This morning I raced my first 5K run at the Mercer Island Half Marathon. Before the race, I was a bit nervous about how I would perform, since I had trained mostly in the gym, on a treadmill. However, when the race started I went into game mode and kept to my pace. Running with hundreds of other fellow athletes gave me a sense of community I had never experienced before; it was exhilarating.  At the end, I pulled all stops and sprinted the final part. I felt like I was flying. I didn't see Elizabeth, but she took the photo below. All I remember are the cow bells ringing us home and supportive shouts: "You can do it!" "You're almost there!". After crossing the finish line, I was overwhelmed with a sense of accomplishment. I finished in just under 30 minutes (chip time); more detailed results are here.

This was definitely a fun experience for me; I'll definitely be doing it again!

Here is a link to  some more photos, shown on a map of the race.

I have been looking for a good lossless video codec for about 4 years now. Lossless video codecs are useful for preserving time-varying scientific data, viewing videos with natural and synthetic imagery, or basically for exporting any video you want to later compress using VirtualDub.

Exporting raw movies from Premiere takes up a lot of space; a 5 minute video can take up more than 4 gigs of hard-drive space. Even worse, VirtualDub can't read these 4+ gig files! (Perhaps a 64bit version can?). Premiere also has problems editing and exporting videos using a couple MPEG4 codecs: Xvid and DivX. One workaround is to use a Quicktime wrapper with the Animation codec. But what if I want to use an AVI wrapper so I can embed videos in a Powerpoint slide?

HuffYUV to the rescue! HuffYUV (FourCC: HFYU) is a lossless video codec that is fast, and free. Premiere is happy editing/exporting videos using this codec. VirtualDub can later recompress this using your favorite MPEG4 codec. I use this codec all the time for archiving my research in progress. Since the codec is lossless, I can snip out frames for Powerpoint presentations, etc. You can even tell Matlab to use HuffYUV as the compression codec when creating an avi by specifying the FourCC HYFU.

One caveat: Huffyuv assumes that your video has a horizontal resolution which is a multiple of four.

Enjoy!

Well, this is my first post using Microsoft’s Word 2007 Beta 2. I read that Word 2007 would have blogging capabilities and was quite curious. This curiosity and my increasing annoyance at consumer technologies was enough to start me in the world of blogging.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Billy, and I’m 27 years old. I will soon be getting my Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science. During my time at school, I studied graphics and worked with image-based representations of objects. Later this fall, I will be joining Microsoft in an effort to combine my love of research with my interest in building technologies with real impact on people. Outside of work, I enjoy playing intellectual games like go, and chess, playing the piano, and running.

Ok, that’s me in less than 100 words. Now the important stuff: the goal of this blog. In some sense, my blog exemplifies what a majority of other blogs illustrate: a brain dump of some random person’s life. However, I’d like to think that my life has some pretty interesting daily features. Perhaps it’s the people I hang out with, or the way my brain is wired, but I find myself thinking about or discussing some pretty interesting (but wacky) topics.

For example, just the other day, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about doubly land-locked countries. A land-locked country is a country that is surrounded by land (e.g. other countries). A doubly land-locked country is a country that is surrounded by land-locked countries. For example, Niger is a land-locked country because it is surrounded by Libya, Chad, Nigeria, Benin, etc. It is not a doubly land-locked country because Benin is incident to the Atlantic. It turns out (although I have no proof), that there are only two doubly land-locked countries. Do you know which countries they are?

I guessed Liechtenstein, which is correct (see here for yourself). The other is Uzbekistan. Knowing that piece of trivia is fun, but how do we know it’s actually true? The CIA world factbook claims that this is true. However, it also claims that Taiwan is a country with its own capital, etc. There is at least one country that would dispute this claim. If there are more doubly land-locked countries, how would we go about computing these countries? It turns out, that if we could construct a graph where each node is a country (and special nodes exist for the different oceans), and an edge between two nodes represents adjacency in the world, then the algorithm is simple: remove all nodes connected to “ocean nodes”. The remaining land nodes are at least singly land-locked (otherwise they would have been removed in the first iteration. Next, remove any nodes that were adjacent to the nodes removed in the first iteration. These nodes were land-locked, but not doubly land-locked. The remaining nodes are at least doubly land-locked (are there triply land-locked countries??). Neat. Now if only I could get my hands on such a graph………

Anyway, that’s a taste of what I like to think about. If you like, stay tuned for more!