Picked up an iSight camera from Alan.
• Overhead quote of the day: “…’Nature‘ the tabloid of science!”
• Talked to Mark, Ed, Mike, et al. about the Age of Apocalypse, life after grad school, networking and HCI research juxtaposed, and NP-complete problems.
• Learnt about GLSL samplers. Wrote more of my shader. And bit by bit, I am constructing “a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world!!” [ Bride of the Atom ]
• Attended the AStecs reading group. Thanks Sheelagh and Petra for joining us!
• Did my taxes.

Links 234:

• Nintendo Wiimote Library for C# (thanks Chris & RMS).
• Guice

Today I…

• Spent two hours at the Harry Hays Building trying to submit my passport application.
• Sent some faxes. Ya, it was pretty sweet.
• Attended Tim’s talk during today’s iLab meeting.
• Got my head around how NSOpenGLContext is meant to interact with NSView. With this new knowledge of the API, I changed my rip off of Apple’s Custom Cocoa OpenGL to something based on CocoaDev‘s CustomGLView but slightly cleaner. And double buffered.
• Meet with Sheelagh.
• Talked to Chris and Petra about colour.
• Finish all the fragment shader initialization code.
• Saw my one-line shader in action. Awesome.
• Tim’s bike was lifted!! The Death Penalty for Bike Thieves!
• Added the pedantic compiler flag. Discovered some issues the version of EPS–or should I say, EPF–that I’m using. Time to find the *lastest* version of the library.
• Went for dinner.

Earlier this week I…

• Monday:
  • Sushi for lunch!
  • (Well, this happened on Sunday…) FINALLY connected textures to Book’s scene rendering.
  • “CGPS_HI_testcube.fits” (the 800 MB FITS file) crashes Book during the [NSOpenGLContext flushBuffer]; method call.
  • Shortly before dinner, discovered a memory leak in Book. PAIN begins here.
  • Looked for memory leaks.
  • Just after midnight, started writing my first GLSL fragment shader.
  • While trying to fall asleep, which proved in vain, decided that a multi-threaded texture generator approach to Book isn’t appropriate. A fragment shader is definitely the way to go.
• Tuesday I….
  • Went to Alan’s Sound Pt. Two lecture for AStecs.
  • Started using the ARB_multitexture extension.
  • Read chapter eight, “Connectivity”, from Robert Spence’s book Information Visualization. Looks like the second edition of this title came out at the end of 2006: Information Visualization: Design for Interaction. InfoVis Wiki link.
  • Started refactoring Book–die threads, DIE!!1
  • Sorted out passport application.

Links 234:

• rand()% – “…is an automated net radio station streaming real-time generative music. All audio is generated by software written by sound artists and programmers.”
• Optimize your Mac.

Today I…

• Learnt of the death of Steve Rogers. R.I.P. Captain America, R.I.P.

• In other news… today is International Women’s Day.
• Helped Ed demo for today’s “media event”.
• Attended Smart’s groundbreaking at the Alberta Research Council Building. The mayor and the university president were also in attendance.
• Congratulations to Saul and Sheelagh on their iCORE/Smart Technologies Industrial join Chair in Interactive Technologies!
• Attended the AStecs reading group to talk about Do We Need Formal Education in Visualization? Yes we do!
• Talked to Sheelagh.
• Programmed more of Book.
• Did not stay in the lab until 11:00 pm.

Note: “Stab me in the face!” was said my the Mark while discussing The Aviator.

Today I…

• Met with Dr. Fung and talked stats.
• Developed more of Book:
  • Vexed by forward declaration problems (rea: me not understanding the point of “@class” in the objective-C header files.
  • Implemented a Core Video Display Link for wicked fast rendering timing.
  • Implemented Dr. Fung’s suggestion, on using a colour scale ranging from +/- two times the standard deviation of the global data set.
• Went to the airport

Things on my “To-Do” list:

• For Book:
  • Figure out where to control the time update logic from…
  • Add Mach Ports stuff for thread communication.
  • Do OpenGL textures stuff–at last!!
• Pickup Mac Mini RAM.
• Work on my brain age, which is currently 40.
• Get some spoke cards.

Links 234:

• Music video of the day: Fort Minor – Remember the Name
• Biking video of the day: Fixed Gear Spin

Today I…

• Went to class for AStecs. Successfully delayed Alan’s lecture on sound/MaxMSP until next week, such that Amanda can attend.
• Noticed that Adobe Creative Suite 2 was finally installed on my lab machine.
• Attended an impromptu iLab meeting concerning Smart‘s media event on Thursday.
• Finished reading Understanding Comics.
• Went to the reading group for AStecs to discuss Understanding Comics. A big thank you to Mark for joining us.
• Figured out what will be read next in the reading group: Chapter 8 of Information Visualization by Robert Spence, “Artifacts of the presence era: Using visualization to create an evocative souvenir” by F.B. Viegas, et al. from IEEE InfoVis 2004, and the last two “Best Paper” recipients from IEEE InfoVis conference.
• Started programming my threads for Book.
• Ordered four threadless t-shirts for $10 USD a piece ($12.75 CND): Caged, Tagged, Perpetuate The Stereotype, and Get Some Fresh Air.
• Went biking at my ill attended Club Racer program. Boy did I feel this last month away from the bike. <br />The secret to escaping the boredom: listening to podcasts on my iPod.
• Set up a meeting tomorrow with Dr. Tak Fung to talk stats.
• Listened to some Flunk.

Today I…

• Went to yoga at 6:30 am. My first post-challenge yoga practice. Ya, I took the weekend off.
• Software engineered Book a whole bunch:
  • Wrote my Statistician class.
  • Refactored–the DataHandler class is out!
  • Designed a multi-threaded texture caching system.
• Emailed Dr. Tak Fung about some stats help.
• Had two servings of Mac Hall food–vomit!!
• Read Understanding Comics.

On my “To-Do” list:

• Pick up Mac Mini RAM.
• Do my taxes–but I need those T4 slips first!!!
• Claim flight to CHI in PeopleSoft. Someone should really put together: www.PeopleSoftSucks.com Ah, only if there were more time in the day… then again if I had extra time, I likely won’t be making hate websites. Needless to say, PeopleSoft still sucks.
• Implement my multi-threaded texture caching system for Book.
• Watch some Battlestar Galactica.

Links 234:

• WIndows Vista Cracked by Paradox 2007
• Circular menu.
• Drug Dealers vs. Geeks – Oh, the similarities!
• Free and legal torrents.
• Things my boyfriend says.
• Music video of the day: The Killers – Read My Mind

Saturday I…

• Booked flights to San José and San Francisco, and I’m not flying Air Canada!!
• Compiled EPS as a static library for OS X. No luck on the shared library.
• Book [Digital && Physical] is now using Objective-C++ and using the EPS library. Oh, ya.
• Put multiple pairs of jeans in the dryer–STUPID!!

Friday I…

• Went to yoga 6:30 am. The challenge is complete!
• Answered emails.
• Wrote my review of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for the AStecs reading group. Why does it take so long?
• Read about connecting C++ libraries with Objective-C.
• Met with Amanda.
• Met with Sheelag, Floh, and Robin.
• Made plans for the West Coast Trail trip with Dave.

Links 234:

• Patrick Stewart Alphabet

Today I…

• Went to yoga at 6:30 am. Oh the pain. But on the bright side, only two more days left in the challenge!
• Discovered numerous new emails from the night before in my inbox.
• Wrote my review of last night’s Science Café for CPSC 699.
• Attended the iLab meeting.
• Talked to Amanda for a while. Demo’d FITS Liberator in Photoshop.
• Kobe Beef!
• Talked to James + Tim.
• Joined in on a conference call with SGI. Feels like old times…
• Talked to Sheelagh and Floh about materializing the CFI grant.
• Talked to Min about fiducials. Thanks Min!
• Uninstalled VirusScan.

I’ve been wondering where all the time during the day goes. So today, I’m going to solve that mystery. Here is pretty much exactly what I did today.

Today I…

• 4:45 am – Woke up.
• 6:30 – Yoga.
• 8:30 – Arrived in the iLab.
• 8:30 – 9:00 – Ate breakfast, set up my computer, read some emails, began writing this post.
• 9:00 – Started reading “Chapter 14 – Statistical Description of Data” in Numerical Recipes in C, but decided to skip the stats stuff more the moment.
• 9:12 – Started up Xcode. Started coding Book.
• 9:13 – Put on my headphones and started up iTunes.
• 9:50 – Started listening to this dude’s iTunes music share. I particularly enjoyed the “Calm the fuck down!” play list.
• 10:17 -Browsed some torrents… eg. Got distracted. Possiblity this is becase, my program isn’t working.
• 10:24 – Discovered the source of the bug. fits_read_pix() is returning a 410 error. Hmmm…. My print-error-message utility method isn’t working either. Change sprintf(stderr, …) to NSLog and it works…. But it gave me ꀀꔰꂠ〽退ꖌƐ
  
  on the first try.
• 10:35 – Met with Sheelagh and talked about my AStecs literature review paper. Feedback!
• 11:00 – AStecs class.
• 12:20 – Ate lunch. Mmmm, fresh dill.
• 12:40 – 1:05 – Went to the library to get my interlibrary loan: GPU-Based Interactive Visualization Techniques. The book came all the way from University of Miami!!
• 1:05 – Started flipping through my library book.
• 1:11 – Back to Xcode and Book.
• 2:30 – Meeting with Sheelagh and Uta about AStecs InfoVis reading group.
• 2:51 – Lost internet connection.
• 2:53 – Back online and blogging. And then back to programming.
• 3:13 – Found my bug from this morning. And all it took was <code>tmp = data[(i * height) + j];</code> NOT <code>tmp = data[(i * width) + j];</code>
• 3:14 – Bagel Time! Another bug…
• 3:37 – Bug fixed. Hey, it’s not segfaulting anymore… More coding
• 4:10 – Thought about null pointers. Forget that. Looked for additional FITS files online.
• 4:27 – Bagel + Yogurt Time! This time, it’s for real.
• 4:39 – It was brought to my attention that Science Café is happening tonight.
• 5:00 – Started a new Xcode project: Poster.
• 5:05 – Wrote up a CPSC 699 seminar for two weeks ago.
• 5:38 – Exited the iLab for Science Cafe!
• Later tonight: Read Understanding Comics.

And that’s all for today!

Today I:

• Went to yoga at 6:30 am. Four more days left!
• Went straight home afterwards and wrote lots and lots of objective-C code.
• Enabled “Syntax aware indenting” in Xcode. At last.
• Missed skipped the Innovis meeting.
• Blogged about my progress on the course blog. Sigh. There is tons left to do. Tons.
• Listened to Death From Above 1979. Thanks James!

On my To-Do list:

• Write stats package to automatically generate colour scales.
• More coding for the AStecs installation.
• Find a cure for cancer.

Today I…

• Went to yoga at 6:30 am.
• Processed my student loan–in three seperate trips to the post office!
• Picked up my Adobe Creative Suit 2 Premium, which was order back at the beginning of November. Ya, only took three months.
• Decided that Mark and I are brothers from different mothers.
• Read more about Cocoa.
• Went to yoga at noon.
• Thank you to who ever picked up my mail from ICT. Fun Fact: I NEVER check my ICT mailbox. Hell, I don’t even know the door code…
• Met with Amanda.
• Installed Creative Suit.
• Programmed.
• I had three cookies.
• Three of us went to dinner and ordered three sushi rolls (Vancouver, Power of Love, and Crunch’n'Munch) at Globe Fish.

Links 234:

• Wallpaper.
• Insane Japanese Costumes
• Music Video of the Day: Death From Above 1979 – Black History Month

Today I…

• Did not go to yoga in the morning.
• Worked from home today.
• Talked to Amanda. Meeting tomorrow.
• Thought about moving from Cocoa to Carbon (eg. Objective-C to C++) since that would allow for “cross platform” development (well, the GUI stuff would be platform dependent). But UI stuff in Carbon is way more annoying and Cocoa deals with a lot of the annoying UI details. So it’s Cocoa is here to stay.
• More reading on UI development with Cocoa. And a bit more coding.
• Saw Stranger Than Fiction at Canyon ghettos. It was pleasant. Got some ideas about my visualization during the end credits…