Sigh.... I almost wasn't sure if I should write another 'countdown' post on my thesis after last week. I was seriously thinking about quitting.
I found out that I won't be able to graduate this quarter, AND later that same day, I crashed the file server that all my data is on. The file server was back up and running later that night but some of my data got corrupted. I have to regenerate all my features which I estimate will take me at least a week.
In other news, which I happen to find less depressing than talking about my thesis..... Great Depression 09! Is it coming? Is it just hype?
What I am finding interesting right now is that peak oil types and mainstream media are starting to converge on some similar topics, although perhaps for slightly different reasons. The following two stories are both very interesting, and both talk about suburbanites growing their own food.
What would a modern depression look like? <-- h/t @ Marginal Revolution.
A Resilient Suburbia? Weighing the Potential for Self-Sufficiency.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Swiss Socks
This post is for Traci and Peter. Traci, because she was there when I bought these socks, and Peter because he is Swiss.
I bought these socks in 1997, when I went to Europe for the first time on a band trip. They are really comfy and good quality... I just wanted to share that over 11 years later they are still in good shape! Those Swiss socks are just unbeatable.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Best Use of Machine Learning I Have Seen Yet
According to Typealyzer, I am an ESFP.
The description:
I'm not sure whether I should be happy because this description is quite accurate (minus the fabrics... I am too cheap for such things!) or sad because apparently I am the exact opposite of Greg Mankiw.
The description:
The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.
The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.
I'm not sure whether I should be happy because this description is quite accurate (minus the fabrics... I am too cheap for such things!) or sad because apparently I am the exact opposite of Greg Mankiw.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Countdown to Thesis (6)
My defense has been scheduled - December 10th. That means I am now at T - 23 days.
I have already started fantasizing about what I will do to celebrate when I'm done, and I have come up with a list of 10 things:
1. Jog - I haven't had much time to exercise in a while. In fact, I practically have "chair sores" from sitting in front of the laptop for 14+ hours a day. This victory jog will not only be sweet and glorious, it will also be the first step towards getting my pre-thesis body back. (OK I have gained at most 5 lbs but still.)
2. Coffee - Of course I'm actually drinking more coffee than ever now. But this 'victory coffee' will be sipped at a leisurely pace, in a coffee shop of my choosing. I could get really crazy and not even bring my laptop to the coffee shop.
3. Shopping - I don't really need to buy anything... especially since I'm planning on being unemployed soon. But nowadays I don't go to a store unless I need something. Usually groceries. I want to just look at stuff, and maybe try stuff on. I can go to 5 shoe stores and not buy a pair of shoes!
4. Make Phone Calls - I haven't exactly been good at staying in touch lately. I will spend a whole day on the phone!
5. Funk concert - I have been living in Seattle for over 2 years and I have probably gone to less than 10 concerts. Any concert will do really, but I'd like to find a funk band if possible. Why funk? Because funk music meanders lazily, like teenagers' IM conversations.
6. Carte de Oaxaca - Of course I want to go out to eat! This is always one of my favorite activities. Carte de Oaxaca has been on my list for a long time, but I haven't gone because of the long lines. But post-school, long lines will deter me no longer!!
7. Sit and Read - Ahhhh reading. Perhaps the Utne Reader. This may be done in conjunction with #2.
8. Spa visit - I've only been to a spa once, and that was in Indonesia. (I got a full body massage for $20 - pretty sweet!) Perhaps I will treat myself to a facial. I have heard that stress is bad for your skin.
9. breakfast - I haven't tried very many breakfast places in Seattle. I hear that Schultzy's has good breakfast burritos. This must be verified.
10. Watch It's a Wonderful Life - Somehow my dear Canadian boyfriend has made it through his whole life without seeing this timeless classic. I think it's important for him to see how knowledgeable the average American is about the financial crisis of the 30's. Plus it's just a good movie.
I have already started fantasizing about what I will do to celebrate when I'm done, and I have come up with a list of 10 things:
1. Jog - I haven't had much time to exercise in a while. In fact, I practically have "chair sores" from sitting in front of the laptop for 14+ hours a day. This victory jog will not only be sweet and glorious, it will also be the first step towards getting my pre-thesis body back. (OK I have gained at most 5 lbs but still.)
2. Coffee - Of course I'm actually drinking more coffee than ever now. But this 'victory coffee' will be sipped at a leisurely pace, in a coffee shop of my choosing. I could get really crazy and not even bring my laptop to the coffee shop.
3. Shopping - I don't really need to buy anything... especially since I'm planning on being unemployed soon. But nowadays I don't go to a store unless I need something. Usually groceries. I want to just look at stuff, and maybe try stuff on. I can go to 5 shoe stores and not buy a pair of shoes!
4. Make Phone Calls - I haven't exactly been good at staying in touch lately. I will spend a whole day on the phone!
5. Funk concert - I have been living in Seattle for over 2 years and I have probably gone to less than 10 concerts. Any concert will do really, but I'd like to find a funk band if possible. Why funk? Because funk music meanders lazily, like teenagers' IM conversations.
6. Carte de Oaxaca - Of course I want to go out to eat! This is always one of my favorite activities. Carte de Oaxaca has been on my list for a long time, but I haven't gone because of the long lines. But post-school, long lines will deter me no longer!!
7. Sit and Read - Ahhhh reading. Perhaps the Utne Reader. This may be done in conjunction with #2.
8. Spa visit - I've only been to a spa once, and that was in Indonesia. (I got a full body massage for $20 - pretty sweet!) Perhaps I will treat myself to a facial. I have heard that stress is bad for your skin.
9. breakfast - I haven't tried very many breakfast places in Seattle. I hear that Schultzy's has good breakfast burritos. This must be verified.
10. Watch It's a Wonderful Life - Somehow my dear Canadian boyfriend has made it through his whole life without seeing this timeless classic. I think it's important for him to see how knowledgeable the average American is about the financial crisis of the 30's. Plus it's just a good movie.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Countdown to Thesis (5)
I think I may have turned into a zombie. It is 5:30am, and I went to bed at about 1am. I am working on my thesis. And I don't really care. I'm not particularly tired, or awake. I'm not getting upset when things aren't working - just methodically going through and fixing them.
I guess I should have switched to four hours of sleep a night a long time ago.
I guess I should have switched to four hours of sleep a night a long time ago.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Mad Max
I finally watched Mad Max last night. I was excited to watch this movie because multiple people had told me that it was about peak oil.
I could go into detail here but suffice it to say that the movie sucked really bad. It was boring, didn't make any sense, and I ended up falling asleep before it was over. And although my understanding is that it is supposed to take place in a dystopian future with a shortage of oil, that is never mentioned in the movie.
Sean and I discussed the movie a bit, trying to figure out why on earth it could have become so popular. We have no answer to that, but I came up with a fun question to ask people. For those of you who care about cars at all (and I understand if you don't cause I sure don't either), here is the question: If you were running from the cops and could be driving any car, which car would you choose and why? I'll put Sean's answer in the comments later.
I could go into detail here but suffice it to say that the movie sucked really bad. It was boring, didn't make any sense, and I ended up falling asleep before it was over. And although my understanding is that it is supposed to take place in a dystopian future with a shortage of oil, that is never mentioned in the movie.
Sean and I discussed the movie a bit, trying to figure out why on earth it could have become so popular. We have no answer to that, but I came up with a fun question to ask people. For those of you who care about cars at all (and I understand if you don't cause I sure don't either), here is the question: If you were running from the cops and could be driving any car, which car would you choose and why? I'll put Sean's answer in the comments later.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
5 Short Unix Fairy Tales
As I mentioned a while back, I "published" an article about unix on a friend's website. That site is no longer up, so I thought I'd just republish the article here. Cause it's good. :)
5 Short Unix Fairy Tales
These are stories about overcoming adversity. In each story, a girl (me) goes head-to-head with an intimidating foe - the operating system known simply by one four-letter word. Unix.
When I started using unix on a regular basis last year, it was a slow and painful process for me to become the savvy power user that I am today. OK who am I kidding? Two days ago I wrote a bash script and named one of my variables $PATH. (This ruins your actual path and you lose the ability to use any commands.) And about a week ago I tried to cat a binary file and ended up causing my terminal to go into wing-dings mode. It was really weird. But I'm getting there! I thought I would share a few of the frustrating mistakes I have run into, in the hopes that they might be helpful to someone else.
1. Grep and find do not work the same way. This may be obvious to some people, but it caused me so much confusion that for many months I tried avoiding the find command altogether. Finally, I figured out what the key difference was. When you give grep a string to search for, it returns anything that contains that substring. When you give find a string, it looks for that entire string. Therefore, if you did want to look for anything with a given substring, you would need to add a wildcard operator to your find string.
For example, say you have the files:
amy1
amy2
in a directory. Watch what happens:
>> ls | grep amy*
>>
This returns nothing.
>> ls | grep amy
amy1
amy2
This works as expected, returning all files with the substring amy.
>> find . -name "amy" -maxdepth 1
>>
This returns nothing, because there is no file with the exact name "amy".
>> find . -name "amy*" -maxdepth 1
amy1
amy2
Once I figured this out, my life got way better.
2. Symlinks can create some havoc. I just recently ran into a problem with a symlink. I was in a folder which was a symlink to another folder. Let's call this folder foo:
/amy/foo -> /bob/foo
So there I am in my foo folder, which is actually a link to Brian's foo folder. Now let's say there's also a folder called /amy/bar. I think I want to copy something over from bar so I do this:
>> ls ../bar
ls: ../bar: No such file or directory
But that's weird because if I do this:
>> cd ..
>> ls
bar foo yourmom
I see that the bar folder is indeed there. It turns out that when you are in a symlinked folder, you can use relative paths with the cd command and it uses your destination folder as the reference. But, when you use the ls command it uses the sources folder as the reference. Oh, tricky unix!
3. Sed only reads in one line at a time . I got excited recently, seeing that I could use sed to replace spaces with commas in a file, like so:
>> cat file | sed "s/ /,/g"
Ta da, all spaces have been magically morphed into commas! But then I got a little more ambitious and decided to try adding a period to the end of each line, like this:
>> cat file | sed "s/\n/\.\n/g"
This should replace all newline characters with a period plus newline, right? No! Sed stops at the newline, so it doesn't see it. I spent a couple hours trying to find a way around this problem. Finally, my very helpful labmate showed me this:
>> cat file | sed "s/$/\./g"
Easy! The '$' character represents the end of the string, and I replace that with a period. No newlines needed.
4. Input file is output file>? Recently, I did the following:
>> head filename > filename
I thought this was a great idea. (All I have really learned in the past year is that when I think something is a great idea, I'm wrong.) I thought I was being so smart. I only needed the first ten lines of filename, so I print them out with head, and then save them back to filename. I was so confident that this worked that I went and started running scripts that use filename. Well guess what actually happened? Filename was empty! Bummer. Unfortunately, I cannot explain the inner workings of why this is. Suffice it to say that it is inadvisable to redirect a file to itself.
Some commands will actually warn you about this, such as:
>> cat filename > filename
cat: filename: input file is output file
But head is not one of those files! Now you have been warned.
5. Don't start filenames with a dash A while back, I wrote a script that had a bug in it (go figure!) and it accidentally output some files whose names started with a dash. Then, I tried to do an ls * in that directory. Don't ask me why I put the star there. I guess I hadn't had my coffee yet and forgot that just a simple ls would suffice. Actually today I forgot what floor of the building I work on for a little while and had to look at the room numbers as I was going down the hall. So forgetting how to use ls may be the least of my problems. Anyway, here is what happened to me:
>> ls *
ls: invalid option -- 9
Of course it makes sense that dashes are bad! Unix commands accept flags which all start with dashes. Of course, once I got myself into this pickle, I had to get myself out of it, without rm-ing anything that I didn't want to rm. Here's what I did:
>> rm ./-*
I found out later that you can also use the "--" option to treat everything afterwards as literal characters. So I could have done:
>> rm -- -*
I think if there's a moral to these stories, it is that unix is basically a wild stallion. If you are cocky enough to think that you could tame such a beast, you will be thrown off and trampled. To death. But if you can win its trust, it might take you for a magical ride.
5 Short Unix Fairy Tales
These are stories about overcoming adversity. In each story, a girl (me) goes head-to-head with an intimidating foe - the operating system known simply by one four-letter word. Unix.
When I started using unix on a regular basis last year, it was a slow and painful process for me to become the savvy power user that I am today. OK who am I kidding? Two days ago I wrote a bash script and named one of my variables $PATH. (This ruins your actual path and you lose the ability to use any commands.) And about a week ago I tried to cat a binary file and ended up causing my terminal to go into wing-dings mode. It was really weird. But I'm getting there! I thought I would share a few of the frustrating mistakes I have run into, in the hopes that they might be helpful to someone else.
1. Grep and find do not work the same way. This may be obvious to some people, but it caused me so much confusion that for many months I tried avoiding the find command altogether. Finally, I figured out what the key difference was. When you give grep a string to search for, it returns anything that contains that substring. When you give find a string, it looks for that entire string. Therefore, if you did want to look for anything with a given substring, you would need to add a wildcard operator to your find string.
For example, say you have the files:
amy1
amy2
in a directory. Watch what happens:
>> ls | grep amy*
>>
This returns nothing.
>> ls | grep amy
amy1
amy2
This works as expected, returning all files with the substring amy.
>> find . -name "amy" -maxdepth 1
>>
This returns nothing, because there is no file with the exact name "amy".
>> find . -name "amy*" -maxdepth 1
amy1
amy2
Once I figured this out, my life got way better.
2. Symlinks can create some havoc. I just recently ran into a problem with a symlink. I was in a folder which was a symlink to another folder. Let's call this folder foo:
/amy/foo -> /bob/foo
So there I am in my foo folder, which is actually a link to Brian's foo folder. Now let's say there's also a folder called /amy/bar. I think I want to copy something over from bar so I do this:
>> ls ../bar
ls: ../bar: No such file or directory
But that's weird because if I do this:
>> cd ..
>> ls
bar foo yourmom
I see that the bar folder is indeed there. It turns out that when you are in a symlinked folder, you can use relative paths with the cd command and it uses your destination folder as the reference. But, when you use the ls command it uses the sources folder as the reference. Oh, tricky unix!
3. Sed only reads in one line at a time . I got excited recently, seeing that I could use sed to replace spaces with commas in a file, like so:
>> cat file | sed "s/ /,/g"
Ta da, all spaces have been magically morphed into commas! But then I got a little more ambitious and decided to try adding a period to the end of each line, like this:
>> cat file | sed "s/\n/\.\n/g"
This should replace all newline characters with a period plus newline, right? No! Sed stops at the newline, so it doesn't see it. I spent a couple hours trying to find a way around this problem. Finally, my very helpful labmate showed me this:
>> cat file | sed "s/$/\./g"
Easy! The '$' character represents the end of the string, and I replace that with a period. No newlines needed.
4. Input file is output file>? Recently, I did the following:
>> head filename > filename
I thought this was a great idea. (All I have really learned in the past year is that when I think something is a great idea, I'm wrong.) I thought I was being so smart. I only needed the first ten lines of filename, so I print them out with head, and then save them back to filename. I was so confident that this worked that I went and started running scripts that use filename. Well guess what actually happened? Filename was empty! Bummer. Unfortunately, I cannot explain the inner workings of why this is. Suffice it to say that it is inadvisable to redirect a file to itself.
Some commands will actually warn you about this, such as:
>> cat filename > filename
cat: filename: input file is output file
But head is not one of those files! Now you have been warned.
5. Don't start filenames with a dash A while back, I wrote a script that had a bug in it (go figure!) and it accidentally output some files whose names started with a dash. Then, I tried to do an ls * in that directory. Don't ask me why I put the star there. I guess I hadn't had my coffee yet and forgot that just a simple ls would suffice. Actually today I forgot what floor of the building I work on for a little while and had to look at the room numbers as I was going down the hall. So forgetting how to use ls may be the least of my problems. Anyway, here is what happened to me:
>> ls *
ls: invalid option -- 9
Of course it makes sense that dashes are bad! Unix commands accept flags which all start with dashes. Of course, once I got myself into this pickle, I had to get myself out of it, without rm-ing anything that I didn't want to rm. Here's what I did:
>> rm ./-*
I found out later that you can also use the "--" option to treat everything afterwards as literal characters. So I could have done:
>> rm -- -*
I think if there's a moral to these stories, it is that unix is basically a wild stallion. If you are cocky enough to think that you could tame such a beast, you will be thrown off and trampled. To death. But if you can win its trust, it might take you for a magical ride.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Countdown to Thesis (4)
While everyone was out voting and getting free coffee at Starbucks, I was trying to run jobs on the cluster. To make a long story short, I was getting a bug when I sent two jobs to the cluster, but it was not repeatable and when I sent the single bug-producing job to the cluster by itself, it didn't seem to have a problem. (Also when I run it on my home machine it is bug free.)
So, when people talk about cloud computing and how warm and fuzzy and wonderful it will make the world, I just feel the cold hand of the grim reaper gently scratching my backbone.
What else is new with my thesis? I have written most of chapter 3, and the total page count (including table of contents, bibliography, etc.) is now at 30. My India trip got postponed so that will give me more time to buckle down and get this freaking thing done.
So, when people talk about cloud computing and how warm and fuzzy and wonderful it will make the world, I just feel the cold hand of the grim reaper gently scratching my backbone.
What else is new with my thesis? I have written most of chapter 3, and the total page count (including table of contents, bibliography, etc.) is now at 30. My India trip got postponed so that will give me more time to buckle down and get this freaking thing done.
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