Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Ada Lovelace Day – Natalia Trayanova

Suw Charman-Anderson made a pledge to post about a woman in technology that he she admired, as long as 1000 other people signed up to do the same. (Details here.) It sounded like a great idea, so I signed right up. Then I puzzled for a long while about whom I should write.

I considered writing about Anousheh Ansari, a serial tech entrepreneur who has also gone into space (something I dreamed of as a child), but I don’t actually know that much about her, and she’s rather high profile.

Then I realized the answer has been staring me in the face — I should write about my doctoral advisor, Professor Natalia Trayanova.

Dr.Trayanova is a leader in the cardiac electrophysiology field, a field both historically and currently dominated by men. While I have met many talented women with promising careers in the field, very few of them have been full professors, leaders of labs, commonly invited speakers, or HRS fellows. All of these are true of Dr.Trayanova. Furthermore, along with a few other labs ( many of which are ‘related’ to hers ), she has been at the forefront of cardiac simulation technology since the year I was born (1983). She has helped to drive cardiac simulations from mathematical models of the electrical fields induced by excitable fibers in a volume conductor all the way to full-scale models of the human heart derived from medical images, running on massive supercomputers.

I think she is the perfect example of a woman in technology that can be a role model to aspiring women (per the stated goals of the Ada Lovelace Day project).

Happy first Ada Lovelace day, everyone!

Site tweaks

I’ve been doing quite a bit of web programming lately for work, and now that my skills are sharpening up I’m tempted to do a totally custom theme for this site. You know, with all of my mythical free time.

In the mean time I applied a few tweaks, including a new background from the tiled backgrounds designer.

Just Sit

As a learning exercise, and because it was something I wanted to have, I created a simple meditation timer application for Android called JustSit.

The name is derived from a quote attributed to Zen Master Unmon:

If you walk, just walk, if you sit, just sit, but whatever you do, don’t wobble.

This quote is a tongue-in-cheek admonition to focus on the task at hand. There are plenty of timers for Android already, but this one does something special — it optionally helps to shut out the outside world by silencing the phone’s ringtone and/or turning off all of the network connections.

There are still a few things I want to add to the application, namely, options for sounds marking the beginning and end of the meditation period (currently mandatory), and options for vibrating notifications or no notifications. I’d also like to allow users to select the sounds to be used — currently they are hard-coded. Finally, it would be nice to allow people to save various profiles and timings. Nonetheless, at this point I find the application perfectly useful for its intended purpose.

For now, I’m not putting it on the Android Market. I don’t feel like it’s been tested enough to withstand the brutal onslaught of the Market users, and I am waiting to charge a small fee in order to recover my developer registration. The application will always remain open source, and will always be available for free on the project website. However, the majority of users will neither know how to nor want to download and install the app from there, so I’ll make it available with the aforementioned ‘convenience fee’ from the Market. The ability to charge for apps is not currently available on the market, and one is not allowed to charge later for an app that is initially given away for free. I may post it to other Android application sites.

Please let me know if you try this and find it useful, and submit any feature requests or bug reports on the project Issues page.

Building Android for the Asus Eee PC 701

NOTE as of 2009-02-19:

These instructions are now probably out of date. Thanks everyone for the discussion and the links. If you’re really interested in this, you should probably check out the android-porting google group / mailing list.

BIG RED FLASHY WARNING

  • THIS WILL wipe whatever you have installed on your Eee PC
  • THIS IS at a rather experimental stage, so don’t expect everything to function appropriately

Now that you’ve read the warnings, I’ll point out that I’ve posted an installation image below. If you want to roll your own, continue from here.

Instructions

  1. READ THE WARNINGS – I won’t be held responsible if you nuke your Eee PC
  2. Get the source by following these instructions.
  3. Create a local_manifest.xml file in your .repo directory with the following contents:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <manifest>
    <project name="platform/vendor/asus/eee_701" \ path="vendor/asus/eee_701"/>
    </manifest>
  4. Sync – do another repo sync to pull the eee_701 stuff
  5. Build – type

    TARGET_ARCH=x86 TARGET_PRODUCT=eee_701 DISABLE_DEXPREOPT=true make -j8 installer_img
  6. Wait … It’ll take a while, particularly webkit
  7. Make installer USB stick

    dd if=out/target/product/eee_701/installer.img of=/dev/<usbstick of your choice>
  8. BIOS Settings – Go into the BIOS settings (press F2 on boot) and set the boot device order so that the hard drive comes first. Also under IDE configuration set the internal flash drive to load before any USB drives. ADDED 2008-12-21 – You must also turn off the SD card reader for the installation procedure.
  9. Boot – Plug the usb stick into your Eee PC and boot from it. When the BIOS screen comes up, press the ‘Esc’ key to get the boot menu. Select the USB drive. You should be presented with a rudimentary installer menu. Quickly press an arrow and select option 0 (sysloader), then press Enter.
  10. Let the install run – When it’s done type “reboot” and hit enter. Once it reboots, wait a few seconds and then the android boot screen will appear. Tada!

Note that wifi and many other things don’t work right now, so I’m trying to figure them out. I’ll post the installation image shortly, and more details here as I find them.

These instructions are mostly based on information found here.

Here’s a screenshot from the awful camera on my android phone:

Android Cupcake on the Eee PC

Android Cupcake on the Eee PC

UPDATE: 2008-12-20 19:12Z

Image for your consumption is here (mirror) (torrent). (Please use the torrent if you can). This is governed by the Apache 2.0 and GNU GPL Licenses. The sources are currently available from Google.

UPDATE: 2009-01-03 22:51Z

For the pedants, and my conscience. (On a related note, hello Slashdot and Gizmodo visitors.)
The software included in this product contains copyrighted software that is licensed under the GPL. A copy of that license is available here (2008-01-04 – Link typo fixed, sorry). You may obtain the complete Corresponding Source code from me for a period of three years after the binary was posted, which will be no earlier than 2011-12-20, by sending a money order or check for $5 to:

Brock M. Tice
PO BOX 17416
Saint Paul, MN 55117

Please write “source for Android EeePC build ” in the memo line of your payment.

This offer is valid to anyone in receipt of this information.