Advogato blog for katzj

SDM Business Trip, Summer '08

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:07:28 GMT

This semester's business trip seems to have a better turn out than the one from the spring. It's been good to see the distance folks again but given the classes I chose to take and people doing internships, there are a lot of people around I haven't seen much of.

Yesterday as a speaker we had Nitzan Shaer. And while he was an interesting speaker he seemed somewhat unwilling to generalize based upon his experience and instead just recounted a lot about Skype. He had a couple of specific comments about the mobile space more generally but it really wasn't his focus. The amount of interest in mobile though is phenomenal and quite possibly higher than it should be. But it's hard to ignore a market of 3.5 billion phones :)

Last night was then dinner at the Summer Shack. Was good to go around and talk with folks and also got to catch up with Alyson a bit on her new job. And ended up having a couple of conversations with people about the iPhone. Unfortunately due to class, Kara couldn't make it.

Today was a light day with lunch and then nothing really until dinner time. For that we had a mixer with the LFMs which was good. And for a change we managed to go through the entire budget for the event.

Tomorrow is class in the morning and then the SDM town hall. Then i'll hopefully get some good work done before heading to the alumni event which Yoav helped to put together.

And then on tap for the weekend - rest. Between Seacoast over the weekend and this week, I'm looking forward to it.

Seacoast Safari 2008

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:07:28 GMT

I rode in this year's Seacoast Safari over the weekend. As with last year the route was gorgeous. The rest stops were also well stocked although I didn't take much advantage of them. This year, Kara also helped out by staffing two rest stops.

All in all a good, if slightly tiring, weekend. Good to get back into riding though after my crash a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully I can get back to a semi-normal riding and training schedule this week or next. And I may race the Norwell circuit race on Sunday although that depends on how my legs feel over the next couple of days.

Seacoast Safari tomorrow

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:08:12 GMT

FIOS install today went okay, although it took waaayyyy too long for the cable cards with the Tivo. For some reason, they weren't getting signal at all at first. But eventually got things straightened out. The process was a lot like that of a cable install, but just a bit more involved and with more steps. Installer was nice, though. And thus far, connection speed and the like seems reasonable.

Tomorrow is the Seacoast Safari. And it looks like tomorrow is going to be a scorcher. Temperatures in the mid-90s, heat index of around 100. So the key will be to drink a lot of water and stay hydrated. Luckily, the ride starts nice and early so that we beat some of the traffic. Unfortunately, it leaves nice and early and I still need to finish packing. So now, to go do that :-)

Another busy day

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:12:24 GMT

Another busy day today. Started out with Systems Engineering in the morning and Professor Dan Frey talking about the Design of Experiments. Another session where I can easily see where in a physical engineering field, it would have a lot of relevance and could be easily applied. Software, still, not so much. Maybe if you're doing human factors/user interface you could take advantage of some pieces of it but I'm not entirely convinced. And if you're doing things at a lower-level, then almost certainly not. When you're designing a software system at that level, you don't really have knobs and levers to adjust and then see how they change some sort of outcome -- instead, your design is focused on functional requirements and just meeting those requirements. And then adjusting as the requirements inevitably change.

Later in the day, I had my final-for-now FESCo meeting. As some may have noticed, I have decided not to run for FESCo this time around. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case and it's really not worth going into all of them. One thing that will be nice will be having one less meeting a week to need to attend. Although I'll probably still chime in frequently enough from the cheap seats.

After that, it was off for a trip to the dentist. Biked there, got there right on time and then got to wait half an hour for the dentist. *sigh* Eventually got things taken care of and was on my way, if a bit later than I had intended.

Then, this evening, we had another SDM Connect event. I tried to organize it more in the fashion that Alyson had started things off in last year -- very informal and low-key. And so I asked the inimitable Yoav Shapira to come and talk about his startup/entrepreneur experience and what helped (and didn't help) from his time at SDM. As usual, he gave lots of good information and insight and it was good to see him again. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I think that the format kind of "clicked" with people to some extent. Or so I'm hoping. A few people had some ideas about future speakers and I told them to let me know and hopefully we can get SDM Connect to happen again on a more regular basis.

Then, home and now it's time to head to bed. Tomorrow, I'm getting FIOS installed... hopefully they've figured out cable cards (as I'm still quite happy with the Series3 Tivo) by this point and it'll be painless. But, I'm going into it expecting basically the worst given that it's a telecom company. We'll see how it goes.

Quick update

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:12:27 GMT

Lots of things to update on, so it's probably just easiest to do a list-style update ala my good friend SPAM

System dynamics continues to be a great class. I can actually see myself using it some to try to justify my intuition on what the outcome of changes will be and then maybe have more effective arguments against (or for) various things. Also the Beer Game was a lot of fun last week. To be fair, some of it is supply chain-y, but that just seems like it's because it's the easy examples, not because of any inherent flaw in the modeling approach.
SDM business trip is next week. Will be good to see folks again. Will likely be a busy week though. I should actually look at what is planned
Kara's sister's wedding was on Saturday so we went down for that. Was nice although I was tired by the end of the evening.
Then on Sunday, Kara and I stood in line for iPhones. Line wasn't too bad but we then had extra time due to the first phone they opened for me had a bad screen. And they were good about just taking care of right away, no questions asked.
Yes, by getting an iPhone, I'm somewhat of a sellout. But it's a pretty nice phone. Although i've crashed Safari a couple of times. But having a web browser that's actually sane for, say, browsing the web is good and HSDPA is the upgrade I had hoped over edge. And realistically, it's not like the Blackberry is more open, or Symbian (although it may someday be) and Android is a farce of openness at present. I'll save my Android rant for another day, though.
Took last week easy on the bike to let my injuries recover. But everything's feeling pretty good and the healing seems to be coming along pretty well. This weekend is the Seacoast Safari
Need to figure out a good vacation for the break between summer classes and the fall semester
Err, I had more to say, but I've forgotten it now. Suffice it to say that I'm sure it was interesting and would have been incredibly enlightening.

Support me riding in this year's Seacoast Safari

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:10:07 GMT

This year, I am again riding in the Seacoast Safari to help raise money to support the Cycstic Fibrosis Foundation in their efforts. Cystic fibrosis is a devastating genetic disease that affects children and young adults. Advances continue to be made in finding a cure, but your help is needed now—more than ever—to help keep up the momentum of this life-saving research. Too many young lives depend on this vital research to let it go unfunded!

Please help me meet my fund-raising goal by sponsoring me. Your generous gift will be used efficiently and effectively—nearly 90 cents of every dollar of revenue raised is available for investment in vital CF programs to support research, care and education. And, it's tax-deductible. The research being done by the CF Foundation is both important and making great strides -- not too long ago, the average life expectancy of a child with CF was 20. But today, one of the people that I regularly ride with has CF and yet he continues to ride on (strong!) in this as well as a couple of other events, including most recently a trip across the Canadian Rockies by bike.

The Seacoast Safari ride is a two-day ride up along the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. Each day is 75 (or so) miles of coastal scenery. The ride was beautiful last year and I'm looking forward to doing it again.

Making a donation is easy and secure! Just click on the link below to make a donation to my fund-raising page where your donation will be credited to my fund-raising efforts. Any amount you can donate will be greatly appreciated!

Donating is such a simple and effective way for you to show your support for this important cause. Together, we can make a difference in the lives of those with CF. Once again, thank you for supporting the mission of the CF Foundation!

If you'd like to help, you can easily donate online at http://www.cff.org/LWC/JeremyKatz7945

Weekend

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:07:59 GMT

Was going to do a post, but too tired. So sleep now. Post later. Can I have a vacation yet?

And by popular demand... a plymouth screencast

Wed, 9 Jul 2008 05:08:21 GMT

And by popular (by which, I mean one person) demand, a screencast of plymouth on the live cd.

Screencast

Currently using vesafb to get the pretty graphics instead of modesetting. And there's something slowing down livecd boots the past couple of days, but I haven't gotten around to looking at what it is. But it lets you see the basic idea.

Graphical Boot and Live Images

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 16:13:21 GMT

One of the goals for Fedora 10 is to replace the aging rhgb that has been used for graphical boot since Red Hat Linux 8.0. rhgb is implemented using an X server which started in rc.sysinit relatively early during the boot process and then some feedback is provided to the user. With some of the improvements underway for Fedora 10 we should hopefully have kernel modesetting in place at least for some drivers which will let us set a native resolution graphical mode as opposed to requiring either text-mode, an X driver + server or the use of a framebuffer.

Given this, enter plymouth -- a new graphical boot implementation which will be taking advantage of that infrastructure. And since we don't need the X server or anything that's really complicated, we can even include plymouth in the initrd and provide that nice graphical experience earlier in the boot process. The bits landed for the regular initrd a couple of weeks ago and I finally got around to looking at integrating things for the live initrds the end of last week and finished it up yesterday. So now, we should have the new graphical booting hotness for livecds as well. And once the kernel modesetting pieces land in rawhide (I'm looking at you krh :-), that should be easily hooked up also making things quite nice in time for the Fedora 10 alpha.

Now on to the next thing on my todo list...

Rest of the weekend

Mon, 7 Jul 2008 14:09:21 GMT

In addition to my racing fun yesterday, had a pretty good and full weekend. My parents were up and so on Thursday after class, I headed down to South Station to meet them. We grabbed lunch and then headed back to Arlington. From there, my dad and I headed down to the bike shop so that we could pick up a bike for him to ride on Friday. Thursday evening, we went down to Tanjore for dinner and mostly avoided getting soaked. Given the rain and everyone being kind of tired, we decided not to go down and watch the Pops rehearse and instead just headed back to the house and watched Michael Clayton

Friday morning, woke up and went out with my dad in the drizzle on the Quad ride. He did pretty well and we got in a nice 40 mile ride. By the time we got to Starbuck's at the end, the rain had stopped and it looked like it was going to be a nice day. Go figure. Then, headed down to Braintree and met up with Kara's parents for dinner. We then ended up going and watching the Get Smart movie. I was somewhat unsure how it would be as the reviews were somewhat mixed, but I really enjoyed it as did everyone else. I watched Get Smart a lot on Nick at Nite as I was growing up and so it was enjoyable a lot of the things that they pulled in. It was also good that they modernized it and tried to give some backstory. And I also thought that Steve Carrell made a really good Maxwell Smart and put his own little bits on the part rather than just trying to imitate Don Adams.

On Saturday, we took a day trip up to Vermont to visit the Ben and Jerry's factory as well as a few other things. Vermont was pretty and the Ben and Jerry's tour was cool I guess. But lots and lots of driving. I'd like to go back to Vermont, though, to spend some more time. Seems like it could be pretty relaxing and also have some good biking ;-) When we got home, spent some time watching the end of the first stage of the Tour de France.

Yesterday, my parents headed back home and I raced. After the race, came home and made some lunch and then watched the second stage of the Tour. Spent the evening between catching up on some email for work and getting started on the System Dynamics assignment for the week.

All in all, a good weekend. The next few weeks are pretty busy for me, but busy in a good way.