media of the week

Reconciliation + New Beginnings + Hope = Obama

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:49:08 -0700

credit “www.barackobama.com”

More than eight months ago, I featured this week’s photo as hope for a better tomorrow. I am again using it since we have never been in more dire need for change and the stakes could not be any more important and urgent.

The sure definition of individual, or collective, insanity is to perform the same actions, to elect the same leaders, or to say the same things, and expect a different outcome...

We are in need of need change, a new beginnings with reconciliation and hope for a better tomorrow.

I am Barack Obama...
Barack Obama is all of us...

pure genius

Sat, 4 Oct 2008 18:46:14 -0700

credit “Self with iPhone on opening day, Sep. 27th, at The TECH museum in downtown San José”

Considering humanity stands at more than five billions living beings today and a somewhat well documented history of less than a few thousands of years; the facts and numbers are that few humans are celebrated during their lifetimes outside of their immediate surroundings or family. Even fewer are celebrated during their generations. And practically none after centuries.

Exceptions are the well known inventors, scientists, artists, poets and writers, religious figures, philosophers, and political figures who have marked their times. If pressed for a top 10 list in the western world I would select, in chronological order: Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Jesus of Nazareth, Issac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Darwin, Albert Einstein, Picasso, and Nelson Mandela.

Now imagine someone who has contributed practically to all of the fields aforementioned and who was celebrated during his lifetime as surpassing all others for his talents, and who is now, 500 years later, mostly regarded as being still of such stature. So much so that a certain recent best selling pop-culture fictional book questioning widely cherished dogma has its roots in the man's passion and ability to astonish us.

The man in question is none other than Leonardo da Vinci [1452 – 1519]. Widely regarded as the prototype of the Renaissance Man and the prototype of genius. His talent and contributions are well chronicled and celebrated, and 500 years after his life, the San José's TECH museum has the only north american showing of an exhibition focusing on Leonardo the engineer and inventor. Considering San José's role as capital of Silicon Valley, the choice of this city is not lost by the visitor of the exhibition.

In front of the TECH stands a completed replica of Leonardo's unfinished colossal equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza. But, the interesting bits are inside and are as much awe inspiring as they are tiring and jaw dropping. While Leonardo's legend helps carry his name and genius today, you are forced to accept this legend as fact when you spend some time looking at his prodigious models, drafts, drawings, and journals. And, engineering is one aspect of Leonardo's talent that has gotten significant attention only in the past century...

The man's curiosity was so profound that he collected some 13,000 pages of observations on everything from anatomy, botany, to flying machines, war instruments, human physiognomy, and zoology, to name a few. He envisioned machines to take us in the air as well as under water and to protect us as we drop for high heights. He had prototypes of a robot as well as shock absorbers. His notion of decomposing machines into smaller reusable parts, much like the human body, was a first. For instance, he literally had pages and pages studying the “physics” of screws and how to best design threads that would hold and assemble various parts into larger wholes.

The exhibition has various working life-size replica of his models as well as the original drawings and writings. One feels exhausted and leaving awe-struck and a bit perplexed from visiting Leonardo's “mind” with this exhibition. Recall the focus is on his engineering and inventions primarily. We all know this is the man who has also given us two of the most admired paintings ever devised by human hands...

What can one say, nature worked its magic 500 years ago and unproportionately favored the son of an unknown woman in Tuscany with talents rarely seen nor documented before and since.

OOPSLA 2008

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:14:50 -0700

credit “http://www.oopsla.org”

As member of the committee for the 23rd annual object-oriented programming systems, systems, and languages (OOPSLA) conference, I am well in tune with this year’s program and schedule.

And as a long time attendee of OOPSLA, somewhat regularly since 1996, I have some perspectives to compare this year’s with previous ones... with maybe some bias toward this one :-)

Nonetheless, this year’s OOPSLA has two main characteristics that I believe make it unique:

I believe we are at the crux of a new wave of programming languages, research, innovations, and applications. This is due in main part to the fact that current programming languages are suboptimal in terms of taking advantage of modern computing hardware (multicores) and modern computing systems (emerging cloud platforms). The right languages and abstractions are key to change this state of affair. Adding more cores is useless if you cannot easily program your application to take advantage of them... OOPSLA has always been the main source of innovation in the programming languages space. I believe this year is no different. See the Research Program for a preview and the OOPLSA podcast for some discussions on Domain-Specific Languages as an example.
While software is one (maybe The) key driving force in today’s globally connected information age—recall that even socialization is increasingly done using Web software, e.g., Facebook—we however have little lasting details on important softwares, that can help us advance the field 20 and 100 years from now. This realization is clear when you try to learn about old (less than 20 years ago) software such as Lotus 123 or Microsoft Windows (to name a few) that have changed businesses or our personal lives. The simple fact is that not much information is available... This problem was first heralded by IBM’s Grady Booch who has since been working on cataloguing software architectures to enable archeological digs of the future to result in fruitful and useful data. OOPSLA keynote Marc Lehner, a real Egyptologist, will be sharing some insights on how, we, as an industry and community can learn from the expert in the field...

And of course, this is simply a short highlight of two important themes at the conference. Many many other topics are also in line with the tutorials, Onward!, practitioners’ report, as well as essays, posters, demonstrations, and panels.

Finally, the conference is held in Nashville. A wonderful city, full of life, and music... What else could you ask for. See you there on October 19th - 23rd.

San José, California

Sun, 7 Sep 2008 21:19:05 -0700

credit "Self with iPhone during Labor Day weekend"

I recently moved to downtown San José. While I have lived in the San José suburbs for a while now, moving downtown has helped me appreciate the city a lot more. The photo this week is of the new city hall. This relatively new (circa 2001) structure gives the city a nice character... upon seeing it, you know you are in high-tech land.

As the capital of Silicon Valley, San José boasts the highest
concentration of high-technology companies and workers anywhere in the world. However, here are ten not so well known facts about the city collected from the Wikipedia article:

San José's population is made up of greater than 40% foreign-born residents
San José's residents have the highest median income for cities of 300,000 or more
More than 35% of all US venture capital investments are to companies in the San José and Silicon Valley area
San José has the highest number of Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) speaking citizens of any other US cities
The computer hard disk drive was invented at IBM's West Coast headquarters and labs in San José, helping spur the area’s economy into the high-tech capital of the world
San José has the lowest crime rate of any US cities
It's the third largest city in California and tenth in the US, population of about 989,496
San José de Guadalupe was the first official city of Spanish California, established in 1777
San José was the capital of US California in 1850-51 and the first incorporated city in the state
Its residents produce more patents per capita than any other US cities

Of course, with average yearlong temperatures of 71℉ (high) and 50℉ (low) and more than 300 days of sunshine, this last statistic along makes this a great place to live.

Go Sharks!

the Sonoma county coastline

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:44:26 -0700

credit “Self with iPhone on Saturday August 2nd”

Admire the pretty coastline north of San Francisco. Reminds me of South Victoria in Australia. Amazingly the rest of the northern California coastline is similarly filled with such natural breathtaking beauty... However, don’t be fool, it’s pretty chilly out, around 55℉ (or 23℃) at 7 PM in the beginning of August! The dry and cool climate makes this entire area near the Russian River an ideal location for the best Pinot Noir and Zin in the world.

Hope you agree that these amazing sights and the dry and mostly warm (70℉) climate more than make up for the constant threats of the earth shaking... maybe they are just gentle reminders that we are not in paradise.