How come this ignorant lady used to be vice president candidate

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

I knew Sarah Palin had no idea on fixing this country in 2008. She only had slogans.

But I really never expected her to be so ignorant. She even didn't know the difference between S. Korea and N. Korea.

I got on Twitter today to check some news about N. Korea and then I saw a stunning news: Sarah Palin says, "we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies."  http://twitter.com/#!/saved-search/north%20korea%20sarah%20palin

I found a formal version: http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/11/25/sarah-palin-says-us-must-stand-with-north-korean-allies/#

How come this idiot used to be the vice president candidate in 2008 election? How come still so many people out there want her to run for president in 2012?

That really makes sense that Barbara Bush wants her to stay at home.

America, never ever give her the launch code. She will swipe out our allies, including Canadians.

Measurement file header and NI Biomedical Start Kit

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

This semester, I am building an ECG sampling system (yes, like the one you can see in ER in Grey's Anatomy on TV) for my Medical Instrumentation class project. For the first time in my life, I amplified a signal by 5000 times! And, luckily, I had the chance to use a prototype NI myDAQ - yup, the one before released to the market.

This is my ECG of one beat! It doesn't look like textbook version though.

Then I decided to use NI Biomedical Startup Kit to check the quality of my ECG. But something unpleasant. The ECG Feature Extractor of NI Biomedical Start Kit could only load the first 1 second of my data. Clearly, I had 2-minute long ECG recordings. Then I notice, the problem is on the header. The header of LVM file showed Samples: 1000. In my LabVIEW program, I selected One header only in Segment headers option in Save to Measurement file express VI. So I guess this might be the problem.

Hence, I changed the Samples tag to 120000. Everything worked perfectly as expected!

So, a reminder. If you are using NI Biomedical Start Kit out there, do select One header per segment when saving measurement data. Or you can manually change the header as I did.

PS: I sampled many classmates' ECG. But many of them do not look like the ``standard ECG'' as shown on the textbook. I really don't know why. So on my software interface, I call the one made from NI ECG simulator ``human ECG'' and the one sampled from us ``alien ECG."

On the left: ECG from simulator; On the right: ECG from us (We are confused whether we are human babies any more.)

I decide to rewrite flyback 0.4 code for a new project

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Flyback (http://code.google.com/p/flyback/) is a very good backing up tool for Linux like Time Machine for Mac.

But I really cannot stand the versions of flyback after v.0.4.

1. It uses Git instead of rsync (before v.0.4). Not to argue that rsync is small (file synchronization only) and Git is big (features for source code management), Git cannot handle files larger than the memory. I do medical image and signal processing. I have a lotta large files. 
2. flyback after v.0.4 is too complex. I can't even find where I can exclude a directory in backup. But Git actually provides such a function. I don't have the luxury to study the complex code to modify it. 
3. Icannot set up timed backup now. For example, I want the code to be backed up twice a day.

I looked around other open source backup solutions. They are all too complex for me. After reading their websites for 1 minute, I still don't know how they work. For desktop users' simple requirement, we need simple solution: I tell the problem which directories to or not to back up and the program will back up for me incrementally, and even periodically.

So I decide to work from flyback 0.4 source code which uses rsync and cp to do incremental backup. And create a new project which also uses GPL v2.

1. I wanna write a command line version of flyback 0.4. It will be designed very simple, just reading my configurations from a text file and calling basic Linux commands, e.g., rsync, chmod, cp and rm. This will be very easy and very useful on servers. 
2. I will simplify the flyback 0.4 code and add some new features, such as backup thru network using SSH. 
3. In such a way, the code can also work on Mac OS X. I can't stand the robustness of Time Machine. It sucks. 

I am quite busy now but I will slowly move this project as a hobby - which means I will have to eliminate my time on hanging out with girls :P .

Getting old version Google Docs back (no page or margins, like webpages)

I really don't like the new version of Google documents which creates new docs as on pieces of sized paper - what you see in a Word editor. I love the old one like webpages, without pages or margins. I want my content to be as wide as my computer screen.

Google has an official way to go back the old style at the bottom of this help page: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=176442.

The solution is to use this link to create new docs, in the old style: https://docs.google.com/?action=newdoc

My ECG modulated on 60Hz

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Below is a real ECG sampled from me! You can see the signal is highly polluted by 60Hz noise from our power system (60Hz in North America and 50Hz in elsewhere.) There are exactly 6 peaks of the same amplitude in 0.1 second. So, my ECG is modulated on a 60Hz base band signal. you can imagine my ECG by drawing a line from the middle of the 60Hz wave.

I have also moved the circuit to a PCB prototyping matrix board. I used the analog I/O and power supply on NI ELVIS to test it with a simulated ECG signal. Wunderbarschon!