The Niu PhD

June 11th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I’m done. All the paperwork and all that – DONE. I’m officially Dr. Niu now, but not the useful kind of doctor who can save your life. I’m the kind of doctor that could possibly help you troubleshoot your computer problems.

So I’m off to China on the 14th before I start the next stage of my life – employment with Yahoo. This academic year’s been very travel heavy. Let’s see (for those trips that required a plane ticket)…

- Multiple trips to Seattle for interviews
- NYC in November
- Singapore and India in April
- Denmark and Germany in May (with an accidental excursion into Sweden)
- Boston in June

So that’s 4 countries, 3 american cities so far. This was probably my last year to travel as freely as I did… once I start working all this can no longer be. Siiiigh.

It’s been a good year though. Next year, I foresee a lot of Boston in my future. :)

So very close

May 24th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Got one signature on the cover sheet already.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have two more.

And then, on Thursday, I’ll hear that bell ring!

cr-48: dual booting with ubuntu

March 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Ok. I’ve finally done something with the cr-48. I’ve installed ubuntu on it. Why do I do this? It’s not as if I don’t already have a laptop and computer running linux. Well – here comes the exciting bit: In april, I shall be going to India for my friend Balaji’s wedding. To minimize the weight that I’ll be carrying, I’m going to bring the cr-48 instead of one of the macbooks. Because I still need to work on my dissertation, I don’t want to use the shell that comes with Chrome OS in case I don’t have reliable or trustworthy internet sources.

There are about ten bajillion posts out there commenting on how easy it is to do this and it is indeed incredibly easy, especially if you already have a linux machine running ubuntu. If you don’t, just get a live CD or use something like portable ubuntu or andlinux or use a virtual machine. (Which leads to a very Inception-like situation of a virtual machine within a virtual machine.)

Me, I SSHed into my workstation in lab and used remote x to handle all of this. The advantage of this method, as opposed to only using the linux partition, is that I can download the ubuntu ISO much much faster, and the processing power on that machine is way better than my laptop.

I followed Google’s instructions. And then I used this guide to help make the trackpad and keyboard more usable.

And voila – a tiny, light ubuntu laptop with built in SD-card reader (to upload the many photos that I’ll take) with great battery power!

Yahoo!

March 1st, 2011 § 3 comments § permalink

I guess now that the paperwork’s been sent in, I can say with certainty that my job hunt is done. I’ll be working for Yahoo after graduation!

Next checkbox: Dissertation.

CR-48: What’s next?

January 3rd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

There’s a shell, albeit a rather limited one, from which I can use SSH, so yay – a whole new world of wonder and excitement!

Google’s pretty awesome in that they’ve actually provided instructions on how to get into developer mode, from which you can flash your own custom OS, if you choose to do so. Of course I chose to do so.

Ok, so what else can I do with this thing? Suggestions so far include:
1. Connect my android phone to this thing. Not sure what I’ll do yet.
2. Get bluetooth mouse working because the trackpad is somewhat painful to use if you’re trying to do anything beside point and click.
3. Install Android OS. I’ll try this luigi tool that other blogs have mentioned.

What else should I try with this thing?

Editted to add: Oh My God. I really need to just google “cr-48″ more often. Just found a page that taught me how to enable a media player and file browser that will let me use an SD card or USB drive to either save stuff, or to play mp3s and maybe movies. :) Not everything has to be streamed after all!

Cr-48: IDEs

December 29th, 2010 § Comments Off § permalink

I know these notebooks aren’t exactly meant to be developer machines, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want to be able to do SOMETHING. For the most part, the online IDEs I’ve tried (codepad, ideone) are ok, but I miss the comfort of having an IDE that does AUTO-INDENT in which I don’t need to use the spacebar to produce tabbing… so this sounds like a trivial request until you remember that Python is a language in which whitespace has great significance. Sigh. And I do most of my scripting in python. I wish Google Docs had a programming language syntax mode…

In other areas… my fat fingers are finally getting used to typing on such a little keyboard (when I use my macbook the keys feel ginormous and seem to have vast expanses between each little chiclet). The trackpad, however, still sucks. This, sadly, is out of the Chrome OS team’s power to change and the least of their problems since there will no doubt be a bajillion different shiny, beautiful devices once this guinea pig phase is complete.

Cr-48 – favorite app and specs

December 26th, 2010 § Comments Off § permalink

First off, specs as requested. It’s a nice little machine.

Google’s really trying to push their web app and cloud computing vision, so that’s why I’d imagine they devoted an entire device to it. It’s a proof of concept that you can do pretty much everything you need to from a web browser, especially by using Google provided products.

My new favorite thing on this notebook (it’s far too big to be a netbook, as I called it in my previous post) is the NYTimes chrome app. I had to get used to the idea of chrome apps being nothing more than just glorified links… They’re web apps… so it makes sense to link them to a URL where before you might be linking to some executable in your computer. Anyway, the nytimes chrome version is lovely. I think of all the NYTimes apps I’ve tried, chrome site is my favorite, then iPhone version is 2nd, and Android app is 3rd.

Second useful thing: Read Later Fast. This extension caches copies of webpages so you can read it later. I have grand plans of caching a lot of wikipedia and wikibooks pages…

Oh, I’ve also installed a python shell – where there’s a python shell, I’ll definitely try it out.

BTW, because all this is for Chrome, these apps and extensions work with and are synced to my desktop version of the Chrome browser as well. Pretty neat, because it’s so nice being able to switch to a new computer and still keep the same browser environment.

Chrome Netbook

December 25th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink

For Christmas this year, Google sent me a cr-48 chrome netbook. I didn’t get to do the unboxing (which is definitely one of my favorite parts of the whole thing) because it was sent to my parents’ house and they opened it up to play with it before I arrived home.

The netbook pilot program provides its users with a two year verizon data plan with 100mb free per month. Haven’t tried it out yet…

It’s a true netbook in the sense that the only UI you see is a browser – Chrome. Since I use google sync, all my bookmarks, extensions, and chrome apps were already waiting for me when I signed in. Oh yeah, to add a user account, all you do is sign in with your google account. Quick, easy, painless… unless you don’t have an internet connection.

Battery life is wonderful. Hours and hours and hours!

The hardware is not as great… The macbook style trackpad with no buttons is not the most responsive. And language input, though it exists, is kind of annoying in that when you press the key sequence to switch, sometimes it doesn’t switch.

I’m having fun with it so far. More updates to come, because I’m supposed to be giving detailed feedback as part of the pilot program… so I’m going to try to record things that annoy me and things that make me happy here.

The Quest for Cake

December 6th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink

Over Thanksgiving break, I was struck with a powerful desire for strawberry shortcake, or strawberry fruit cake, or an Asian style fruit cake brought by one I saw in Stanford Shopping center. Of course, I knew as a western style bakery, they wouldn’t have exactly what I was looking for. I wasn’t TOO picky – I simply wanted a small slice of a moist cake with light frosting that wasn’t too sweet and some fresh fruit. Mike was nice enough to indulge me as we searched. As luck would have it, all the Asian bakeries I went to either didn’t have the cake I wanted or only had it available as a whole cake. So I settled.

My first concession came at La Patisserie, a bakery close to the Marukai supermarket in Cupertino. I saw a green tea mousse cake, albeit with mango mousse on top. For some people, mango mousse is a plus, but I personally am not fond of mango flavored confections or pastries. And then I saw the lemon mousse with raspberries. Raspberry, strawberry… both are berries, I thought, so I gave these a try.

I was a little disappointed. The green tea mousse didn’t have the matcha taste I was looking for and the mango mousse was just OK. The lemon mousse was delicious and I love raspberries, but it wasn’t the strawberry cake I wanted.

The next day, we tried yet another Asian market. (At this point, we’d visited Marukai, La Patisserie, and Ranch 99.) NO luck. My precious strawberry cake and fruit cake were both sold out. Bah.

On the last day, before we left for Davis, I gave up and returned to Stanford shopping center. I went to La Baguette and Cocola and picked up a strawberry cake from each. And a hazelnut mousse cake. I can’t resist hazelnut.

The hazelnut was nothing too special, but it was good. The strawberry shortcake from La Baguette was my preferred cake of the two strawberry ones.

It was fluffy, light, not incredibly sweet – but there wasn’t enough strawberry to it. I was rather happy with it though.


Cocola Bakery’s strawberry fruit cake was visually stunning, but it wasn’t as delicious as it looked. The green marzipan with a bit of chocolate ruined it for me, I think. I was in the mood for light, fluffy and fruity, and the marzipan made it too heavy. In addition, the entire thing was a bit on the sweet side for me.

Verdict: La Baguette wins hands down, but the strawberry fruit cake from a small asian bakery in SF near Tom’s place and Satura’s strawberry shortcake are definitely superior. I’ll have to brave the downtown Palo Alto traffic to get some Satura cake over Christmas.

This quest may be complete, but I must re-do it to get complete satisfaction.

Oh Delicious Snack!

November 19th, 2010 § Comments Off § permalink

This, 凉皮 or 面皮, is one of my favorite street foods to eat. The noodles are chewy and the gluten is squishy. The sauce is just a little spicy with lots of sesame…. mmmmm….

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