Hiking at Mount Misery in Lincoln, MA
Erika and I, under advisement from boston.com, decided to try to hike to Mount Misery in Lincoln, MA. It was nice to get outside on such a nice day, but the directions from the website were TERRIBLE. We never made it to the mountain, and we never even saw it. A sample from the directions: “Walk up the road for about 50 yards, and take left into Linden Tree Farm”. This sounds like reasonable directions, except when you get to the road, you can either go right or left. “Up” is an ambiguous direction, and I think we went the wrong way. I would not recommend attempting to do this hike, unless you want to wander aimlessly around Lincoln for a while. On the ride back though, we saved a turtle from getting run over, so I consider this a successful day. Also, check out my photosynth of Erika on a swing (have to be using Internet Explorer).
The turtle was in the middle of the road.
So we put him in the pond across the street where we think he was headed.
Plug for MIT Lincoln Laboratory (“The Lab”)
As cool as it looks
For the past two years I have worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, or the Lab for short. Not many people outside of the research circles know about this place, and in fact I only stumbled upon it in my job search because I went to a job fair for high tech companies and got some literature. In fact, the wikipedia page on the Lab is comically short considering the amount of research that has been conducted there for the past 50+ years – while the Lab didn’t invent radar, it probably perfected it. However, because most of this research is classified for national security, 95% of the amazing work by Lab scientists goes unpublished. When I was looking around for information on the Lab, I could hardly find any online, so hopefully somebody may stumble upon this page when they are thinking about working there.
While at the Lab, I worked for the Surveillance Systems group, Group 42. When I got to the Lab, the group was called the Air Traffic Control and Surveillance Systems Group, and about half of the group’s research is sponsored by the FAA. Most of my work centered around the TCAS collision avoidance system, which is mandated by Congress to be installed on every commercial passenger aircraft above a certain size.
TCAS vertical speed indicator (displayed in cockpit)
I also worked on new collision avoidance systems for UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles). My major project was developing airspace encounter models for generating random, realistic encounters so that these systems can be tested in simulation. Over the course of developing these models, I learned a great deal about Bayesian networks, Monte Carlo methods, importance sampling, radar (note: the giant radar ALTAIR in that link is operated by Lincoln for missile defense in the Marshall Islands), flight dynamics, and especially air traffic control. It was a fascinating project, and only one of many fascinating projects that I was involved in (I will probably blog about my thoughts on ATC at some point in the future).
Global Hawk, one of the platforms we worked with.
I’ve worked with some amazingly smart and capable people who I now consider my friends. In particular Mykel Kochenderfer and Jim Kuchar have been my mentors, among many others who don’t have personal websites. Over half of the Lab employees have PhDs, most from MIT and other top schools, and the sheer brain power there is kind of awesome. People also work at the Lab for the love of their research, and that definately comes through as well.
I will be leaving the Lab in a couple months because I accepted an offer to be a LGO fellow at MIT. However, my work there has been very intellectually satisfying, and it has served to focus my future academic interests. For instance, I will recieve a MS in Computer Science, largely because my work at the Lab has piqued my interest in AI and machine learning. In particular, I hope to research how these principles can be applied to improve the efficiency and operation of manufacturing companies. I would say that the Lab is an excellent place to work if you are interested in doing cutting edge research, are intellectually curious and smart, and enjoy tackling difficult problems in the area of national defense, homeland security or the FAA.
Creating a personal website
As I was going through the process of creating my own website, I decided that my inaugural blog post would be about the process of creating a website, because I found that steps that the most basic steps that work do not exist in one area. I really have no idea how the internet works, so hopefully somebody like me who started out by googling “creating a personal website using Vista” will be able to find this page, and get some detailed advice as to what worked for me. This step by step guide will be for people who are using Windows Vista and interested in having their website hosted by a hosting service, which will obviously cost some money (currently $6.95 a month plus startup fees from lypha) but I would recommend due to ease of use, service and support, garaunteed uptime, and the ability to use it as a remote backup of stuff on your computer (even things completely unrelated to your website). I will describe my specific experience using lypha, I don’t know if other services are different.
- Setting up your server: The first step to creating your own website is to purchase space on lypha. I opted for the unlimited space option, but you can go cheaper. As part of this process, you will choose a domain name for your website. I just chose leoespindle.com. Lypha will take care of automatically registering the domain name for you with the authorities, but it may take several days. In the meantime, once you purchase the service, they will give you the actual IP address for your website, which is just as good as a domain name (only harder to remember). If it takes more than 72 hours to register your domain name (as it did with mine), then you can simply send an email to Lypha customer support and they’ll take care of it for you immediately manually. Lypha will then send you an account setup email with a ton of information about all the things that are included in your purchase, most of which I am still not familiar with, but look pretty cool.
- Accessing your website: Once you recieve your email from lypha, your website is available. In the email will be a link to your website. When you go to it for the first time in a web browser, it will simply show a default page showing that it is “working”. At this point, you may be wondering, as I was, “okay, what now?” At this point, I would recommend going to your website “control panel”, the link to which is also in your email from lypha. From the control panel, you can set up your email and an FTP account, as well as monitor disk space usage and even upload and edit files. I immediately set up an FTP account – I don’t know if you have to because I think one might already be set up (details in the lypha email), but thats what I did.
- Setting up FTP: The hardest part for me was/is using FTP. I had no idea what FTP program to use – the ones that the control panel all recommend cost money to download. The one I ended up using was WinSCP, which is free, simple, and worked beautifully for me right off the bat. I don’t think you have to mess around with the Vista firewall or the Norton firewall or anything. I still can’t figure out how to use SFTP, but my FTP settings were: hostname: my IP address; port: 21; username: whatever was in your lypha email under FTP; password: whatever was in your lypha email under FTP; file protocol: FTP; encryption: no encryption. I realize this setup is not ideal, as there is no security in terms of encryption, but until I figure out how to use SFTP, this works. Once connected, the interface is pretty self-explanatory.
- Designing your content: Now that you can connect to your website via FTP, you can upload files to your website from your computer. The default setup is that when somebody types in your domain name into the address bar in their browser, what is displayed on their screen is in the “index.html” file in your www folder. You can edit this index.html file on your own computer and then upload it to your website, but it has to be called “index.html” (there are actually many default names if you google it, but it has to be one of those listed). I am pretty worthless as far as HTML and website design goes, so I recommend finding somebody’s personal webpage that you like and then “borrowing” their code (right clicking on the page and then choosing “view source” works nicely). You should also “borrow” their css files. Browsing computer science departments at universities is fertile ground for finding functional, stylish personal websites with varying degrees of complexity. For instance, I “borrowed” Joel Brandt‘s website. Once you have a template, editing the HTML and CSS files are pretty self-explanatory – I find it is easier to learn when you start with a template than making something from scratch when you are just starting out. Make sure that you put your index.html file and all your website directories and files that the website needs in your www foler.
- Setting up WordPress: If you want to start a blog, then I would recommend setting up wordpress. CPanel supports WordPress through a nice little program called Fantastico which can be found on your control panel under software/services. The setup is self-explanatory and easy – just click on Fantastico and there are step by step instructions. While Fantastico does all the work for you, all of your blog files will also be located in your www folder on your website, so that is where you can access them for whatever reason.
I hope these five steps will help people. I basically created this website to learn how to do “web stuff”, so as I learn things I will publish them here.
