April crunchtimes brings May graduations?

One of my professors just called April the worst month of the year. I had never thought of it that way, but in a way it is, and has been since I was maybe 10 or so. The second half of spring semester always comes upon us suddenly: it's staggering (and more than slightly terrifying, truth be told) to think that I only have 6 weeks of school left: 4 weeks of classes, projects week (finals week, too, for seniors), and an empty week (finals week for the rest of the school).

The downside of this, of course, is the 4 weeks I have to get EVERYTHING done. That includes my Computer Vision independent study, Clinic, Clinic presentation, Clinic poster, Clinic report, Photography, Philosophy of Mind, and tools.

Tools is my current favorite. I'm making my hammer now, and I just finished all the work that I need to do on the metal lathe. A quick search of my archives tells me that I haven't actually talked about tools yet, which is strange since I really enjoy it and I'm taking it for pure enjoyment. Tools, or E-8, is one of the first engineering classes that prospective engineering students take at Mudd. It's the introductory shop course, called "Tools" because that's what you build. You use the sheet-metal shop to craft a tool tray, bending, cutting and welding sheet metal into shape. You use the metal shop to build a flat head screwdriver, and most of a machinist's hammer (something like this, with one face made of nylon and the other of hardened steel). You use the wood shop to build the hammer handle.

I have not yet made my tool tray, but I've finished my screwdriver and much of my hammer. The screwdriver handle is made from acrylic using the lathe and the mill, and the blade is made on the mill. The hammer is the most complex piece. The hammer head (a short piece of 1in steel bar stock) is machined on the lathe and mill to fit the handle and both faces. The handle is made with the band-saw and wood lathe followed by a LOT of sanding. The hard face is machined from carbon steel on the lathe, followed by some filing, and then heat treated to bring it up to full hardness. It's polished by sand-blasting and fits into the head by press-fitting. The soft face is made from nylon (the nicest material I've worked with on the lathe) and attaches to the head with a screw. I'll post pictures of my pieces when I get off my butt and take some pictures (possibly tomorrow).

The shop proctors tried to chastise me when I told them (on, say, Wednesday night) that I hadn't started my hammer yet (due Friday of the following week). I corrected them. I am not a sophomore engineering student with no time. I'm a senior computer science student taking this class for fun. I can be in the shop every morning for 3 hours if I feel like it, and if I don't feel like it, I can drop the class (HMC's drop date is insanely late in the semester) or turn in half a hammer. It's a good way to approach the class.

In other news, I photoshopped up my senior page for the yearbook yesterday. Each senior gets a full page in the yearbook to decorate as desired, so I sifted through my (meagre) photo collection and placed the pictures on a canvas in Photoshop.
The pictures include me eating a Chinese-Donut-Burger, my barnstormers co-president, my girlfriend, my roommate (first three years; we have singles now), a prank some friends and I pulled, a prank some friends pulled on me, a few Halloween costumes (I'm the Rorschach near the top), me getting my head shaved for a friend who had cancer sophomore year (he's doing fine and back at school), the boxers a friend decided to hang on her wall after finding them in her laundry, the Mudd Amateur Rocketry Club at ROCStock a few years ago, Iris Critchell with her Cessna 172, and Rotsnake. And lots of gratuitous Photoshop effects.

I discovered Photoshop brush packs. Thus I have a coffee stain, ink stain, and crinkled-paper effects. The torn edges, actually, are incredibly simple to do in newer versions of Photoshop: turn on layer-effects and add a drop shadow, inner glow and outer glow to the layer. That gives the very slight drop-shadow to create some depth in the image and a thin white border to each picture. Take the eraser tool and grab a ragged brush, then erase the corners/edges of the photo. The white border now looks like torn paper where you've erased the image. I used this to create pinholes, torn corners where pushpins may have been ripped out, and half-ripped photographs. Putting the whole thing on a wooden surface gave it a bit more context, and I couldn't resist the coffee stain. The tape strikes me as a bit cheesy, but not too much and I had just learned how to make the tape.

As for post-graduation plans, I'm not sure yet where I'll be working; I have an offer from DreamHost, and I'm waiting on a few more. I'll probably take the summer off, though, and start in the fall. Over the summer I think I might take some classes at The Crucible in Oakland and visit old friends.

~KMarsh

Quest for Graduation: Shadows of the Real World

They say there is no life after Graduation. If so, I've seen some pretty lively corpses in the last couple of years. But now it's my turn and I have to find a place to work when I am no longer with you. Normally this wouldn't be very hard -- everyone needs computer scientists, right? -- but I have to find something near whatever my girlfriend finds so we don't have to commute too far. Again, we're both in technical fields so this shouldn't be too hard. My girlfriend, however, is looking very closely at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB. For those of you who don't know, Edwards AFB is in the Middle of Nowhere:
This is great when you want to test supersonic aircraft or munitions, either of which may leave enormous craters in the ground (depending on whether they work or not, respectively). It is somewhat sub-optimal when it comes to having anything else within a reasonable commute of the place.

Hopefully they will have a place for a poor computer scientist among all the engineers. Besides...how cool would it be to learn to fly from a fighter pilot?

In other news, I am really enjoying my Computer Vision class. Professor Dodds is a fun guy and he really makes learning these things fun. Two weeks ago we implemented an algorithm called "seam carving". This algorithm will remove connected seams of pixels from images to resize them to different aspect ratios without cropping or distortion. The idea is that you first find the edges of a picture (or some other measure of "energy"), then find the string across the picture with the least "edgyness" or "energy" and remove it. This maintains any interesting areas of the picture, where "interesting" is defined by your energy function; in this example, edges are "interesting".
This picture is of a Pentium Pro I opened up (fairly destructively) to get a look at what was inside. The die on the left is the L-2 cache and the die on the right is the processor itself (Pentium Pro was based off the Pentium II's microarchitecture, which is what the Core2 chips are based on, as well). The image in the upper right is the energy function; white pixels are strong edges, black pixels have no edge strength. The lower left picture is the result of adding up energy across the image to find the lowest energy "seam" and the picture in the lower right shows the carve result (same scale as the original image in the upper left). This method doesn't always work well, but when it does it can produce some spectacular results. There is an extension (that we did not implement) to use seam carving to resize videos as well.

This week we're working on auto-mosaicking to create panoramic images from a set of pictures.

Also: I'm looking forward to Halloween like crazy; it's by far my favorite holiday and there are always such great costumes here at Mudd.

~KMars

Quest for Graduation: So You Want To Be A Mudder

Здравствуйте!

We're back and school has begun. Actually, it began 3 weeks ago. The semester started off rushed for me, but it's settled down for now and I finally have time to blog again. As you may have noticed, I'm learning Russian. It's far too much work to be worth it (6 hours of class/week + 2 hours of homework/night = totally not worth it), but it's my favorite class so far. Be that as it is, however, I'm enjoying all my classes considerably more than usual -- there are often one or two that I just need to take, but this year all my classes are of my own choosing (except clinic, sort of) and I'm enjoying them all.

I'm enjoying living in Case, too. The rooms are huge, although mine is still filled with boxes that I haven't unpacked yet or are waiting to return to storage, and this time around I actually know the people I'm living with and they all range from "I don't know you very well yet" to "damn cool". We've got my Wii in the corner of the L and Litz got a PS3 over the summer so we're going to buy Rock Band 2 when they come out with the new peripherals for it. I also managed to acquire an armchair and 3-seat couch from my grandparents when they bought new furnature. It is some of the most excruciatingly comfortable furnature I've ever experienced, so I'm happy.

Computer Vision is such a cool class. I'm not really sure how much Professor Dodds actually knows about robotics and computer vision because he's always telling us stories about things he tried that didn't work, but I get the feeling that he knows his stuff. It doesn't actually matter, though, because he is extremely good at teaching it and at inspiring excitement and enthusiasm in his students, and that's really the whole point. Our first project was to write a program in C++ or Matlab that locates a can of spam in an image. We took a bunch of pictures of each other holding spam in class on the first day and used those to test our programs. We met with mixed success, but had a fun time seeing what we could do with the code libraries available.

In non-academic news I am now co-president of the Barnstormers (as mentioned before, apparently...). The Barnstormers are HMC's club for all things aeronautical, and Claire and I were given leadership of the club when Matt McKnett graduated. We've already done some cool stuff, like skipping class to hang out with Stan Love -- an HMC alumnus who happens to be an astronaut, but we have even more cool stuff coming up.

First is the annual aero alumni fly-in. At the end of September each year many of the school's alumni who have airplanes will fly in to Brackett Field, take current students up on joyrides with them in everything from carbon-fiber homebuilts to a Citation 2 jet. After the flying we all retire to the Aviation Room at Hoch-Shannahan dining hall (paid for by the aero alumni, hence the "Aviation Room") to have dinner and catch up.

Second is an event we've been planning since last year (also mentioned before). When Claire and I took over the Barnstormers, Matt and Iris proposed that we try to take any interested students on a gliding trip. We started looking at possible glider schools and sent an e-mail to the student body asking for interested parties. Within hours I'd received over 50 responses. Now, after sending an e-mail to the new freshman class, I have over 80 people who have expressed interest. The club got $2400 in funding from the school for the trip, and if even half of those people are still interested when the time comes we'll probably have to make them pay more than I wanted. Also, Claire, Iris and I flew out to visit one of the potential glider schools and the guy there mentioned that he could probably fit about 12 students in one day, so we'll have to split this up into multiple days. More on this as it unfolds.

That's about all I can think of right now, but keep an eye out for more regular posting -- I'll probably start updating on Friday or Saturday and I'll see about getting an RSS feed going. As a parting word, kudos to all those who caught the reference in this post's title.

~KMarsh

At World's End

This first semester of blogging has finally drawn to a close. Another year is lost to the mists of time, the summer coalesces into reality, and my friends and I become Seniors. My apologies for not making these posts separate and sooner, but I've been remarkably busy the last week. It just means I have more to talk about now.

First up is the end of school. Spring semester 2008 is now over at Harvey Mudd College and that means us students are out to do whatever it is students do over the summer. In my case that means working in Pasadena. Before we get there, though, we have graduation! The seniors are leaving us for ever and ever until they come back to tell us how easy the rest of the world is, and we get to listen to Bill Nye the Science Guy give the commencement speech. Bill's a great speaker and now my class has to come up with someone better...I have no clue how we're going to magic that up. Side note: I swear, if you're gonna get a doctoral degree pick the school with the best robes. We've got some very colorful members among our faculty.

Graduation from Mudd occurs on a Sunday (often Mother's day) and students are required to vacate the dorms by 8:00 Monday morning. Thus Sunday night finds my roommate and I packing feverishly and wondering where all this crap came from and more importantly, where it all can possibly hide during the year -- you really settle into a place and don't realize how much stuff you have until it's time to pack it all away. Things also tend to be distressingly non-rectangular. Being the first time that I'm spending the entire summer not living at Mudd (frosh year I took Summer Math, so I stayed for the first 6 weeks and soph year I worked on Staff for the CS Department almost the entire time) this is the first time that I've actually had to pack everything. I'm moving (moved...) into my sister's apartment in LA for the next 11 (10) weeks, so everything must be packed up and everything must be moved or put in storage. Good thing Mudd provides a lot of storage options for us. You see there my room in a state of partial destrucion. Things certainly got worse before they got better. I hadn't thought to take any pictures of my new room/apartment until now and it's currently plunged into darkness, so that'll wait until the morning.

Finally, I started work last week! So far I'm enjoying it. Guidance Software does computer forensics; in the paraphrased words of my (Mudd alum!) boss: first the door-kickers go and kick in the door (doorknobs are out of style in today's world), they shoot a bunch of people and shout "Clear!" Then the detectives come in and shut down the computers in a forensically-sound manner, check the computers into evidence, check them back out, and take the hard drives out. The hard drives have write-blockers attached and the detectives use our software to make an image of the drives. The computers get checked back into evidence and finally the detective uses our software to search the drive images for whatever he or she is looking for (incriminating e-mails, pictures, documents) even in the unallocated disk space (deleted files and such). It's apparently incredible to see someone tear into a drive with this and my boss is hoping to get me into one of the training courses they offer because it's "Wicked cool."

In order to unlock all the features of the software so I can be a developer, they gave me a USB dongle. It's worth about $60,000.

~KMarsh


edit: Here are pictures of my apartment. The first is the living room/kitchen/dining room and the second is my room.