LewsTheri's

Nokia has just recently announces its latest N-series mobile phone, the Nokia N95.

Here are some photos:






Some of its impressive features include:

- 5MP Photo Lens
- 2-way slide for fast transformation from multimedia computer to player
- WLAN or HSDPA (3.5g) withup to 10 times faster download than with 3g
- 2.6 TFT Display
- Carl Zeiss optics with advanced Auto Focus
- VGA Resolution up to 30 frames per second
- WCDMA HSPDA 2100 and EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
- Supports Micro SD up to 2 gigs
- Internal memory up to 160mb (memory card is not included in sales package)
- RAM 64 mb
- SIP support - client for VoIP in some timeframe
- Standard Battery Time 215 hours stand-by
- Bluetooth (including support for A2DP profile)
- Infared
- Weight: 120 gms
- Size: 99mm x 20mm x 53mm
- Dedicated Media Keys
- Nokia Web Browser version 2.0
- Video Output
- Built-in GPS and world map covering 100 countries via the Nokia Maps
Application. Additional navigation and city guides will be available for purchase

Priced at €550 the N95 will be available Q1 2007 in 2 colors, plum and sand, with future developments for other colors.

God! What a cool phone! The crucial features that make me drool over this phone are its light weight of 120 g, the 5MP camera and its innovative double sliding mechanism. The GPS ia also a cool new feature, particularly useful since I may be overseas in Europe for conference and travelling next year.

Don't get me wrong. I love my Nokia N93. It's an impressive thing but I guess the pace of technological advancement always wins. one can never beat the lust for cooler stuffs :)

Today I went 'landrolling', or skating, with my Landroller skates along the foot-paths of Lake Burley Griffin. Don't get me wrong, I've been skating to and from my research school a number of times already. But I figure it'd make my skates 'happy' if I bring them for a real ride.

The weather today was fine. Sunny, dry and just slightly cold. It's considered warm for a September day. Apparently, everyone's saying that this summer will be extremely hot and dry. I would have to agree with that, because this winter has also been very dry. There hadn't been much raining lately, and even if it rained, it rained in the wrong place. And there's already been a few bushfires in New South Wales. Nasty ones, I'd say, a few houses burnt down.

So anyway, while I was doing a bit of skating, I also took some photos around the lake. Here they are ...




















And here's the same scenery using different camera modes ...

This is damn funny! I couldn't resist laughing when I saw this at work. Makes one wonder where they get the English translation from a Chinese menu. From a digital translator word by word?

Oh shit! I laughed so hard that I had to wipe away my tears.

Link

Last night I had dinner with Ee Peng and JJ, two friends of mine who came from Melbourne for work-related purposes. Ee Peng was also from Penang and we were in the same college in Perth in 1999. Somehow we didn't keep in touch until now. Here's a photo of Ee Peng and I taken last night.



JJ was my ex-housemate's brother. When he came to Canberra for a few months at the end of 2003, we just somehow got very close. I think that was the best days I had since coming to Canberra, because the house was like an 'attraction point' for our friends. It was the time when a lot of our friends are graduating, so some of them moved in to stay with us for a while before leaving for Sydney or Melbourne. At one point there were about 8/9 of us staying at the town house. We played Starcraft (computer game), Settles of Catan (board game), cooked and just hang out together. It was just great.

JJ's a funny guy. But Ee Peng says he keeps irritating her at work :) and he wouldn't allow me to put his photos on my blog, so I'll just cover his face. Say 'Hi' to JJ :)



Anyway, back to our dinner. We went to Belluci's in Manuka. JJ and I each had a fillet mignon on mashed potato with mushroon sauce. Ee Peng had pan-seared ocean trout on garden greens.

Here's the fillet mignon..



and the ocean trout..



Well, it was a good dinner and we had a great chat. Aya and I will be going to Melbourne for the New Year celebrations. We'll fly there on the 29th Dec and leaving on the 1st Jan 2007, so we'll have plenty of time to catch up with friends.

I have recently updated my PhD website. I guess it is about time to do that as well. So the first thing I did was to change my photo. It used to be this:



Ugly, isn't it? It's now been changed to the following photo which I took myself:



And the equipment beside me, that's my precious experimental test bed. Took me in total about 8 months last year to complete it from scratch. The whole thing was custom designed, commissioned, built, debugged, tested and finished in the research school. The whole project was undertaken by myself, with advice from my supervisor and as well as help from the Engineering Department workshop manager for some of the parts. So i'm quite proud of the achievement.

An explanation of the various components of the test bed will certainly bore you guys so I won't go into that. The important point is that we now have the ability to conduct experiments that were never before possible or had been done by others in the research of Shape Memory Alloy actuators. Most of the papers in the literature are usually about position control and not many have delved into SMA force control systems. With our test bed, we can investigate constrained force control and even combined position and force control.

So far, our results are very convincing. We have achieved very accurate force control and fast response as well. A paper for ICRA next year has been submitted based on our simulation and experimental force control results so I am looking forward to this conference and trip to Rome, Italy.

Our final research milestone is to implement combined position and force control using an antagonistic pair of SMA actuators. The two SMA actuators are attached to a rotating pulley and the rotation of the pulley can be measured using an optical encoder/sensor. The idea is to have a position outer loop, to track position commands (rotation of the pulley), and a faster force inner loop. The reason is because we already have a very accurate SMA force control, so we can treat the actuators as ideal force actuators. This means that whatever force command we ask for, the control system is capable of getting the actuator to produce the required force.

Although a single position feedback loop is always easy to implement, and can track the position commands, which was demonstrated countless times in the literature, the introduction of an external load or disturbance to the plant will cause oscillations and result in tracking inaccuracy. The reason is that the load introduces extra dynamics which are difficult to compensate with a simple position control. With the combined position and force control, we hope to solve the oscillation problem. In fact, when I recently implemented such a control scheme, it worked. Oscillations were not observed. What we plan to do in the next few months is to tune up our control systems to produce faster and more accurate response and to obtain a model of the SMA as a design and simulation aid.

Hmm... I wasn't planning to explain what I did and why or how it was done that way but I guess I ended up getting worked out over it. Perhaps for the engineers reading this, I hope you may find my work interesting. This certainly is the exciting period in my PhD. After this, I will start writing up my thesis next year At the same time, I will start planning my career and searching for jobs.

I wonder if they'd offer scholarships if I were to do another PhD :)

I attended a forum to discuss about possible oral defense assessments for PhD student at ANU organised by PARSA (The Postgraduate And Research Students' Association). About 50 PhD students across many colleges and departments attended the forum, including 3 university representatives sitting on the University Education Committee, the body that makes decisions on student education and regulations.

The idea of PhD oral defense stems from surveys made by the university on various colleges about possible ways to improve the PhD experience as well as the competitive edge of ANU postgraduates. So it was one of the ideas that had come up. However, there were polarizing opinions across the committee as to what model the oral defense should follow.

The first has serves a more ceremonial function, attended by the candidate's supervisory panel members. Under this model, the results is normally clear before the oral examinations.

Another model is a form of 'approval/endorsement to submit' the written thesis. The assessment panel consists of the supervisor panel members and perhaps other members either internal or external to the university. The panel would make a written report with a list of recommendations or outlines where additional work is required on the thesis. So it's an extra step before the submission of the thesis.

The final model is where external examiners have assessed the written thesis and have provided a written report on recommendations, questions about parts of the thesis that require further explanations that will be addressed at the oral defense. They will then attend the oral defense and make a recommendation to the university in regards to the outcome.

The idea of an oral defense has had some negative responses from some of the students at the forum. Some of the arguments are that it will create additional workload/pressure/effort for students, extra finance/time is required especially for overseas assessors to attend. There is a general opinion that an oral defense is associated with border line pass/fail results and this would reflect negatively on the PhD candidate. The idea of video conferencing was floated but people say they are generally negative about that idea because you could not see their body languages and it's difficult talking to a camera. There are also problems with time zone differences.

There are also those who are in favour of the idea. I for one am supportive of an oral defense. I think it is actually good for personal and professional development because you have the opportunity to have in-depth discussions with a few leading experts in your field. A PhD candidate should not only demonstrate organised and in-depth knowledge in written form, he/she should be able to present his arguments orally. It's a different experience to conference/departmental seminar presentations. But I believe that an aggresive environment for an oral defense is a bad idea. There should be some sort of university representatives or one/two of your supervisory panel members who can witness/arbituate the defense. But there are also some, especially overseas students, who may have problem in orally communicating his/her research, so they may have a disadvantage. So perhaps some sort of regulations can be identified for them.

The important outcome from the forum is that this issue requires further discussions and dialogs between the university and the students. Well, at least we, the students, have a say in such a crucial decision making that affects our PhD experiences.

Today we made a two-hour drive to the Sunnataram Forest Monastery. It's a Buddhist monastery/temple taken care of by Thai Buddhist monks.



One of the aunties I went with is a devout Buddhist and she wanted somebody to drive her and two other aunties to the monastery. It's located near the small town of Bundanoon, about halfway between Canberra and Sydney. I was told that the land the monastery was built on is about 100 hectares but there were only a few small buildings that I saw. Upon entry, we could see that a new temple housing golden Buddha statues was being built.



They were also building a pond right next to the new temple. It certainly didn't look impressive at first sight. We parked the car and made a walk towards the main monastery. People, volunteers and worshippers, were just helping out with cooking and lunch preparation. I was told that anyone could come to the monastery and have meals at the monastery at no cost. The monks were a friendly bunch.

When lunch was prepared, everyone gathered in the meditation room. The abbot chanted some prayers for a short moment before we started eating. The food were offered to the monks first of course. As a 'meat-eater', I was surprised that the vegetarian food was quite good, although I must say I was pretty hungry by the time we had lunch :)

The monastery was situated on a hill. we could almost make out the ocean from where we stood. There were birds chirping, unafraid of all the people around the compound. The air was crisp, although it wasn't too cold as it is almost spring time.







There were even a few peacocks which displayed their elegant feathers in full view. They were just amazing!





Here are some photos I took using my new Nokia N93 in 'negative' mode. The new phone is pretty cool. I could lots of things with its features - WiFi, 3.2 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, video camcording, TV output, swirvel and twist configurations, MP3s etc.







Well, it was a good journey on a lazy Sunday!

I'm a coffee person. Usually I must have at least one cuppa coffee a day. It doesn't matter what time I have my coffee. Even a cup of coffee late at night, I can still be sound asleep in 15 minutes. I've even got my own coffee machine at home. And here's a nice video clip for an amazing feat of coffee making.

It's a good thing that I sold my share of the restaurant business. Although I truly enjoy cooking and preparing cuisines that are delicious, at the time when I was comtemplating about my stressful lifestyle and future, I was pretty messed up. I was always too stressed. In the day I was exhausting my brain doing research and thinking about complicated experiments and mathematical models. By about 4pm I had to leave my work and go to the restaurant for physical work. I did not have enough time for other things such as leisure and sports. I even had headaches and neck pains that required chiropractic sessions. Basically I was messed up.

It didn't take long for me to realise that this isn't the right thing anymore. Basically I've learnt everything about running a restaurant business including most of the culinary preparation skills. And my time would be running out for the completion of my PhD.

And it didn't take long for the results to turn positive. I've moved out to my own studio apartment close to uni. Here's a view from my room.



My research has progressed so significantly that we could probably wrap up the experiments by the end of the year. All robotics researchers know that achieving really accurate force control for a large robotic manipulator is damn difficult because of problems like torque ripple, dynamics and inertia due to the heavy mechanism, motor and gearing effects. With Shape Memory Alloys, we've achieved that. This material has always been considered slow and inaccurate. With the experimental set-up we have in the lab, we are doing many new experiments that were never thought of before and the results are simply breath-taking. Who would thought that Shape Memory alloys could even produce mechanical response in the audio range? Just listen to this.

I've submitted a paper for ICRA'07 (The International Conference for Robotics and Automation) which will be held in Italy next year. So I'm looking forward to attending this conference and doing some travelling in Europe.

I also plan to enrol in a vocational culinary course next year. I've always enjoyed cooking, so maybe it's just to fulfil one of my desires to have a formal 'qualification' and acknowledgement of my restaurant experiences. It would be interesting to have both a PhD in Robotics as well as a culinary diploma :)



Winter is almost over. I'm actually looking forward to spring actually. It's the time of Floriade in Canberra. A time when flowers bloom and the skies are blue. A good time to try out my new Landroller skates on the bicycle and jogging paths around the Lake Burley Griffin.



Okay, that's all from me for now. The next time I blog, I will probably be talking about our experiences doing hang-gliding, or maybe about the culinary experience we had in a Sydney Japanese-French fusion cuisine restaurant, whose chef and owner has been awarded the Three Chef's Hats honour, as well as being voted the best restaurant in Australia and the 5th around the world, Tetsuya's.

Cheers
Yee Harn

The other day I met up with Ee Peng, a friend of mine from Year 12 in Perth, who was in Canberra for work. She was from Penang as well. We lamented that we had not been keeping in touch since 2000. It was in 1999 that we met, and we can't belieave that it is now the year 2006. We have known each other for 7 year already! As for high school friends, we'd be going back for at least 10 years! So it's great that we did manage to meet up. And I've made a personal promise to go to Melbourne before the end of the year. I also have a number of good friends in Melbourne - Tat Jun, Su-En and JJ. The saying 'Out of sight, out of mind'. That's an accurate description of my situation here.

Returning to blogging? I think I can now afford to spend some time on my personal site now that I've sold my shares in the restaurant business. My sole mission now is to finish my PhD and submit by August next year. Perhaps this is the starting point for me to keep my old friends in the loop.

Cheers
Yee Harn