To relax after some months of hard working and paper grinding Lumi and I decided to head down to Big Sur and Carmel for some days of relaxing, hiking, and nature watching to reload our batteries. We started off on a lazy Wednesday and drove the 130 miles down to …
read moreJoaquin Miller park
For today's hike we went to Joaquin Miller park in Oakland. The park is about 30min drive from our home and on the way to the park we collected a couple of friends who joined us on today's excursion. The park features nice views of Oakland and the bay and …
read moreAngel Island
Angel Island is a multi-purpose island that is right in the middle of the bay and surrounded by the three big bridges: Golden Gate bridge, Bay bridge, and Richmond bridge. Over the years the island was used for a whole bunch of things, including a hunting ground for native Americans …
read moreWarGames in memory: shall we play a game?
Memory corruption (e.g., buffer overflows, random writes, memory allocation bugs, or uncontrolled format strings) is one of the oldest and most exploited problems in computer science. Low-level languages like C or C++ trade memory safety and type safety for performance: the compiler adds no bound checks and no type …
read moreDynamite and explosions galore: Point Pinole Regional Shoreline
For those that know us personally it is obvious that Lumi and I are the adventurous types, so when we had the opportunity to explore a dangerous dynamite facility we grabbed it! Point Pinole Regional Shoreline is a nice little park with a great view of the upper bay. We …
read moreWildcat Canyon double hike
For two weekends in a row we went for nice day hikes in Tilden regional park / Wildcat canyon. The area is very nice and the views of San Francisco and the bay area are awesome. We prepared both hikes by looking at the GeoCaching website and planning a couple of …
read moreTilden regional park: Vollmer peak
A quick and easy 7.2mi (12km) hike in Tilden park with awesome views of the bay area, including San Francisco, the golden gate bridge, Oakland, Emeryville, the bay bridge, silicon valley and much more.
We set off really late (at around 11:30am) and just drove up to Grizzly …
read moreRobots, wildlife and bioinspiration
Sangbae Kim, professor in mechanical engineering from MIT visited Berkeley today and gave a great inspiring talk on dynamic locomotion. The original title of the talk was "Toward Highly Dynamic Locomotion: Actuation, structure and control of the MIT cheetah robot".
An early model of the cheetah robot. Image (c) biomimetics …
read moreHiking and Geo Caching along the Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline / the Keller Beach Park
Today we went off for another short 'warm-up' hike before the big hiking seasons starts. We drove to Richmond, CA where we walked along the shoreline, explored some old railroad tracks, discovered some brick houses (and factories), enjoyed the view over almost the complete bay area, and strolled through Richmond's …
read moreAll paths lead to Rome: POPL and PPREW from a syssec perspective
read moreA week in Rome: what could be better than sitting all day in a conference room?
POPL (Principles Of Programming Languages) is one of these great conferences that have been around forever and sound very interesting to any systems person. The definition of POPL according to the SIGPLAN homepage is …