Al Hoang » Uncategorized http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga Just another weblog Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:52:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5.2 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Realities of Leadership: New Yorker on Obama reforming Health Care http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/02/15/realities-of-leadership-new-yorker-on-obama-reforming-health-care/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/02/15/realities-of-leadership-new-yorker-on-obama-reforming-health-care/#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:30:52 +0000 hoanga http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/?p=714 The New Yorker has a nice article describing health care reform. But some interesting tidbits from the article is the discussion on the origins of the the modern health care systems for Britain, Switzerland and France. (Wish there were references to double check besides Wikipedia).

However, one choice quote I really like is:

The reality is that leaders are held responsible for the hazards of change as well as for the benefits.

References

  • Via a Tim O’Reilly Tweet
  • Read more
    • ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/02/15/realities-of-leadership-new-yorker-on-obama-reforming-health-care/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     What would Knuth say in this situation… http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/12/13/what-would-knuth-say-in-this-situation/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/12/13/what-would-knuth-say-in-this-situation/#comments Wed, 13 Dec 2006 06:24:38 +0000 hoanga http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/12/13/what-would-knuth-say-in-this-situation

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/12/13/what-would-knuth-say-in-this-situation/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Hello Wordpress world! http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/19/hello-world/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/19/hello-world/#comments Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:22:25 +0000 hoanga I’ve migrated to the Wordpress setup here.   The manila instance that was running was getting old and decrepit.

    Let’s see how this goes

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/19/hello-world/feed/ 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     The story of one guy’s life http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/14/the-story-of-one-guys-life/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/14/the-story-of-one-guys-life/#comments Wed, 15 Nov 2006 04:13:19 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/14/the-story-of-one-guys-life/

    via James Duncan Davidson’s blog

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/14/the-story-of-one-guys-life/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Photosynth, a new way of seeing relations in your photo collection http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/10/photosynth-a-new-way-of-seeing-relations-in-your-photo-collection/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/10/photosynth-a-new-way-of-seeing-relations-in-your-photo-collection/#comments Fri, 10 Nov 2006 20:19:43 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/10/photosynth-a-new-way-of-seeing-relatio

    I just took a glance at

    photosynch and

    am really impressed with the applications of computer vision and image

    processing techniques to create a really unique application.

    The basic

    idea is to take a pile of photos that are related to each other somehow

    (imagine taking zillions of pictures of the Taj Mahal from tons of

    different places) find similar features in all the images and try to

    reconstruct a mock 3d space that shows the spacial relation between

    all of your photos. This is really cool as you might be able to create

    a very interesting photo tour from your photo collection in a 3d

    navigatable space.

    Oddly, I was trying to come up with a similar idea to link videos stills

    in QuickTimeVR movies and try to use the linkable features in QuicktimeVR

    to provide clickable hotspots that would take you to another photo that

    was a picture of the same scene however this is far slicker and if it works

    with very little intervention from the user besides pointing to a pile

    of photos and letting it do its job that would be great.

    However, there are still caveats. The whole process takes hours or days

    to currently do and the current technology preview is only for a pre-rendered

    project. The true acid test will be in my opinion the ability to

    just point to a folder of pictures and have it do its job with as little

    possible human intervention as possible. That is a not a trivial problem

    but I’m sure we’ll see something interesting especially since it has

    two (very well)

    known researchers

    in the computer vision field. I’m really looking forward to the results

    of their labor. My last question is how many technologies behind this

    are patented already. It’d be great if it an OSS implementation inspired

    from this project could be made however patents are a sticky problem.

    Try it yourself

    ( 6 or 7 REQUIRED)

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/10/photosynth-a-new-way-of-seeing-relations-in-your-photo-collection/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     THE Official 8800GTX Performance Comparison http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/09/the-official-8800gtx-performance-comparison/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/09/the-official-8800gtx-performance-comparison/#comments Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:01:08 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/09/the-official-8800gtx-performance-compa

    This is awesome. I won’t ruin it for you by posting more than the link.

    Check it out

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/11/09/the-official-8800gtx-performance-comparison/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     If normal biff needs some more shinyness to it.. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/27/if-normal-biff-needs-some-more-shinyness-to-it/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/27/if-normal-biff-needs-some-more-shinyness-to-it/#comments Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:46:47 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/27/if-normal-biff-needs-some-more-shinyne

    cdbiff execute `eject’ command to eject a CD-ROM tray when mail arrives.

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/27/if-normal-biff-needs-some-more-shinyness-to-it/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     The Pied Piper of Architects (aka be careful of the wrong brain drain) http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/the-pied-piper-of-architects-aka-be-careful-of-the-wrong-brain-drai/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/the-pied-piper-of-architects-aka-be-careful-of-the-wrong-brain-drai/#comments Sun, 22 Oct 2006 13:50:49 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/the-pied-piper-of-architects-aka-be-ca

    Interesting article on trying to keep your technical architects around

    as they are the ones that have the scars from war stories and have built

    up experience on leading the project in the right direction

    But cynically speaking, what company is ever going to see the wisdom in that.

    Right? I mean keeping an old fart around on the payroll that might save

    you a significant chunk of change is just too forward looking…

    Read it yourself

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/the-pied-piper-of-architects-aka-be-careful-of-the-wrong-brain-drai/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     David Pogue reviews the Sony Mylo http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/david-pogue-reviews-the-sony-mylo/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/david-pogue-reviews-the-sony-mylo/#comments Sun, 22 Oct 2006 13:50:40 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/david-pogue-reviews-the-sony-mylo/

    From the article…

    Sony may be the first company ever to depict throwing up as a way to

    sell electronics.

    Seems once again Sony missed the target market by a decent amount again.

    One of these days they’ll hit the right combination again. But it seems

    as usual, their engineers are a little out of touch with the target market.

    Read it yourself

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/22/david-pogue-reviews-the-sony-mylo/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Getting cvsync running on cygwin http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/14/getting-cvsync-running-on-cygwin/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/14/getting-cvsync-running-on-cygwin/#comments Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:56:10 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/14/getting-cvsync-running-on-cygwin/

    I’m trying to get cvsync running on cygwin

    and after looking at the homepage. There didn’t seem to be that many

    straightforward instructions nor is there a package in the default

    cygwin repository. Bummer.

    So I took a shot and tried downloading the tarball and compiling it.

    $ wget http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/10/google-groups-beta-doesnt-support-page

    I’ve been testing the new Google

    Groups Beta and design-wise it looks a little bit cleaner however one

    SERIOUS flaw is that I can’t seem to get paging to work at all. Pressing

    Page Up or Page Down results in no response.

    Okay, rtfm… Piles

    and piles of pages of useless docs on how to create and add content. But

    how about people who need to BROWSE content? No documentation whatsoever

    if Google Groups Beta uses some sort of special hotkeys for navigation. And

    no, I’m not going to experiment/read the JS source/use intuition to guess

    what they are. This is something I consider BASIC for any type of news

    reader tool.

    And yes, I’ve already sent the folks at Google an email about it. However,

    frankly I’m a bit disappointed at the Google Overlords for missing such a

    brain-dead simple feature (or the failure to document it). How many

    advanced algorithms and UI pains did you guys go through just to forget

    the lowly Page Down key?

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/10/google-groups-beta-doesnt-support-page-updown-or-keyboard-shortcuts/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     A social psychology model answer to why people won’t switch OSes http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/07/a-social-psychology-model-answer-to-why-people-wont-switch-oses/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/07/a-social-psychology-model-answer-to-why-people-wont-switch-oses/#comments Sat, 07 Oct 2006 09:46:53 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/07/a-social-psychology-model-answer-to-wh

    OSNews has an interesting

    article detailing

    why people won’t switch OSes even when there might be many technical advantages

    to. Definitely an interesting read. It frames the reasoning in something

    called the Elaboration Likelihood Model. I’ve not heard of it but then

    again I’m no psychologist researcher either so I guess that’s not surprising.

    Read it yourself

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/07/a-social-psychology-model-answer-to-why-people-wont-switch-oses/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Fixing SVK ‘Oh no, no more exceptions! add_directory() failed’ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/fixing-svk-oh-no-no-more-exceptions-add_directory-failed/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/fixing-svk-oh-no-no-more-exceptions-add_directory-failed/#comments Wed, 04 Oct 2006 07:43:38 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/fixing-svk-oh-no-no-more-exceptions-ad

    The Problem

    $ svk mirror  http://svn.somewhere.org/project //mirror/project

    Committed revision 1.

    $ svk sync //mirror/project

    Syncing this

    bug.

    The cause

    I’m not sure what the reason but in general the problem seems

    to be isolated to the SVN::Mirror perl module. Perhaps if you upgrade

    SVK and all its dependencies via your package manager of choice and SVN::Mirror

    is updated to the right version I think you can get away from the problem.

    A Fix

    Upgrade SVN::Mirror (somehow). Since I installed SVK by hand it was possible

    to upgrade using cpan. Here’s what I did:

    $ /usr/local/bin/cpan

    cpan> install SVN::Mirror

    Running install for module SVN::Mirror

    Running make for C/CL/CLKAO/SVN-Mirror-0.71.tar.gz

    …

    …

    After that, I was able to use svk sync as expected.

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/fixing-svk-oh-no-no-more-exceptions-add_directory-failed/feed/ 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Clinton ‘endorses’ Ubuntu http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/clinton-endorses-ubuntu/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/clinton-endorses-ubuntu/#comments Wed, 04 Oct 2006 07:31:48 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/clinton-endorses-ubuntu/

    Well perhaps not the Ubuntu

    I associate with but close enough…

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/10/04/clinton-endorses-ubuntu/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     The OLPC Project finally starts showing off an implementation of their display http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/18/the-olpc-project-finally-starts-showing-off-an-implementation-of-th/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/18/the-olpc-project-finally-starts-showing-off-an-implementation-of-th/#comments Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:31:39 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/18/the-olpc-project-finally-starts-showin

    Can’t wait to get my hands on one (million) of them.

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/18/the-olpc-project-finally-starts-showing-off-an-implementation-of-th/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     AIBO creator’s new robot is powered by NetBSD http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/aibo-creators-new-robot-is-powered-by-netbsd/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/aibo-creators-new-robot-is-powered-by-netbsd/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 09:57:38 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/aibo-creators-new-robot-is-powered-by-

    Very cool. Who says NetBSD is

    dying?

    Check the specs

    at the bottom and you’ll see NetBSD listed..

    Thanks Engadget

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/aibo-creators-new-robot-is-powered-by-netbsd/feed/ 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Mythtv + Mysql5 + Ubuntu Dapper = Busted http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/mythtv-mysql5-ubuntu-dapper-busted/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/mythtv-mysql5-ubuntu-dapper-busted/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 08:52:32 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/mythtv-mysql5-ubuntu-dapper-busted/

    A little history…

    I took another shot at getting mythtv setup again after trying it a few

    years ago and lashing myself a few times trying to get the ivtv driver

    patched into a mainline kernel. After a bit of work back then I got it

    working but times changed and I ended up using the machine for different

    purposes.

    Installing MythTV again…

    Once again, I’ve decided to take another shot at a mythtv installation.

    This time I figured I’d piggyback onto a distribution that probably had

    packages for it available. My choice was Ubuntu Dapper. So I did the

    simple thing and tried:

    sudo apt-get install mythtv

    Trying to configure MythTV

    And soon I had a mythtv installation almost setup. It seems that many

    of the Japanese patches have been merged into mythtv (Wow!) so I didn’t

    have to crawl all over the Japanese web space to figure out how to patch

    in Japanese patches to obscure_utility (TM) just to get this working.

    The first time I tried populating mythtv’s database with TV listing information

    I got errors siilar to:

    Malformed UTF-8 character (1 byte, need 3, after start byte 0xe7) at

    /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Date/Manip.pm line 7167.

    Since I’m not a perl god nor am I intimately familiar with mythtv or any

    of its tools, I ended up searching on that error message and found a

    post

    on a Japanese board basically saying this would not be a major problem

    with using mythtv in Japanese so I did what most people do… ignored it.

    After I got the base configuration done, I realized I’d be spending a lot

    of time not looking directly at this machine since it’s main job was to be

    a backend recording machine rather than a frontend so I installed mythweb

    to help me manage recordings:

    sudo apt-get install mythweb

    The Killer Problem settles in

    This is where problems started coming in. After populating the TV listings

    database, mythweb still failed to show ANY listings whatsoever. Needless

    to say, this makes it a little hard to schedule watching anything.

    After waiting a few days to see if this was just a transient problem

    I still had no TV listings so I decided to search on it. What I found

    basically was Mysql 5 changed a keyword ‘repeat’ to a reserved word which

    OF COURSE mythtv relied on using in one of its tables. What this results

    in is a non-working setup for viewing TV listings on mythtv. This problem

    affects mythtv 0.18.x and the mythtv developers have basically said ‘upgrade’

    if you want to fix it. However the Ubuntu Dapper packages stay steady at

    0.18.x with a dependency on mysql-server which defaults to Mysql5. It seems

    there are updated packages in Edgy (Why the f’ is it always in the NEXT

    release rather than backported to THIS release????) but none for Dapper yet.

    I hope someone backports these packages. In the meantime, I’ll try to see

    if the updated packages build cleanly on Dapper for my own purposes.

    References

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/16/mythtv-mysql5-ubuntu-dapper-busted/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Why evil is only a matter of time http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/why-evil-is-only-a-matter-of-time/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/why-evil-is-only-a-matter-of-time/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:25:36 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/why-evil-is-only-a-matter-of-time/

    Here is one explanation why Google will eventually become evil…

    companies are at different stages of a standard software business model, which goes like this:

    1. build market share
    2. lock in customers
    3. profit from lock-in

    Read it yourself

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/why-evil-is-only-a-matter-of-time/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     Will be bad http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/will-be-bad/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/will-be-bad/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:25:31 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/will-be-bad/

    Check it out yourself

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/09/11/will-be-bad/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/     How to make a DSP hardware project be on time http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/08/12/how-to-make-a-dsp-hardware-project-be-on-time/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/08/12/how-to-make-a-dsp-hardware-project-be-on-time/#comments Sun, 13 Aug 2006 03:48:46 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/08/12/how-to-make-a-dsp-hardware-project-be-

    Here is an article describing

    a fairy tale (sadly) idea of how one would run a project for creating a product

    from DSP chips. I’ll have to say it makes a lot of sense but what would

    be more interesting is some hard data on anyone that has actually managed to

    apply this idea:

    This is OK for a simple algorithm, but what if it is even moderately complex?

    Then you are dealing with (i) a very complex algorithm and (ii) very complex

    assembler all at the same time. This is usually too much for mere mortals (and

    even minor deities). The result is long, painful development, failed projects,

    late nights, angry spouses, and lots of pizza (well its not all bad I guess).

    The trick is to divide and conquer. Make sure we are only hitting one tough

    problem at any given time.

    One approach I have found very useful is bit

    exact porting to assembler.

    There are two important steps:

    1. At the fixed point C stage, you test very very carefully. Run batteries

      of tests and simulations. These can be performed on a regular PC in non real

      time, using powerful debuggers. The idea is to verify that:

      (i) The algorithm is OK and

      (ii) The fixed point port works OK.

      In particular (ii) is very tough, so its nice to handle this in a relatively

      benign environment like a PC or

      workstation.

    2. Port each function to real time assembler one by one. Test each function

      against the fixed point C reference. Make sure the functions give IDENTICAL

      output – right down to the last bit. This takes a lot of discipline – near

      enough is NOT good enough.

    Read it yourself

    Kudos to Joel’s Reddit page for this one.

    ]]>     http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2006/08/12/how-to-make-a-dsp-hardware-project-be-on-time/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/