This week I am listening to “Mother Earth” by Within Temptation
Archives for 2001
Read – The Long Goodbye
Today I finished reading “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler
Classic pick up line?
Just closed the first game contract for my new little video game company. I am going to be creating a couple of games for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance.
Rather excited by that.
I have come to the conclusion that in any romantic relationship you should aim to make it as interesting as your first Nintendo games console.
Classic, hours of fun for everyone involved, and every problem can usually be fixed by blowing on it before shoving it back in.
Paper – Linear probing and graphs
Today I read a paper titled “Linear probing and graphs”
The abstract is:
Mallows and Riordan showed in 1968 that labeled trees with a small number of inversions are related to labeled graphs that are connected and sparse.
Wright enumerated sparse connected graphs in 1977, and Kreweras related the inversions of trees to the so-called “parking problem” in 1980.
A~combination of these three results leads to a surprisingly simple analysis of the behavior of hashing by linear probing, including higher moments of the cost of successful search.
Read – The Fast Forward MBA in Technology Management
Today I finished reading “The Fast Forward MBA in Technology Management” by Daniel Petrozzo
Listening – Like Water For Chocolate
This week I am listening to “Like Water For Chocolate” by Common
Read – Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide
Today I finished reading “Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide” by Monte Cook
Read – Planning Extreme Programming
Today I finished reading “Planning Extreme Programming” by Kent Beck
De Facto Encryption
Sing like no one’s listening.
Dance like nobody’s watching.
Encrypt like everyone is.
Read – Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Today I finished reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki
Listening – American III: Solitary Man
This week I am listening to “American III: Solitary Man” by Johnny Cash
Read – Charlotte’s Web
Today I finished reading “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White
Read – Ivanhoe
Today I finished reading “Ivanhoe” by Walter Scott
Studying – Foundations of figure drawing
This month I am studying “Foundations of figure drawing”
Two nights a week, one month course offered at the local art school in San Diego I just enrolled for. It’s sort of a follow-on course to last months offering.
Update #1: I am bad at anatomy. But I am getting really good at drawing stick figures and stick figures that look like sausages.
Update #2: I won’t be attending the final week as I am moving from Carlsbad, CA to just North of Seattle at the end of September.
Update #3: Between the 18 hours of class (rather than 24 because I had to skip the last week due to moving house) and some extra practice sessions to make up for the fact I skipped two classes I managed to log 28 hours of practice and study.
Listening – Mad Season
This week I am listening to “Mad Season” by Matchbox Twenty
Listening – Holy Wood (In The Shadow Of The Valley Of Death)
This week I am listening to “Holy Wood (In The Shadow Of The Valley Of Death)” by Marilyn Manson
Read – The Signalman
Today I finished reading “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens
Read – Advanced 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9
Today I finished reading “Advanced 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9” by Peter Walsh
Read – Paradise Lost
Today I finished reading “Paradise Lost” by John Milton
Read – The Essays of Warren Buffett
Today I finished reading “The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America” by Warren Buffet
Read – Extreme Programming Explained
Today I finished reading “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change” by Kent Beck
Listening – The Sickness
This week I am listening to “The Sickness” by Disturbed
Read – Memoirs of Hadrian
Today I finished reading “Memoirs of Hadrian” by Marguerite Yourcenar
Read – North and South
Today I finished reading “North and South” by Elizabeth Gaskell
Read – Python Essential Reference
Today I finished reading “Python Essential Reference” by David Beazley
Read – The Stolen White Elephant
Today I finished reading “The Stolen White Elephant” by Mark Twain
Listening – Kid A
This week I am listening to “Kid A” by Radiohead
Paper – Towards Flexible Teamwork
Today I read a paper titled “Towards Flexible Teamwork”
The abstract is:
Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics.
Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains obstruct coherent teamwork.
In particular, team members often encounter differing, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent views of their environment.
Furthermore, team members can unexpectedly fail in fulfilling responsibilities or discover unexpected opportunities.
Highly flexible coordination and communication is key in addressing such uncertainties.
Simply fitting individual agents with precomputed coordination plans will not do, for their inflexibility can cause severe failures in teamwork, and their domain-specificity hinders reusability.
Our central hypothesis is that the key to such flexibility and reusability is providing agents with general models of teamwork.
Agents exploit such models to autonomously reason about coordination and communication, providing requisite flexibility.
Furthermore, the models enable reuse across domains, both saving implementation effort and enforcing consistency.
This article presents one general, implemented model of teamwork, called STEAM.
The basic building block of teamwork in STEAM is joint intentions (Cohen & Levesque, 1991b); teamwork in STEAM is based on agents’ building up a (partial) hierarchy of joint intentions (this hierarchy is seen to parallel Grosz & Kraus’s partial SharedPlans, 1996).
Furthermore, in STEAM, team members monitor the team’s and individual members’ performance, reorganizing the team as necessary.
Finally, decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate sensitivity to the environmental conditions.
This article describes STEAM’s application in three different complex domains, and presents detailed empirical results.
Read – The Light of Other Days
Today I finished reading “The Light of Other Days” by Arthur C. Clarke
Studying – Figure drawing fundamentals
This month I am studying “Figure drawing fundamentals”
Two nights a week, one month course that Art Institute of California San Diego is hosting.
Update: I managed to log 21 hours of class time and practice.
Listening – XTRMNTR
This week I am listening to “XTRMNTR” by Primal Scream
Read – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Today I finished reading “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” by J.K. Rowling
I like to compartmentalise my food
One small bowl with dry cereal in it.
One small milk jug.
One small bowl with nothing in it.
One small bowl with fruit (sliced strawberries, raspberries, blueberries) in it.
The milk doesn’t become clogged with breakfast cereal dust.
The breakfast cereal doesn’t get so wet it loses the crunch.
Read – How To Make Anyone Like You
Today I finished reading “How To Make Anyone Like You” by Leil Lowndes
Listening – Parachutes
This week I am listening to “Parachutes” by Coldplay
Read – The Cathedral & the Bazaar
Today I finished reading “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary” by Eric S. Raymond
Paper – Boosting the Differences: A fast Bayesian classifier neural network
Today I read a paper titled “Boosting the Differences: A fast Bayesian classifier neural network”
The abstract is:
A Bayesian classifier that up-weights the differences in the attribute values is discussed.
Using four popular datasets from the UCI repository, some interesting features of the network are illustrated.
The network is suitable for classification problems.
Read – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Today I finished reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving
Read – The Fast Forward MBA In Negotiating And Deal Making
Today I finished reading “The Fast Forward MBA In Negotiating And Deal Making” by Roy Lewicki
Listening – The Rising Tide
This week I am listening to “The Rising Tide” by Sunny Day Real Estate
Read – Asterix and the Actress
Today I finished reading “Asterix and the Actress” by Albert Uderzo
Listening – Selmasongs
This week I am listening to “Selmasongs” by Björk
Read – Don’t Step in the Leadership
Today I finished reading “Don’t Step in the Leadership” by Scott Adams
Read – Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich… Without Cutting Up Your Credit Cards
Today I finished reading “Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich… Without Cutting Up Your Credit Cards” by Robert Kiyosaki
Listening – Minor Earth Major Sky
This week I am listening to “Minor Earth Major Sky” by a-ha
Paper – Orderly Spanning Trees with Applications
Today I read a paper titled “Orderly Spanning Trees with Applications”
The abstract is:
We introduce and study the {\em orderly spanning trees} of plane graphs.
This algorithmic tool generalizes {\em canonical orderings}, which exist only for triconnected plane graphs.
Although not every plane graph admits an orderly spanning tree, we provide an algorithm to compute an {\em orderly pair} for any connected planar graph $G$, consisting of a plane graph $H$ of $G$, and an orderly spanning tree of $H$.
We also present several applications of orderly spanning trees: (1) a new constructive proof for Schnyder’s Realizer Theorem, (2) the first area-optimal 2-visibility drawing of $G$, and (3) the best known encodings of $G$ with O(1)-time query support.
All algorithms in this paper run in linear time.
Studying – Typography from A to Z
This month I am studying “Typography from A to Z”
Seems like a basic introductory class on typography. Should be an interesting area of study.
In-person class. Two nights a week, three hours a night for four weeks.
Update: I really liked this class. Instructor was super interesting and had a lot of examples to demonstrate feel and tone just by changing a font or the size of a font.
Also… whitespace. It’s super-important.
Logged 31 hours of classwork and homework and extra studies.
Listening – Supreme Clientele
This week I am listening to “Supreme Clientele” by Ghostface Killah
Read – Vanity Fair
Today I finished reading “Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray
Read – The Thin Man
Today I finished reading “The Thin Man” by Dashiell Hammett