Lots of Media Interest

I found out what happened. Our research was originally detailed in an article at UWeek (the University of Washington’s News Site). This article was started all of the media activity and was quoted at Ocean Lines, EurekAlert!, and Slashdot.

This was followed by a news cast at King 5 (Local News for Seattle).

Our work was also featured at ZDNet and Science Daily. Very cool. Today I learned that the Mumbai Mirror also wrote an article. In the Mumbai article, we’re referred to as “boffins” – apparently British slang for “scientists”.

All of this activity isn’t surprising – robots are cool. Robotic fish are even cooler. We’ll be doing some more demos for reporters wanting to show video of coordinated maneuvering of the robotic fish. When this is posted, I’ll let you know

ZDNet Article on the Fish

Located here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=945

Robot Fish on King 5 News

My lab’s work was featured on our local Seattle News station. I designed the radio transceivers that the robotic fish use (you can see a green wire antenna sticking out of them while they swim). Ben designed the actual fish and its unique swimming mechanism (fin actuation). He’s got a sweet CAD model that I’m using in my thesis. Dan built the camera tracking system featured in the broadcast. We used that tracking system to enable autonomous swimming for our open house demonstration that I described a few posts ago.

Video here: King 5 Video on Demand

Internet Black Holes (the invisible /dev/null beast)

The University of Washington has some great ongoing research projects. This one made national news at MSNBC (article: here). The Internet’s backbone consists of many thousands of routers speaking the TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP was designed at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to allow network traffic to take multiple routes to a destination. This provides for communication if one or more of the routers fails – a likely scenario in the event of a nuclear war. Because destinations can be reached though multiple routes, each individual path may or may not link to its destination. If it doesn’t link, any traffic that uses that route gets lost, forever. Never before have these ‘bad routes’ been charted. The CS department developed a tool to search for and track these black holes and they affectionately called it UW Hubble.

Check it out: http://hubble.cs.washington.edu

While Installing Gentoo Linux I Erased My Windows NTFS Partition

I’ve been using Ubuntu for my desktop OS and my labmates finally convinced me to replace it with Gentoo. They are heavily in favor of the Portage package management system and Ben spent some time earlier today showing me the coolness of Gentoo. I returned convinced of its superiority and was determined to have it installed on my system by the evening.

Got the installer live CD, fired it up and did an incredibly stupid thing – I used the partitioning util that comes with Gentoo to configure THE WRONG DRIVE. Yes, I killed the partition table of my windows partition thinking it was a different disk where I wanted to install Gentoo.

Fortunately I found a kick-ass util called TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org. The great thing about this program is that it can scan for lost partition data and restore it. In the case of NTFS its a bit more complicated because this filesystem has two boot sectors – a primary one and a back-up located elsewhere on the drive. If there is a mismatch the filesystem will be unreadable. This was the case for me and I just figured it out and restored my Windows drive! Phew… my thesis is on that drive and its not done yet!!!

UW Engineering Open House – Little Red Hen’s Take

My husband's labTime for my take on my husband’s robotic fish and Engineering Open House. I had a really good time today! If Friday was the day for field trips, then Saturday was the day for families. I came to the open house today, Saturday, and got a kick out of observing the family dynamics of those who came. Some parents seemed to have engineering in their genes and wanted to share their interests with their children. Others were clearly bewildered by the technical questions their children were asking volunteers but were being good sports trying to feed the minds of their little Einsteins. I enjoyed watching Patrick field questions from adults and children alike, and my favorite interaction was between a father and Patrick. It went something like this:

Dad: So do you like video games? [Read more…]