Photo courtesy of Tazintosh My problem was that I was running a virtual machine in VMWare that didn't have enough hard drive space. The underlying host machine did have more hard drive space. I wanted to increase the amount...

I have a copy of TurboTax that I want to install on a Windows virtual machine. In order to do that I need to insert the DVD in the underlying host hardware first. Unfortunately that requires physical access to...

Props the telephone tech support at Apple who treated me like I had a brain and quickly helped me to fix my problem with my broken MacBook Pro built-in iSight. He said that the following procedure fixes about 40%...

NSF CAREER Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship Sloan Research Fellowship UCOP Opportunity Award UCI Faculty Career Development Award UCI Faculty Desktop Computing Initiative UCI Distinguished Assistant Faculty Award for Research/Teaching/Service UCI CORCLR Multi-Investigator UCI...

I was having a hard time getting the Processing graphics environment to work as a Java Application. Basically I wanted to use Processing as a quick way to embed some graphics into my existing java program, but quickly found...

Another one of those things I wish someone had taught me comes from David Kay in this email: "Okay; I get it now. Here's the story. It's actually a bit longer than you might expect. At any university, there are...

A graduate school survival guide: "So long, and thanks for the Ph.D!" a.k.a. "Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn't learn until later." The 4th guide in the Hitchhiker's guide trilogy (and if...

I have a Powerbook G4 laptop. From time to time I can't connect to an Ethernet landline, or a Wi-Fi access point and need to get on the Internet. During those times, it is very convenient to be able...

My advisor, Henry Kautz, offers this bit of wisdom that somehow I missed in my years of schooling. In addition to being a world-class AI researcher, he also has some creative writing credibility, so I would expect he could...

Don't you just hate it when you run out of the office with a copy of Doucet, Freitas, and Gordon's book, "Sequential Monte Carlo Methods in Practice", but you really should have had Duda, Hart, and Stork's, "Pattern Classification"...

Thursday night I went on the intern cruise and sat next to the Intel Seattle interns and Hans Mulder the Associate Director of Intel Research. We chatted about Intel's research strategy and a little about the SHARP RFID project,...

Here is a small interesting problem. A user in a smart home performs a sequence of activities and the smart home records a sensor stream that was generated by those activities. The sensors might be motion sensors or RFID...

Recently, at a joint Intel/University of Washington meeting, we had a discussion in which the performance of Java was called into question. Discussions like this rarely have much ammunition to support either side. However, in this case, there seems...