15-year-old girl scoops top prize at Science Hack Day Nairobi
Leah Atieno, a 15-year old high school student came out top in the Judges Selection for her brilliant showcase of Alpharex, a 30 inch robot that walks and uses voice commands.
Interested in robotics, Leah says her interest in the event was only social as she sought to meet fellow hackers and developers.
George Mbuthia settled for the second spot with Data Mash, a data visualization and manipulation web tool with Denis Munene edging out other participants for the third position with Ufahamu, a crowd-mapping platform that promotes the fight against malaria.
Leah’s Alpharex was also attracted an extra award for the Best Hardware and Data Mash grabbing the Best Data award. Ufahamu squeezed in the second award by winning the Best Design category.
The other winning team as announced by the judges for the Best Science category included Muon’s Flight Path, an animated representation of the flight path of muons, created in the CMS detector by collisions of protons accelerated in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).
The three-day event saw the first group of more than 240 registered developers gather for the Science Hack Day at Nairobi’s Startup Garage last week Friday.
The highlight of the event came on Sunday when 21 teams took to the stage for the demo session. At the end, winning teams were honoured in six-prize categories-People’s Choice, Best In Show, The Data Award, The Brightworks Hardware Award, The Design Award and The DTRA Government Award.
The event brings together developers, designers and people with great technological ideas for a period of hacking and collaboration aimed at encouraging future collaboration, community building and social awareness of one another.
The Nairobi event featured several speakers among them Ariel Waldman, organizer of Science Hack Day San Francisco.
Sponsored by iLabAfrica, Github, Google, Microsoft, Kenya LPI, Poptech and Safaricom, the Nairobi event was the first of its kind in Kenya. Several Science Hack Day events have been held in cities across the world with the next two expected to be held in Chicago and Eindhoven.
Source : 15-year-old-girl-scoops-top-prize-at-Science-Hack-Day-Nairobi
CMS public data activity scoops prize in Nairobi
An application using real event data from CMS has won “Best Science” prize in a public “Science Hack Day” held in Nairobi between 13th and 15th April 2012. Science Hack days bring together a wide range of enthusiastic members of the public to create something completely new using existing scientific systems or data.
The winning application visualized real CMS di-muon events from the 2011 LHC run, which are made public for use in various educational programmes, such as the IPPOG Masterclasses, Quarknet and I2U2. The application showed an animation of muons produced in CMS superimposed on a map of the world, showing where they would go if they were to continue without stopping (which they don’t in reality).
Other prizes were awarded to Leah Atieno, a 15-year-old high-school student, for a voice-controlled walking robot and Denis Munene for a crowd-mapping platform to help promote the fight against malaria.
The Nairobi event, involving 240 developers, is part of broader series of Science Hack Day events. CMS data previously featured in another very successful event in San Francisco.
Source : http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/cms-public-data-activity-scoops-prize-nairobi
Dear gnome, you’ve lost one more die hard fan today.
I was mega pissed off when gnome was pulled from slackware. At that time one could argue that the only other fully featured usable desktop was KDE, and we all know KDE sucks! I’ve lived off garnome, the gsb project and other bearly usable slackware builds till now.
Today was the last straw (that broke my back). I upgraded to gnome 3.0 via gsb current build and found it to be too buggy, heavy and plain just unusable, gnome 3.2 was no different. It takes hours to get simple applets (power management e.t.c) to work and hardware keys don’t just work, you have to literally tweak everything to make it just right, and even then you always end up with the one little annoying problem that you can’t solve [ In my case this was when my computer went to “sleep mode”, I had to restart X just to get everything working again.
So after deciding that I will downgrade to gnome 2.3 via gsb and enjoy a “stable, old, working environment”, I figured that I might as well try something else, something lighter, something faster, something sexier. xfe 4! Guess what? am hooked. Gnome, bye! It was good while it lasted.
First Day at Flight School
Always wanted to fly, ever since I was a kid. I finally stopped procrastinating and signed up.
Had to do tons of paperwork though.
- Sent passport and driver’s license copies to the TSA.
- They ran a criminal background check on me.
- Had my fingerprints taken.
So after getting done with all the paperwork and the flight school officially “admitting” me. I went for my discovery flight.
The beauty I was flying in was a Cessna 172 in “sound mechanical state” . I had to ask.
We went to the aircraft and did about 30 minutes of ground lessons: What flaps do, how to manually check fuel quantity and quality, ailerons control, radios, avionics, the whole works.
Got into the plane, adjusted seat properly, did a pre-flight checkup and fired up the engine. Thrilling experience with the propeller spinning and all the 180 horse power tugging the plane along. Got authorization from ground control to taxi the the holding area.
I got a chance to navigate the plane with the toe brakes while taxing to the holding area Zulu.
The call finally came over the radio, permission to take off!
We got into runway Delta and my instructor pushed the throttle full in. Over the radio came the instructions: “When we hit 60 knots, pull gently on the joystick. I had no idea I was the one taking off! So game on, we push for a few seconds and I have my eye on the “six-pack”. I count up slowly 50-52-55-57-60, and I gently pull backwards, whoops! lift-off! We were ascending pretty fast and I noticed I was slightly banking to the left. Looking at the artificial horizon confirmed this, I slowly adjusted by banking to the right and slowly ascended till we were at 3500 ft.
From there it was pretty much awesome. We flew right over I-85 and towards lake lanier, slowly banking left and right and ascending and descending and generally learning the feel of the aircraft. I’d be headed north then the instructor would tell me over the radio to turn to SE and so forth and so on.
After about 1 hour of roaming suburban Atlanta skies, it was time to bring back the plane and land. I did not participate in landing. The instructor got permission from the tower and navigated towards the airstrip, he aligned the aircraft perpendicular to the airstrip till the runway was to my right then slowly turned and came in for the landing. Main gear down, nose gear down, pull the throttle back and turn into “Delta”, then into the parking.
There goes my first experience at the cockpit.
So what’s CS grad school like?
I always wondered what grad school would be? I imagined I would be bunker-ed up in the lab creating the next generation technology, building cool robots, solving the millennium problems e.t.c . It is less glitzy, very frustrating and sometimes just heart breaking. We do create cool stuff at the Mobile Apps research Lab and I do have fun sometimes, but in the end it boils down to:
- Sitting on my desk on Sunday at 2:00PM to wind up an assignment and ending up coding for 14 hours straight (now 6AM! Monday morning)
And in the 14 hours I have been sitting here: I’ve cursed why I left my job to go to school, wondered why I do this(!), really gotten pissed of at MS Visio for not having red-fucking-arrows that define database cardinality, cursed MS SQL Server for having crap syntax, wished my professor gave us DB work to do in MySQL instead of MS SQL, wondered if my professor is secretly punishing us for skipping his classes. Grad school, the end is so close I can taste it.
MS SQL Server error handler is totally crap. Stupid, stupid MS SQL.
Slackware 13.37 Kernel 3.1.2
Here’s my instructions of how to upgrade to Kernel 3.1.2 for Slackware 13.37 (adopted from http://standardcode.eu/blog/linux/compilation-and-installation-of-kernel-3.0.0-in-slackware.html )
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.1.2.tar.bz2
mv linux-3.1.2.tar.bz2 /usr/src/
cd /usr/src/
tar xfj linux-3.1.2.tar.bz2
rm -rf linux
ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.1.2 /usr/src/linux
cd /usr/src/linux
zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
make oldnoconfig
#use what you need - you can skip this if you want to use the current configs
make menuconfig
#use 'make -j(number of cores+1) all' for multicore processor. I have 4 cores so it's 'make -j5 all' for me
make all
make modules_install
#if make install fails because of your partition table, you can invoke lilo with either FIX_TABLE or IGNORE_TABLE
make install
cd /etc/rc.d
cp rc.modules rc.modules-3.1.2
rm rc.modules
ln -s /etc/rc.d/rc.modules-3.1.2 /etc/rc.d/rc.modules
mv /boot/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.2
ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.2 /boot/vmlinuz
mv /boot/System.map /boot/System.map-3.1.2
ln -s /boot/System.map-3.1.2 /boot/System.map
cp /usr/src/linux/.config /boot/config-3.1.2
rm /boot/config
ln -s /boot/config-3.1.2 /boot/config
#add new option and reconfigure old if needed
vim /etc/lilo.conf
lilo
Reboot and run ‘uname -r’ to confirm the new kernel version