My Senior Supervisor Dr. Jian Pei

I was going to write about my senior supervisor in a summary in my defense. However, to describe a man like Dr. Jian Pei, I really needed to enter a new blog entry. In life, we are not very often blessed to meet people of greatness. As my favorite quote from Isaac Newton states, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants". This quote really does tell the story about Dr. Pei. This is the story of how I met this great person, Dr. Pei.

Thesis Defense

On November 9th, 2010 at 9 AM I successfully defended my Masters Thesis defense. It was an interesting experience. I was quite nervous but at the same time excited. With 3 days of no sleep, I was wired on something. So probably it was the excitement that finally another key milestone in my life out of the way. I passed with minor revisions. So now all that is left to do is make those revisions, send to Dr. Pei for review and then submit for publishing to the library at which point I can hit that button to apply to graduate. Looking forward to that.

P != NP

On August 7th I received an email stating that Vinay Deolalikar from HP labs has proven that P in fact does not equal NP. What does that really mean? In layman terms it checks if a solution to a problem can be efficiently checked by a computer, then the computer can efficiently solve the problem. The problem was introduced by Steve Cook in 1971. In this email it stated: "... And Steve Cook says that it is to be taken seriously".

Bing now powers Yahoo Search

http://mashable.com/2010/08/24/bing-powers-yahoo-search/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_content=Twitter Could this be the demise of Google? I doubt it. With a 65% search market share it will take some time for Microsoft to catch up to Google. Google's primary business is in search and ads while Microsoft is touching every sector of IT from OS, Browser, Search, and so on. It wouldn't shock me if Microsoft decides to buy out Dell to touch a little on the hardware side as well.

Groupon Concept

So the other day I was on facebook and noticed my sister-in-law had posted something about Groupon. Ofcourse I had to go see it. I saw this amazing deal for $40 voucher to this restaurant called 'Shaken not Stirred' in downtown vancouver for a mere $15 dollars. I looked into the restaurant and the reviews were amazing. So I went ahead and bought the voucher for $15.

gdb stacktrace

For my thesis I have been coding in C++. Having to workthrough another persons c++ code is quite the trying task. Especially one that chunks away millions of tuples of just raw numbers. So finding out the stack trace when your c++ code throws the very nice and useful "Segmentation Fault" would be good. After digging through the net I found a nifty alias for your ubuntu that runs the app in gdb and will throw out the stacktrace if seg fault happens. Add the following to your .bashrc, source it and your good to go: alias gcatch='gdb -ex r -ex back -ex q -args'

Drupal login problem with 6.17 and php 5.2

So I got home and tried login in again. Guess what the login was broke again. So was talking to Scott and he suggested to reverse all the changes. I went one step up and just untared a new version of drupal 6.17 over my installation and magically it worked again. Interesting... Why wasn't it working before? No clue... But the most important thing is it works now :)

Drupal 6.17 Login problems with PHP 5.2

So I upgraded to drupal 6.17 a week or so ago and guess what my hosting company decides to upgrade their PHP to 5.2. Ofcourse as you would know it my drupal instance decides to not work any more. I would try to login as an admin and get prompted right back. I searched for quite a while and finally found a combination that fixed it. I believe the following will fix: Drupal 6.17 Php: 5.2.13 Add following at the very bottom of index.php: drupal_page_footer(); $GLOBALS['tempUser'] = $user; session_write_close(); Also following dirty patch for includes/session.inc