Welcome to HEL

My lab group's brand-new Wiki. We take ourselves seriously.

Get up

"…for sitting softly cushioned,
or tucked in bed, is no way to win fame;
and without it man must waste his life away,
leaving such traces of what he was on earth
as smoke in wind and foam upon the water.
Stand up! Dominate this weariness of yours
with the strength of soul that wins in every battle
if it does not sink beneath the body’s weight."

- Inferno XXIV.46-51

The Crazy Ones

The world hardly needs another obituary post, but I just wanted to say thank you to Steve Jobs. His company, without question, put me on my current path in life. I remember using Apple II and IIGs's in the first grade. I remember "hacking" the network program selector screen to show my name. I remember playing Number Crunchers, and being proud that I was playing on the multiplication setting while everyone else was stuck on addition. I remember the first time I played Mille Bornes on the IIgs, and was amazed at the graphics. I remember when there was only one Mac in the whole school, a Mac LC. We used KidPix, and I liked the tool that drew in four-fold symmetry.

During my last year of elementary school, every 5th grade classroom got a Power Mac 5400. Some of the classrooms got newer models, with a newer version of the operating system. I didn't really know what that meant at that point, but I knew that System 8 looked nicer than System 7. I determined that this was due to a system extension, so I devised a reason to go into the other classrooms and copy the file over the network to the Mac in my classroom. Yes, the networking was that easy. I remember DJing for my class on that Mac because I was too shy to dance. I remember putting together a 5th grade commencement slideshow with one of my best friends in elementary school, shamelessly stealing the idea to use Rod Stewart's "Forever Young" from my little sister's dance studio. I remember coming back to that Mac during the summer after commencement and excitedly discussing cable internet with another friend that I haven't spoken to since.

Much of my confidence and ability in technology stems from my early exposure to computers, and Macs specifically. They were the perfect playground to explore and learn, and Steve Jobs knew that. Every day I use my Mac and iPhone for hours at a time. I use them to keep up with my interests. I use them to read about sports. I use them to check the weather. I use them to post on Facebook, and write tweets. I use my Mac to simulate transistors, and write journal articles. Most importantly, I use them to talk to my family, and my friends. That is a gift for which there is no substitute.

Steve Jobs didn't just create products; he created markets. Virtually every piece of technology we use today bears at least some of his influence. For a man I never knew, he has had a profound effect on my life.

An appropriate epitaph:

SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE

Monte Carlo solver

Just wanted to post a quick video of a coupled Monte Carlo transport-Poisson equation solver for a 2D MESFET. The colored background is a heat map of electric field strength, while the white dots represent individual electrons being accelerated and scattered in the device. Sorry for the low quality. YouTube decided that was acceptable, despite having a higher-quality source available. Each frame is 2e-15 seconds, and the total length corresponds to 8e-12 seconds.

First-world problems, third-world solutions

Who needs a thermostat?

IPython dependencies

IPython has some nifty features, but since IPython is still in development, they are awfully hard to get running, at least on OS X. Compounding this is the dependency on Qt for the cool new features to work. Qt isn't the most seamless package to get installed and running. I'm not complaining at all. I just want to list all the steps that I went through to get the Qt console working.

1. Try starting the IPython qtconsole:
   python qtconsole
   and learn that I'm missing all kinds of dependencies.
2. Try to install pyqt using pip:
   pip install pyqt
   and learn that the egg for pyqt is broken.
3. Try to build pyqt using the files that pip installed
   python configure.py
   and learn that pyqt depends on sip.
4. Try to install sip using pip(!):
   pip install sip
   and learn that the sip egg is broken in the same way as pyqt
5. Install sip using the files that pip downloaded:
   python configure.py
   make
   make install
   This actually works.
6. Try to build pyqt again:
   python configure.py
   and learn that I need the Qt SDK. This one is my fault.
7. Install Qt from the Nokia website
8. Repeat step 6, find that for some reason qmake was not installed.
9. Uninstall Qt
10. Uninstall sip
11. Install Homebrew
12. Try to install pyqt:
    brew install pyqt
    which successfully installs Qt, but fails because it can't link to the right version of Python, which I have somehow accumulated 4 different installations of
13. Install python through homebrew:
    brew install python
    This fails sip has hard coded the location of the old, broken framework.
14. Uninstall sip.
    brew remove sip
15. Try to install pyqt:
    brew install pyqt
    This still fails. No idea why.

Speaker Upgrade

While waiting for the new shift rod to get in, I decided to upgrade the speakers in my car. When I first got the car in 2005, I decided to install new speakers that didn't really fit the car. I'm finally redoing the installation now with speakers that are higher quality that also fit neatly in the car.