Heading to DB

I think this is a very special place and one that I'm particularly fond of.

• DB D-Deck dining

Workload

It's one of those moments when you felt your intuition is correct and you have put in significant effort to start the process, but all of a sudden you have been told your intuition will not lead you to the usefulness people see in you in the future.

Now I'm taking a step back and make sure I will not lead myself astray but trust the guidance of an expert more experienced than I am.

Anyway. It's complex.

How do you get gigabit per second over the air?

This question is still keeping my awake during the night.

• Multiple bits per symbol is a given; there is simply no technology out there that can digitize at gigasample per second.
• Multiple antenna - how do you pack up to four antenna to a device? I can picture that being possible on a decent sized laptop, at 5GHz or more, over short distance with a favourable channel.
• Getting gigabits to the home. This becomes a question of what type of infrastructure is required to do just that. Fiber to the home, and a wireless access point (femtocell). A cell tower managing hundreds of gigabits of data over the air will be challenging.
• A lot has to take place, similar to idea of fuel cell vehicles. Infrastructure is a significant issue.

Simulations

It appears most simulations are done in a Linux environment. Research tools are both open and actively worked on by the academic community as well as the industry.

However, a fair amount of practical implementation tools are developed on Window.

Survey of the disciplines in communications research

The study of communications encompasses the following theories

• Information theory
• Coding theory
• Dectection theory
• Control theory
• Network theory
• Computation theory
• Game theory

The underlying fundamentals consist of

• Linear systems and signals
• Statistics and random processes
• Antenna & wave propagation

Simulations

• Large Deviation Theory
• Importance sampling

Implementation level

• DSP and alogrithms
• RF/Microwave circuits
• Embedded systems

Illustrations in Latex documents

I've searched around for tools to help with creating diagrams. The closest contender seems to be something that is vector based and supports importing and exporting eps format.

One expensive choice is Adobe Illustrator + MathType. Even at student price, Illustrator is still prohibitively $$$.

A good contender is Inkscape but it's not mature enough for dealing with importing eps equations and editing them in place.

Library barcode system

Keeping track of the details for our library setup.

• My old Toshiba Portege A100 laptop
• Metrologic MS9540 (part of Honeywell) - $150
• Barcode labels (1000 labels) -$28
• Gaylord
• Brodart
• Demco

Barcode details

• Symbology: code 3 of 9, 5-6 Characters, no check code
• Heading: "Mira Mesa Chinese Baptist Church"
• Sequence: nnnnn (n = 0-9, e.g. 01234)

Testing formulas

This is a cool way of adding formulas to email/blogs. However it's not supported natively on the browser. Under the hood, it makes a request to a server for an embedded gif image.

The LaTex Equation Editor website is here

UCSD planning

• Take first quarter at $8,000, no-support.

Winning moves

A very good cheat sheet on Winning Eleven (PES)'s moves.

Thought record

Now is the time to blow the dust off my blog and start something substantial. I'll have to see what I want to place on here. I'll start off probably by writing what I've learned during the period.