I’ve been less than a year at my job, and it’s becoming clear why we’re encouraged to write specifications of our features from so many different angles.  It’s nearly impossible for someone else to pick up your project without any sort of communication between the originating party and the new party.  Textual, visual, and even audio/visual documentation is an relatively easy, time-efficient way to commute with your users, customers, and future maintainers.

Everyone seems to hate doing creating docs though, as if they admit that it is a necessary evil.  I must be in the minority since I enjoy it!  I’m in the process of documenting a molecular computation suite and how it’s used.  I learn more about my own process while documenting and it really causes me to question my own workflow and see how it can be optimized.

• Working on plaza improvement near the west main gate of Husky Stadium (E17) to accomadate increased pedestrian density during games/events,
• Montlake and Pacific intersection will have a protected left turn signal added for southbound Montlake traffic into the access road,
• A temporary complete sidewalk closure (4 weeks) on the east side of Montlake Blvd for four weeks to erect noise wall along the street
• After wall is finished, a slurry wall we be constructed underground to outline the future station and ensure the integrity of future digging,
• After slurry wall completed, main excavation down 100ft begins! The tunnel boring machine (TBM) will arrive Spring 2011; the station contract is set to be awarded June 2010, with construction on that starting March 2011.
• Trucking schedule is mostly at night, hauling hours now are established to be 2-3pm, 10pm-7am. Negotiations with the city might allow 12 hour hauling window from 7p-7am.

A couple of interesting comments came up. When first asked for public questions, an older gentleman berated the public relations part of these community meetings (poor Wilbert!), saying that no one came door to door to the historic Montlake homes to inform affected residents of the presence of the meetings and how the sound is “carrying really well” across the cut. He repeated this gripe two more times. Sound Transit replied that they had done door-to-door canvasing in the neighborhood in addition to public flyers and email announcements, and countered his argument that none of his neighbors knew about these meetings by claiming that his neighbors had indeed shown up to previous meetings and voiced similar concerns to his (noise, hauling schedule).

On the topic of noise (which seems extremely silly to me because this station seems to affect the least homes due to its position far away from residential areas), ST said the contractor applied for a temporary noise variance permit (in addition to the February-approved 24 month permit for six decibles over ambient) to experiment with what equipment can and cannot be used during the night hours.

With respect to the pedestrian bridge, Sound Transit noted that SDOT policy discourages pedestrian bridges (seems rather non-applicable to this situation), and also withdrew their portion of funding due to budget constraints. This leaves the UW with $4 million and ST with $4 million + the cost of the pedestrian bridge to find an alternative. A public meeting on this topic will be held very soon in May or June.

Lastly, environmental impacts were brought up. Concerns over the gobbling of green space by the parking lot by the project were voices, especially of the climbing wall and old cottonwood trees. Sound Transit assured that no futher use of green area is required and that the rock wall will be fine.

It’s often striking to observe what my fellow Seattleite does when confronted with sudden weather changes and weather of that they don’t approve (which is another topic in itself). Many people lament the fact that it is raining, despite being shielded from the elements by being in buildings at work/school, parking garages between work and car, in a closed car while commuting, and a warm home in the evenings. People seem to absolutely abhor stepping outside into the rain. When they do, it’s never at a walking pace.

Putting down the weather always seemed like needless arrogance to me. There’s a reason that everything in this region is so green and living – this wonderful rain that sprinkles down now and again makes sure that Seattle and the surrounding area never go brown. While it may be an inconvenience if you’re trying to stay dry for your skip-level meeting, it is incredibly beneficial for so many animals, plants, and soil.

Besides, it’s so much more fun playing soccer in the rain.

It’s always been my goal to stay humble about the weather – at least we can give Mother Nature the control that she desires.

Using Jason Smith’s Wiimote Presenter, I just remapped some keys to make more sense for Hulu.  The Hulu configuration file for Wiimote Presenter is here.

Windows 7 also comes with Bluetooth support in-box, so all you have to do (if you have a BT dongle or laptop) is right-click the Bluetooth icon in the system tray, go to add device, press 1+2 on the wiimote, click the wiimote in the device list, and select the option to pair without a code.

Basically, ipconfig /all would give me the following message:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::ed42:547:5d1b:20ef%9
Autoconfiguration IPv4 Address. . : 169.254.32.239
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

Ooooh, how fun, they say.  169.254.x.x is the IANA-defined black-hole.  Oops.  Of course, rebuilding the IP stack or turning off IPv6 didn’t help.  Sigh.  Probably recommending that everyone remove Norton now now that MS Security Essentials, AVG, Ad-aware, etc etc do a better job without destroying the computer while updating.

The issue is that a phone can be locked out if too many tries of the unlock pattern fails to unlock a phone (usually a friend or a kid playing with the pattern maker).  The fallback mechanism that the Android puts forth is to fall back to the google login screen, which prompts for the google apps account associated with the phone.  Only problem is that even though you enter your username and password correctly, the phone refuses to let you in.  This is with Android 1.6.

Here’s how I fixed it, based on feedback from the above two bugs.

1. Have someone call you.
2. Either you or the caller hang up.
3. Immediately start mashing the home button, this should bring you to the home screen, bypassing the lock.  Be wary as inactivity will reinstate the lock (though a keyboard-open event will bypass it again).
4. Go into Settings > Security and disable the pattern lock by entering your pattern.
5. Put the phone to sleep.
6. Wake it up, and enter in your username associated with the phone.
7. Enter in ‘null‘ as the password (no quotes).
8. Rejoice.

I’m not sure if entering in null as your password in the outset will work, but that’ll be fun if it did! 

The problem with the implementation here is that if the phone is locked out, the Android phone will check a local hash of the account password.  At some point in the unlock process, however, this hash is screwed up and overwritten.  The phone seems to have no inclination to connect to 3G in order to verify the password, though some users have reported persuading the phone to connect to the internet in order to verify the password.

Seems like a serious issue as the only solution before this fix was to hard-reset the phone.  Any issue like this that threatens to corrupt/lose customer data should be prioritized to the top-level.  That’s, of course, not to mention (“the feature”) that you can circumvent the security mechanism by mashing the home button!  I hope this helps anyone else that runs into this problem.

There were a considerable number of repeat questions after Sound Transit’s presentation, and it was definitely neat to see that the plans are a lot more concrete and the plans make practical sense (for the most part!). Questions such as bike access (grade-separation from the Burke-Gillman trail, bike runners for the stairs on the east end), trucking soil and spoils out of the excavation area (modifying the Montlake/Pacific Wy signal), and parking issues dominated the Q&A period.

Then came the UW presentation for the overhaul of Rainier Vista and everything went incredibly insane. The guy gave a decent presentation, although quite sparse on the comparisons with replacing Sound Transit’s arcing footbridge to the south end of C-12 with a 100-ft wide lid over Pacific Place (necessitating the need for regrading the street 17 feet lower) and using a separate signaled crosswalk to cross Montlake at the midpoint between Pacific Pl and Pacific Ave (think the Seattle Aquarium crosswalk).  I’ve included a picture below.

It’s tiny at the moment, hopefully a better image will surface in the next couple of days.  One of the most important debatable aspects of the design is the crossing at Montlake that’s partially hidden by the lower text bubble.  Sound Transit is predicting at least 10,000 daily trips using the light rail at Husky Stadium by 2030.  Which one supports this growth?  Apparently 25% of riders are expected to make transit connections, and 70% of the remaining 75% will go north to upper campus.  The remaining 22% will go to the hospital and points south.

Of course, most of the criticism that came after the UW presentation was the practicality of the change compared to the Sound Transit proposal ($18 mil vs. $6-8 mil) and the complete infeasibility of an at-grade crossing for over 75% of users.  The poor UW guy eventually shut down while suggestions and criticisms were voiced against the UW plan, but some important points were raised.  One gentleman was particularly concerned with the jaywalking tendancies and the lack of queuing of the university community and questioned the pace of the traffic light counter to pedestrian traffic (“…if the traffic light isn’t responsive to within 10 seconds, it’s not fast enough…“, to which the reply was “…[the light] is fixed to 30-second intervals.“)  Many concerns were raised about efficiency; is constructing a 100-ft wide bridge only accessible from the station/bus stops by crosswalk really necessary?  The Seattle Transit Blog has a little discussion about pedestrian feasibility in the area, though throughout the presentation it was becoming clear that a pedestrian bridge would not be constructed in conjunction with the Rainier Vista lid.

Neither option supports good connections to the hospital, and it came up through some discussions with other people at the meeting that the medical center didn’t support a dedicated pedestrian right-of-way from the station to the hospital (why? crowd control?).  People that work/visit at the hospital will still have to make the two-hop jump to the hospital through Montlake and Pacific. 

My suggestion would be to extend Sound Transit’s bridge idea. At the current time, transit planners are envisioning re-routing buses to take advantage of the light-rail transfer and utilize the north side of Pacific Pl, hence the inclusion of a stairwell and elevator in the center of the walkway span. Instead of (or in addition to), there should be a pedestrian ramp from that midpoint toward the center of the vista triangle. While this enables people to populate the triangle (it hardly gets any traffic and can be a decent gathering area), it allows for a one-crosswalk connection to the hospital, bike connection to street level, and access to future bus stops.

After adding all the data to a sql server instance, I hacked together a C# program to extract the lat/long points for each shape and encode Google Maps polylines, with the help of an implementation Mark Rambow did in java.  That put info back into the database, so I exported it into mysql and put it up on Alpertopia.

It seems to work pretty well!  There’s a wacky issue with some routes completely screwing up the map though; so if a route doesn’t display, you’ll have to reload the page.  I haven’t pinned down the bug yet.. One of the coolest things here is jQuery, which everyone on the internet says is awesome.  I really didn’t like the syntax at first, but my then-roommate Chris was using it in his research and was extoling the virtues of it.  Looking at the code of my hacking above, I’ve gotta admit that it’s pretty nice

Those shape IDs correspond to individual trips that the buses take, so that a  bus can have more than just two trips (allows for express, weekend, snow routes).  That’s the next step, hopefully.

If there’s any interest in the code behind it to generate the polylines, I’d be happy to make it available.

I have graduated from the University of Washington and am now working with Microsoft in Windows Core! It’s an interesting transition as I’ve been in academia for nearly all of my life as the expectations, responsibilities, and obligations are different, and free time is radically different (only in the evening, usually not on my terms!). I’m working with a great group of people, and they’ve been really accommodating to me.

For my senior thesis, I wrote a little bit about quantum computation. You can learn more about it by clicking on the image on the right-hand side or by browsing to the projects page.  It went pretty well, but I’ve been rather anxious at how quickly it ended; I feel like I need to actually complete the research in order to tie it off!

I recently trundled down to the SDOT warehouse in SoDo to pick up some surplus signs.  I took a couple pictures with my phone and some pictures of the spoils!  Greenwood Ave., Sand Pt. Wy., Fremont Ave., and Newton St. all made the cut!  See the pictures below or at the Flickr set.

I’m hoping to get a lot of backpacking in this fall, keep your eyes posted for pictures soon.