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An AP story that was on the front page of today's Albuquerque Journal:

Study 'Vindication' for Low-Carb Diet.

iphone or millionare via Get Rich Slowly.

Elisa and I have a Hoya carnosa that started to bloom for the first time this week. I'm very excited about it:

This plant is the most common Hoya species and a very popular house plant, so you wouldn't think that yet another example of it blooming would be a big deal. However, this particular plant has a lot of history in my family, making it a big deal to me. I got it as a cutting off a plant that was owned by my grandmother Letha. Letha's plant was in turn taken as a cutting off a plant that was owned by her grandmother Augusta.

Letha Marie Rau (Born) [1908 - 1991] My grandmother	Augusta Charlotta Born (Raasch) [1841 - 1907] My great, great grandmother

The plant's full lineage detailed below for future reference:

• The original plant - "Hoya A" - was owned by Augusta. Acquisition date/place unknown.
• When Augusta died in 1907, the plant was transfered to two of her daughters: Emilia Augusta Born [1868 - 1952] and Lydia Louise Born [1881 - 1969]
• Sometime around 1945, Letha received a cutting of "Hoya A" from Emilia or Lydia. This cutting - "Hoya B" - remained with Letha until her death.
• After Lydia's death in 1969, Berta Bohnsack (Rau) acquired "Hoya A" from Lydia. It remains with her to this day. A cutting of "Hoya A" was also given to Barbara Born Kraai at this time. She reportedly still has it and her two daughters have cuttings of it.
• After Letha's death in 1991, Carol Rau acquired "Hoya B" and has it to this day.
• Sometime before 2006, Carol took a cutting off of "Hoya B", creating "Hoya C".
• Carol gave me "Hoya C" when I visited Watertown for the 2006 Tour de Kota.

I have two photos of Letha's "Hoya B" in her rural Watertown, SD home [one, two]. I don't know when they were taken. Probably in the mid 1970s to late 1980s.

In December, my brother Craig and I made a plant stand for "Hoya C", attempting to partially emulate the plant stand that my Grandfather Carl made for Letha's "Hoya B":

And so Augusta, born in Pomerania in 1841, has in me a fifth generation ancestor who's made an offshoot of her house plant bloom in New Mexico more than one hundred years after she first made it bloom in South Dakota. This is very important to me.

It becomes even more important now that Elisa and I have our first child on the way. We'll try to be good parents and good care takers of the plant. Then, as a result, I hope that one of our ancestors can continue the line by someday treasuring a related Hoya blooming for the first time in their own home.

In an effort to communicate a few ideas with someone I am collaborating with, I created a simple self-contained example HTML document to illustrate concepts related to read/write, read-only, and disabled text boxes. The document also demonstrates Javascript control of these properties and a disabled text box that's populated based on the selection of a drop down widget.

Here's the document.

Update 2/18/2008:

I created a new example that's similar to the previous one, except that it demonstrates a) The use of jQuery, b) some of jQuery's easy build in effects, c) the use of jQuery's $(document).ready(function() ...) and $(...).bind(...) to totally remove all Javascript from the markup.

I really like jQuery. I highly recommend that you have a look at it, if you're looking for a "web 2.0" Javascript library.

I got back from a two week business trip to southern India last weekend. It
was a very interesting experience.

Many photos are available here. A few select ones are shown below:

General People, Places, and Things of India

Team Members and Me in India

Vechicles

What Marxism Gets You

This year, Elisa and I went into the wilderness with a National Forest Christmas Tree Permit to cut down a tree. We were assisted by Elisa's sister, her husband, and Elisa's parents. We went to the Cibola National Forest, near Magdalena, New Mexico, where we could see the VLA radio telescope in the background:

In the Cibola National Forest, looking out onto the VLA. Click on the image and view a large resolution version to see the telescopes.

Elisa finds the tree - a Piñon Pine.

I start to saw it down.

Larry finishes cutting it down, as everyone watches.

I drag the tree to the truck.

Into the truck.

Up in the house.

Aftermath.

Decorated.

When processing JPEG images taken with a digital camera, you often want rotate the images that were taken in portrait orientation, so that they appear "right side up" on your computer monitor.

For example,

This is easy enough in a many GUI image manipulation packages, but it tends to be tedious for a large number of images. Further, if you're not careful to use the right options, the rotation process will uncompress and recompress the images, degrading their quality.

Thankfully, there's an awesome command line utility called jhead that does lossless JPEG rotation and a whole lot more. Here's an example. Quick, easy, and scriptable:

$ jhead -autorot *
Modified: IMG_1007.JPG
Modified: IMG_1037.JPG
Modified: IMG_1038.JPG
Modified: IMG_1039.JPG
...

jhead's author has a very interesting home page, including information on a home-made mechanical organ and a link to Raphi Giangiulio's Homemade Pipe Organ, which is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

I got an A in my Neural Networks class, keeping my cumulative GPA at 4.04:

Here's a screen shot of me working on the final project:

I enjoyed the class's back propagation learning assignment. My solution was implemented with Ruby, which resulted in a very elegant implementation (IMHO).

More photos.

This morning I had need for an in-browser HTML validation tool. I quickly found the Firefox HTML Validator Extension and it's even more than hoped for. It is an awesome tool! If you're doing web development and care about creating standards compliant HTML, you need this tool.

I'll have to fix those 69 warnings that show up on this blog's front page sometime soon.

As I mentioned in Fun with Gnuplot, you can use Gnuplot's epslatex terminal to create really nice vector graphics having fonts that exactly match your LaTeX documents. This post describes the general process I follow to accomplish this.

Read the rest of this entry »

I left Sandia and CDS last month after almost five years of service to take a new position. For two weeks now, I've been serving as Vice President of Development and Implementation for Pay Lynxs, Inc. - a software startup in headquartered in Albuquerque, with an exciting product and business model centered around banking money transfers for international remittance. That is, immigrants electronically sending money to their home countries.

In this role, I'll be concentrating on scalable software development and quality assurance processes to ensure that the company's products get to market correctly and quickly. In addition, I'll be working on system architecture, feature development, and project management. It's a very challenging and exciting opportunity for me.

I'm still riding my bike to work, except for Fridays when Elisa drops me off and picks me up so we can more efficiently execute our weekly go-out-to-eat night. The ride is ~ 23 miles round trip or about twice the distance it was to Sandia and back, but I'm very much enjoying the extra distance, as it gives me time to contemplate the challenges that face me in my new position and much of the route is either on bike paths or passes through beautiful neighborhoods that I normally don't get the chance to see. I'm very happy that Albuquerque has done such an excellent job making the city bicycle accessible.

I've created a few plots with Gnuplot this semester that I'm fairly proud of. Three examples are shown below. The inline thumbnails are screen shots of PDF plots. If you click on the image, you'll be taken to the PDF file in all its vector glory.

The mathpazo (Palatino) LaTeX fonts are shown above, but I've also created PDF versions with txfonts (Times) and the the default LaTeX font (Computer Modern) for comparison.

There are two really great things about these plots:

1. They were created with a completely free / opensource tool chain, and they look quite good.
2. Using Gnuplot's epslatex color terminal allows me to combine vector EPS output with custom LaTeX post-processing so that, for example, the fonts of the plots exactly match those of my LaTeX documents, including all of the fancy math and other special symbols I can imagine.

The ability to create publication-quality plots like this will be a great benefit when I start working on my MS Thesis in earnest next semester. The process of creating these plots is admittedly somewhat arcane (the subject of an upcoming blog post), but this can be automated with a Makefile, and I think the results are worth the effort.

I made another attempt at acquiring source images for my Thesis on Friday.

The images below were taken on top of the UNM bookstore looking out at the new Architecture building, the Frontier restaurant, and Central Avenue.

Before: 2,336 × 3,504 pixel (~ 8.1 MegaPixel) source images arranged in a 3x15 matrix

Summary

The digital panoramic photo mosaic process involves taking multiple overlapping source photographs of a scene from slightly different vantage points and then digitally "stitching" these images together to form a single composite image that appears as if is was taken from a higher resolution and a possibly wider angle camera.

An example of photo mosaic of UNM's Zimmerman Library follows. A 2×11 matrix of source photographs is shown, followed by the processed mosaic:

Before: 2,336 × 3,504 pixel (~ 8.1 MegaPixel) source images arranged in a 2x11 matrix

After: photo mosaic: 16,961 × 5,792 pixels (~ 98 MegaPixels)

This 16,961 × 5,792 pixel image is big!

One way to think about its size would be to print it out at a relatively standard 200 pixels per inch. If you did so, the print would about 7 × 2.4 feet.

Another way to think its size is to look at a small 100%-scale cropped portion of the image like the one shown below:

If you look carefully, you can see this student crossing the plaza in the right hand portion of the full mosaic.

For full-resolution high-quality output, creating one of these composite panoramas is not a trivial computational task. An example like the one shown above can take hours on a modern workstation, while processing extremely large examples like Max Lyon's GigaPixel image can take many days.

I propose an MS Thesis that will demonstrate how the performance of digital panoramic photo mosaic compositing can be improved through parallel computing. The goal will be to take a multi-day real-world serial example and after writing parallel modifications to existing serial codes, accomplish the same task much quicker in parallel (given access to sufficient computational resources).

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My brother Craig Bohnsack was married on September 1st 2007 to Kayla Cichon. Naturally, I took a lot of photos. More than 600 are here.

Here's what they looked like:

This post is to make commenting about broken bone recovery easier, as the old posts, especially Broken Ankle Progress, Broken Ankle Progress (part II), and Broken Ankle Progress (part III) have so many comments, that navigation has become difficult.

So... new comments can be attached to this post, while you can continue to view old comments on those other posts.

Fall 2007 semester classes started for me on Tuesday.

My Grad School Curriculum page has been updated to show:

• I'm taking ECE 547 (Neural Networks) with Thomas Caudell this semester
• I'm taking 3 credits of ECE 599 (MS Thesis) with Greg Heileman this semester
• I'm finishing my thesis next semester (Spring 2008) with three more credits of ECE 599
• I'm hoping to get CS 481 (Operating System Principles) to apply as a credit for my Computational Science and Engineering Certificate Program elective. At least one professor has recommended that this be allowed, so we'll see. If it's not allowed as an elective, I'll try and also take CS 564 - Introduction to Database Management in the Spring 2008 semester, if it's offered.

Important next steps:

• Get my "Program of Studies for Master's Degree" form submitted and approved.
• Get my thesis proposal in a fair state
• Meet with Dr. Heileman regarding the thesis

If everything works out, I'll have my MS is May 2008.

I came across a fantastic writeup this morning called The Little JavaScripter.

Through a wonderful display of Turing Equivalence, it reimplements The Little Schemer, which teaches recursive thinking via Scheme, in Javascript.

Really, really cool. I'm increasingly interested in languages and the transformations through which they can be made to solve equivalent problems. There's an awful lot down this rabbit hole!