Kyle Dickerson – Page 110 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Tilden Regional Park

May 12, 2013 3:14 pm

Last week we learned about Tilden Regional Park. I don’t remember how, but I had stumbled across something that mentioned the “Steam Trains” which sounded interesting. As it turns out, they have a great little narrow-gauge, scale-model (I think it’s 1:5) train system. For $3 per person you get to ride the train around for about 15 minutes. They have tunnels and bridges and roundhouses and water towers. It’s great fun.

Heather thought it was pretty fun, but she was a little unsure about the whistle. It would startle her every time it blew.

Also in the park is a “Little Farm” with some animals. Heather loved watching the ducks and chickens run around. She made sure to keep an eye on the rooster which kept crowing. The cows weren’t interested in us much because we didn’t bring any food for them, but we were able to get some face time anyway.

From there it was on to the carousel. Yes, this park also has a carousel (and no parking/entrance fees!). The carousel is $2 a ticket or 7 tickets for $10. Given that Heather’s favorite part about Disneyland was the carousels we figured this was a good bet. And she got very excited when she saw it and realized what it was.

Heather mostly had her ride face on, but she was loving it.

And here’s photographic proof that I was there too.

Getting up to the park takes us through Walnut Creek, so, of course, lunch on the way home was at the new Chick-Fil-A.

Word of warning:
We decided that anytime anyone comes to visit us from now on we’ll need to go ride the train and carousel. They run all year round, weather permitting.

2007 Honda Civic Efficiency Update

May 7, 2013 7:41 pm

Just an update on the gas mileage efficiency I’ve been getting with my 2007 Honda Civic (automatic transmission). The orange line represents the average, which is currently hovering just above 30MPG. The EPA rating was 25/36 so I’m doing pretty well still.

It does look like the efficiency may have dropped a little bit starting around autumn 2011. But it’s hard to say for sure since the gasoline formulations change regularly what with the summer/winter mixes and inconsistent ethanol levels.

Vacation Part 1: Aquarium of the Pacific

April 28, 2013 8:45 am

We went down to southern California for most of the week on a short vacation. We drove down on Sunday and met up with Josh (of Project Runway fame) for dinner. On Monday we met up with him again to go to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach.

Traffic in the Los Angeles area is notoriously bad, but what makes it even more fun is when they hold a Grand Prix event on the blocks that surround the place you’re trying to get to. The Aquarium had been closed over the weekend for the race, but reopened on Monday. However, they were just starting to take down all of the fencing, barriers, stands, etc. from the race. So roads were randomly blocked off and everything our GPS unit wanted us to do was simply not possible. We finally wandered into a member of the event staff at yet another intersection where our only allowed movement was a U-turn. They were able to tell us how to get to the aquarium.

Heather thought it was pretty great.

Being my daughter, she loved the penguins. Mainly the penguin statues though; which she, of course, felt the need to kiss.

Turns out that having a third pair of hands with us made things much more manageable: one to handle Heather, one to push the stroller, and one to take pictures. Thanks again, Josh!

For somewhat unknown reasons, the aquarium also has a lorikeet exhibit you can walk through. You can buy a little cup of nectar to feed the birds. This wasn’t any of us, just some random other person feeding this bird.

Jess finds the jellyfish to be mesmerizing.

Here’s Heather playing in a touch pool:

Josh meets up with a sea turtle:

And this is Jess’ other favorite thing at aquariums, sea dragons:

And this is where we part ways.

Heather’s Got Moves!

April 14, 2013 12:47 pm

Heather got up this morning and just couldn’t hold in her dance energy, so we put some music on for her and let her go.

It’s the best 60 seconds you’ll spend this week, I promise.

Automaton Simulator

March 23, 2013 5:20 pm

I posted about this on Google+ a while back, but I’ve updated the site and it’s now much cleaner. I still have a few features I’d like to add in the future, but they don’t really impact the site’s purpose.

Anyway, I present AutomatonSimulator.com:

In Computer Science we study simple automatons called finite-state machines. They are equivalent to various useful language concepts. For example, Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) can be used to process any Regular Language (i.e., regular expressions, which are infinitely useful). And Push-Down Automata (PDA) can process any Context-Free Grammars.

In the CS course I TA’d for as a student, CS 252, a chunk of the course is devoted to working with these concepts. This usually means developing a working automaton design based on some desired language recognition. For example, make a machine that will accept strings that alternate between “A” and “B”. Or, make a machine that will accept strings that have the same number of “A”s as “B”s.

They’re usually quite meaningless in and of themselves, but the point is to develop the skills necessary to understand how programming languages are created and why, as well as to hone the ability to logically analyze problems and build logically consistent solutions.

Well, we had to do all this work by hand. Drawing out machines, tracing through their execution, finding bugs, and making sure they did what they were supposed to without doing things they weren’t supposed to.

As the TA I had to grade a lot of these messily drawn machines that often didn’t work. It was tiring. So to aid my grading I wrote a simple simulator in Python for each machine type. Then I’d encode each student’s machine into my simulator, run a bunch of tests and figure out from there whether it worked and, if not, how badly it was wrong.

AutomatonSimulator.com is a fully functional tool to visually create and test these types of machines. I took my Python simulators, rewrote them in Javascript, and built a lovely UI around them.

You can save/load machines from your browser’s local storage. Or you can copy/paste machine descriptions to share with other people. A small set of examples is included on the site. You can debug a machine by stepping through an input and you can bulk test a large set of strings with a single button press.

I had fun creating the site and hopefully CS students will find it useful in developing their understanding of finite-state machines.

Something I’d like to do in the future is to build a simple game around the site. It wouldn’t be very involved, but it would challenge the user to build a machine for a certain language and help them make the connections between these machines and regular expressions. We’ll see if I get around to it someday.