Moving to sunju.org

I’m in the process of moving this blog to http://www.sunju.org (probably also mirrored at http://www.columbia.edu/~js4038/ in due time, hopefully), which obviously features my own domain name. One of the biggest reason to move is to allow wide accessibility of the blog, as wordpress.com is believed to be blocked by the great firewall of mainland China.

I’ll keep the old content intact here. Comments are always welcome and please post them on the new sites. Unfortunately I’m not bothered to move the old comments along.

How to fix ‘$MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0)’ [updated version… ]

I hate Toshiba external disk driver’s fragile cable port … you have to keep your hands on while data are being transferred; otherwise you probably find the current article or this (a) or this (b).

This (a) has explained things pretty clearly, except for that you won’t find ntfsprogs in recent versions of Linux distributions, as the ntfsprogs project has been merged with the ntfs-3g project under Tuxera Inc. according to Wiki. The real attack works as described in Answer in this (b), except that one needs to check out the mount point by “sudo fdisk -l” and “sudo ntfsfix -b XXX” to get the program to start the fix, where XXX is to be replaced by the real mount point.

Signs of Spring about Riverside

侏罗纪公园！

恕我童年枉度，这部关于复活恐龙和人龙斗的片子我是第一次看。不过3D的妙处，确实在此种动作剧烈和景深参差的电影中，才能被体现的淋漓透彻。另一例子如《阿凡达》。

内容我就不总结了，以防制造笑料，毕竟还不知后续剧情(我就只等3D了)。主要总结各位痴人之梦语如下，仅供娱己。

一、科学家很危险，特别是狂热型的。当然尤其是搞生物和物理的一一此影片在验证前者，金三世的小朝廷正在验证后者。科学加政治是毁灭。

一、码工不可靠，尤其胖子码工。人家需要花钱畜油，你当老板的让人家总差钱是要把人逼成反派的。

一、戴墨镜的爱耍流氓。那个试验为名搞亲密接触的家伙，当着人家老公求交往。不过这家伙相对于那个倔强的老头还是有点科学良知的。

一、律师招人厌，也最没节操。坐在马桶上 死，是不是剧组为迎合观众的深度发泄和调侃。就像骂人“生孩子没屁眼”，这个是“死在马桶上”。

一、科学家很现世，特别是看到子funding 。对于在沙地里挖恐龙的主，钱比啥的风力都大。

一、话多的熊孩子是美剧的黄金导线；你觉的可有可无又控场的角色，如挖恐龙的夫妇，铁定的英雄好汉。主人英雄主义横行乃王道。

一、恐龙也有素食主义者的，它们可爱温驯。

Script for OpenCV installation on Ubuntu 12.10

Installing OpenCV on Ubuntu was painful for me in the past. There are lots of dependencies to be sorted out first and there’s no comprehensive installation tutorial shipped with the OpenCV distribution.
This script has done a great job assembling all necessary “apt-get-install’s” into an executable script. Some personal notes about this:

• It seems to me ” sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev” for dependencies is not necessary – this will be superseded by the subsequent installation of opencv from source. At the end of the scripting installation, the package seems to be in some cache place and be not in effect:
  
• It seems ” sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev” is also unnecessary. These libraries are to be provided by the next fresh installation of ffmpeg follows. Checking their location seems to also confirm my guess:
  
• About version of ffmpeg: ffmepg is under active development as always. The choice of its version is sometimes tricky, especially in running together with OpenCV. I remember the 1.x series was not compatible with OpenCV 2.3 in my previous trial (compilation errors were thrown due to some problem with ffmpeg libraries). The current 2.4.3 version seems to be at least fine with ffmpeg 0.11.2 in compilation.

[Update] From test by Mr. Alok Singh Mahor   (comments below), installing Ubuntu package “libopencv-dev” would already get things work, though the linking order with g++ has to be taken care of as discussed (also comments below and here) . Of course, it’s not bad idea to install from source that always guarantees to bring  in the newest feature of actively developed OpenCV. [Dec 28 2012]

Photos taken at Florence (Italy) and Beer Mountain (New York)

Follow the pictures and click to enter my google photo galleries. I hope you enjoy~

Florence Gallery

Beer Mountain Gallery (Oct 27 2012)

Math bits from a computational blog

This blog (“Walking randomly”) contains a pretty host of good pieces in computational programming, in Matlab, Python, R, etc, and also of news about computational software, particularly open-source tools, and mathematics by large.

Several that are of interest to most (after a very random walk of recent entries):

• Randomness in Matlab (discussing why using the new random generator controller rng() is important, here also)
• Pandas toolbox (Python data analysis package frequently mentioned in the blog)
• The Julia language (A new high-level language targeted for high-performance with the slightest coding pain)
• Disagreement on operator precedence for 2^3^4 (Don’t be afraid to use brackets!)
• Nonlinear eigenvalue problems and a toolbox (Solving problem of the form where maps complex scalars to complex matrices (e.g., matrix-coefficient polynomials). Applications can be found in many minimal problems in computer vision, e.g., the relative pose problem.
• Will 2012 be the year when OpenCL adoption really takes off? (Describing trends in CPU-contained GPU units and relative lack in OpenCL’s stand in scientific computing arena)

Tallest Iphone Everrr!

海风中骑行：Manhattan Waterfront Greenway

弄到手头这辆自行车之后，心里就一直痒着要牵出去溜溜。网上查到这个Greenway 之后，忍不住激动，拉着车就出发了！（哥也是有车的人啦！哈哈哈）

按官方的说法，这条Greenway 全长32 Miles （约51.2 公里）。西边沿Hudson River 一直蜿蜒至Battery Park, 远眺自由女神后，折向东北，继而继续蜿蜒前行，经Manhattan Bridge, Willamburg Bridge, 联合国， 至Harlem River 上游。

我从West 103 街的入口，取道Riverside Park。时值下午3点左右，众多的New Yorkers在公园里玩弄时光：跑步的人最多好像，然后慢性散步的，脱了上衣晒太阳的，轮滑的，当然也有谈请说爱的。哥关注玩Soccer的小朋友们

从一座天桥下穿过后，Hudsen River已尽在眼前。来去匆匆的跑步的和骑行者，点缀着这座都市的一个典型周末。河风，在单车旁拍打，渗透，直至心灵。好清爽的下午！河上的泛舟者，伴着偶尔的帆船，让人们诉说风中点点惺味的来由。

CVX Annouced Version 2 (beta)

CVX has become an indispensable tool for modeling and prototyping in various scientific disciplines, in particular where optimization play significant roles.  It provides a most intuitive modeling interface that bridges complex formulation and the underlying numerical solvers, saving the user abundant time for thinking.

Version 2 of CVX has featured extended support for commercial solvers, MOSEK and Gurobi. This is really good news for academic users, since 1) both solvers provide free licenses to academic users; and 2) both solvers are mostly more optimized than the free solvers currently bundles with CVX, namely, SDPT3 and SeDuMi. Related part of the announcement as follows:

• Academic users may utilize the CVX Professional capability at no charge.
  • Users with a valid academic license for Gurobi 5.0 or later may use it with CVX without obtaining a CVX Professional license. This is because CVX is able to detect the presence of an academic Gurobi license.
  • In order to use MOSEK, a CVX Professional license is required. We intend to provide such licenses at no charge, but we have not yet completed the licensing architecture. We will make an announcement once this has been completed.

In addition, mailing list support has changed into a Q&A forum (StackExchange style …) and the documentation has changed to online html version with better cross references.