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.