My Name is Rob

October 24, 2009

October 19, 2009

You may recall that I was slightly busy from shortly before Will was born until early October. Well, my big project was finally released yesterday. The Wolfram|Alpha iPhone application is now available in the iTunes app store.

The app has generated quite a lot of buzz over the past 24 hours, mostly because the price is significantly greater than the vast majority of iPhone applications. While I was intimately involved in the development of the application, I am completely in the dark about the business and marketing side of the product. On the bright side, most of the reviews speak relatively highly of the app itself, even though many are quite critical of the price.

Since I work primarily on Mathematica, I've been fairly uninvolved with the Wolfram|Alpha project prior to this iPhone app. I'm still not an expert on innards of Wolfram|Alpha but I do understand the big picture a little better than I did before.

If you've never used Wolfram|Alpha before, go ahead and give it a try on the website. It's kind of hard to describe what it does, simply because it's not like any other application you've ever used before. Despite certain visual similarities to web search engines like Google or Yahoo, Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. It doesn't find web pages that might be related to your query, it computes factual answers to your query (except when it doesn't).

Typically this means your query must be constructed in a slightly different way (perhaps using slightly different language) than you would use for a search engine. It's worth taking the time to experiment to see what works and what doesn't work. Perhaps my best description of Wolfram|Alpha is that it is a combination of a calculator and an encyclopedia.

The iPhone app features optimized input and output for the interesting and useful Wolfram|Alpha computation engine.

W|A knows all sorts of interesting facts. For instance, Robert was a more popular given name than William in the U.S. for most of the 20th century (though William recently overtook Robert... a sign of things to come?).

The app provides a number of ways to share the interesting results you find. Click the "share" button in the upper-right corner, or press and hold on a result.

The app also has numerous built-in examples to help you get started.

It also contains a complete history of all your queries.

Many of the computations have parameters that can be fine tuned for more precise results.

So there you have it. The app was a lot of fun to write, even if the release schedule was a bit hectic. The next version should be even better.

October 18, 2009

The Autumn at Allerton Park

Entering Allerton Park

The changing leaves means the Allerton Trail Run is coming up. This is one of my favorite races for a variety of reasons. I love the trail. The race is a good distance for me. The weather is cooling down, and my running thrives in cool weather. The race falls right before, after, or (like last year) on my birthday. You may recall I ran 30 miles at Allerton last year in celebration of my 30th birthday.

I like to get in a few loops on the trail in the weeks leading up to the race to re-familiarize myself with it, so the last two Sundays I've run at Allerton. Last week the Sangamon river was so high that parts of the trail were waist deep under water. I walked around three of these places and splashed through one other. I was expecting it to be ankle deep, but it was knee deep. That was a wet surprise in 39˚ weather.

Fortunately, this week the river was four or five feet lower and no parts of the trail were under water. Hopefully, it won't rain to much this week and the course will remain fast for the race next week.

After my run today I took a little time to snap some photos. For most of them I used bracketed exposures. For each photo I actually took three photos: one with normal exposure, one underexposed, and one overexposed. The underexposed photo picks up details in the bright areas of the photo (e.g. the sky) and the overexposed image picks up details in the dark areas (e.g. shadows).

Once back home I combined each set of three images into a single high dynamic range photo and adjusted the levels so both the lights and the darks are visible in same image. If combined well HDR images look spectacularly vibrant and detailed. If combined poorly HDR images look very unnatural and washed out. I'm still pretty new to HDR so I may not of done a great job, but most of them look pretty decent I think.

Fu Dog garden

Fu Dogs

House of the Golden Buddhas

Leaving Allerton Park

October 3, 2009

The End of September

Between the baby and work, I've been utterly exhausted. Hopefully the work-related busyness will ease up before the end of this week when I finish up with the big project from the last two months.

Photo of the Day

"September 2009 Photo of the Day"

Running

Well, I've been running a couple times per week, usually pretty fast. I feel like I'm definitely getting back into shape, despite the fact that my fun run times have been slightly slower each week.

Month	Distance	# Workouts	Avg per Workout
January	109.34 Mile	10	10.934 Mile
February	55.83 Mile	7	7.97571 Mile
March	108.792 Mile	10	10.8792 Mile
April	74.85 Mile	8	9.35625 Mile
May	64.5669 Mile	9	7.1741 Mile
June	7. Mile	1	7. Mile
July	0	0	0
August	16.3 Mile	5	3.26 Mile
September	39.78 Mile	7	5.68286 Mile
Total	476.458 Mile	57	8.35892 Mile

Cycling

I've been doing roughly one ride per week. It's been too hectic to get out any more than that. I had a fun ride up in Chicago last week with the XXX Racing team.

September 2009

Bike	Distance	# Rides	Avg per Ride
Bianchi	33.15 Mile	9	3.68333 Mile
Pocket Rocket	73.96 Mile	8	9.245 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird	180. Mile	4	45. Mile
Total	287.11 Mile	21	13.6719 Mile

January - September 2009

Bike	Distance	# Rides	Avg per Ride
Bianchi	500.65 Mile	112	4.47009 Mile
Big Red	12.07 Mile	4	3.0175 Mile
El Fuego	54.42 Mile	7	7.77429 Mile
Pocket Rocket	280.93 Mile	39	7.20333 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird	1638.2 Mile	39	42.0051 Mile
Total	2486.27 Mile	201	12.3695 Mile

Walking

Will loves walking, so I've been doing quite a bit of that, more so earlier in the month.

Month	Distance	# Workouts	Avg per Workout
January	0	0	0
February	3.75 Mile	2	1.875 Mile
March	0	0	0
April	8.51 Mile	4	2.1275 Mile
May	6.7 Mile	4	1.675 Mile
June	11. Mile	3	3.66667 Mile
July	29.52 Mile	10	2.952 Mile
August	35.02 Mile	14	2.50143 Mile
September	29.82 Mile	12	2.485 Mile
Total	124.82 Mile	50	2.4964 Mile

September 24, 2009

The Silence

It's been a little quiet around here lately at My Name is Rob. In real life things have been anything but quiet. Nearly all my time at home has been occupied by our little bundle of joy, Will (now six weeks old).

On top of that I've been busier at work than I've ever been before. I am in the middle of seven projects at the moment (up from the usual two or three), one of which has completely monopolized my time for a month or so. The other six haven't gone away, they'll still be waiting for me when I finish this one. Needless to say, things have been pretty tense lately. It's no wonder Will has been able to post way more to his blog than I have to mine.

As I write, I am putting off packing for my weekend trip to Chicago for a software development conference. I really should get back to that.

Oh, and what's the deal with the damn soy aphids?

September 3, 2009

The Swing-a-majig

We were lucky enough not to be the first of our generation of friends and family to have a child. As a result, we've been fortunate enough to receive many hand-me-downs. Will loves his little hand-me-down bouncer.

Melissa's sister was nice enough to give us (among other things) a nifty swing. There was a slight hiccup with the swing though, when I started to assemble it I realized the entire assembly was there except for the seat... which I could not find anywhere. I searched the house high and low. Finally, Melissa asked her sister if she happened to sill have the seat. Her sister couldn't find the seat.

Melissa started looking on Craigslist for swings. After a few days she noticed someone selling the exact same swing for a reasonable price, with the caveat that it didn't run on AC power (battery only). Well, since it was exactly the same swing this limitation didn't really matter because we could just take the seat off this one and attach it to the one we already had. We got the swing, swapped the seat, and Fig was good to go.

A day or two later we got a call from Melissa's sister... she found the seat. Oh well, now there's an extra. A day or two after that, a brand new swing (the exact same model) arrived at our house via UPS. My mom (who was well aware of our earlier dilemma) was kind enough to get the swing for us. In less than a week we went from zero functioning swings to three!

Well, I returned the new one, we're using the pieced together swing, and we have still enough spare parts to build an entire new swing, should the need arise. We are fortunate enough to have many wonderful people who care about us enough to help us out in these stressful times, and for that we are truly grateful.

September 1, 2009

The End of August

Big news

The big news, of course, was Fig's arrival on the 12th.

In case you're interested, you can follow William's blog here, or his Twitter updates here.