Ethan is four weeks old

Little Ethan is four weeks old today. This has probably been one of the most challenging times for Becky and me, dealing with very little sleep and not knowing what we’re doing half the time. But by the grace of God, we've made it this far.

Here are some photos from the past few weeks. If you're in a hurry, make sure you at least see this one.

Daddy time	I'm not sure what to do with this guy
What are you lookin' at?	Go Bisons!
Proud father	Doing push-ups together
Playtime on the sports rug	Proud mother
Chillin' in the swing	Comparing feet
Finally, some space to stretch out!	Fear of the Bath
Looking cool in his Nike outfit	It's tough being a baby
Bean burrito	Drying off
Dad, you better watch out...	You were warned!

Daddy’s Prayer for Ethan

Lord, thank you for this little boy that you have blessed us with. Please give me the strength and wisdom to raise him to be wild at heart, compassionate, courageous, strong, and passionate about you. Help me to be patient when I’m at my whit’s end and can’t get him to sleep, and help me to enjoy these times because they will soon be gone. Thank you for each day that you give us, no matter how few or many we may enjoy on this earth. Amen.

Proposal: HTML 5

Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are pushing the W3C to recognize their proposal for HTML 5, the first large upgrade to HTML since 1999. You can read more about it here.

The HTML 5 specification includes some really cool stuff: Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0. Web Applications 1.0 adds new elements to HTML and DOM to provide a richer environment in which to build on-line applications. For example, Web Apps 1.0 will allow you to present a context menu when the user right-clicks on an element, and you can draw a line connecting two points on the browser screen. Web Forms 2.0 (not to be confused with XForms) adds some powerful features to make controlling and processing user input from web forms a little easier. For example, you can more easily specify what types of characters are acceptable in a textbox or indicate that the form values are to be submitted as an XML document.

HTML 5 is designed to be backwards compatible, so the billions of pages which have been written with previous versions of HTML will still display correctly in newer browsers supporting HTML 5. This is a very important and positive development from a preservation standpoint, and it will likely help HTML 5 be adopted more readily by the development community.

Of course the most important player to get onboard is Microsoft who still controls around 75% of the browser market. Microsoft is busy right now promoting XAML, so it may not be in there best interest to devote many resources to HTML 5.

Preserving the entertainment industry

Now that movies are increasingly produced without film, it should be easier to save them for the long term, right? Here’s an excerpt from David Cohen’s Variety article:

In what is being called the first commercial effort to address the movie industry's looming digital preservation headaches, Elektrofilm Digital Studios and Sun Microsystems will introduce a long-term archiving system built specifically for the entertainment industry.
...
Though digital filmmaking promised an end to concerns about fading dyes and unstable film stocks, it has actually exacerbated problems with movie archiving and preservation.
...
The Motion Picture Academy's Science & Technology council saw enough danger to warn the studios that some movies could be lost, especially "born digital" films such as "300" and "Miami Vice."

Well, I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over the loss of either of those two movies, but it is exciting to see pro-active archiving initiatives from organizations that are not backed with tax payer money.

Update 4/22/07:

David Cohen has written another article about preserving film footage which further elaborates on some of the problems:

More than one tech expert, including the Academy's Sci-Tech Council director Andy Maltz, told Variety they had found archival tapes unreadable just 18 months after they were made.

Feiner, the former longtime prexy of Pacific Title, says when he worked on studio feature films he found missing frames or corrupted data on 40% of the data tapes that came in from digital intermediate houses.

The tapes were only nine months old.

Down with the pink hotel!

The ugliest building in the Riverview business district was demolished (at least partly) today. Although I stood looking from across the water in my neighborhood (Colonial Place), I thought I heard cheering from the group of people who had gathered to watch the demolition. RIP Lafayette Motor Hotel.




Update 4/17/06:

Another Colonial Place resident took some great photos of the demolition and there's an article about it on hamptonroads.com.

Bad news from Blacksburg

I stayed home today to help Becky a little with Ethan, and after returning from the hotel demolition, I returned home to discover there had been a shooting at Virginia Tech this morning. From what we can tell, it is the single largest school shooting in American history, reviling the Colombine massacre, with close to 30 students killed. This is the second time a gunman has been loose on their campus this year.

In the past few years at ODU, we’ve had a basketball player shot close to where I work out (he was ok) and a female student who was murdered in a mall parking lot by her ex-boyfriend. But nothing as crazy as a gunman going around campus killing kids. Now the media frenzy begins of assigning blame... Was it the administration's fault? Bullies? Parents? Law makers? Global warming? Everything will be rehashed endlessly while those involved try to make peace with it and move on. blah.

I pray God will ease the suffering of those involved.

A friend recently reminded me of what Jesus once said to his disciples:

"I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." - John 16:33

Update 4/19/07

Now idiots all over the country, including one at ODU, are showing how original they can be. I got this email last night:

April 18, 2007

Dear Members of the Old Dominion University Community,

We just received a telephone threat which we are taking seriously. The caller said “There is going to be a shooting at ODU....”

We have increased security on campus and our police are working with the Norfolk City Police to insure safety and security on campus.

Please exercise caution and report any unusual activity to the campus police at 683-4000.

Students who choose not to attend class tonight will be accommodated.


Sincerely yours,

Roseann Runte
President

Tax time again

It’s tax time, and you probably hate the process as much as me. I spent around 20 hours using TurboTax, and I still have no idea if I got it right. Even though our income is nearly the same in 2005 and 2006, I owed the feds more than $1K in 2005, and this year they owe me over $1K! It’s a shame that someone with (almost) a Ph.D. can’t figure them out.

Some other tax tidbits that drive home just how ludicrous our tax system really is:

• If you were to use some tax-savings strategies, you could be in danger of patent infringement.


• According to a new study, loop-holes in California's tax code leave the poorest fifth of California households (average income of $11,100) paying 11.7% of their income on state and local taxes and the highest earning 1% of earners paying 7.1%.


• Even though California created a system to simplify how many citizens paid their income taxes in 2005, the system has been stifled by companies that could lose money if consumers quit using their parasitic tax preparation services.


• And you thought you had a pretty good personal relationship with your tax preparer? Well, he’d like you to know that he doesn’t want to hear about your personal matters, including what your kids are up to.

"Taxation with representation ain't so hot either."
-Gerald Barzan

Honda's Tron commercial

I’m a huge Tron fan, and apparently someone from Honda’s advertising agency is too.

Google Trends

I’ve been allowing Google to log my search history for almost a year, and now there’s enough data to give a good picture of my personal googling habits. If you’ve never taken a look at a history of your Web searches before, you should try it. I personally find it fascinating.

If you’re using Google’s personalized search, you can view your data from the Trends link on the Search History page. How do you know if you have enabled personalized search? If you see a Sign Out link (along with several others) at the top right of your web page when you visit www.google.com, you have enabled personalized search, and all your search history is available. See Personalizing your Google homepage for more information.

Let’s start with my top queries, sites, and links:


Five of the top 10 queries are to conferences. I often have to check on deadlines, author guidelines, etc., so it’s no surprise to see them listed. I can never remember the cryptic tar commands or commands for R, so they’re also up there. Why do I search for “list” often? I worked on an experiment for the past several months where I was querying Google and their API everyday for multiple search terms (including list), and "list" just happened to be one of the terms I manually checked quite a lot.

It’s no surprise I clink on Wikipedia search results the most. They’re often returned in the top 10 search results, and I’m a fan. The tolstoy website houses R documentation. It’s interesting to note the almost one-to-one mapping of the top clicks with the top queries.

Moving on to monthly search activity, you can see I average around 10 searches a day:


Daily activity shows I’m not much for searching on weekends:


And hourly activity shows I’m typically not on the computer late at night... I’m more of a morning person.


Althogh the aggregated data is not made available via an API, Google does provide an RSS feed of your personal search history.

Check out this article which has more details about using personalized search.

Seeking high-quality Ph.D. students

If you live in Virginia and have a subscription to Time, US News, Newsweek, or Sports Illustrated, you may have seen this full-page advertisement for Old Dominion University (right) in this week’s issue (only subscribers receive regional ads). The guy featured in the ad is my advisor, Michael Nelson.

If you are looking to get your Ph.D. in computer science and want to work on some really interesting problems, I highly recommend Michael as an advisor. He’s got lots of good ideas and plenty of funding, and he will guide you to becoming an independent researcher. Plus you can live at the beach!

Here’s a little “advertisement” we’ve worked up to send prospective Ph.D. students:

Michael Nelson is seeking high-quality Ph.D. students for digital library and digital preservation research in the computer science department at Old Dominion University. Dr. Nelson has a well-funded research program focusing on object-repository interaction and alternative models of digital preservation. He has been PI or Co-PI on 9 grants (~$2.5M) from the NSF, NASA, Library of Congress and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. His most recent grant is a 5 year NSF CAREER award for "self-preserving digital objects".

More information about research projects, funding, publications and courses can be found at his website.

Dr. Nelson currently has 3 Ph.D. students, all of whom publish and travel on a regular basis. They also collaborate with colleagues at prestigious institutions such as LANL, Internet Archive and Cornell University. Dr. Nelson and his students welcome questions about joining their research group.

Ethan's first week

Those of you that have kids know how crazy the first week is with a newborn-- you feel a huge range of emotions, ups and downs. Although I'm rather tired and Becky even more so, Ethan has been a delight to his parents and grandparents. We just can't get enough of him.

I've had numerous requests for more photos, so here they are:

Tummy time	Mommy and the sleeping Bean
Baby on blue	Yes, I'm cute
Asleep in Dadd'y arms	Soon to be size 13
Grandparents Andy and Genia see Ethan for the first time	Holding Dad's finger
Grandparents Debbie and Bill see Ethan for the first time	Wow, this kid's heavy!
Aunt Sara sees Ethan for the first time

Ethan is here!

Little Ethan (the Bean) decided to come a little early. On Friday night Becky and I had ordered some pizza and were watching Rocky Balboa. She got through a few pieces before the contractions got so strong that she couldn’t eat any more. After timing them for hours, we decided they weren’t going away, so we hopped in the car and sped to the hospital.

At 5:11 am Saturday morning, Ethan made his appearance. He was 21 inches, 8 lbs and 7 ounces and the cutest little guy I have ever seen. Becky did fantastic.

After a couple of long nights at the hospital, they finally let us go home. Tonight is our first time to be a family at home. The eager grandparents (first grandchild on both sides) will be flying in tomorrow and Tuesday. We’re very grateful to God for our little blessing and thankful to all our friends and family for their support.

You might want to keep up with this kid... I suspect he’ll be doing some great things in this world.

GUI programming in the fall

Yesterday I gave a Tech Lunch talk entitled Introduction to .NET to a pretty full room of grad students. My slides are available here if you’re interested. I had to do a little brushing up before the presentation… I haven’t used Visual Studio in a few years, but I really liked the improvements made in VS .NET 2005.

Preparing for this talk got me to thinking about what I’ll be teaching this fall in my GUI Programming at Harding Univ. When I taught this class in the past, I would first have my students start off writing some fairly simple programs using the Win32 API. After struggling with the API for several weeks, we’d then move on to C# and VB.NET at which point most students thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

But a lot has changed over the past 4 years: a new OS (Vista), new tools (VS .NET 2005 and XAML), and new APIs (.NET Framework 3.0 and WPF). I’m a bit behind the learning curve having not even seen Vista yet. Fortunately, I found a really good article about Vista by Peter Bright which helped me put the changes into perspective.

Rather than teach the Win32 API again, this time I think I’ll just show my students what it used to be like (150 lines of C code for a Hello World application) and then move directly into .NET programming. Although they may not truly appreciate all that the .NET Framework is doing for them, I don’t think spending time learning a deprecated API is going to be of much value. The text we’ll be using is Programming Microsoft Windows Forms by Charles Petzold.

Perhaps I’ll also mix in some GUI development using Java, just so they can see what it's like on other platforms (and appreciate why more developers don’t use Java for GUI development ). Additionally I want to focus more on the theory behind GUIs. I found an excellent book that I’m going to use called GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers by Jeff Johnson.

Of course I’m open to other suggestions anyone may have.

Jury duty

It took 5 hours of questioning, moving back and forth from one room to another, and sitting for long periods of time with nothing to do before the court finally decided they didn’t need me on the jury. This was my last chance of getting picked, and I struck out again. I think the reason they let me go was because I made the court aware of Becky’s impending due date, and I guess it’s a good thing I got dismissed… otherwise I would have been deciding the fate of a murder suspect for the next couple of days while Becky nervously wondered if I would make it to the delivery room on time if Ethan came early. Still, I would have really liked to have experienced being a juror. Maybe it’s because L.A. Law was my favorite show in my teens, or maybe it’s because I am all about civic duty. Anyway, at least I got $30 for my time.

You'll see why 2008 won't be like "1984"

If you’re a fan of Apple’s 1984 commercial, you’ll want to see this. Obama says he has nothing to do with the skillfully developed Clinton video.

Search engine interfaces and their APIs - How synchronized are they?

A few months ago I gave a little teaser about some research I was doing comparing the results you receive from the search engine APIs of Google, Yahoo, and MSN with the results that you see when you use their web user interface (WUI). The WUI is a fancy term for the little search box that you enter your queries into.

Most API users think that if they search for “march madness”, for example, that the returned results will be equivalent to what they would see if they searched for “march madness” using the WUI. In practice, this rarely occurs.

This leads us to ask, how different are the search engine API results from the WUI results? Are the APIs serving off of older indexes? Smaller indexes? Which search engine offers the most synchronized interfaces?

I will be presenting the answer to these questions at this year’s ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) this June in a paper entitled Agreeing to Disagree: Search Engines and their Public Interfaces. I’ll also be presenting a summary of my findings as a poster at the World Wide Web conference in May. Detailed findings can be found here. If you attend either of these conferences, please come by and introduce yourself... I’d be happy to discuss my findings with you.

By the way, if you haven't heard already, Google's SOAP web search API has been "depricated."

Copilot

This weekend I spent some time celebrating a friend’s birthday (a lot of fun), seeing 300 (blah), praising God (great lesson, Mike), and trouble-shooting Mom and Dad’s PC. It’s the last event I want to talk more about.

If you have family like me who live in a different town and don’t know the difference between a browser and a cursor, you have probably spent hours and hours trying to talk them through updating their anti-virus software or attaching a file to an email. It can be an exercise in frustration for both parties.

I first tried helping my parents by running Windows XP’s Remote Assistance. It took a while to walk Dad through the process, but eventually we got it figured out. But just when I was about to connect, we discovered that my parent’s computer wouldn’t allow me access… probably because of an ISP firewall setting. Argh.

So next I tried Copilot from Fog Creek. This is a program which was written by a bunch of college interns a few summers ago (their experience was turned into a movie called Ardvark’d).

Anyway, Copilot allows you to connect to the remote computer you are helping via their own servers. This allows you to skirt many firewall issues like the one that made Remote Assistance impossible. A more technical description of how it works can be found here.

Copilot crashed on my Dad at first, but reading through their discussion list, it was due to a proxy setting in my Dad’s browser (still not a good excuse though). Finally we were able to connect, and it hasn’t caused me any problems since.

I only have a few complaints. The response time is a little slow, and every time my parent’s screensaver kicks on, I get disconnected. Also if I have to reboot their computer, I need them to login and re-start the Copilot program. Besides these, at $5 a day, Copilot is a pretty nifty little program.

TechLunches at ODU

On Wednesday we held the first TechLunch at ODU. Brandon Hill (another Ph.D. student) and I organized the lunches as a way for CS graduate students to meet each other and share their research or other expertise with the group. We had 20 students show up for Brandon’s talk on source control software. After taking a vote, it looks like I’ll be presenting an introduction to .NET at the next TechLunch. (That is, if Ethan doesn't come early.)

I’ve wanted to get this started for years, but I was finally motivated to do so when interviewing department chairs a few weeks ago who noted that these types of talks are really useful for cultivating good Ph.D. programs.

If you are in the area and interested in sitting in on the talks, please feel free to join us. I’ve created a wiki at http://bluwiki.com/go/TechLunch which lists the upcoming talks.

Petition for OA in US

I was the 1126th individual to sign the Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States. If you think the US government should pass the "Federal Research Public Access Act, which calls for open public access to federally funded research findings within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal," then I recommend you sign the petition as well.

March Madness

I just filled out my first NCAA Tournament bracket. I joined the Knights Pool on FaceBook-- apparently I could win $25K just for getting lucky. I’ve got ODU winning their first game against Butler (hey, I gotta show my Monarch spirit...), but I don’t think they’ll get any farther than that. But wouldn’t it be awesome though if they could follow in George Mason’s footsteps?

Final Four: UCLA vs. Oregon and UNV vs. Ohio State
Championship: UCLA 86, UNC 83

If you are laughing out loud, just remember this is my first bracket...

Update 3/15/07:

Well, ODU played a good first half and went into the locker room ahead by one. Unfortunately, they couldn't keep up in the second half and lost 57-46. Maybe the women can do better on Sat.