Huffman Coding

Two years ago I took my oldest daughter to Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day at Ohio State.  I shadowed Marissa as she learned about chemical and civil engineering by making bath soaps, ice cream and attempting to build a structure out of 3″x5″ index cards that would hold a stack of bricks six inches above a flat table surface.

Back then, I was with another engineering dad and we watched helplessly from the sidelines as our daughters team built something that, as we found out later, couldn’t hold a single brick.  Both my daughter and her friend had a good time, but they complained on the way home about a bossy teammate who wanted to control a design that turned out to be inferior.

I to this year’s event today with both Marissa and Katie.  They made homemade chalk, stretched bubble gum, and assembled a doorbell buzzer.

Katie and Marissa at OSU

This year, however, they wouldn’t allow the parents to follow their daughters around so I wasn’t able to get any good pictures of them being engineeringesque. The adults were sequestered in the lecture hall for a few, less compelling talks.  There was however a team exercise in the middle of the day for the parents which just happened to be the same brick levitating task given my third grader two years ago.

Each team had to keep track of the number of 3″x5″ cards they used, the number of cards that had to be bent or folded, and the number of staples what were used.  These numbers went into a formula for the “cost” of the design.  The goal was to see who could achieve the highest ratio of bricks held to the overall cost.

Knowing what designs did work two years ago, I felt I had insider information.  I become the leader that I’m sure my teammates found annoying.  :-)  Unfortunately the other teams of adults knew about cylindrical shapes too.

While I’m sure we would have humiliated teams comprised of 8-year-olds, we ended up in the middle of the pack of the adult competitors.  Our design wasn’t too expensive and it held a respectable 6 bricks, but it wasn’t enough.

Right before it fell...

The guy you see in the background on the right was from the team that won.  Their design only held one brick more than ours could, but theirs was constructed with half the cards and without any staples!  Since the cost of their design was about one third of ours, we would have had to hold twenty bricks to have beaten them.

Takeaway lesson: never ask a software engineer to do hardware.

I put in my travel request at work this morning for a software conference.  I was unsure whether I’d be allowed to attend with the economy being was it is, but last Friday my boss said yes.

And my boss’s boss, the VP of engineering, said yes too.

And then I went home for the weekend for the ultimate boss approval.

My wife Chris said sure… and then she reminded me that the conference was during our 15th anniversary.  Doh!

I did a 6-mile ride with Claire on the tandem this afternoon.  It was my usual short route out to a rural elementary school and back.

To alleviate some of the boredom and to give the rider something to do (other than poking the cell phone in my back pocket), I put a speedometer on the bike for the stoker. Claire kept on announcing her speed and she continually asked me what my computer was showing.  After several reports were exchanged, I eventually explained to her that the front half of the bike goes the same speed as the back half.  She seemed to accept that.  On the way out, we went  too fast for her liking: a whopping 13mph.

We stopped, as usual, at the school to allow her to stretch her legs and play on the school’s playground equipment.  She could only do the two older slides, because all the new slides emptied out into wood chip indentations that were filled with ice water runoff from last week’s snow.  The rock climbing wall was puddle free, but the jungle gym spanned another big puddle.

But the swings were too enticing for her.  She gingerly boarded the swing from the edge of the ice puddle underneath it, but after she lost her back and forth momentum, she submerged both her feet extricating herself from her perch.  We moved to a bench and she tossed her now wet shoes at me.  She wanted me to air dry her shoes with the frame pump I had pointed out a hour earlier while we prepping the bike.  I puffed on her shoes instead.

When I told her that I would not allow her to pedal in her stocking feet, she put her shoes back on and we headed home after reading the playground rules.  The first rule said you weren’t supposed to play on wet equipment.  The last rule said you weren’t supposed to take off your shoes.  Claire said it was okay because there were no teachers around.

On the way home she asked whether we would be warmer going to slow or fast.  After I told her we’d spend less time in the cold if we rode fast, 14 mph was no longer fast enough for her and she started pedaling harder and shifting her weight.

I told her to stop wobbling and she responded:

I’m not wobbling; I’m fastering!

Last night I plunged the upstairs toilet to prevent it from overflowing.  I also adjusted the float on the master bath toilet so it would not continually run.

This morning I, with the aid of noxious chemicals, cleaned out the drain of the upstairs bathtub.

I also took apart the pipes of the two upstairs sinks to remove large clogs that we causing them to drain very slowly.

Hey, I believe these efforts make me qualified to be a war correspondent.

Slashdot.org has article on the naming of computer servers, so I thought I’d share.

When I started at my current job, we got to name the computers that sat in our offices.  I named my first server “merckx,” after the most decorated road cyclist of all time.  For the first couple of months, my co-workers could never remember the order of the consonants in his name.

A few years later, I upgraded my development machine to another box and I named it “indurain.” He was the latest (at the time) 5-time winner of the Tour de France.  My co-workers we pleased that that was a least phonetic.

The team grew and I got to name another machine: “hinault.”  Yet another 5-time winner of the bike race.  Yes, I have a one track mind.  He name is pronounced EEE-no so I had to spell it out for my colleagues for them to access it.

Keeping with the trend, I named the next one “anquetil.”  Yet another French name.

Within days our IT staff decided that they would take over responsibility for naming our servers from that point on.