PS3

I installed Yellow Dog Linux on my PS3. I tried running my vectorization program on it and was pleased to see that it runs about 50% faster than on my desktop. Here was the output (with 250 triangles and 200 iterations):

India Trip

I got back from my trip to India yesterday. Overall I had a great time. I had some problems trying to get into the country however. In ignorance, I assumed that I could get a tourist visa on arrival. This was not the case. When they discovered that I did not have a visa, they immediately tried to deport me. I was given two options: either fly to Sri Lanka in an attempt to get an Indian visa, or fly back to France. I was leaning towards the Sri Lanka option, but after lengthy negotiation I discovered a hidden third option. Several hours later I was issued a temporary landing permit. This allowed me to stay in India for three days. In those three days I visited the Bureau of Immigration and got an extended exit endorsement until the end of my trip.

I spent most of vacation relaxing at my parent's house by the beach. We did some exploring along the coast between Chennai and Mahabalipuram. We found a cool place with a network of pools surrounded by rock cliffs. After Christmas we took trip to Kerala for a few days. We stayed in Kumarakom and explored the backwaters, lake Vembanad, and a bird sanctuary. I was hoping to spend a few days on a house boat, but unfortunately we were visiting at the peak of tourist season so it was impossible to reserve one for a decent price. We took several boat rides and even rented our own canoe. Kerala is an incredibly beautiful place so I made sure to take plenty of pictures.

For Christmas I got a PS3. I managed to get video output to my monitor after buying an expensive HDMI to DVI cable. I have been having trouble trying to get the audio working. There are three audio output options: RCA, TOSLINK, and HDMI. I have a cable which converts RCA to a male TRS connector. If I want to get audio to my speakers/headphones, I need a female connector. Using the audio in/out ports of my computer would do the trick, but unfortunately I am having sound card driver issues in Ubuntu. If I fail at fixing the driver problems I'll need to buy another cable.

On my way to India I worked on a new version of Swarm. On the way back I worked on a vectorization program (see this blog entry). Neither of the projects turned out as well as I was hoping. I have now abandoned releasing the new version of Swarm since it isn't much of an improvement. The vectorization program is slow and does not seem to do a very good job. Here is the Mona Lisa with 100 triangles:

Original image:Iteration 10:Iteration 50:Iteration 150:It took about one hour to get to iteration 150 and its rate of improvement seemed to have leveled off. I assume that 100 triangles can represent the Mona Lisa much better than this solution, so I am going to work on improving both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the program.

I have finally finished reading Anathem. Overall I thought it was a great book, although I got really bored by some of the long philosophical discussions. Since I didn't bring GEB to India, I have started reading A Game of Thrones.

Flight Cancelled

To save money I booked a bizarre flight path to India:

Seattle -> Vancouver -> Hong Kong -> Chennai

This means I had to take a bus from Vancouver to Seattle in order to fly back to Vancouver. In addition, the flight leaves in the morning so I had to stay in a hotel overnight. I couldn't just cancel the flight because that would cancel the connecting flights as well.

The flight from Seattle to Vancouver was cancelled this morning due to mechanical problems. There were no other flights to Vancouver in time for my connecting flight, and taking a taxi/bus probably wouldn't have made it in time either (especially with the snow). The only option was book a completely different flight path which leaves tomorrow:

Seattle -> Paris -> Chennai

Projects

Now that exams are finished and I have submitted most of my grad school applications, I should finally have time to work on some projects I have been planning:

• Vectorization using stochastic local search: I read a cool blog entry about evolving a picture of the Mona Lisa using only 50 polygons. Inspired by the results, I think it would be cool to use stochastic local search to convert an arbitrary image to vector graphics. I will add a parameter to choose the number of polygons. I will try to animate it to show the progress of the algorithm as it optimizes the image representation in real-time.
  
  
• A new version of Arlisy: A generic neural network framework which can be applied to a variety of problems. It will have the ability to detect temporal patterns. I also plan on implementing an attention control mechanism which allows the framework to focus on a subset of its input, similar to the role that attention plays in biological perception by concentrating the use of mental resources on a particular aspect of the environment.
  
  
• Netflix prize: I haven't made much progress since last summer. I am going to try implementing singular value decomposition to combine with my neural network approach.
  
  
• A better version of Swarm: I know the algorithm I used for finding nearest neighbors in the old version can be made much more efficient. This will allow larger swarms to be simulated in real-time. I'll try adding some more advanced behavior rules as well.
  
  
• I am considering competing in the Robotics & Algorithm category of Imagine Cup 2009.
  

Exams!

Once again it is exam period, so if you are in need of some distraction here are two neat flash games I've found:

Auditorium: awesome concept for a puzzle game. Its a shame there are so few levels in the demo.

99 Bricks: my record is slightly over 700.

I have two exams tomorrow. I should really be studying right now.

Sudoku Fail

This was printed recently in the local newspaper.

Pie Chart

Mmm... π!

2008 ACM-ICPC Pacific Northwest Contest

Yesterday I competed in the regional ACM programming contest. There were 85 teams competing in our region. Here is the final ranking for the top five places:

1) Stanford
2) Stanford
3) University of California, Berkeley
4) UBC ^
5) UBC *

This was really frustrating because only two teams advance from a region to the world final (which is in Sweden this year). Since only one team can advance per university, UBC was only one spot away from advancing. There is actually still a chance that UBC might get to advance however, since there is a wildcard slot. I was on the UBC * team. We were ridiculously close to solving another problem in the last few minutes. If we had solved it, we would have jumped to 2nd place. We made a submission with about two minutes left which failed because it took too long to execute. However, with a minor modification to the code (just one or two lines) our solution probably would have run under the time limit. Both of my teammates were doing really well during the contest and did the majority of the work. They will both be at UBC next year, so I'm sure that their team will do really well at the next regional. Here were the results from last year's regional:

1) UBC ^
2) UBC *
3) Stanford
4) Simon Fraser University
5) University of California, Berkeley

Grad School Applications

I have finally decided on a list of schools I will be applying to:

University of California, Berkeley
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Washington
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Waterloo
McGill University
University of Alberta
University of British Columbia
University of Toronto

Most of the applications are due mid-December. I have a ridiculous amount of work due in the next two weeks, followed by final exams (which are all within 7 days). Hopefully I'll manage to submit the applications without having to sacrifice studying time. I will be so happy once finals are finished, instantly switching between having an overwhelming amount of work to having absolutely no work at all. Over Christmas vacation I will be traveling around southern India.

World of Goo

My new favorite game. [link]

Hotmail

A few hours ago I was automatically "upgraded" to a new version of Hotmail. I am not picky about what additional features an email client has or how stylish the interface is as long as I can conveniently read/send emails. I have had my Hotmail account for about five years. When Gmail came out I decided not to switch since I didn't want to go through the hassle of changing my contact information. With the newest version of Hotmail I am finally considering making the switch.

When logging into Hotmail I am greeted with this page:
It tells me to upgrade my browser despite the fact that I am using Firefox version 3.0.3, the latest version for Linux. After logging in it takes me two clicks to reach my inbox (which is two clicks too many in my opinion).

This is what happens when I try to compose an email:
Notice that the text formatting buttons are grayed out. I tried clicking on the whitespace below that panel to find that there is no text box. That's right, there is absolutely no way for me to send emails because I don't have any way to enter text. I am probably not the only person with this problem. With the most critical functionality of Hotmail broken, I have no choice but to switch providers.

Sad

Well the exchange rate has continued rising, making me really regret trading when I did.

The next month is going to be extremely busy/stressful for me:

• I will have a series of midterms over the next few weeks.
• I have to send out grad school applications. This includes finalizing my list of schools, filling out applications, and writing numerous essays.
  
• I am part of a team for the ACM programming competition. UBC has three teams (UBC^, UBC*, and UBC+). I am part of UBC* (UBC^ is the best team). There is a regional competition hosted by UBC on November 15th. We will have up to 10 hours of practice every week until the regionals. The world finals will be in Sweden in 2009.
  
• I have two big papers due in Psychology and Philosophy.
  
• All of my exams are packed in between December 3rd through 10th.
  
• I have other commitments like my part time job as a TA, assignments, meetings, etc...

:'(

Fail

Update

Since my last post about the exchange rate, the US to Canadian dollar rate has been skyrocketing upward. I exchanged money at exactly the wrong time. I won't feel too bad about it though since I had no choice but to exchange in order to pay for tuition. Luckily I only exchanged enough to pay for tuition and left the rest in US dollars. A few days ago I converted the rest of my money:
Hopefully this time the exchange rate won't significantly increase immediately after my trade. Predicting exchange rate fluctuations is frustratingly difficult.

In other news, there have been two separate incidents happen to my bike since it was almost stolen. A few weeks ago the bike was knocked over and the disc brake was severely bent (I had to replace the unit). Since the disc is a fairly solid piece of metal, it must have been deliberately stepped on in order to bend it. This morning I found that the mudguard had been stolen and the seat was also adjusted to a lower position (I am not quite sure why the thief would feel compelled to adjust the level of the seat).

Anathem and GEB

Earlier this week I ordered two books online. I received the books today in a surprisingly quick display of international delivery. Behold:
Neal Stephenson's Anathem and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I have very high expectations for both books. I just flipped a coin (really!) and it looks like I will be reading Anathem first. Given the length/density of the books, it should take me quite a while to get through them.

Smiley Value Decomposition

For an assignment in my machine learning course I performed principal components analysis (PCA) using singular value decomposition (SVD) on some smiley faces:
Reducing the dimensionality of a data matrix of smiley vectors allows us to visualize smiley face features in two dimensions. Yay!

Exchange Rate

This is a graph of the U.S. dollar to Canadian dollar exchange rate for the last three months:
The red "X" is when I exchanged a lot of money. D'oh!

CAPTCHA

[link]

Somebody tried to steal my bike!

I found my bike tipped over this morning and there was a big cut made into my bike lock. I am glad I invested in a decent quality lock! Bike theft is a pretty big problem at UBC. The cut made it entirely through the outer plastic layer of the lock and partially through the metal interior. I think I will buy another (even more secure) lock since another theft attempt at the weakened part of the lock might make it all the through. There was never a theft attempt on my old bike during my last four years at UBC. This was probably due to the fact that I bought that bike for $20 (significantly cheaper than my current bike). However, some of the accessories were stolen from my old bike (cyclocomputer and portable bike pump). Some of my friends have had pieces of their bikes stolen (a wheel, a seat, etc) and at least four people I know had their entire bike stolen.

GRE

I took the GRE this morning. It started with two writing sections. My essays weren't spectacular, but the topics were interesting so at least I had something to write about. The next section was the math section. I did really well on this and finished just barely on time. I switched the answer for my last question with less than 5 seconds to spare! Next was a verbal section which went about as well as could be expected (English is not one of my strong points). I thought that would be the end of the exam but was surprised when another math section started. My practice tests only had one math section so I was annoyed that the test wasn't finished. This second math section went terrible since by then I was getting tired. I was working way too slow and still had 7 questions remaining with only one minute left. I had to randomly guess for the last few questions. I was surprised to see in the end that my scores were 800 in math and 600 in English. I am really lucky that the second math section must not have been scored. Apparently they put in an extra unmarked experimental section. I will have to wait for the scores to be sent to me before I get the marks for the essays.