受傷的心

受傷的心 - 作詞：吳宗憲, 作曲：吳宗憲

受傷的心已經無閒　無閒聽你擱講分明
就欲離開的行李內　找無你我的將來
男人的心嘛真堅定　擱再講感覺無著你的愛情
這張無留住址的批　代表阮永遠無後悔

啊...　傷心傷心的話　請你放置你的心肝底
無論天涯　亦是海角　阮永遠欲走乎你找
啊...　愛情愛情是假　何必聲聲句句欲挽回
若是日頭從西邊出來　阮還是決定欲走乎你找

Toward Freedom

Some days ago, I decided to get rid of Matlab because

1. It is heavy. It takes at least 3 seconds to start itself and usually the programs are running slowly compared to the programs written in Python.
2. It is propritary. Although many people in the control field use Matlab to do simulations, I don't agree with that. Why not use open source software instead? For operations with matrices and transfer functions, I highly recommand Scilab. As for numerical calucations, I think any programming language will perform better than the Mablab programming language.

Convexity

Recently I enjoyed surfing homepages of famous people in the control field. At first, I don't even know those people have a homepage. I came across their homepages because I wanted to find an old paper whose electronical version was not available through school's library. So I used google to search the paper's information. And found some authors place pdf files of the papers in their homepage, which is a nice idea from my point of view. I also found there are many interesting things in their homepages, e.g. their lecture notes, old papers, books, biography... I especially like to see their lecture notes, because they are usually written in a compact way, only the main and important concepts are listed in the notes and tedious calculation are omitted. This helps me to quickly catch the most important idea that the authors want to convey. Today I read three different people's lecture notes:

1. Stephen P. Boyd: Convex Optimization in Electrical Engineering.
2. Carsten W. Scherer: LMI Relaxations in Robust Control.
3. M. C. de Oliveira: Background material on convexity.

I found one thing in common: they all have the following quote

The greatest watershed in optimiztion is not between linearity and nonlinearity, but between convexity and nonconvexity - Rockafellar

常用軟體列表

好像總是每個禮拜一才比較時間寫寫部落格，今天就把我常用的免費軟體做個列表好了。 我覺得一個好的軟體所要具備的條件是：介面簡潔，程式啟動快速，不會影響作業系統的執行。

我心似海洋

在逛薄荷的網站時， 有提到我心似海洋 這一首歌，於是就找來聽聽看，覺得還蠻好聽的，以下是這一首歌的歌詞：

叫阮的名

每星期六回家的時候，總是會收看八大電視台的一個節目叫亞洲新人歌唱大賽， 一開始會看的理由是覺得評審老師對參賽者的講評很有趣，評審常指出的問題不 外乎：節奏、音準、咬字、轉音的技巧、感情的融入、台風等。節奏、音準是最 基本的要求，最難的應該算是感情的融入吧！

The papers

The papers I've studied during my PhD program:

1. Jan C. Willems, ``Least squares stationary optimal control and the algebraic Riccati equation," IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr., vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 621-634, 1971.
2. Carsten W. Scherer and Siep Weiland, Linear Matrix Inequalities in Control.
3. V. Balakrishnan and L. Vandenberghe, ``Semidefinite programming duality and linear time-invariant systems," IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr., vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 30-41, 2003.
4. Tetsuya Iwasaki and S. Hara, ``Well-posedness of feedback systems: insights into exact robustness analysis and approximate computations," IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr., vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 619-630, 1998.
5. Tetsuya Iwasaki and G. Shibata, ``LPV system analysis via quadratic separator for uncertain implicit systems," IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr., vol. 46, no. 8, pp. 1195-1208, 2001.
6. Minyue Fu and S. Dasgupta, ``Parametric Lyapunov functions for uncertain systems: The multiplier approach," in Advances in Linear Matrix Inequality Methods in Control, L. El Ghaoui and S. Niculescu, Eds., 2000, pp. 95-108.