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Today I have encountered dirty diaper for the very first time in my life and it is not pretty.  While doing routine cleaning of our guest bathroom, I was shocked to discover a stack of dirty diaper deposited in the trash can in our guest bathroom.  I am still struggling on how to get rid of the terrible smell of the trash can after dumping the diapers.

The IT department of my company has been urging us Mac users to upgrade OSX to Lion a long time ago. After getting a few papers submitted last week, I finally got around to upgrade the Snow Leopard for my Macbook Pro work machine. Since I couldn't find Lion on Apple Store any more, I decided to go straight to Mountain Lion. The download and installation went smoothly, and most things seemed to work after the upgrade. Here are a few things that broke and the fixes I found.

SSH with public key

Mountain Lion changed a few things that broke password-free SSH access to and from OSX using public/private key pairs.

SSH from Mountain Lion to older SSH severs: Continue reading »

If you have one or more long hair cats at home, like our Mayori and Tom, you probably share the same dream as us --- a house without cat hair, at least a house without having cat hair everywhere.

Towards this dream, we have tried out various product. Today, I am going to talk about the various vacuums we have used.

1. Hoover WindTunnel T-Series Rewind Upright Vacuum

While preparing the camera-ready version for our CIKM demo, my colleagues and I found that the screenshot included in our paper appeared to be fairly blurry in the pdf version, even though the original .jpg file looks fine.

I searched online to try to find the solutions. After a few trials and errors, adding the following two lines into the beginning of the latex files (before \begin{document}) did the trick.

\pdfpxdimen=1in

\divide\pdfpxdimen by 300

For unknown reason, my machines would certainly disable their screen saver options (e.g. with the "on resume, display log on screen" check box grayed out). Whenever this happens, it would trigger the security alert and I will get a warning from the IT department to fix the issue.

I am tired of having to hunting down the answer every time and therefore I am recording it here.

The following method is what usually works for me.

1. Go to "Start" type in "regedit"

2. Go to

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop]

Delete the "ScreenSaverIsSecure" value.

I happen to come across this excellent article from this year's ICML on Machine Learning that Matters. I encourage everyone, especially computer science Ph.D students, to read it.

As an industrial researcher who draws a lot of job satisfaction by making both scientific and practical impact, I completely agree with the author on that we need to work on research "that matters",  not just for machine learning. Many of the challenges outlined by the author are applicable to many other areas in computer science as well. 

As a new home owner, we have been going through a lot of home remodeling and repair projects. I found myself often search online for the same set of forms again and again. Thist post is to record all the forms that I often use and sometimes difficult to found.

1. Simple contract (To be updated)

2. Payment forms (including those for both pregressive payments and final payments)

As a busy computer scientist, I don't really get to exercise my inner Martha too much. But I did somehow manage to make my first ever attempt on sewing projects --- baby cloth shoes (as gift for my niece).

Here is the result --- I added the handmade pompom for extra cuteness. :)

The detailed steps can be found from the following link

http://www.michaelmillerfabrics.com/blog/cloth_shoe.pdf

It has been a while since Yunyao got her iPhone 4s, which is known for its "superb" camera --- "8MP camera with all-new optics also shoots 1080p HD video". 8MP on a cell phone sounds really impressive, does it? Maybe she finally can leave her big heavy Pentax for a while?

So she tested its performance with her favoriate model: Mayori.

First, let's test it under natural light setting:

"What's up?"

"I am sad ..."

"I am really really sad"