Flyingroc.org

Skiing

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:25:00 +0000

Our team's morale event was skiing at Crystal Mountain. I almost forgot that (1) I really liked skiing and (2) I'm horrible at it. Lol, only fell down once though. That's a record for me.

Me at Crystal Mountain, originally uploaded by flyingroc.

Marlon's visit

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:18:00 +0000

Finally found some time to put up a few pics from Marlon's visit. Marlon was here for some sort of boot camp thinger on some sort of business scorecard thing. Lol, all I know was that it was an excuse to fly out to San Diego. Traveling more is after all part of my new year's resolution.

It was fun whirlwind tour of 3 cities in 5 days.

Solving my shoelace problem

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:29:00 +0000

The way I used to tie my shoelaces, they would come undone every few minutes. So much that I just wore them untied a lot of times. As usual, the internet comes to the rescue and I found Ian's secure knot. I've been tying my shoelaces like that for a couple of weeks now, and they haven't come undone so far!

Ian has plenty more stuff about shoelaces at Ian's shoelace site. He may have just saved me from an inglorious death of tripping over my own shoelaces.

RIP JD Salinger

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:18:00 +0000

I had just blogged about rereading The Catcher in the Rye, and now I find out that J.D. Salinger died.

Today's haul

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:48:00 +0000

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Brave New World

The Hundred Secret Senses

Still looking for Flowers for Algernon, the Aeneid, The Good Earth, The Little Prince, etc.

Texas

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:32:00 +0000

Had a fun time in Amarillo, Texas, visiting my cousin Matt. The sky is so wide open in Texas, almost as if you can see all the way to heaven.

We also drove to Lubbock to see Bibins, who I learned is now engaged. Congratulations! Matt got a speeding ticket on the way back to Amarillo. I didn't even realize we were going so fast--the roads were so straight and even. It was really good to have a change of scenery; the sun and the sky comes out so rarely in the winter here that I almost forgot what they looked like.

New Year's Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:59:00 +0000

Last year's resolution was "keep a tidier apartment." I don't think I can say I kept that one. So this year's resolutions are hopefully easier to achieve--do more of things that feel good:

Read more, fill up that book collection
Travel more, even if it just means taking the ferry to Vashon island
Explore more restaurants
Pay off my car

And ultimately, have more fun.

Rereading The Catcher In The Rye

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:58:00 +0000

Reading The Catcher in the Rye when you're in your 30s is a different experience as opposed to reading it in your teens. All I remember from reading it in high school was how I agreed with the rants about phonies. I don't remember any of the other details until I read it again.

What seemed like a simple character back then now seems incredibly young and terribly complex. I don't think I realized even back then that Holden was actually well-to-do; that he was narrating it from some sort of hospital; or even that it was set in New York city. The setting seems much more present now that I've been to NYC several times. I know where the museum with the Indians is.

These days, instead of simply agreeing with the boy's point of view, I can't help but worry if I've turned into one of those phonies that Holden Caulfield detested.

This post brought to you by the free wifi at SEATAC airport.

Book buying binge + building a library

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:31:00 +0000

So yesterday, I went on a book buying binge. I got:

I imagine all but one of them are part of a high school reading list. All but two of them I bought from a a used books store. I've read all of them, except for Gravity's Rainbow, which I plan to read on the plane to Texas next week.

One of my new year's resolutions is to start a personal library. It's not gonna be like this guy's library, but a modest one where I have copies of all the good books that I've read and enjoyed.

The plan is to mostly acquire them cheaply, from second hand stores. I got a ways to go, I think. Off the top of my head, I'm looking for copies of Flowers for Algernon, A Brave New World, and the Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Aeneid. Oh and a bunch of Shakespeare.

Christmas 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 07:36:00 +0000

Had Christmas eve dinner with Joel, Julie, Rob, and Cindy. I tried making lechon kawali, and it sort of kind of worked, but it took way too long to fry the pork, and the oil splattered all over my kitchen. It was still fun to have xmas with good friends. Yes, that's San Miguel beer on the table, imported from Manila, $9.50—about 400 pesos—for six bottles!

After dinner we went to have midnight mass (which was actually held at midnight) at the local church (St. Jude, patron of the hopeless). Including Cindy, who was curious about how Catholics celebrated Christmas. She endured mass for an hour, which is remarkable, given how many people actually avoid going to mass.

Just like last year, I put up the tree barely in time for Christmas.

Today, a gang of Filipinos had another party at the billiards room downstairs. Fun... billiards, poker, and karaoke. I got the lowest scores at karaoke; I'm better at pusoy dos. Tess promised pictures on facebook. All in all, a busier Christmas than I expected this year. Probably a good thing for this old hermit.

Made from scratch ramen.

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:05:00 +0000

I love ramen, but the ones from a package leave something to be desired. I really wanted to have a chewy noodle that doesnt disintigrate into your soup. The kind you would get in a good noodle house.

I've been reading the cookbook Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking recently, and thought the pasta recipe (2 parts egg, 3 parts flour, by weight) would make for good ramen. So I attempted to make the noodles last weekend. It turned out really well on my second attempt, even though the hand-cut noodles are sometimes wide and sometimes thin :). I put individual portions into sandwich bags and put them in the freezer.

Tonight, I tried making everything from scratch. Made the vegetable broth, cooked some pork, boiled the noodles, and put them all together. Took an hour to make everything! It was a meditative process though, so it's ok. The end result was surprisingly edible. Maybe the noodles were a tad bit too al-dente and I might have added a bit too much soy sauce on the broth, but it is definitely better than Maruchan.

cuisine du jour

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 07:51:00 +0000

I'm gonna jump the shark on new year's resolutions and start blogging more. So my good friend Rob is working in Seattle now, and I have an excuse to go cross the bridge and eat at Seattle's many many restaurants.

I've been eating at a lot of French ones lately. Cafe Presse, Le Pichet, Cafe Campagne, The Artisanal Brasserie, and even Taste the Moment here in Redmond. They're all good, though the quail in Cafe Presse deserves special mention for being really good.

Escargot, however, is sadly disappointing. I'd rather have a plate of kuhol where you tease out the meat from the snail with a toothpick.

Speaking of French food, I've been trying to make Bechamel using lactose-free milk (the kind I usually have at home), and it's too sweet. I guess I can sneak out some free milk from Microsoft just for making sauce!

My profile

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:02:00 +0000

So many in my team went on this personality profile training (Insights Discovery). As part of it, we got a 22-page personality profile. I thought I'd upload it and let you decide if it's accurate. So here it is; there's at least one thing in there that's absolutely wrong. But in general I thought is was insightful.

Not sure that I learned anything that I didn't know though.

Civ

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:38:00 +0000

If you haven't heard from me lately, it's because I've been playing too much Civilizations Revolution on my iphone. The game is crashy, but that just makes me start over...

Hopefully the game will wear out on me like field runners did ;)

Can Runtime Assertion Checking Work for Concurrency?

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:40:00 +0000

I was reading this article Programs that Test Themselves in Computer magazine (unfortunately, link requires payment to access... Bertrand Meyer has a different but equally fascinating fascinating article which is now free to access: Seven Principles of Software Testing), and noticed that once again, the testing strategy described doesn't work out of the box for concurrent software.

The article describes an end-to-end scenario for automated+manual testing called AutoTest. It has an automated test generation strategy, a mechanism to run these automatically generated tests, and a way to automatically check the tests (pass/fail). They use the trick of runtime assertion checking of postconditions as an oracle (a technique I also used in my thesis). They paint a very attractive picture of testing that fully integrated automated and manually written unit tests that can check their own correctness. Problem is, it doesn't *quite* work for concurrent software.

Issues include:

An automated test generation strategy that is inherently single-threaded
No knob for exploring different schedules when executing the tests (byproduct of the first issue)
Runtime assertion of postconditions don't work in concurrent systems.

The first issue is probably easy to fix, one can imagine a variant of their test generation strategy but on multiple threads. The second can be fixed by running a test multiple times, each with a different thread schedule such as the CHESS tool does. But the last one is quite problematic.

AutoTest relies on the fact that you can evaluate design-by-contract postconditions at runtime to see whether they hold or not. But in concurrent systems, DBC runtime checking is a lot more tricky. Imagine that you have a simple concurrent stack type that had a Push() method: a typical postcondition for a stack would assert that after the Push(), the size of the stack grew by one element. But what if there was a Pop() running concurrently with the Push()--it is now possible that by the time the Push method returns, the stack did not grow at all!

I kind of recall a JML related paper where they try to solve this by putting in safe points--locations inside the code where pre- and postconditions can be checked safely. It wasn't clear to me that this is doable in general. Plus, we now have to muddy the implementation with contract stuff--which isn't very clean at all.

The idea of self-checking software components is certainly very appealing to me, but how do we make it work for concurrency components? Can we make dbc-style runtime checking work? Or do we need something else?

Code coverage for concurrency

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:16:00 +0000

My article with Chris Dern on synchronization coverage is up at MSDN Magazine.

Who could have guessed that someday I'd co-author an article on MSDN Magazine. lol

Taste the Moment

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 06:16:00 +0000

One good thing about moving to a new neighborhood is the opportunity to explore it. Today, I discovered Taste the Moment restaurant, about a block away from my apartment. It's a real cute place, it feels like you're eating in a dollhouse.

I had brunch there, ordered the eggs benedict, and it was yummy.

Stuffffffff

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:23:00 +0000

You never really realize how much stuff you got until you move.

Most of the boxes are marked "kitchen". The new apartment has a smaller kitchen with fewer storage. Wonder how I'll fare.

Oh well, I guess I'll find out.

Omelette almost totally unlike Julia Child's

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:44:00 +0000

Inspired by the movie, I attempted to make an omelette just like Julia Child made it. I ended up with this sorry looking thing. I think the pan wasn't hot enough, and I kept the eggs in too long. Also, I put too much butter that wasn't that fresh anymore. Oh well, maybe I'll attempt it again after I move :)

Omelette, originally uploaded by flyingroc.

Here's Julia making an omelette, the right way.

Unexpected Lechon

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:16:00 +0000

Yesterday, Joel and I went to the Filipino Community Center in Seattle, because we heard the consul would be there and we could register to vote. But it turned out when we got there around lunch time that they consuls have left for California already. However, the people there were having lunch, and in the typical Filipino fashion, shared their lunch with us, which turned out to be lechon.

It's not the best lechon in the world, not like the kind Anthony Bourdain rhapsodized about. But it was lechon nonetheless, a whole roast pig. A few stragglers were there too--a couple of nuns also missed the voters registration. Oh well, they will do another one in November; not sure whether that qualifies me to vote for the elections next year, tho.

Getting a new lease

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Signed the lease today, moving to a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Redmond. Should save me a few hundred dollars a month in rent. Gotta start packing things up... I should move every couple of years so that I can re-evaluate the stuff that I have.

I'm hoping this blog gets a new lease, too. Gotta have more inane ramblings. So what should I talk about in this blog?

Julie and Julia

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:05:00 +0000

I saw Julie and Julia tonight. Friends at work were joking about how it was a "chick flick". Yeah, it is, but how can I *not* watch a movie about Julia Child? It was a good movie. I am not usually a fan of Meryl Streep, but she did justice to the role here.

After watching the movie, I felt like I should be cooking more. Ah well, perhaps after I move next week.

Here's a video of Julia Child:

"Save up to null on your car insurance"

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:27:00 +0000

LOL just goes to show, they never really read these things. This should remind us all that when dealing with numbers especially floating point, we should be careful about Not-A-Number values. Reminds me of this article by Gary Leavens.

photo, originally uploaded by flyingroc.

The cost of software error

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:46:00 +0000

It's about $500 Million for Social Security. What's the likelihood that two people have the same name and birth date? And what's the likelihood that one of them is a felon?

The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Rosa Martinez, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., was cut off from her $870 monthly disability benefit check in January 2008 because the system had flagged an outstanding drug warrant in 1980 for a Rosa Martinez from Miami. An investigation showed that the warrant was for a different Rosa Martinez. Martinez tried for months to convince officials that she was innocent but failed.

(via slashdot)

Back from vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Roy) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:12:00 +0000

My wonderful vacation was punctured by a tragic event. My nephew Tyler, born with a congenital heart defect, passed away after surgery. Angel and Tom are heartbroken, but determined to persevere with life, I think. I'm praying for them.

Aside from that tragedy though, my vacation was great. I got to spend time with my family and friends. Got to go home to my home town of Cotabato City, got through singing on stage at my father's birthday without any scars, and even spent a day at the beach (Pearl Farm beach resort).

And all the food! It seems that just as one meal is ending, another one is about to start. In many ways, our lives in the Philippines is one of incredible luxury. We have maids to wash our clothes, cook our food, and clean our house. We have a driver to chauffeur us around. Food is cheap *and* good. If only we could fix government corruption, traffic, and pollution.

Now it's back to work, hopefully with renewed vigor and passion. I considered not coming back to the US and decided not to give Shaun a heart attack :P. Thanks to everyone who made the trip so wonderful. To the friends I didn't get to meet, let's do it next time!