The West Coast student cooperative conference was held in Eugene, OR from April 3rd to April 5th, 2009. 15 members from Berkeley Student Cooperative attended in passionate fashion. Throughout the 3 day weekend, many workshops were held in exchanging ideas; from basket weaving using waste grape vines to parading Eugene on talls bikes. Perhaps the circus-esque environment in the coops promote incredible re-use of junk parts, I was taken aback by their engineering and artistic ingenuity.

The Student Cooperative Association comprised of 3 different buildings. Each with unique characteristics filling the needs of individuals.
1. The Lorax - Vegan, around 30 people, completely de-centralized in management. No assigned workshifts but careful in admitting residents. I liked this coop for its similarity to Lothlorien.
2. The Campbell Club- Vegitarian, around 30 people, council passes motions on (n-1) consensus basis. More party-centric, I met more international, underclassman here.
3. Janet Smith house - Smaller, older graduate student coop just down the Alder St. Cleaner, also works on consensus - 1 to pass motions. We have lovely breakfast here!

A few mentions- I loved visiting an intentional community called the Maitreya EcoVillage. We learned about natural building techniques, living off the garden, using junk to close the vicious consumer cycle. Our cynical and doomsday happy guide, Rob, is a knowledgeable and experienced builder who created the EcoVillage as an intentional sustainable community. I liked his style.

Here's the scope- don't upgrade to 10.5.6 until this problem has been solved.

Recently I updated to Mac OS 10.5.6 and I can't backup using Time Machine or any other USB storage devices. When I plug in my USB hdd, it triggers a kernel panic forcing me to hold the power button to shut down my precious bug-free Mac.

I've heard from forums that this is a resulting "fix" from Apple to disallow iPhone jailbreakers from going into DFU mode via USB. if anyone can confirm, please email me: jackchi [at]
jackchi.com

Sun Mar 8 17:17:08 2009
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x003EB97C): "IOUSBDevice::_RESERVEDIOUSBDevice8 called\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.9.59/libkern/c++/OSMetaClass.cpp:816
Backtrace (CPU 1), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x53c2fa68 : 0x12b4f3 (0x45b13c 0x53c2fa9c 0x1335e4 0x0)
0x53c2fab8 : 0x3eb97c (0x49c500 0x608280 0x608280 0x8)
0x53c2fad8 : 0x5f94d4 (0x610118 0x8 0x53c2fb08 0x3ece8f)
0x53c2faf8 : 0x477f2b66 (0x51a0600 0x53c2fb1c 0x53c2fb28 0x3f0459)
0x53c2fb28 : 0x477f39ce (0x5a17a00 0x477f8ad4 0x51a88e0 0x0)
0x53c2fb78 : 0x412976 (0x5a17a00 0x6054d00 0x1 0x3ecd96)
0x53c2fbd8 : 0x414219 (0x6054d00 0x5a17a00 0x51898e0 0x5186420)
0x53c2fc58 : 0x413a7d (0x6054d00 0x966b880 0x0 0x1)
0x53c2fca8 : 0x414786 (0x6054d00 0x2 0x0 0x0)
0x53c2fce8 : 0x40e528 (0x6054d00 0x2 0x0 0x6054d00)
0x53c2fd28 : 0x5f7c75 (0x6054d00 0x2 0x4 0x0)
0x53c2fda8 : 0x92ee3c (0x51a0600 0x92c2180 0x1 0x1)
0x53c2fdc8 : 0x92e886 (0x92c2180 0x1 0x1 0x0)
0x53c2fe18 : 0x92e3f5 (0x92c2180 0x610118 0x5138d80 0x10001)
0x53c2fe48 : 0x412976 (0x92c2180 0x51a0600 0x1 0x3ecd96)
0x53c2fea8 : 0x414219 (0x51a0600 0x92c2180 0x519ea20 0x51d3a20)
Backtrace continues...
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass(2.0.4)@0x477f1000->0x477fafff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily(2.0.5)@0x7cb000

Living Cooperatively: Berkeley Co-Opers

In my increasing effort to stay green, connect communities, sometimes the most logical way is also the most affordable way. If you think cooperative living, community garden, house bikes, sustainable projects, alternative student culture is cool, stay tuned for my social talk on "Living Cooperatively: The Berkeley Student Co-Op". A panel of Berkeley coopers will be present to give you a first-encounter insight into the lifestyle at different co-ops.

Life in the Berkeley Coops is fun. Do you like to?

* jam with other musicians, other than Guiar Hero
* grow your own food "i <3 basil"
* paint a mural
* compete on energy-efficiency projects
* cook quinoa, make yogurt, brew kombucha
* heal your mind, through meditation or shamanistic methods
* free stuff in the free pile

Join me and my friends at RAD lab on 4.20.09 5pm.

Today is a monumental day in US history. The inauguration of Barack Obama rekindles my belief in the American democratic system. My faith in the American dream waned and dwindled ever since I entered US on a fabricated promise. This singular event reignited my conviction in an exciting bright American future.

The peaceful transition of power took place on the steps of
capitol hill. As the 44th President-elect, Barack Obama, is sworn into the highest office, a generation of civil rights activists, hopeful younger generation, peaceful people of the world watched this deliverance of promise. The measure of the Presidency once again reflected the dreams of the American people. The words etched in the Lincoln memorial finally reached the Oval Office. We celebrate this day as a triumph; yet we are reminded of the sacrifices and bloodshed of our founding fathers. Let this day be a splash in the pond of hopeful future. As we expand to rebuild and refuel America, let this trigger a ripple effect of change from nuclear waste, deceitful greed and compromised ideals. As Obama said, "[America's defense]...Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more."

The front end interface is written in Flash/AS3. It talks to a PHP backend, which uses the Festival text-to-speech software and some other Unix audio tools to render each of the four voices. Those all get compiled back into a single mp3 and sent back to flash, along with an xml file that tells the app how to animate the emoticons and custom lyrics. Aside from some of the animated bits, this could work as-is with an HTML/CSS/JS front end as well.

The process is pretty cpu intensive, so we had to use a number of load balanced machines to handle requests. They output files on amazon s3, all keyed by a unique id. If this becomes popular (fingers crossed), there's no database or anything that will bottleneck reads or writes, and it should just scale linearly as we add more boxes.

It's funny how the text-to-singing stuff ended up being only a small portion of the project.

Links:
emoticarolers.com

In the area of security, the most prevalent form of authentication is something you know. However, this form of authentication has been increasingly defeated due to the amount of information one needs to recall. Often, laziness gets the best of us. We store our secret passwords on computers, write it down. Therefore simply defeating this security mechanism... Often, the security policy is to implement two-factor or multi-factor authentication, such as 1) something you know (passwords, mother's maiden name) 2) something you have (key card) 3) something you are (biometrics). Anderson cleverly stated in “Security Engineering”, these 3 forms of authentication often becomes “something you forgot, something you lost, something you were”. Therefore, research in a better form of authentication continues to be a hot topic. Many forms of breaches originates from social engineering attacks techniques; that is, understanding how human behavior contributes to its eventual downfall in giving away privacy.

Security research regarding human subject studies involving usability and psychology needs permission from IRB review of research. At Berkeley, if your study is to appear in a published form of research paper, permission needs to be approved at http://cphs.berkeley.edu/. The committee for Human Protection provides the guidelines of informed consent on both parties; investigators and subjects. Private information on the subjects should not be revealed. For example, if the research study is done on phishing, the subjects' private data such as social security number and ip address cannot be collected. However, the overall sample data such as click-through rate and other statistics are not regarded as private information. This is because in a commercialized study, these statistics are also collected and stored.

Think the computer age started in the 20th Century? think again. My eyes had the honor to see Charles Babbage's difference engine no. 2. mountain view's Computer Science History Museum. The 5 tons machine is hand crank operated to perform polynomial functions to the 7 decimal digit precision- the inputs are entered via columns of movable digits and the results are printed onto a roll of paper. All the theoretical design by Babbage and Ada Loveless took place in the early 19th Century. The difference engine was demonstrated and operated for me, the cranking, the oil dripping from the gears, I was looking at the first computer.

Sustainability Summit Applauds Michel Gelobter for Green Work

Michel Gelobter, one of the most prominent voices in developing a sustainable future; he is the executive director of Redefining Progress, using his experience as an academic, activists and administrator, he is currently the founder and CEO of Cooler. One of my latest hero in the battle against environmental injustice. On 4/21/08, he gave a keynote speech at the UC Berkeley Sustainability Summit. A speech which outlined current environmental problems, such as carbon economy investments, provided methods for potential responsible solutions. His voice of optimism echoes deep in my long fight against this crisis.

Our nation could look to New Orleans as a model green city, the finest environmental workers rebuilding not the destroyed city but the reborn city. Instead, the Bush administration allowed the rise of emission to continue at a steady pace of 1% per year until 2025.

Our capitalistic society value system must be altered to factor in environmental costs. The cost of polluting the rivers, the sea, the forests have all been greatly minimized. The effects of such oversight is clear, with new evidence uncovering everyday from research institutions, investments in a carbon economy must be redistributed. Investment towards a greener, sustainable future must be highly monetized. Giving incentives for the tumbling economy. I see a connection between climate change and world economic downturn of 2008.

my updated cv (march2009)
sheep

Fuching Jack Chi
iamjack@eecs.berkeley.edu
2545 Hillegass Ave, Berkeley CA. 94704

EDUCATIONAL PROFILE

Creative in collaborative research setting. Strong skills in software scalability, isolating security vulnerability and enhancing user usability. Experienced in business communication. Significant exposure to statistical models and convex classifiers. Lives in a sustainable urban living that uses organic farming, renewable energy sources; advocates cooperative living, maintains our agricultural community supported gardens with fair trade produce keeping in mind to close the cycle.

I desire to help and connect lives through prevalent use of technology and peaceful conversations.

University of California- Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. Research Scholar

Rice University BA in Computer Science; Managerial Science. 2008

University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. Exchange Scholar. 2005

Languages: Chinese-Mandarin, English ; fluent

Technologies: oop / java / perl / c++ / R / unix /

Web Technologies: HTML / CSS / PHP / SQL / Web 2.0 / CMS / EC2 / S3 /

WORK EXPERIENCE

Berkeley Student Cooperative, Berkeley, CA
Technology Manager, HIP House 2008 - Present
Maintains a mid-size nonprofit local area network at a student cooperative. Troubleshoots common problems in computer operations. Webmaster to the Hip House wikipedia. administrate network infrastructures, monitors security and health of networked hardware.

Esdena.com, Houston, TX
Co-Founder,www.esdena.com 2005 - 2007

Avg(Thai / Indian / Japanese) * Chicken Curry

(+)white onions caramelized with
- cumin - chili powder - mace - mustard seeds - chili pepper flakes - nutmeg - coriander - cinnamon - turmeric -

(+)chopped up garlic / giner with chicken drenched in rice wine, lime juice concentrate - soy sauce - melted gee

(+)warmed up coconut milk

(+)skinned potatoes with vegetable broth - white cap mushrooms - squash - red bell peppers

Cook each + separately in a cast iron pan. All stirred and simmer together to taste.
Salt to taste on each +.

Steamed Artichoke

This is how Julia MacMillan, the editor of the Berkeley Farmers' Market Cookbook, prepares artichokes.

Spring Artichokes- From Berkeley Ecology Center

4 medium or large artichokes
1 quart water
4 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp olive oil
1 bay leaf
4 black pepper berries
1 small sprig thyme (1/2 tsp dried)
1 small sprig oregano (1/2 tsp dried)