bohnsack.com

On Monday, we drove to Magdalena and then to to top of South Baldy and the Magdalena Ridge Observatory.

All Photos.

We had a chicken wing cookoff yesterday. The consensus seemed to be that Jerry won, but I carefully observed his craft and will crush him the next time we meet:

All photos.

I'm been doing a little bit of consulting to get Erik Erhardt's SISUS application working on his website. This has involved integrating Linux, Apache, Apache Tomcat, Perl, R, and various R libraries. The first cut seems to be working, and I'm very excited about it.

SISUS is a Bayesian statistical model and software aiming to provide a comprehensive solution to stable isotope sourcing inference and prediction problems. Erik is a Ph.D. student and statistical consultant that I met in a parallel processing class we both took from Barney Maccabe in the spring of 2006 (CS442).

I can't claim to understand the statistical underpinnings of what SISUS is doing, but do understand conceptually that it:

• Offers an easy web interface for biologists and other scientists to solve a very interesting problem by simply uploading an input deck via a web interface.
• Does some sophisticated statistical processing using R (I guess that's the "Stable Isotope Sourcing using Sampling" part).
• Automatically creates publication ready graphs and other results for the user.

This such an incredible idea! If you're an academic that's created something new like Erik has, the default is to write a paper that others can use to try and recreate your work. While "the paper" will probably always be required, I think this online SISUS tool represents what successful researchers will want to deliver in the future. That is, the successful academic will say, "My paper is a good reference, but if you want to use or reproduce what I've created, just go to my website and access the new knowledge as a service."

Awesome!

Think of the increased number of citations you'll get by providing an easy web interface to your work vs making someone reproduce everything from scratch. Seems a no-brainer to me.

If you need a solution to stable isotope sourcing inference and prediction problems, check out SISUS, and if you need other statistical consulting contact Erik. He's wicked smart, and I honestly don't know another person as dedicated to quality and excellence as he is.

The Accordion/Ukelele duet at this evening's keynote was awesome in person.

In DHH's keynote, it was noted that something like AssetPackager will come with Rails 2.0. This is a really important optimization from a user experience perspective.

Yesterday I explored quite a bit of Portland, but today was all technology.

Highlights of stuff I expect to deploy soon:

1. Test-driven development gives you a giant competitive edge. Use unit tests with Test::Unit, and integration tests with fixtures. RSpec also looks interesting.
2. CruiseControl.rb - Implement continuous integration, such that all commits have to pass all the tests from above. If they fail, the the whole team knows who broke the tree, and if they pass a quality version of the app is automatically deployed.
3. TextMate - Yeah, I think I'm going to get a mac just to use this text editor
4. Piston - Much better than svn:external for dealing with vendor branches
5. acts_as_solar - Add full text search to rails models
6. Enhanced scaffolding - Not sure yet which to use, as there are a few options, including: Streamlined, Hobo, Active Scaffold, and AutoAdmin.

I'm excited to be attending RailsConf 2007 in Portland, OR this week.

The sessions I'm planning on attending can be viewed at MyConfPlan. Not included in MyConfPlan, are the tutorial sessions on Thursday that I will most definitely attend and BOF sessions Thr-Sat that I might attend.

Charlie points to his schedule here.

Strangely the cumulative GPA doesn't reflect this new A. Seems like fairly serious breakage to me.

The curriculum page has been updated. I'll most likely be taking ECE 547 - Neural Networks with Thomas Caudell in the Fall.

Update: On Tuesday I got the following message explaining the GPA stuff:

to		STUMESSAGES-L@list.unm.edu
date		May 15, 2007 2:14 PM
subject		[STUMESSAGES-L] Spring Semester Cumulative GPA Calculation
	
Dear UNM Student,
	
For your information Spring 2007 GPA (Grade Point Average)information will
be calculated into your Cumulative GPA officially on the evening of May 23.
If you believe your GPA is incorrect after this date, you may contact the
Registrar's Office for more information.

Embarrassing.

UNM could really, really use some serious process improvement.

I submitted the final assignment for CS522 yesterday, after sitting in front of a screen that looks something like the following for more than a good while (click on image for full size version):

The result of this particular assignment was a forward and reverse Daubechies 4 Wavelet transform implemented in Scheme (UNM Scheme specifically).