Digium: The Asterisk Company

The trip to Digium went well, though we were sitting for about 7 hours on the trip to Huntsville and back. Please see the photos on Facebook. We depart from Auburn at exactly and precisely 6 o'clock in the morning and arrived in Huntsville around 11.

We visited Digium's first location at West Park, but then soon transferred to their Intergraph 23b location in Madison. We had a meeting with their software developers and the CEO Mark Spencer. Very friendly group of people I must add. We soon engaged in discussion on their product Asterisk and telephony in general.

After the meeting, the people at Digium took us to Heidelberg, a German resturant on the University Drive across the street from Wal-Mart. We had another quick chat afterward lunch and departed soon afterwards.

Today afternoon, Tuan and I went lifting weight for 45 minutes, then we went swimming at the Aquatic Center for 30 minutes. Afterwards, we went to tennis court. We ran into James on the court and we started a uber-unexpected intensive hitting. By then we were on the verge of collapsing.

After tennis, I went to Bo's place to get his electric guitar restrung and tuned, and played a little.

Tomorrow is the trip to Huntsville! I happy to have a trip back to one of my favorite places :)

OpenMoko

So for this summer I will be doing research on the OpenMoko Project under the supervision of Dr. Chapman. The REU group had to pick the project we want to work on by the end of Friday and I was deliberating between the OpenMoko project and SpySwatter lead by Dr. Umphress. Both projects are truly interesting, but I believe OpenMoko has more growth potential, so I chose OpenMoko as my first choice and therefore my research topic.

In short, OpenMoko is a novel idea of developing a non-proprietary platform for cell phones. The idea is that the architecture of OpenMoko phones is completely open. Anyone interested can develop software for the architecture including contribute code to the operating system. The advantages of this are security and the growth of the number of applications on the architecture.

Reserach Plan for the week Talked to Dr. Chapman here is the revised list of week's objectives:

• Since I don't know much of what I'll be working on, I'll have to talk to Dr. Chapman and get an idea what I'll be working on. Done. 5/29/2007.
  
• Reformat and install Linux on my computer. Done. 5/31/2007.
  
• Get OpenMoko emulators running. Done 6/4/2007.
• Set up the development environment and get a working Hello-World program.
  

Summer 07 REU

It's been a while since I posted any entry. My last entry was posted in August of last year about my trip to Mobile where I ran my car into another car in front of me at a intersection stop sign -- ah, how funny when looking back. So after about a year of non-posting and another major car repair, I'm here again writing another entry (Why do I always get into car problem?).

I don't remember the details, but here is a summary of what happened in the gap of about a year. I started going to Chi Alpha events after moving back from Huntsville, though I still think the Huntsville church is more spiritual. School wise, I took Statistics in the Fall of 2006 as well as in Spring 2007 because I wasn't satisfied with the effort I put into the first time. Also, I played a ton of tennis between now and then and bought a Babolat PureDrive because of my wrist injuries.

So this summer, I'm working in the undergraduate research program sponsored by the National Science Foundation at the Computer Science and Software Engineering here in Auburn. One of the requirements for the program is to keep a journal of what we're doing, so I guess that's one of the reason of me coming back.

It's the first week with 3 days of lecture by Dr. Biaz on research. He gave me a laptop to do whatever I want, but one draw back is I do have to return in after the program :(

We went to Shogun tonight for the welcome dinner. I had some delicious sushi! Tomorrow is when we select our research topic. I hope there are some interesting stuff awaiting us!