A Computer Scientist

To young programmers, like me, I willingly recommend Emacs, one of my secrete development toolset, to be a real programmer. If you use Emacs as your development tool, you will have a feeling of being omnipotent. You can control everything. This feeling is really important, because it derives active development for your own purpose. In litterature it is called domain specific language 0r development. Without explicitly saying anything about domain specific language, you will be familiar with it, naturally. We are young enough to try to understand every details about all programs and abstract them for later purpose. In that purpose, understaning your development tools, you might access everyday, is also important to be competent programmer. It do not mean choosing ready-to-use Visual Studio is the hell, but choosing difficult way given both of easy and difficult ways could sometime the easest way to be successful at the end. Remeber we are young, do not restrict your potent only within the Visual Studio.

I made my gundam for about 10 hours. I bought it when visiting Japan to take a GRE examination. I put it off until having the last summer vacation. I love to design and make robots as hobby. However I am sincerely worrying, as a job or study, whether Robotics really fits to me. Anyhow this is my first trial to make Gundam Figure! Great fun!

What the professor really means? by J.Timothy Petersik.

You’ll be using one of the leading textbooks in the field.
=> I used it as a grad student.

The gist of what the author is saying is what’s most important.
=> I don’t understand the details either.

The answer to your question is beyond the scope of this class.
=> I don’t know.

In answer to your question, you must recognize that there are several disparate points of view.
=> I really don’t know.

Today we are going to discuss a most important topic.
=> Today we are going to discuss my dissertation.

We can continue this discussion outside of class.
=> 1. I’m tired of this – let’s quit
=> 2. You’re winning the arguement, let’s quit.

Today we’ll let a member of the class lead the discussion. It will be a good educational experience.
=> I stayed out to late last night and didn’t have time to prepare a lecture

Any questions?
=> I’m ready to let you go.

The implications of this study are clear.
=> I don’t know what it means either, but there’ll be a question about it on the test.

The test scores were generally good.
=> Some of you managed a C+.

The test scores were a little below my expectations.
=> Where was the party last night?

Some of you could have done better.
=> Everyone flunked.

Before we begin the lecture for today, are there any questions about previous material?
= > Has anyone opened the book yet?

It’s been very rewarding to teach this class.
=> I hope they find someone else to teach it next year.

For EE Major, there is last, but most notorious class, called Lab3 (officially Design Lab). There is Lab1, Lab2 and lastly Lab3 (Lab4 is option – I did). Among all of Lab classes, Lab3 is the most demanding. Since it is so tough, we have to spend 3~5 days in a lab including 2 official days. At least 2 night standings are normal for layman.

I and my lab mate completed to implement a complete Digital Storage Oscilloscope. As you can see the picture, our digital oscilloscope display 2 channel signal-200 kHz at maximum. It includes trigger level control, x1000 programmable gain amplifier and frequency analysis. In this picture, a blue signal comes from microphone, separate circuit from bread board.

Frankly, the most difficult part is to design FPGA with Verilog. Since it has to generate 20MHz sampling signal to capture signal in 8bits ADC and to write them into a FIFO. In addition, reducing noisy by separating analog and digital circuit is also hard. On top of that, managing a gain and frequency of signals passing through a couple of Op-Amps is not easy job.

However, we completed all circuits in one interface board on the provided embedded board. Wow!

course

Not like my friends expected after I got admissions from MIT, I was over burdened by many import works. And I also determined to spend my last summer vacation on having fun with computers. (crazy?)

1. Publication : Network – wireless schedule with simple and unified O(1) algorithm
2. Publication : Robotics – designing ultimate human like walking mechanism
3. PT job – IR rendering (huge project) documentation and rendering features

And my lovely todo list is under,

1. Start to design Robot OS (I got a volume of IA books from Intel)
2. Refactoring emacs setting (2G can you believe?) – as autoload/dump
3. Improve git-emacs (documentation) – as almost product quality
4. Start to design Dictionary (in leopard) alternative in Linux
5. Start to participate in one more open source project
6. Start to read and solve problems in Art of computer programming
7. Solve one ICPC related problem per day for fun
8. Hacking related stuffs (CTF) – read documents from black hats and wow hackers

And the fundamental understandings to be a big shot,

1. Linear Algebra
2. Probability
3. Functional Analysis

I need 48 hours a day. How can I manage them to complete!

The way that programmers read resumes can be your and my standard way to go. Yes, it is similar to my previous standards mentioned by ‘How to become a hacker’ or ‘Hacker and Painter.’ The understanding of Operating System and Robotics is crucial The necessary skills for me is to learn latex for my documentation (I am MS Office guy, not even Open Office favorit) and ‘Google or Microsoft Internship.’ It is time to make me on the right track of the programmer’s market! You can see the details of its talk here.

cs

What Price Cool?: Users may know pay more for Mac, but much of the ‘Apple Tax’ is hidden. The bottom line is that Mac users are willing to pay exorbitant price (not just only on Hardware, but also  on Software) than they will get a fancy outlook. When purchasing Mac books or iMac, users have to pay more to operate them fully. Moreover, as passing time, the users have to pay over and over again, like Tax. For example, there are Mac Care, iLife upgrade and iMac account. I hate them a lot, even I use Mac at home. At work, I mostly use Linux and Window as my main developing environment. Any how, in order to get coolness, we have to pay more on it.

economics

At April Fool’s Day, I saw PC modem communication service screen at Paran website. It is similar to the screen when I was 13 or something. We called it ‘PC 통신.’ Most of students majoring computer science are really familiar with this service, almost old memories.  I also love this communication service, called BBS or telnet. However, at that time, it is too exorbitant to use frequently. Frankly, most of guys felt necessity of super fast connection at the purpose of downloading ‘Adult games’ It was younger’s hopes. I think that it can be a possible reason the internet speed become steadily faster and faster.

cs

The other university that I really want to be involved is definitely Carnegie Mellon University. CMU recently becomes famous due to tough and diverse Computer Science programs. Not only that the Robotics Institutes (RI) is the first and biggest department developing robots. I applied to both of programs CSD and RI of CMU. However, I thought RI fitted to me because of my previous experiences. I saw the state-of-the-art robots here and there around the campus while staying in Pittsburgh. The one interesting robot is balancing robot.

This robot automatically keeps its stable position dynamically within the any environment. By moving the ball under the feet, it can actively interact with humans and obstacles. And human-size robot with air-pressure driven actuators is also impressive even though I saw Hubo’s interactions a few years ago.

As a robotician, CMU RI is the best place to learn and do research. On top of that I reasonably expect that CMU RI will be the best robot institute if they improve their overall image of university, personally. By April 4, I have to decide which university is best for my graduate study. It is really happy situation but also difficult decision at least for me.

In this week, I have to think about which fields I feel happy if do something.

P.S. the problem is that I am interested in a lot of diverse fields.

robot, trip

It was my first visit to the U.S.. With dreams that I had as a freshmen, I finally went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I had dreamed this whenever I felt into sleep. Sometime after getting graduate admissions of schools in the U.S., I often thought that I had completed everything. However, please remember, this is new start, even starting from the bottom. There are no students who know me well and there are no professors who often applause me at MIT. This is absolutely new start. However, this is a new chance (I’d like to refer to it as ‘new transition’) to be brand new Taesoo. Even if I am lack of thorough technical skills and logical thinking skills, I will become new Taesoo as I am dreaming as a scientist. The computer scientist, I love this jargon, is the scholar that I have to be. I saw many young computer genius in my generation in MIT CSAIL Open House. Please think all the time I’ am here as a representative of Korean and KAIST students. I will introduce to you about CSAIL later on

cs, trip