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October6th

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As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.

Posted in: Introspection

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
We were born to make manifest the glory
of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson, from A Return to Love
October4th

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Change your Wordpress upload_max_filesize limit with Bluehost in 6 easy steps

Posted in: Website
My website is hosted under Bluehost, which so far has been treating me well. I do a lot of uploading since my site also serves as my portfolio for art and music, and there have been times when I would attempt to upload something into Wordpress and it would give me the following error:

The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini.

I was able to fix the problem, so I figured I’d create a post to help out anyone out there who has this problem as well. This guide assumes:
- You are a Bluehost user
- You setup Wordpress on your domain using Bluehost
This guide is current as of 10/4/2009.
Read More
October4th

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That’s what brings everaftering so happy

Posted in: Music

Enchanted is one of my favorite Disney movies. It’s a parody of Disney’s own work where they explore how it would be if they brought one of their typical “princess” character’s (Giselle) in the real world, and I thought the story pulled off well. In a way, sometimes I wish that I was Giselle too … I mean, wouldn’t it be magical to just sing in Central Park where your song brings other people to sing with you, and suddenly you have a musical? (Heh, I remember when my friends and I first saw the movie, we joked that Giselle was brainwashing people with music. :))

Here’s a slower piano instrumental I recorded a bit ago from Enchanted called True Love’s Kiss. It was actually recorded a while ago, before I got my audio interface, so there’s a bit of static in the recording.

Song Title: True Love’s Kiss
Arranged By: Charlene Valerio
Original Artist: Steven Schwartz & Alan Menken
Instruments: Live! Grand Piano
Listen:

Right click to download: Charlene Valerio – True Love’s Kiss (Piano Instrumental)
October3rd

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Bass, Beats and Melody

Posted in: Electronica Beat Testing, Music

One type of music I’d like to produce a full song for is an electronica song of some sort. I still have yet to play around with it more since it doesn’t quite come as intuitive to me, but I started today actually playing with loops and synthesized sounds with my keyboard. This is a first for me since I’ve been mostly producing my music strictly with my keyboard alone in the past.

This is just a piece of scrap music to get my feet wet with this type of music production. (As such, I also ended up making a folder for myself “Electronica Beat Testing“.) It’s nothing amazing, but it’s a start. It actually starts off much “darker” than I actually intended it to … initially I wanted it to be something bright and happy-like.

Also, I do end up liking the “frog” beat I figured out how to put in there, despite my distaste for frogs, heh.

Right click to download: Charlene Valerio – Test 1
October1st

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“What do I want with a Master’s degree in Computer Science?”

Posted in: Graduate School, Introspection

Sometimes I feel silly going to school.

Even though I am, by technicality, a “graduate student”, I am still taking undergraduate classes in computer science since I’m in the transitory period between becoming an aerospace engineer to a computer scientist. One of the courses that I’m taking is a software engineering course that seems to be mostly comprised of juniors and seniors, and my professor ties in a lot of real-world work experience in making the material of software engineering come alive. Without a doubt, this class is by far my favorite class since I like a systematic, disciplined approaches to design and also because for each topic, I could relate with my own work experience, even though it may not have been directly related to software.

My professor talks a lot about different roles and functions people have (requirements analysis, programmers, designers, SQA, etc) and also reminds us to open our mind to what sort of role we, the students, see ourselves in. Whenever I think about, it ends up turning into a higher level thought of, “What do I want with a Master’s degree in Computer Science?”

I do know that I want to complement my Bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering with this Master’s. From my time working, it’s apparent of the role that computer science plays into engineering (albeit aerospace or not) and I’ve adapted the attitude that to become a good engineer that deals with systems hardware, it would be good to also be able to understand that system’s software. And of course, there are the other factors too such as the fact that the brink of new technologies deals with computers and that this line of study is applicable to a seemingly unlimited number of industries.

Just, will I ever end up actually working on aerospace and computer science applications?

Will I end up eventually forgoing my aerospace engineering degree and end up sticking to software, or vice versa?

I know I have a lot of time to figure out where my specific interests are in computer science. I suppose my fear with taking up two (or more) disciplines is that I would end up becoming a jack-of-all-trades, master of nothing. And that would be kind of amusing and contradictory since I am pursuing a Master’s degree.
September30th

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Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold beneath the clouds

Posted in: Music

This happened to be one of those nights before an exam where I should be studying, but ended up being called to the keyboard. I’ve had the Neverending Story theme stuck in my head most of all today, so I guess this was a way to appease the madness.

Unfortunately, this was hastily put together since I really, really do need to be studying so this certainly goes into scraps. The arrangement could be put together, and actually having a bass line that I don’t mess up.

Song Title: Neverending Story (Instrumental, Short)
Arranged By: Charlene Valerio
Original Artist: Limahl
Instruments: Fantasia (appropriately enough, heh), acoustic bass, grand piano
Listen:

Right-click to download: Charlene Valerio – Neverending Story Theme (short)
September30th

2 Comments

Minimizing an Expression to Sum-of-Products Form

Posted in: The Toolbox
I was given a review homework assignment recently for my Embedded Systems class. Most of it was just basic things such as converting decimal numbers to binary and hex and the sort, however I came across a problem on minimizing an expression to sum-of-products (SoP) form where the function yielded a summation of a bunch of values. It certainly didn’t help that I’ve been out of school for a bit, and most of what I was finding online to help me figure this out was on reducing a boolean function to sum-of-products form instead. Now that I’ve solved the problem, I figured I’d be a model citizen of the internet and post on how to come up with a solution for the problem to save some wasted time and effort for others.

Let’s say you are given the expression,

To solve this you would go through 4 simple steps:
1. Change each of the numbers in the summation into binary
2. Map the binary numbers into a Karnaugh Map
3. Group the Karnaugh Map as necessary
4. Interpret the expression.
Change each of the numbers in the summation into binary. In order, this would give you:

0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, 0100, 0101, 0110, 1010, 1011

Map the binary numbers into a Karnaugh Map.

Group the Karnaugh Map as necessary.

Interpret the expression. Thus, the reduced boolean expression in sum-of-products form is
September30th

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Representing Negative 16-Bit Hex Values in Hex

Posted in: The Toolbox
If you’re given a positive 16-bit hex value and asked to provide the hex representation of its negative value, it is otherwise asking for the 16-bit 2’s complement of the given value.

So, for example if you’re given 1D7A in hex and asked for representing -1D7A simply take its 2’s complement.
1. Convert to binary: 1D7A = 0001 1101 0111 1010
2. Flip the 1’s and 0’s: 1110 0010 1000 0101
3. Add 1: 1110 0010 1000 0101 + 1 = 1110 0010 1000 0110
4. Convert back to hex: E286
Therefore, the representation of -1D7A in hex is E286.
September30th

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Graphs of Exponential Functions

Posted in: The Toolbox
I’ve put together a bunch of screenshots I’ve taken from my TI-89 on the graphs of exponential functions, from y = x, y = x^2, …, y = x^10. The important thing to take from it is that when remembering how these functions look like:
- y = x is a line
- even exponents yield parabolas
- odd exponents yield cubic curves (“squigglies”)
This is very trivial knowledge, but I’m putting this up because graphs of functions tend to be one of those things that once learned, people toss aside by relying on their graphing calculators can do. And knowing this off-hand is good general knowledge, really. (I.e., determining if a function is injective or surjective without breaking a sweat.)
September29th

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The Toolbox

Posted in: Graduate School, The Toolbox

As I’m going through this semester, I’m thinking about posting on some topics for my classes to help myself on preparing for exams and doing projects, as well as for anyone who’s looking for more help too. I often find myself surprised on how scattered information on seemingly simplistic search terms on Google are, and I’d like to have something that could act as my own resource.

I don’t intend on making posts under the category “The Toolbox” in-depth, as I want them to be short and to the point. Of course, if there’s anyone out there in teh internets who’d like me to elaborate more on certain topics I’d certainly be willing to help.

Of course, they’ll been plenty of posts on my other endeavors in music and art, but hey — an engineer needs to have their own toolbox of sorts.