Buyog Blog

Not so smart

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:50:00 +0000

So a while ago I had to rent a car to drive to work, because our van was in the shop (leaky thermostat and intake gasket, thanks for asking). Nice little Hyundai subcompact with XM radio, it was good enough for one day and cheaper than taking the day off. But when Sweetheart and I returned it that night, I accidentally left my smartphone on the console when I parked it and turned in the keys! Within 5 minutes I realized my mistake and we turned around to get it, but by then the guy they pay minimum wage to move cars around for them had re-parked it, and the phone was mysteriously nowhere to be found. I asked at the front desk and they said that nothing had been found and turned in to their lost and found, but hey we're closing now and would I mind coming in tomorrow morning thankyouverymuch? So I went away fuming, kicking myself for my absentmindedness, knowing full well that there was absolutely no way I could prove that I had, in fact, left my phone in the car, and that somebody had decided to take the opportunity to supplement his income. I did go back in on Saturday morning, but as I had expected, there wasn't anything that had been turned in.

Before you ask: yes, I even tried one of the "my phone has been stolen" apps that you're supposed to be able to remotely install, which will turn on the GPS and email you its location, but I never got an email, so I'm willing to bet the phone got put into airplane mode or otherwise disconnected from the network pretty soon after it fell out of my hands, so the app never got installed.

The thing about this that really frustrates me is that a little more operational security would have prevented a lot of potential damage to my privacy. I didn't have a passcode on my phone, because I foolishly believed that I would always have it in my possession and therefore didn't need the slowdown such a passcode would force upon me. I also didn't have any kind of "find my phone" app already installed and ready to activate, nor did I subscribe to Verizon's service that lets you remote-wipe a phone that has fallen into the wrong hands. All I could do was change my passwords on the accounts that were tied to the phone, and suspend it from my wireless carrier so that it couldn't do any further communication with a network. Better than nothing, but that still leaves whatever data already on the device wide open to anyone who cares to mine it (which may be no one, if all that matters is the hardware).

My replacement phone ordered from eBay should be here tomorrow, and thanks to Google's cloud technology, I should be able to recover very nearly everything that was on the old phone, so that's some small comfort. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that if we're going to trust so much of our personal data to any kind of electronic device, we should take care enough to protect it.

Lesson learned.

Is this thing on?

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:49:00 +0000

I've been a negligent blogger... too busy living life, I guess you could say.

I'm considering retiring this blog; mostly everything I used to put here is now being shared through other means (Twitter and Facebook), and the few longer-form entries I've done could just as easily fall under my geeky / coding blog (which has also been somewhat dormant this Winter). That said, I've got big plans for my site. Stay tuned...

Intervals

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:21:00 +0000

I try to power walk / run during lunch at least a few days a week. Some days fast, some days slow(er), and some (okay, most) days I fall somewhere in the middle, although it's never a slow mosey like when I'm walking with my sweetheart. Usually, I have my Zen Stone on to help me keep the pace, and today I wanted to share one of my current favorite exercise albums: Blood on the Asphalt. Produced and released under the Overclocked Remix umbrella, BotA contains remixes of all the main themes from one of the best video game soundtracks to come out back when I was an arcade regular: Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Each character had a theme that perfectly fit their personality, stage, and nationality, complete with really catchy hooks that would leave you humming the tunes days later. Here's the bit I like to run to most often, one of the fastest stretches of the overall album:

(warmup) Dhalsim
(fast) Guile
(medium) Zangief
(fast) Fei Long
(mellow) Cammy
(fast) Ken
(REALLY fast) Ryu

Anyway, this isn't just a post about how much I love the album, or how perfect it is for doing interval power-walking. What I really wanted to share was my humble little add-on to the album, a little something I whipped up a while back to make this awesome album just a little bit more so:

Blood on the Asphalt: cutscene add-on

In the original game, there was a little cutscene between matches, where a jet plane would fly, Indiana Jones-style, to the country of your next opponent, while the announcer would call it out: "China!", "USSR!" and so on. This add-on pack adds those little interludes to the album's sonic storyline, taking you back to those glory days of yesteryear when you could perform a flawless bajillion-hit combo against all takers. To use it, just unzip the archive into the same folder as the album itself, and your player should insert them into the right places in the playlist. Easy-peasy.

Enjoy, and let me know in the comments about your favorite exercise music. I'm always open to suggestions.

Slaying the Beast

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 02:14:00 +0000

(cross-posted from my code blog)

So tell me if this sounds familiar:

goal: build up my online portfolio.
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Yeah, not so much. Instead, the past 6 months of my life have been swallowed up by a ravenous beast known as "graduate school," that has grown more and more aggressive in the past 3 or 4 weeks. I dealt it a mortal blow when I passed my defense on Monday the 19th, but it limped along for a while, whispering to me of Target Audiences, Proper Whitespacing, and Nested Bookmarks. Today, I think it finally gasped its last breath, but I have to wait until tomorrow for the official word from the ~~graduate reviewer~~coroner.

So, this is me saying "I'm back." I have a half-dozen half-finished posts in draft, way more free time than I'm used to, and a lot to catch up on.

See you soon.

Postcards from my Recent Past

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:16:00 +0000

So. This has certainly been an eventful year, and it's only a little better than half over. I recently returned from a 10-day trip with Sweetheart and the kids to Utah, where we had almost more fun with our extended family than humanly possible for as long as possible. Oh, and I successfully defended my Master's project, capping 6 months of insane sleep schedules and kicking off two weeks of seemingly-endless rewrites. At least, that's how it's felt. Tonight, I uploaded the final(?) version to the BYU thesis/project/dissertation website, and should hear tomorrow if it's golden... or if I have to do more revisions (sigh).

Also, in preparing a blog post over on my code blog, I was reminded of my resolutions from the beginning of the year. I thought it would be ~~not at all depressing~~fun to review those goals, and see how I'm doing:

Spiritual

goal: read the entire Old Testament this year, from start to finish
how I'll do it: make time to read daily

This is one where I'm doing horribly. We read scripture together as a family at least 4 or 5 nights a week, but it's been a while since I've had a daily personal habit. Maybe that's something I should be doing with my commute time... (ya think?!?)

Academic

goal: finish my MA project
how I'll do it: get back on my roadmap (I'll blog about this in more detail soon)

Yay, one I can report complete success! I'm done, and qualified for graduation! Not that I'll take the time off and pay the airfare to actually walk in the graduation ceremony, but I'll have the "soup label" to pin on my wall, and will be able to take the "(pending)" off of my resume's education section. WIN!

Professional
goal: build up my online portfolio
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Any semblance of a regular blogging schedule went out the window as a direct result of my focus on my academic goal. Now that that's out of the way, hopefully I can right the Good Ship Buyog.com.

Physical
goal: lose 15 pounds, and then maintain the loss
how I'll do it:
change my diet (less junk food!)
workout at least 3 times per week
sleep at least 6 hrs every night (this is a toughie for me)

I still haven't lost that weight, but that's probably in large part due to my general lack of sleep and steady diet of refined sugars and Mountain Dew. Trying to wean myself from that little caffeine IV drip is going to be a bit of a challenge, but so far, so good. Plus, I'm exercising a couple of times a week. Sleep, I'm still working on. Speaking of which...

[Lost posts] Recent family outings

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Author's note: This post has been sitting in my queue, half-finished, for the past 8 months. It's a story worth telling, and seems especially fitting given the long summer weekend here in the U.S... so I'm making it public now, leaving the narrative more or less in the form I originally drafted. Enjoy, and happy 4th of July!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The last two weekends have both been crazy/busy (crizzy?) for our family. Last weekend, as an alternative to Princess's middle school dance, we decided to go camping in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia. Sweetheart and the kids picked me up a little early from work Friday afternoon, and we slogged through Beltway/I-66 traffic (soooo glad we chose to live where we do, so I don't have to contend with that kind of traffic on a regular basis!) We finally punched through the gridlock to the calm, quiet roads of rural Virginia, and climbed the switchbacks to Skyline Drive, on the backbone of the Blue Ridge mountains. Up and over we went, to our final destination: Luray.

Sweetheart had reserved us a place at the Jellystone Park campground, which (as the name implies) is Yogi Bear-themed. As enthusiastic watchers of the old cartoons on Boomerang, our kids thought this was just about the coolest thing ever.

We pitched our tent and fired up the propane stove, and had a great dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches, applesauce, and chocolate milk. We opted not to make a campfire, so the mandatory s'mores dessert (All-Star's favorite part, since we don't usually have marshmallows) was assembled over the propane burners. The kids weren't too sure about this at first, but warmed (sorry) pretty quickly to the idea.

To be continued...

Catching up

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:16:00 +0000

So it's been a while since I've posted anything very news-y about my family, and felt like it was overdue (my sister thinks so too, and has told me as much in no uncertain terms!) So, let's see what's been happening...

In February...

Princess had her "New Beginnings" event at church; it's a preview for the girls of the transition they make from the children's Primary Sunday School to the Young Women's program. Each of the moms got to present a rose and a letter to their daughters, extolling their virtues. Pretty neat.
In March...

All-Star finally decided he wanted to learn to ride his bike without training wheels—and within an hour he was off and going, and has never looked back since. If it's sunny and he isn't busy on the computer or with his nose in a book (he's recently discovered the Harry Potter books, and is plowing through them), there's a pretty good chance he's out in the cul-de-sac on his bike.

Princess has been working hard this year as part of her school's robotics club, which culminated in a competition in Waldorf one fine spring Saturday. She and her team did very well, but came in just shy of the cutoff score for state qualifications. Oh well, better luck next year!
In April...

All-Star is doing little league again this year. Moving up from tee-ball, this year he's on a machine-pitch team, the Rock Hounds. Games started last Saturday, and will be ongoing for the next few months. I'm glad the weather has turned the corner, and most evenings are more sunny than cold & breezy!
Coming up...

The rest of the month is looking pretty busy too. Next weekend, Sweetheart and her mother are driving up to Pittsburgh for a women's retreat, and the kids and I will get to hang out here. Princess is in the school play—they're doing Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and she's in the ensemble as a fork (or possibly a spoon; I'm not she they've decided yet). Rehearsals have been nearly daily for the past few weeks, and will run every afternoon this week and all day on Saturday (the show goes up next week). Of course I'll post pics when we get closer to the show.

Coming out of Hibernation

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:09:00 +0000

Yesterday was our first bonafide "nice day" in a while, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go jogging during my lunch break. I ran a pretty typical stretch from last fall, a quick 2.2-mile out-and-back that takes me about 30 minutes to do, and I did I noticed something: I've slid backwards. This is pretty typical for most athletes, I'm told: the winter conspires to keep us inside and make us fat, no matter how much time we spend on the treadmill. (full disclosure: I've not been very good about that, either, but it's not like I haven't worked out for the past few months) But it still made me much more sore than I had expected.

Anyway, due to my continued soreness from yesterday's run, I stayed in today, and instead wrestled with Blogger's new layout engine, trying to re-create as much of the old blog's look and feel as possible. I'm not there yet; the current look and feel is a compromise between the default skin I picked and the old stylesheet, and some things (like the toolbar links and sidebar text) are still ugly and borderline-unusable. But it'll get better.

Plus, I still haven't got my server configured yet to redirect/proxy/whatever the blog content from the new hosted location, so things haven't yet gelled completely. I have every confidence that, at some point later this week, they will.

My Inner Child Just Passed Out For Joy

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:53:00 +0000

The first full trailer for Tron 2.0 just hit the interwebs yesterday, and I'm REALLY excited about seeing it. Have a look:

Well, darn.

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:53:00 +0000

I just started playing with the new "Blogger in Beta" console this morning, which makes editing my blog posts much less painful. That made me happy.

Karma should have told me there'd be another shoe to drop.

And here it is: Blogger is phasing out support for publishing via FTP. That means it's time for me to get serious about finding a replacement, since I do NOT want to move to a hosted account (e.g. buyog.blogspot.com). Sigh.

Blizzard!

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:16:00 +0000

Over Friday and Saturday this week, we had a huge snowstorm that dumped over a foot of snow on top of the 5-6 inches we had leftover from last weekend's storm. Total accumulation is somewhere in the neighborhood of 21-22 inches!

We're very fortunate that we haven't lost power at all through the weekend... we have friends all around in the area that have had to do without.

Here are a few pictures of the "luge" I made in the front driveway for the kids to enjoy, since we won't be driving to a sledding hill anytime soon:

Pinocchio's a Real Boy Now

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:07:00 +0000

After many years in school, I can finally call myself a "real" linguist: I've been published!

Here's the abstract

Snow job

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:53:00 +0000

So for the second time this winter, we're snowed in... it snowed pretty much all day yesterday, and when the final tally was done this morning, I think we came in at about 12 inches (hard to say, since it's pretty powdery and is in drifts). The roads are all still snowpacked, so our church leaders canceled services this morning, and like last time, we had our own service here at home, just the four of us (plus the cat). Allstar chose our hymns, Princess shared a scripture and spiritual thought, and my Sweetheart bore a beautiful testimony. I was getting ready to give my little lesson/talk when Allstar piped up and said he wanted to give a talk too... so he ran and grabbed his scriptures and shared a couple of his favorites. I'm so glad that "my children walk in truth."

Now, while they romp in the neighbor's snowbanks, Sweetheart and I get to go shovel the driveway.

Mutants?

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:28:00 +0000

A pair of two-legged dogs in the Philippines.

Apparently naturally-born, they reportedly get around by hopping like Kangaroos.

Biology is weird!

On matters historic

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:37:00 +0000

Taking a break from posts about my graduate school workload (although there's probably going to be another of those coming up later this week, and one I just posted this morning to my tech blog)

Today I wanted to post a couple of items I've been waiting to blog about for a while now, with a common thread of history. The first is a fascinating "best kept secret" of the Southern Maryland peninsula where we live, shared with me by a friend and co-worker: the Ghost Ships of the Potomac. Most people around here apparently don't even know this exists, but in a secluded corner of the Potomac River, reachable by the determined kayaker, lies an entire fleet of scuttled WWI-era wooden ships. How and why they ended up there is a fascinating story, and a perfect illustration of the astonishing inefficiency (some would say ineptitude) of government bureaucracy.

Here is a public placemarker I put in Google Maps that pinpoints the fleet, and here is a great set of pictures of the fleet from kayak-level. Someday when the kids are a little older, I'd love to rent some kayaks of our own and go check it out.

On another, not-at-all-related note, I love this short story about what an internet forum devoted to time travel might look like (hint: think of how dysfunctional most internet forums are, and add in the complexity of Grandfather paradoxes). Just like the best comedic science fiction, it's funny precisely because it's plausible.

LingMA update, 1-15-2010

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Per my plan for January, today is the day I'd planned to have several EFR segmentation files ready for use in testing the project software. Here's what I've gathered:

Raw data files (sentence alignment files, XCES format)

The segmentation files aren't quite in their final form yet, due to some limitations with XSLT transformations. I'll be posting the gory details of the differences, and writing a JavaScript parser to bridge them, coming later today on the Code section of my site.

The Future

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:40:00 +0000

I love this. It really sums up what I'm trying to do with our kids:

Original here

LingMA update, 1-7-2010

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:26:00 +0000

So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I reset my deadline for the first cut of my project software for December 31. Recall that this software would:

parse input segmentation file, determine lexical items
invoke subject field detection module
parse input termbases for lexical item matches

Item 1 is a simple parsing task. Easy enough to implement, but only doable once I have input files to parse in the proper format. This is a task I neglected to itemize in my initial project plan, which is unfortunate because it will take me some time. I plan to work on that over the next week, so let's say January 15 as a target date by which I'll have at least 2 or 3 input segmentation files.

Item 2 is now unnecessary, as my committee chair suggested I avoid the need to integrate a subject field detector by having the user specify subject field at processing time. One open question in my mind is how we'll represent the subject field: is it simply free-text, which is much less useful, or is it from a specific ontological system? If the latter, what ontology should we use? This seemingly simple subtask suddenly looks complex again.

Item 3 is the simplest subtask in this first incarnation of the software - all we'll need is a good XML/XPath parser to do the lookup. However, as with the segfiles, writing the parser isn't enough if there's no input data to parse. So after producing some sample segfiles with identified target terms, I'll need to hand-create a TBX file with enough entries to be useful. Setting January 22nd for this deadline is likely over-optimistic — even January 29th is probably pushing it, but that's the date I'm going to set.

I just got an email from the BYU Linguistics dept secretary, saying that in order to graduate this semester I'd have to have my final thesis / project writeup delivered to my committee by the first week of February. At this stage in the process, I think it's pretty obvious that I won't be ready to defend by then. Soooooo... Now shooting for Summer term.

Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:29:00 +0000

This time of year, everyone always waxes philosophical about the importance of setting goals. There are others who can do that much, much better than I, so I'll just say that I try to take some time every January to evaluate where I am, versus where I'd like to be. Here's part of what I've come up with:

Spiritual

goal: read the entire Old Testament this year, from start to finish
how I'll do it: make time to read daily

Academic

goal: finish my MA project
how I'll do it: get back on my roadmap (I'll blog about this in more detail soon)

Professional

goal: build up my online portfolio
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Physical

goal: lose 15 pounds, and then maintain the loss
how I'll do it:

change my diet (less junk food!)
workout at least 3 times per week
sleep at least 6 hrs every night (this is a toughie for me)

Relatively modest goals, all told. But it's a start.

Home from the hospital

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:59:00 +0000

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I underwent sinus surgery yesterday, and stayed in the hospital overnight. I'm back home again now, and will be recuperating the rest of the week.

The doctor removed the packing from my nostrils today, but I've still got plastic splints on my septum for a week, and gauze under my nose to catch the drips for the next several days. Overall I feel like I've been hit by a truck - tired and sore. I'll be resting a lot this week, catching up on my reading and "guilty pleasure" movies.

And I'll probably do some MUGEN and Javascript coding too.

Happy holidays, everyone!

LingMA status report for 12-15-2009

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:20:00 +0000

It's been too long since my last school-related update, particularly since I've passed several of my self-imposed deadlines. So here goes:

3. Evaluate available methods of determining subject field of a text

Unfortunately, I haven't really found any good, open-source solutions to this problem, so after conferring with my committee chair, we've changed course slightly: now we'll specify a subject field for the the text prior to processing it.

4. Based on results of milestones 1, 2, and 3, determine overall program architecture
- which programming language will it be written in?

I'm still not 100% sure about this, but am leaning towards either Visual Studio Express (hint: the Express version is free), or Python.

- which SMT package will we use?

Moses is pretty much the only game in town for what we're doing.

- which subject field detection method will we use?

See above; we'll ask the user instead.

- how will we invoke these three modules (subject detection, termbase lookup, and SMT)?
-- due date: Friday, November 20

Yeah... "oops" on that deadline. I'll be invoking Moses from the command-line, rather than trying to integrate its source code into my own project. The exact mechanics of how I do this depend on which programming language I choose.

5. Find source(s) for initial input termbases
-- due date: Friday, November 27

Per my committee chair, BYU has a license to a piece of software called SynchroTerm (good thing, too: a license is $1,800!), to which I may be able to get access. It identifies and extracts source/target translation pairs from bitext input, which I can then plug into a skeleton TBX file. But, since I don't currently have access to SynchroTerm, I'll start with some hand-created entries. The input bitexts will come from a selection of movie subtitle files in the OPUS/OpenSubs corpus, probably English-French since that's a common-enough European language that OpenSubs has a lot of available content, and my committee members all have at least a passing understanding of the language (I don't, but hopefully Google Translate will help me to gist things well enough to proceed).

6. Project software 0.1 alpha
- parse input segmentation file, determine lexical items
- invoke subject field detection module
- parse input termbases for lexical item matches
-- due date: Friday, December 11

Oops, this has slipped a bit. With health, work, and family constraints on my time recently, I haven't kept up quite as well as I would have liked. My new deadline for this will be December 31.

(Assuming, of course, that my surgery on the 28th goes smoothly, and the drugs don't make me completely loopy. So that's my excuse if things slip again! ;))

Thoughts on Twilight: Why Stop at Vampires and Werewolves?

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably heard that last week saw the world premiere of the latest movie in the Twilight Saga, New Moon. My wife, one of maaaaaany 30-something, married "Twi-moms", counts herself a fan of the books, and wanted to share the experience with me. I haven't read the books, and don't really have any intention of doing so, but from her descriptions and the wonders of the interwebs, I feel I've got a pretty good handle on the overall plot.

We rented Twilight a few weeks ago and watched it after the kids were in bed, and despite some issues I had with Bella's general "neediness" (that's a whole 'nother blog post), it was likable enough. So last week, while we had Grandma's free kid-watching services over the Thanksgiving weekend, we went to see New Moon, and I liked it too. But Bella's vampire-werewolf love triangle set up by the film got me thinking.

It's easy to see the Twilight story as not only a teen romance, which it certainly is, but also as something of a cautionary tale to teen girls. In a nutshell, Bella's supernatural boyfriends look human, but have a dangerous hidden nature that makes them want to push her away. For Edward the vampire, it's lust: if he gets too excited, he wants to kill her. For Jacob the werewolf, it's domestic abuse: if he loses his temper, he might hurt her. Saturday Night Live did a hilarious, spot-on parody that used Frankenstein's monsters and mummies; what dangers would they represent? And what other archetypes can we shoehorn into this same dynamic?

Frankenstein monster: the sweet-but-inarticulate guy prone to choking people
mummy: the guy with the full-body, chronic skin condition
zombie: the guy with bad eating habits
ghost: the guy that she can never touch
sasquatch: the guy that never shows up when she needs him
goblin: the guy that loves gold and jewels more than her

What other archetypes can you think of?

FAILBox

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

This past week I had a series of experiences that in a comic book might have made me a rage-fueled Mystery Man like Mr. Furious here, and it's all because of Redbox. Here's what happened.

My family rents from Redbox kiosks quite often. A dollar a night for new-release DVDs, it's perfect for our Friday "pizza and movie night" tradition. They're convenient, they're cheap, it's great. They even have a pretty decent website, where you can search for nearby kiosk locations, reserve new releases, and so on. But recently I've found some ways in which it's proven to be more inconvenient than helpful.

This week marked the DVD debut of Pixar's latest film, Up, and we haven't seen it yet, so I thought I'd hit up the 'Box for a copy on my way home from work. Nope, all checked out. No big deal, we watched something else instead. On Wednesday, I had the day off, so I jumped on the Redbox website, found an available copy at a nearby grocery chain, and reserved it online. I rode my bike over to the store, wanting the exercise anyway and not minding the rain. But when I got to the store, I found the kiosk out of order, and I couldn't retrieve up the disk! FAIL number 1: if you're gonna let me reserve online, the least you could do is verify that the machine is actually in working order!

(temperature... rising...)

Friday afternoon, driving home from work, I thought I'd pull up the Redbox website on my Windows Mobile smartphone to see if any of the kiosks I'd be passing had a copy I could reserve. I first tried to open the site in Opera Mobile, which renders web pages in their full, non-mobile format. I clicked over to the "find a redbox" page, entered my location, tapped Search... and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Yes, I know mobile internet is slow, but after several minutes, I concluded that either it wasn't going to load, or that it wasn't even trying. FAIL number 2: poor usability on the website could be improved by offering some kind--any kind--of user feedback.

(vision... blurring...)

So then I switched over to my phone's built-in Mobile Internet Explorer (which, yes, it's a lousy browser, but sometimes it works better than Opera for certain sites, because it identifies itself as a mobile browser, and requests any available stylesheets for handheld devices). This time, it took over 5 minutes just to load the front page! Over 300 KB of data on what was essentially just a splash page with a few links! FAIL number 3: no mobile/handheld stylesheet to allow for graceful degradation. It's NOT THAT HARD!

(rage... taking... over!)

After striking out twice, I tried one more thing: maybe there was a custom Redbox app available, something I could download and install on my phone to perform the location and reservation tasks. After a few minutes of searching, I found that Redbox started work on a mobile version of their site A YEAR AGO. I'm a web developer, and I can tell you, no matter that your software lifecycle, it shouldn't take a year to do something this straightforward! That same blog article mentioned an iPhone app, and sure enough, "there's an app for that," but for all the rest of you unwashed heathens with Blackberries, Androids, Symbians, Palms, or WinMos, (you know, the 86.3% of the smartphone market not cornered by Apple?), well, sorry, no cookie for you.

To quote Mr. Furious:

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Okay, done ranting now. Not like this has ruined my life or taken away my birthday or anything, but sheesh, for as widespread as Redbox is becoming, and for as much as they tout their convenience, it sure seems like their mobile strategy could use some attention.

Going Back Under the Knife

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:15:00 +0000

I guess this is just the "year of the surgery" for our whole family... my Dad (double knee replacement), Grandma (broken hip), cousin (brain tumor removal), and now me!

I've been having a lot of problems this past year or so with sinus congestion, headaches, loss of smell, chronic snoring, etc, so I finally went to see an ENT a few weeks ago. He checked me out and confirmed my suspicion: the polyps are back (again)!

I had surgery for ethmoidal polyps my senior year of highschool (in '92), and then had a second surgery (outpatient this time) in Charlotte in 2006. Well, that one apparently wasn't as effective as the first one, and they're now back in force. Plus my septum (the cartilage that separates the two sides of your nose) is bent internally, which is contributing to the nasal problems I've been having, so it'll have to be fixed as well. The long and the short of it is, he wants me to undergo surgery again. Like my first go-around, it'll mean an overnight stay in the hospital and a week of down time afterward, so we've scheduled it for the week between Christmas and New Year's. My surgery is scheduled for December 28th, and that whole week will be "movie and book time", as the scheduling nurse put it. Not looking forward to the packing and the saline irrigations <shudder>, but the down time will be kind of nice.

School progress: domain detection

noreply@blogger.com (Rylee Corradini) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:32:00 +0000

So this is a few days late, since task 3 on my Linguistics MA project plan was due November 6th:

3. Evaluate available methods of determining subject field of a text

... but I don't actually have much to report. After several nights of searching, I haven't come up with anything substantial in the way of open-source code for subject field detection of a text. The academic papers I have read that touch on the subject (heh) all seem to gloss over the details of any domain detection step, or simply refer to proprietary solutions to the problem with no discussion of how those solutions are implemented. When I raised this issue with my graduate adviser, he suggested I "punt" -- that is, my software will just have to ask the user to specify the domain at run-time, or run without a specific domain in mind. Anyway, I have bigger fish to fry; the domain inference was never intended to be the core of my project, rather a means to the end of coupling statistical machine translation with terminology management/lookup. So now I move on to step 4:

4. Based on results of milestones 1, 2, and 3, determine overall program architecture

Also, in unrelated news: paralleling similar moves on my Javascript and MUGEN blogs, I've moved my site navigation from the sidebar into the header. I'm also working on merging the three templates used by these blogs into a single template that can accept custom CSS for each blog to help them have a unified appearance, while allowing each to retain its unique look and feel. I've also added more links in the sidebar to my various social media profiles, if that interests you at all. I suspect for most of you it won't, but anyway, they're there.

Buyog Blog

Not so smart

Is this thing on?

Intervals

Slaying the Beast

Postcards from my Recent Past

Spiritual

Academic

Professional

Physical

[Lost posts] Recent family outings

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Catching up

In February...

In March...

In April...

Coming up...

Coming out of Hibernation

My Inner Child Just Passed Out For Joy

Well, darn.

Blizzard!

Pinocchio's a Real Boy Now

Snow job

Mutants?

On matters historic

LingMA update, 1-15-2010

Raw data files (sentence alignment files, XCES format)

XSLT

Segfiles

Tools

Reference

The Future

LingMA update, 1-7-2010

Resolutions

Spiritual

Academic

Professional

Physical

Home from the hospital

LingMA status report for 12-15-2009

Thoughts on Twilight: Why Stop at Vampires and Werewolves?

FAILBox

Going Back Under the Knife

School progress: domain detection