A Concurrent Affair

I’ve complained a lot about the Google Maps app on Android lately. Offline maps were gone, the nice navigation interface while driving was gone, favorites were gone, simple access to alternate routes was gone, distance measurement via ruler was gone. Voice input isn’t working well anymore, and it seems to require a touch to actually start navigating. In fact, I didn’t update to the latest version for a long time. I kept an APK of version 6 around on my device so if I accidentally updated Google Maps to version 7, I could uninstall the update and update to a version I liked.

Yesterday, I updated to Google Maps 8.0 on my phone, and I actually like it. Alternate routes are a button away again. Lane guidance is cool and probably useful (although I’ve found that on the Boren-Westlake-Denny intersection, it’s a bit misleading: if you want to go down Westlake, you should be in the right lane on Boren).

Google Maps 8.0 on Android

What I like the best, though (and I’ll try to get a screenshot of it at some point), is that Google Maps now displays traffic on nearby streets as thin colored lines. They help me decide if I want to quickly turn into an alternate street if I see cars backing up on the street ahead of me.

I haven’t exactly tried out how well favorites, voice input, and offline maps work. I now have direct links to most of the places that I want to go to just on my driving dock, so I don’t need favorites as much anymore. Voice input is still important — I’ll try that out the next few times I’m driving. And offline maps isn’t really important anymore either, since I now use BackCountry Navigator for topographic maps when I’m hiking.

Dr. Moshe Vardi at Rice tweeted a really cool link today: Best Papers vs. Top Cited Papers on Arnetminer.

It lists the most-cited papers that were published at one of many conferences, and then also which paper received the “best paper” award at that conference. Frequently, the “best paper” is far from being the most influential (or at least, far from being cited most often).

I guess that shows how difficult it is to predict the impact of someone’s work. It also makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy, though, because I do know most of the top and best papers from recent PLDI conferences. I guess I’ve retained a few things from my PhD work.

I watched a pre-screening of the movie “Transcendence” today.

Some cliches, like wildly flashing and scrolling consoles and computer-generated voices, as well as the somewhat rapid end aside, the movie was well-made and thought-provoking. Below are some thoughts that occurred to me during the movie, in stream-of-consciousness form (or should we say, Stream<Consciousness>?).

I’m pretty sure that technological, digital evolution is indeed the next step for humanity, if there is one. I’m not sure that I feel too bad about it. I do feel that in some way, machines with consciousness would be our children. Not biological, but most likely cultural, if you cast a wide net around culture. I’m not convinced that we can engineer something as advanced as what is necessary for artificial intelligence, but we can probably give it a good starting point for evolutionary tinkering, evolution@home-style.

Combining Moore’s Law with evolution would lead to incredibly rapid changes, possibly even for the better. “Transcendence”, as well as other stories, such as Asimov’s laws, wonder whether humans would accept a superior technological intellect, even if it is, on the whole, good-natured towards humanity. And is “the whole” of humanity really what matters to humans?

I doubt it, but a digital consciousness would not be human anymore. It wouldn’t be bound by the limitations that make us humans: Hunger, fatigue, death. And in a strange way, these limitations make us bigger, even though what we can achieve is so much smaller. If we had all the time we needed, perfect recollection of our past thoughts and actions, as well as access to all the information gathered by our digital peers, how large would our accomplishments have to be to feel worthy?

Nor would our digital successors have our pleasures. In fact, I wonder if a digital consciousness would not get bored. On the one hand, there is the vastness of the unknown-but-knowable; on the other, there is the enormity of timelessness.

Which would win?

In my last post, I claimed that OneNote for Mac didn’t exist.

That’s actually not true. My friend Chris informed me that about two weeks ago, Microsoft released OneNote for Mac.

That still doesn’t help me, because OneNote for Mac only allows notebooks to be stored in OneDrive, Microsoft cloud solution:

In particular, you can only open notebooks stored on OneDrive, not local OneNote files from your Mac, or from your company SharePoint, or from Office 365.

Uploading company data to another company’s cloud is, understandably, prohibited by my employer’s information security policy.

At the end of last week, I turned in my old 3.5 year-old work laptop, my rugged, trusted Lenovo ThinkPad T410.

My old Lenovo ThinkPad T410 work laptop.

When I started using it at work, I didn’t like it. I was using the MacBook Pro I had purchased to help me finish my dissertation. Windows seemed very pedestrian. The Ctrl and Alt keys were in the wrong place. There was no Unix-like command line (at least not by default).

Obviously, in the last three years I have adapted. One of the nice things was the docking station that came with the Lenovo. It was easy to plug in mouse, keyboard, speakers, Ethernet, and two monitors.

In my work environment, actually developing on Windows would probably be hard, though. So now I have a Mac again (in addition to my own dissertation MacBook Pro at home).

My new MacBook Pro work laptop.

I spent the last weekend setting it up so I could work with it today without interruption. What have I learned? The keys are all in the wrong places.

That’s particularly true when I type on my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I use either a KVM switch or Synergy to control multiple computers with one keyboard and one mouse. At home, I have a Windows 7 desktop, so everything on my keyboard works as expected. At work, I now have an Ubuntu box, so Ctrl/Win/Alt on my keyboard are Ctrl/Super/Alt, also pretty much as expected. Except when I move over to the Mac, then Ctrl/Win/Alt is Ctrl/Alt/Command. Copying on the Mac, for example, is done using Command-C, but now it feels like I’m tying Alt-C. Should I remap that so Ctrl is Command? But then where does Ctrl go?

Furthermore, I have noticed how bad Office is on the Mac. Especially Outlook and Communicator. Oh, and OneNote, of course, which doesn’t exist at all. What do I use now to take notes?

And in Communicator, I now can’t schedule conference calls anymore. And Outlook isn’t able to show my personal Google Calendar anymore, so I’ll have to be more careful about work running late and interfering with other activities.

I’m missing the docking stations. It’s a bit of a mess to plug in power, a Thunderbolt cable with an adapter to Ethernet, a Thunderbolt cable with an adapter to a monitor, and a USB cable to a USB hub, which connects to keyboard and mouse. Apple changed the MagSafe power connector, so none of my power adapters at home fit, and I need to use MagSafe-to-MagSafe2 adapters for the power adapter as well. Ugh. Why, Apple?

I’ll probably try a HengeDock again. I’ve tried a HengeDock in the past, and it broke, but they’re coming out with metal versions.

On the other hand, the MacBook Pro is much faster, has a much better display, is much lighter, and has much better battery life. And I can actually develop on this laptop.

In terms of size, I like it better than my own MacBook Pro. The 15″ MacBook Pro is too big to comfortably work on airplanes, for example. My old 13″ white MacBook fit much better.

13″ MacBook Pro for work on top, my own 15″ dissertation MacBook Pro on the bottom.

So, what can I expect from this laptop? I’ll get used to it, and I’ll like it. That’s what.

For most of this year, I have done yoga every day. I still go to my class at the gym, but five to six times a week I do yoga at home using the Daily Yoga Android app.

Daily Yoga Android App

It’s fun, and I feel calmer.

Isn’t it weird how readily we eat food that randomly appears at work, even though we have no idea who put it there or where it came from? If I found food outside, I wouldn’t eat it. If food randomly appeared in my home, I’d be terrified. But if food appears at the office… sure, I’ll have some without another thought.

The picture below, by the way, is from my three-year work anniversary in January 2014. I brought in 72 donuts. But at least I announced per mailing list that I needed help eating them…

Six dozen donuts for my three-year work anniversary.

I haven’t written in a while. I at least wanted to write about going snowshoeing while attending an avalanche class. I’ll get to it some day.

Today I found a website that computes distance between computer scientists. Kind of like the Erdős number, but in computer science.

The world is small: I can get from Dijkstra to me in just four papers.

1. Edsger W. Dijkstra
   
   worked on 1 publication with
2. Alan J. Perlis
   
   worked on 2 publications with
3. John McCarthy
   
   worked on 2 publications with
4. Robert Cartwright
   
   worked on 3 publications with Mathias Ricken

There are several different ways of getting there:

1. ALGOL Sub-Committee Report – Extensions.
   
   Edsger W. Dijkstra and W. Heise and Alan J. Perlis and Klaus Samelson
   
   Commun. ACM, 1959
2. Revised report on the algorithm language ALGOL 60. (DOI)
   
   John W. Backus and Friedrich L. Bauer and Julien Green and C. Katz and John McCarthy and Alan J. Perlis and Heinz Rutishauser and Klaus Samelson and Bernard Vauquois and Joseph Henry Wegstein and Adriaan van Wijngaarden and Michael Woodger and Peter Naur
   
   Commun. ACM, 1963
   
   
   
   Report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60. (DOI)
   
   John W. Backus and Friedrich L. Bauer and Julien Green and C. Katz and John McCarthy and Alan J. Perlis and Heinz Rutishauser and Klaus Samelson and Bernard Vauquois and Joseph Henry Wegstein and Adriaan van Wijngaarden and Michael Woodger
   
   Commun. ACM, 1960
3. First Order Programming Logic. (DOI)
   
   Robert Cartwright and John McCarthy
   
   Proceedings of the Conference Record of the Sixth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 1979
   
   
   
   Recursive programs as functions in a first order theory. (DOI)
   
   Robert Cartwright and John McCarthy
   
   Proceedings of the Mathematical Studies of Information Processing, 1978
4. DrHJ: a lightweight pedagogic IDE for Habanero Java. (DOI)
   
   Jarred Payne and Vincent Cavé and Raghavan Raman and Mathias Ricken and Robert Cartwright and Vivek Sarkar
   
   Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, 2011
   
   
   
   Test-first Java concurrency for the classroom. (DOI)
   
   Mathias Ricken and Robert Cartwright
   
   Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, 2010
   
   
   
   ConcJUnit: unit testing for concurrent programs. (DOI)
   
   Mathias Ricken and Robert Cartwright
   
   Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, 2009

Mostly out of curiosity, I downloaded the Sleep Time app for Android yesterday. It’s an alarm clock that uses the accelerometer in the phone (which has to be placed on the mattress) to determine one’s sleep phase. Based on that information, it wakes you up at a certain point during a 30-minute window, with the goal of not tearing you out of deep or REM sleep.

I set the alarm clock to 7 AM, but the app actually woke me up at 6:34 AM. Judging by the sleep cycle graph, that was probably the right call, I had been in light sleep for a while.

My sleep cycle graph is so pretty! Apparently I’m quite a normal sleeper.

Sleep Cycle Graph 2013-07-11

Update:

OMG. When talking to guys at work, I realized what an evil genius would do with an app like this: Market the sleep cycle information to advertisers (or worse!), who will then play audio messages to the sleepers! Am I being brainwashed?

In January 2011, I switched from my old Pam Treo 755p to an Android touch screen smartphone. At first I was skeptical about not having a keyboard, but boy, that was the right decision. I’d had the HTC EVO 4G on Sprint for about two years and three months, and it was a really solid phone. Memory was getting a little tight, with apps like Amazon Kindle taking over 20 MB, but it was still good. I also had the best car dock ever, the Seidio Innotraveler: I just had to slip the phone into the dock, and it connected. No cords, just one hand.

But the USB connector was starting to become unreliable, and since Sprint does not reduce the bill after the 24 month minimum contract length was over, I was essentially subsidizing Sprint now. It was time for a new phone. I also looked at cell phone coverage maps and download speeds, and Sprint really wasn’t doing so well. A co-worker recommended T-Mobile (yeah… I’m back under the descendent of the Deutsche Bundespost, the former German post and phone monopoly holder), and I like the fact that the payments go down after 24 months. That actually makes sense.

So I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile and got a Samsung Galaxy S4. Well, actually, from Sprint to i-Wireless with my spare dumbphone to T-Mobile, because Sprint deactivated my line immediately, and it took a week to get the new phone from T-Mobile.

I like the new phone. It has a bigger screen, which is something I didn’t actually want, but it’s thinner and lighter, so it actually feels like I’m carrying around less. And it’s a lot faster. T-Mobile also is a lot faster than Sprint. I like the fact that I can make free calls when I’m on a WiFi network. When I’m traveling internationally, I can call the US for free (provided I have wireless internet)!

Google Now, which I didn’t know about before but which came pre-installed on the Galaxy S4, is pretty cool. It does a pretty good job of displaying what I actually want to know. And Google Currents has become my favorite way of reading… stuff. I don’t have all my feeds in there, those are in feedly now with the looming shutdown of Google Reader, but I have to admit, I probably have too many feeds anyway. I can’t keep up.

Some of the gadgets of the Galaxy S4 are cool, but I don’t use them too much. I like Multi-window, but I’d like more multi-window enabled applications for simpler multitasking. Smart Stay, the phone’s ability to stay on while I’m looking at it, or pausing a video when I look away, can be useful. But some of the other stuff, like waving my hand over the phone, I don’t really use.

The camera on the Galaxy S4 has a lot of bells and whistles too, like an easy to use panorama mode, but I don’t use most of them. At least, I haven’t yet. Eraser, Drama, and Best Face all sound good, but I haven’t found applications for them yet. And over all, I think the Galaxy S4’s camera is worse than that of the EVO 4G, especially under low-light conditions. With the EVO 4G, I rarely had to use the flash, now photos often are too dark without it. And to make matters worse, I think the flash is worse too on the Galaxy S4.

The Galaxy S4 itself is slim and light, but the phone feels plasticy and cheap. I always get a case, though, and I chose the same case that I had on my old phone, a Seidio Surface. And guess what, this case is available with a kickstand, a convenient feature of my old phone. Now, with the Seidio Surface case, the Galaxy S4 feels solid again.

I got an iBOLT xProDock active car dock for my car, and while it works, it’s not nearly as nice as the old Innotraveler. It takes two hands to get the phone in or out, because I have to lift a little clamp and plug in a little cord.

Oh Seidio, won’t you make an Innotraveler for the Galaxy S4, please?

Another neat thing about T-Mobile and the Galaxy S4 is that it uses a SIM card. That means when I travel, I can put another SIM card in, like the Vodafone SIM card that I’ve been using when I’m in Europe. Unfortunately I haven’t got to try this out yet because when I was traveling in May, I didn’t have a SIM card cutter yet, and my Vodafone SIM card was a full-size card, but the Galaxy S4 needs a mini-SD card.

I’m paying a bit more, $94 a month instead of about $60 to $64. But I have to admit, the Sprint Employee Referral Offer plan was a fricking steal! Right now, I’m pretty happy with my decision. I just home this phone also lasts two years.

Old phone (left): HTC EVO 4G. New phone (right): Samsung Galaxy S4.

New phone, Samsung Galaxy S4, feels cheap without case. The Seidio Surface case remedies that well.

New phone, Samsung Galaxy S4, feels cheap without case. The Seidio Surface case remedies that well.

PS: I faced a small conundrum when I was taking that first picture of the new and the old phone: How would I take the picture? I take most photos with my phone, and I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. Of course, I took out my Canon G12, a great camera that I don’t use often enough…

At work, every engineer has a pager. Every few weeks, depending on the team, an engineer is on-call and needs to respond quickly in case something breaks in the team’s products.

The week ending today was, fortunately, very quiet. There were only a few events, and none of them were at night. Additionally, I think this was the healthiest on-call week I’ve had so far.

In the past, I didn’t exercise at all when on-call. It feels like I can’t run or bike as easily, because I have to carry my backpack everywhere. I definitely can’t go hiking, because I need to stay within cell phone range. And (maybe that’s just me) I was worried about not hearing the pager if I left it by the pool side at the gym.

A while ago, I remembered that my office building had a gym. This week, I decided to go to that gym and use the exercise bikes and elliptical machines there. If my pager went off… no problem, I’d just head up to my office, where I had left my laptop. In fact, I had my desktop there too, so I’d even be in a better position to work than if I were at home.

And it felt great. I went to that gym on six days, for an hour each. I think I’ll continue to do that, at least for this next week, when I’m secondary and still need to wear my pager and take my backpack everywhere.

I’ve also started to like the elliptical machines. I started running again a few weeks ago, after not having run since… last July? I was happily surprised that I could still easily run over 4 miles. Unfortunately, I might have ramped up my distance and speed too quickly, and my right knee got inflamed. The elliptical gives me a similar feeling as running, but with much less impact.

From PhD Comics:

A Professor’s Prayer