A Tale of a Technician (with no Ending)

[Original Post at my Blog | My Blog]

[Let me start by saying that this writing is tagged “serious” three times. This signifies it as the most thought-provoking piece (according to my so-so standard) that I've ever written in this blog to date.]


Prolog
If I'm allowed to make a satire about technicians (which I loosely use to refer to engineers and scientists), then perhaps one possibility is to depict them as extremely methodical people; those who uphold objectivity and impartiality above anything else.

[Before continuing, I offer my sincere apology should any engineer/scientist is offended by my remark! Trust me, I have not the slightest intention to offend any of you.]


A Stubborn Technician !
I know one technician who has his own prime example of absolute objectivity. His is about a certain finalist of a popular singing-and-showmanship competition, whom the technician thought to deserve to be crowned as a winner.

Why pick this as an example?

Because the technician thought that this finalist had top-notch vocal and showmanship skills, even though the finalist's personality may court controversies. The technician insisted that in a singing-and-showmanship competition, socio-religious-political aspects shouldn't be the decisive factors (assuming that the rules of the competition are still observed).

Inline with this principle, even though the technician disagrees with certain aspects of the finalist, still the technician deemed the finalist as the worthy winner solely based on his vocal and showmanship. And considering the technician's upbringing, his stance may be arguably controversial, not least within some of his own circles.



A not so Stubborn Technician ?
And yet, in this season of the same competition, the technician is consciously re-assessing his stubbornness of absolute objectivity. All because of one contestant who was cut yet the technician would like it not be the case.

Why does this worth a dedicated writing?

It's because the technician didn't base his preference on vocal and showmanship anymore! Not that the technician deemed the contestant to be a bad performer. No, far from that; the technician didn't catch the show on that particular week, so he's not in a position to judge anyway.

Instead, the technician wanted the contestant to do well because of the contestant's predicament unrelated to vocal and showmanship at all. A predicament where the technician is very fortunate to be blessed with countless opportunities for first-hand observations (and for a prolonged period of time, somewhat).

While the technician's experience is nothing compared to the said contestant's (i.e., it's like comparing an armed-chair critic to a man-in-the-field), the technician seemed to get a timely reminder that extreme impartiality and objectivity is not necessarily appropriate for every practical situation.


Epilog
“... will come back to haunt me.” — perhaps this phrase nicely describes the technician's dilemma (if it may be called so). What was believed as “right”, is being shaken by what had been denounced as “wrong”.

Sometime, unexplained bias is just unavoidable, at all...

Tango

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

A (rather) senior aerospace engineer pointed me to the Schindler's List theme in youtube played by Perlman. It's a beautiful piece — there's absolutely no doubt about that. But I find it a bit too ... dark, and too ... grim. I really can't explain, but it somehow reminds me to the kind of music played right at the end of an enforced battle between two good friends/siblings/etc.; a battle where the winner wins loses as much as the defeated; a battle where the winner feels empty and full of resignation; where the winner just wants to completely wipe out the undeniable historical fact of his/her hollow victory.

Fortunately, I managed to spot the video of Perlman playing Por una Cabeza, a Tango. And I find this one to be much much lighter and cheerful for my ears, my head, and my heart. Here's the obligatory video on youtube which you could also find below. [PS: Don't be intimidated by the first 20-25 seconds, in case you're not used to classical instrumental songs.]




Perlman played the same piece for the Schindler's List movie, albeit with a different arrangement. I found two audio recordings on youtube, supposedly the original soundtracks: 1st version and 2nd version. Some how I prefer the 1st version than the 2nd, even though it's repetitive. It just sounds ... more cheerful. Might be due to the more upbeat tempo and more variations in the tempo itself [ha, me at my f.k.k.b.l. best]. In any case, the 1st version is also embedded below.

The Young Prodigies

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

These have been in my locker for quite sometime (yeah, I blame myself for procastinating): two video footage of renowned violinists, born in the early-to-mid of 1900, performing at their (later stage of) childhood. These footage come from circa 1950-ish and therefore, are still in black-and-white.

• Michael Rabin (1936-1972) — he who (tragically) lived for only a short period of time of ~36 years. Here's the video of Rabin performing at the age of 15, in case the youtube video is not embedded below.
  
  
  
  
  
• Itzhak Perlman (1945-present) — he who overcome polio and defied the odd to become one of today's most celebrated violinists. Here's the video of Perlman performing at the age of 13, in case the youtube video is not embedded below.
  
  

GPUSVM-0.1 and invalid memory accesses

GPUSVM is a CUDA implementation of SVM which uses the SMO algorithm. This library supports two primary functionalities: training and classification.

The code is written in C++, and the source tar-ball contains an example of how to call performTraining() function once. My woe started when calling performTraining() more than once. This gave me a crash:

*** glibc detected *** bin/linux/release/svmTrain: double free or corruption (out): 0x000000000b6e4820 ***

This was apparently triggered by the second performTraining(). After some (ok, ok, 2 days including CUDA crash course actually) huntings, it turned out that there really are two invalid memory accesses:

• one is during memcpy-ing from device to host memory (occur in the second-order heuristic function);
• another is due to the absence of boundary check in a cache object, which leads to accessing a non-existing object;

in addition to a memory leak (alpha array in performTraining()).

(i) napping is a trainable skill, & (ii) nap proudly

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

Sara Mednick visited Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss her book, “Take a Nap! Change Your Life.” This event took place on October 15, 2007 as part of the Authors@Google series.

An old gem

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

Just digging out my old bookmarks, and look at what I found...

An interview with Brian Kernighan (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/kernighan-interview)

A Nice Fact

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

Changi airport is one of the top-class airports globally, as evidence from a series of high-profile awards.

Therefore, it must mean something when its website offers a version in Indonesian, apart from English, Mandarin, and Japanese.

Notice from the picture below, the language selections in top-right of the webpage, and the content in Indonesian language.

Obviously, there are many possible explanations for the inclusion of this language. For a simpleton like me, I can only think that (based on the economic logic) Indonesians must be making up a significant portion of the human traffic in this world-class airport.

Thumbs up for Incheon Intl. Airport, Big Boo for Google's Language Auto-Detection

[My return flight will be departing in about 1.5 hours. Not surprisingly, there're some time to spend on, and here're the outcome...]

:)
There's a free wifi in the airport. It's one of the few airports with such a service. Most airports I've visited provides only paid wifi.


X(
Google's language auto-detect sucks.

Oh well, to clarify (now I'm a bit calmer), the idea is good. But, the execution is not perfect.

See the following screenshot. The blogger.com by default displays Korean characters. There's absolutely no clue for a layman on how to change the displayed language to English.


After a-couple-of-second's screaming within my head, I somehow became curious enough to click the top-right drop-down box. Luckily, it was what I looked for.

Btw., notice how the Flash ads are still in English?