The Patron Saint of the Internets

There is none. We need to find one.

St. Gabriel

In the Catholic belief, we have Patron Saints for most anything: AIDS care-givers (St. Aloysius Gonzaga), accountants (St. Matthew), firefighters (St. Florian), police officers (St. Michael the Archangel), and so on (Source: www.catholic.org). Yet, although we deal and work everyday on and with the internet, it has no Patron Saint to protect it. We rely on the internet to bring us close together: our friends and families in our home country while we study abroad, our loved ones on duty overseas, our business partners, and so on. The internet enabled us to obtain information about our world like never before! The closest saint I could find was of information workers: St. Gabriel the Archangel.

Most of the images I can find on St. Gabriel portrayed him as this handsome, beautiful, long haired angel. Hence, my rendering of St. Gabriel above, as a messenger on bike (I know, I drew a lousy bike). He is delivering God's messages in that awesome satchel of his; padded Blessed Heavenly Leather that could withstand the forces of the elements, safely protecting the message inside. He is faster and better than the internet itself. He has been God's messenger since the very beginning, and I can't imagine the amount of information he has to go through and manage through the years. I think it would be appropriate if St. Gabriel the Archangel be appointed as the Patron Saint of the INTERNETS!

Tale of Two Laptops

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

My ThinkPad and a loaned MacBook just kicked the bucket. The two laptops died only a few weeks apart. The motherboard was fried on one, the HDD was fried on the other (hmm, fried...). Even the iPad is starting to behave weird; some apps were experiencing sluggishness - ugh! This predicament is so blah, I wish Darth Vader would Force Grip it.

In any case, I might need to get a new laptop soon - an expense I'm not looking forward to.

Research/Study
It's back to reading the Basics of Set Theory! A new robot shall rise in the near future!

Facebook Integration, Ho!

A view clear sky and beautiful cloud formations from my seat on my flight to PDX from LAX, after a trip from Jakarta

So, I finally set up a blog. I'm so happy I finally get to use my www.purapurasibuk.com domain! In case you're wondering: "pura pura sibuk" is Indonesian for "pretending (pura pura) to be busy (sibuk)." Eventually, it'll turn into something else other than this blog, but for now the blog will do.

I did run into a couple of snags setting up my blog subscription into Facebook. When I googled (yes, it's officially an English verb: "googled") for a how-to of it, the top results tell something like this: "Under Notes... bla bla ... Import a Blog link .. bla bla" - don't follow this. These are based on 2009 Facebook interface, and if you're a Facebook user, you know how much different it is now for better or worse. Instead of simply googling for "blogger post to facebook" (I'm using Blogger, hence...), search for something in the lines of: "blogger post to facebook 2011" (without quotes). This will give you results for help with the latest version of Facebook. The solution I used was from connectwww.com.

Study/Research
Ok, Brzozowski's Derivatives of Regular Expression is one tough paper for me. While I understand the general idea of its use, I'm yet to understand his formalization, and moreover how to precisely articulate the idea. His formalization used a heavy dose of advanced set theory - a subject I'm not familiar with. I will need to consult with some 'experts' soon.

Headlines
Good lord, the new Nokia Lumia 800 is pretty and seems very capable. I would be 100% for it if it's using Google Maps instead of Nokia Maps. To be fair, I have not used Nokia Maps - but since I've been using Android for a while, I'm just more comfortable with Google Maps (although that Google Navigation voice needs to be improved - GladOS voice?). Now, Richard Kerris and Peter Skillman, both formerly worked at HP on WebOS as VP of Worldwide Developer Relations and Designer, respectively have moved to their new positions at Nokia. Skillman worked on the designs of the new Nokia Windows Phone ... er, phones N9/Lumia 800, and the work and attention they put in the design really shows. Here's a great interview with Skillman by Engadget. Finally, a real challenger to Apple's designs. I hope this will give Windows Phone 7 a fighting chance.

First Post: October 2011

It's a beautiful fall morning here, in Portland, OR.

A New Job
Finally, I have clearance from HR to work on campus. Huzzah! Will be working for the Academic Research and Computing department, effective immediately, on top of my TA duties this term. I think it's going to be a very exciting learning experience.

Study/Research
I have a lot of research and studying to do (which is good). Study: review calculus, and get comfortable with Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). The ODE lectures by Prof. Arthur Mattuck from MIT's OpenCourseware is phenomenal. As far as research goes: I'm reading the Derivatives of Regular Expressions by Janusz A. Brzozowski (1964). (Ancient paper, sure. But the idea is still used today.) Interesting stuff! He proposed the use of Regular Expressions to create state-machines by generalization of the original concept of Regular Expressions. I'll post more once I understand it better.

Headlines
We who dwell in the computing technology field have lost some of our best this month.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs: 1955 - 2011. Co-founder and ex-CEO of Apple Inc. A man with brilliant vision and insights on creating technology products that appeals to his customers: beautifully designed, and intuitive. iPhone and iPad were breakthroughs that set the standards in the touch-input smartphones and tablets market, respectively. Arguably, it was his lead that overturned Apple in just a decade from being the underdog of the industry to the most valuable company in the world in 2011. He passed away on October 5, 2011

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie: 1941 - 2011. The father of the C programming language, and one of the leading persons on the development of UNIX. It's hard to overstate his influence in our world - C is so ubiquitous, we won't be in our current state of computer technology today without it. He passed away on October 12, 2011.

John McCarthy: 1927 - 2011. The father of the Lisp programming language. He is well-known for coining the term 'Artificial Intelligence' and one of the pioneers in Artificial Intelligence. The Lisp programming language is still one of the popular languages used to program AI, due to its extensibility (e.g. generating new functions on-the-fly) and support for recursion. He passed away on October 24, 2011.

My deepest respect and gratitude to those men who had literally changed the world. I hope these great people would inspire you to change the world, as they had inspired me.