June 13, 2012

McCormick Interview - Outreach 101 + QUALS

I was interviewed and given a semi-prominent placement in Northwestern’s McCormick Magazine for the outreach work that 2011-2012 NU-IEEE President Curtis Wang and I have put together. Permalink to article. It was a really nice writeup and really great to get to throw out a mention of Joyce Stark! In other news–I had a crazy couple of weeks due to preparing for (and eventually, taking!) my PhD qualifying examinations. They consist of a panel of three professors questioning me on intricacies of material that I’ve been learning over the last couple of years, namely: Numerical PDE methods, Analytic PDE methods, and optimization.

May 26, 2012

Numerical Recipes & Scientific Libraries

I attended a talk on how to use Quest, Northwestern University’s TOP500 supercomputer(At least during June 2010). Most of it was a routine introduction to MPI, but one interesting question raised was what routines we should be using in our scientific computing codes. A lot of holdouts were still using [ Numerical Recipes] for their research-level codes, which strikes me as a backwards way about it. Numerical Recipes is a starting point, and probably not the best thing to use: it has awful licensing and might not even be that reliable!

April 13, 2012

Integrating Sparrow and Aperture/iPhoto

In my recent quest to take on digital photography, I’ve been using Apple’s Aperture to store download my pictures and do basic manipulation on them. It’s been working great, except that emailing is a pain because Apple hardcoded the email clients to: Apple Mail.app Eudora (really!?) America Online(!?!) Microsoft Entourage Microsoft Outlook while I’d prefer to use Sparrow, a lightweight client that Sharvil got me hooked on a while back.

April 2, 2012

chicago 2012 marathon

I’ve signed up for the Chicago 2012 Marathon with Team To End AIDS or my donation page–PLEASE! every bit helps!). It’s a bit of an unusual choice, probably, to not run for the American Lung Association(I have asthma) or the American Cancer Society(my dad is a survivor.) But it’s actually been a good opportunity to learn a bit more about the current state of AIDS, AIDS policy, and what it’s like to live with it.

March 29, 2012

digital photography

Recently I’ve decided to dedicate a slight bit of time to get a bit better at taking pictures. I’d always wanted to get a truly nice camera, and the opportunity presented itself, so I decided to go for it and bought a Nikon D5100 DSLR. I also ended up getting a complete steal on the Nikon 55-200mm DX VR lens, which was pretty awesome. Project 365 would be a great move from here, since I’m certainly no photographer, but it’s been fun just learning about it all the ins and outs and how it all works together.

March 29, 2012

fibonacci miles and kilometers

In my running, I have been trying to keep track in kilometers. This presents a couple problems: Somehow, my mind still thinks in miles, which is weird because I do not really have /that/ good of an idea exactly how far a mile is, either. Or someone wants to know how far a 5k is. Or, when I was running the 2011 Chicago Marathon, there would be kilometer postings between the mile markers.

March 26, 2012

tjtestharness - a language-agnostic DVCS unit-test/continuous integration tool

I’ve been wanting to have a way to visualize which unit tests(or sets of them) passed for a given commit, if for no other reason than the sense of accomplishment from watching boxes turn yellow, then green, as they pass tests. The trouble is, I write code in a lot of different languages for a lot of different projects. I also don’t want to bother with running unit tests individually–I want them to run as I perform commits.

February 1, 2012

a trig problem solved in MATLAB

I came across this post. The basic idea is the guy wants to maximize $L_1+L_2$ constrained to this box, where $L_i$ is the length of beam $i$. It’s constrained to be a 61 cmx61 cm box, but one beam must start from 10cm up from the bottom right corner and the beams must meet at a point along the top of the box. I added the further assumption that the other beam must end in the bottom left corner.

February 1, 2012

cplex matlab interface

Just for my own reference, I’m documenting the interface to CPLEX. CPLEX expects a problem in the form ( \begin{split} \min \qquad & g^Td + \frac12 d^TWd\ \text{subject to} \qquad & c_L \leq Ad \leq c_U\ & d_L \leq d \leq d_U \end{split} ) and is called by cplex = Cplex('test'); cplex.Param.feasopt.tolerance.Cur = 1e-8; if params.printLevel < 8 cplex.DisplayFunc = []; end cplex.Model.sense = 'minimize'; cplex.Param.qpmethod.Cur = 1; cplex.addCols(gk,[],bl-xk,bu-xk); cplex.addRows(-ck, A0, -ck); cplex.

January 30, 2012

spamfunc for optimization in matlab

what spamfunc is In developing optimization algorithms, one of the most tedious parts is trying different examples, each of which might have its own starting points or upper or lower bounds or other information. The tedium really starts when your algorithm requires first or second order information, which might be tricky to calculate correctly. These bugs can be pernicious, because it might be difficult to differentiate between a bug in your algorithm and a bug in your objective or constraint evaluation.