See you at the 2010 Michigan Agile and Beyond Conference

I’ll be heading down to Dearborn on Saturday for the 2010 Michigan Agile and Beyond Conference with some coworkers from TechSmith. If you didn’t know about the conference before, or you weren’t planning on going, now’s your last chance to change your mind.

Among the speakers will be Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, who I’ve been lucky enough to meet and talk with when they visited TechSmith.

Are you going?

Incorporating Lecture Capture in Graduate School

This semester I’m taking two courses at MSU on my way to a Masters in Computer Science. As an aid to my studying, I’ve taken up watching videos of other schools lectures online, specifically lectures from the authors of our textbooks.

For my CSE 891 course: Language and Interaction, a course that goes more in-depth on specific aspects of Natural Language Processing, I’ve found lectures online from James Martin at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Martin co-authored Speech and Language Processing with Dan Jurafsky from Stanford.

1. CSCI 5832 Lecture 3 (2010-01-19)
2. CSCI 5832 Lecture 4 (2010-01-21)
3. CSCI 5832 Lecture 5 (2010-01-26)
4. CSCI 5832 Lecture 6 (2010-01-28)
5. CSCI 5832 Lecture 7 (2010-02-02)
6. CSCI 5832 Lecture 8 (2010-02-04)
7. CSCI 5832 Lecture 9 (2010-02-09)
8. CSCI 5832 Lecture 10 (2010-02-16)
9. CSCI 5832 Lecture 11 (2010-02-18)
10. CSCI 5832 Lecture 12 (2010-02-23)
11. CSCI 5832 Lecture 13 (2010-02-25)
12. CSCI 5832 Lecture 14 (2010-03-02)
13. CSCI 5832 Lecture 15 (2010-03-04)
14. More lectures can be seen at the RSS feed for the course

For my CSE 820 course: Advanced Computer Architecture, I’ve found lectures online from David Patterson at University of California at Berkeley. Patterson co-authored Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Appraoch with John L. Hennessy, who is currently the President of Stanford University.

• Berkeley’s archive of their CS 252 from Spring 2006

Reflections

Monday, 1/18/2010

I attended the Michigan State University Dr. MLK Jr. Community Dinner and heard from Trustees Ferguson and Owen and President Simon. I also learned more about the new exhibit at the MSU Museum with children letters to Rosa Parks and President Nelson Mandela.

Here is a video of President Barack Obama introducing the exhibit:

I plan to take a trip down to the museum soon. The exhibit will run until December 2010.

Tuesday, 1/19/2010

For lunch I met with @joshpremuda at the Travelers Club International Restaurant and Tuba Museum in Okemos. Josh is working on some side projects and we got to talking about starting a tech group in the Lansing area.

Wednesday, 1/20/2010

I went to my first Detroit Java User Group meeting and saw Mac Liaw give a presentation on Scala. The conversation was great and there were many in-depth questions asked. I was happy that the presentation wasn’t too beginner focused. The questions led the discussion for most of the time.

Automating Mundane Tasks

A couple days ago I wanted to move all of my work email out of the inbox and into an archive folder, similar to how I use Gmail but I ran in to a problem. I had over 3,000 emails in my inbox and Outlook Web Access only allowed me to move up to 100 emails at a time.

The process to move emails is as follows:

1. Click the check box in the table header that checks all of the emails.
2. Click the ‘Move’ button
3. Choose the folder to move it to
4. Click the ‘Move’ button to commit the move

Who wants to sit around clicking the same buttons for 20 minutes just to move messages. It sure would be nice if Outlook Web Access had the same feature as Gmail:

So instead of doing the same old, mundane, click-wait, click-wait task, I downloaded and installed Firefox and the Selenium IDE plugin.

Selenium IDE is a free plugin that allows you to record your use of a web page and play it back. I’ve been using it now for some time in creating automated tests of a website I’m working on.

I played the test back and it worked beautifully. I then copied the test steps and pasted them countless times within the same test. Next I hit ‘play’ and was able to watch a recorded lecture while all of my mails were moved over to the archive folder.

Problem solved. All emails were moved in a couple minutes time.

I will be on the lookout for more ways that Selenium IDE can save me time.

Increasing Build Performance The Easy Way

Yesterday I just got my new computer set up. I had been using an old HP Pavilion dv1000 since about mid-summer 2009 until I couldn’t bare with the slow speed any longer.

This new computer is everything I have been looking for and more. I went and pulled out all the stops, yet I don’t follow computer hardware that much (I like the software side a little more).

To determine what hardware setup I should purchase, I went back to the Chromium Build Instructions for Windows. There is a section within the page that talks about speeding up the build.

Accelerating the build

In decreasing order of speedup:

1. Use a true multicore processor; ie. an Intel Core Duo or later; not a Pentium 4 HT.
2. Use a x64 OS otherwise incremental linking is disabled.
3. Have 8 gigs of RAM.
4. Use VS2008
5. Disable your anti-virus software for .ilk, .pdb, .cc, .h files and only check for viruses on modify. Disable scanning the directory where your sources reside.
6. Store and build the Chromium code on a second hard drive. It won’t really speed up the build but at least your computer will stay responsive when you do gclient sync or a build.
7. Defragment your hard drive regularly.

Using the above information, I purchased the following setup from Ascendtech:

• Intel i7 920 with 8 GB of RAM
• Two hard drives, 750 GB and 160 GB
• Two 24 inch ViewSonic VX2433wm displays
• Two Articulating Wall Mounts by VideoSecu for the displays

Here’s a picture of the performance tab of Task Manager