Study Designs

2x2 Mixed Factorial Design
Within Subjects Design
2x2 Between Subjects Factorial Design

Boxed Wine and One Liter Beers in Ballard

Female Friends in the NY Times

In an article about promoting science and engineering careers to women, my CSE department at the University of Washington was featured along with a few friends.

The man in the middle there is Ed Lazowska, professor in CSE and former chair of the department. The surrounding females are a mixture of grads and undergrads in CSE.

MyExperience Website

I open sourced MyExperience in February after the SourceForge server debacle was resolved (link). Despite releasing the code to the wild, I have not yet had time to create an installation package that users can download and install to their devices. In addition, I've only just begun creating documentation. Thus, I've held off on advertising MyExperience to the larger research community until these two tasks are accomplished. This week, I made substantial progress in designing a webpage. The current (incomplete) version can be viewed here. Screenshot below.

Perceptive Pixel

Jeff Han, of multi-touch fame, recently formed his own company called Perceptive Pixel to market touch screen technology to the masses.

Check out a demo video here.

NTC 2007 in Houston, Texas

Flying to Houston

JFK layover

Dinner with University of Houston NTC team

Cavendar's Western Outfitters w/Coach

Paul disapproves of my Texas belt buckle style

Bobby, the cowboy.

Jason, the cowstud.

Texas breakfast pwnage.

Cassandra and Paul at the NTC Banquet

West Seattle and Fremont

View from West Seattle

Sunday Night Baller's (B. Prouty and myself) at Dad Watsons in Fremont

dub!

SourceForge Downtime

It's hard to complain about SourceForge; it offers an invaluable (and free) service to open source developers and downloaders alike. It is, without question, the predominant host of open source software. However, one criticism that SourceForge can't seem to escape is its propensity for server downtime. Ironically, I was having a similar discussion with colleagues at my research lab and attempting to defend SourceForge for its apparent lack of robustness (and IT resources?). Now, I'm being affected directly by it. I am prepared to launch two open source Windows Mobile 5 projects: Roam and MyExperience. My application for hosting on SourceForge was accepted last week. Unfortunately, however, the project shell service has been down for the past 5 days preventing me from transferring my SVN dumps. It's been very frustrating.

The SourceForge "site status" page says:

( 2007-02-16 12:34:12 - Project Shell Service ) 2007-02-12: The shell server was taken offline for unscheduled maintenance. Due to a need to replace the old hardware and some unforeseen problems in getting the new hardware setup, we estimate that the shell service may not return until the 21st of February. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Interestingly, however, they keep changing this "log" message. On 2/13, they said that the shell service would be down for 24 hours, on 2/14 they changed the same log message to read "between 24 and 48 hours," on 2/15 it read "... will be up as soon as possible" and now today it says "until the 21st of February." I definitely appreciate their openness in relating these facts; I wonder, however, why they don't create a new log posting on the page for these updates--why overwrite prior log messages with new information?

Update 02-21-2007 @ 8:30PM: The SourceForge shell services are still not back up. I do not want to seem ungrateful but this is getting ridiculous. How can a hosting company function this way and still maintain a userbase? Don't they understand that other hosting services are cropping up from major players (see, for example, Google's Project Hosting and Microsoft's CodePlex). How long can SourceForge sustain itself with its well known tendency to break? They are currently recruiting new hires on their frontpage, so perhaps this is simply a matter of scale and lack of personnel. Let us hope. Here's another dissatisfied SourceForge user making a similar point nearly a year ago for similar reasons (link).

Update 02-22-2007 @ 11:05AM: They did it again :-|. SourceForge changed their status message to read "...the shell service may not return until February 23rd" which read February 21st yesterday. Again, I appreciate their candidness but why keep overwriting their old updates. By my count, this status post has been changed five times.

Update 02-23-2007 @ 5:34PM: The shell services are now reportedly back up. I have not had a chance to try them (the SSH keys have changed). The status page now says:

( 2007-02-23 12:00:52 - Project Shell Service ) As of 1200 PST on February 23, 2007, project shell service has been restored. Please note that the SSH host keys have changed: refer to document G04 to see the new host key fingerprints.

New England's NTC Champions

Cassandra Hearn and her partner Paul Caruso won the National Trial Competition's New England Regional Tournament (link). The National Trial Competition (NTC) is one of the oldest and most prestigious mock trial competitions in the United States. Every ABA-accredited law school in the country is invited to compete in this annual competition. The American College of Trial Lawyers sponsors the tournament.

This year 22 teams competed in the New England Regional Tournament including Harvard Law, Maine, New England Law, Franklin Pierce and Suffolk University (to name a few). To get to the championship round, you must win at least 3 of 4 matches.

Cassandra and Paul will travel to Houston, TX on March 28 to face the winners of the thirteen other regional tournaments in the national phase of the competition. Paul Caruso was also the recipient of the Judy Potter Award, which is given to the tournament's Most Outstanding individual advocate. Cassandra Hearn becomes one of only four Suffolk University Law School (Suffolk) students to win the tournament two times. Their primary coaches were Bobby Hazelton (adjunct Suffolk faculty member) and Jason Drori (Suffolk Law alumnus).



According to the Texas Young Lawyers Association web page, The National Trial Competition was established in 1975 to encourage and strengthen students advocacy skills through quality competition and valuable interaction with members of the bench and bar. The program is designed to expose law students to the nature of trial practice and to serve as a supplement to their education. It is the Texas Young Lawyers Association intent to provide a meaningful contribution to the development of future trial lawyers.

Website Launch

My personal website is now officially live. I tested it in Opera (Mac & PC), FireFox (Mac & PC), Safari (Mac), and IE7 (PC). There was a slight JavaScript bug in IE7 that I resolved today thanks to webdeveloper.com (see my post here). It turns out that IE7 does not handle <script .../> correctly. Instead, you must use the longhand closure <script .../></script>.

There are a few small rendering discrepancies across browsers, particularly in IE7 vs. everything else but I'm willing to live with them for now.

You may notice the dynamic content in the right side column of the about me page. This was done using a mixture of php and JavaScript. I plan to post those scripts on the website (in the hacks section) for public consumption. This was my first experience using php and I was impressed. It's amazingly easy to parse XML data and the library calls are straightforward. I imagine that if I did something more complicated, I would definitely need some sort of php debugger.

Website Header Reflected

From Mockup to Website

I've been using PowerPoint to mockup interfaces since I got into graduate school. This weekend, my goal was to implement my website ppt mockup in actual html (and learn php and CSS in the process).

Here's the ppt mockup:


Here's a screen capture of the actual site rendered in FireFox:


Time will tell whether this renders correctly in all browsers, FireFox and Opera seem to do fine.

Running SSH Server on Windows XP

This howto document created by the University of Waterloo on "how to setup the Cygin SSH Daemon on Windows 2003" is fantastic. Note that every piece of advice translated directly for me to Windows XP Professional (except for the keygen stuff which I don't use).

There was one thing missing, however, and that is to unblock port 22 in your firewall. By default, the Windows Firewall blocks this port. If you don't, the ssh server will be inaccessible from outside your domain. :)

NetFlix User Reviews

Recently, NetFlix has been actively promoting their user-created content. NetFlix allows users to rate and review movies and share them with public/friends. One of the coolest features is the user-to-user similarity rankings--e.g., my g/f has rated569 movies and has a 80% similarity ranking with me. The reason for this post, however, is that I recently rented Maria Full of Grace (which was fantastic) and I found the most current"user reviews" to be quite interesting:

The movie might have been OK except that there was non stop comentary [sic] through the whole movie... The comments told every small detail about where he met the actors, physical points he liked etc. I got a BIG headache and had to turn off the movie. Who cares where he met the actors, I wanted to see a movie, not hear about what it is like to make a movie.

and, from another user,

I hated it because the movie was in Spanish and I could not get it to speak English.

New Years Resolution Passed

This year for my New Year's Resolution I decided to gain 100 pounds of pure muscle. On Thursday, the 12th of January, I passed my goal. This is, mind you, without steroids or even Gatorade. This is simply the outcome of 12 days of hard work.

Next year, I plan to work on my other arm.

TechCrunch's Best of Web 2.0

I subscribe to TechCrunch's RSS feed. I found it to be one of the best news sources for up to date information on Web 2.0 and Mobile startups. Recently, they posted their best of Web 2.0 list.

A View From My (Parent's) Window

GSM-Based Context-Aware Profile Switcher

CellProfileSwitcher is a cool freeware application for Windows Mobile 5 based Pocket PCs that can perform a set of tasks like changing profile, running an application, play a sound or turn on/off Bluetooth based on your GSM LAC (Location area code) and Cell Id location. A Today home screen plug-in is shows the current GSM cell, group and the according LAC and cell ID numbers.

Here are the tasks/actions it can perform based on your GSM location:

Change profile
Change Bluetooth status
Execute a program
Vibrate (short for entering the cell, long for leaving it)
Change the home screen
Show a message
Play a wave sound
Change the phone’s wave volume
Notify Automatic Keylock (which must be installed separately)
Switch Wifi (Wifi-enabled WM5 phones only)
Enable flight mode

from (link)

My Life in 19 Seconds