Andres Marrugo

On Suffering

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A reflection on conscience, suffering, and the meaning we create through our actions while reading Crime and Punishment.

Nothing Besides Remains

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 23:12:00 -0500

There would come a time when future researchers would contemplate his work as obsolete and irrelevant.

Attending LAOP

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 23:31:00 -0500

I attended the Latin America Optics and Photonics Conference in Lima, Peru. I had a great time, but above all, this was my first conference, since I started my Lab, in which I didn’t feel so out of place.

How I do Presentations

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 22:23:00 -0500

Presentations are mostly about telling a story, even if it envolves a lot of math.

About

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 18:06:00 -0500

My name is Andrés Marrugo, and I’m a professor of Mechatronics Engineering at the Tecnhological University of Bolívar in Cartagena, Colombia. My research interests are: digital image processing, medical imaging and computer vision.

These days I spend most of my time either at work with teaching, research, and meetings and stuff or at home with my wife and my two sons. Becoming a father has been an amazing experience, it has changed my life and the way I look upon life itself. When I’m not being the family guy or the professor, I’m usually fiddling around at the terminal (doing nerdy stuff), editing photos/videos of my kids, cooking (I love to cook), writing on my journal, catching up on my favorite blogs and podcasts, and–of course–blogging¹.

Group Images by Person

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 23:49:00 -0500

A python script for grouping image files per person on folders.

Get Fridays

Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:58:00 -0500

A Python script for producing an outline for course with dates.

Grading lab reports workflow

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:31:00 -0500

Grading lab reports workflow using Python and Plain Text Files.

Life immutable

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 22:34:00 -0500

Life should always be like this. Inmutable.

In Praise of Slow

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 23:53:00 -0500

I have a recurrent discussion with my wife.

She likes to do most things as fast as possible.

I like to pause and think about things, and do them often slowly. At my pace.

I think that if you do things too quickly you might not be fully aware of what you’re doing.

You might feel that you are not really in charge of your life.

You might feel that you can’t really remember things truly.

On (re)learning things

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 22:47:00 -0500

My favorite topic in an introductory differential equations course is mechanical and electrical vibrations. I enjoyed learning about it as a student and I enjoyed teaching it later. (Or more accurately, I enjoyed being exposed to it as a student and really learning it later when I had to teach it.)

John D. Cook on Mechanical vibrations

I’ve always thought that education is about learning, as much as parenting is about maturing and growing up. On the parenting side, you can’t really teach your kids how to live – you can’t even imagine the kind of world they will have to live from the time they’re born – but you can expose them to the best things you know. In doing so, they can at least have the chance to form an opinion on the many matters of life, they’ll surely make mistakes, but I bet they won’t regret much.

Date Commands

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 22:49:00 -0500

Dr. Drang recently shared two date commands he uses for: i) calculating how many days have passed since a given date, and ii) another that returns the day of the year of the current date.

I was mainly interested in the first one because I often have to do that calculation.¹ Because the script can also compute the days remaining until a future date, you can imagine how handy it can be. For instance, if I’d like to know how many days until the day I start my vacations, I just run the script with a future date and it’ll return a negative result in days. Or if I’d like to know how old I am in days.

A CV for my Thesis

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 21:11:00 -0500

A Ph.D. thesis is one of those things that has a life of its own. Last January, I had the opportunity to write a two-page abstract of my thesis for publication in Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis.

Not Collapsing the Wave Function

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:32:00 -0500

Today in “This American Life” I was listening to an episode about hidden truths. It was really interesting to find out about a secret letter that the prime minister of Britain writes to every commander of a nuclear submarine. It supposedly contains instructions on what to do if the nation has been wiped out and if the commander should retaliate or not. It poses a mystery on what the contents are, even more so because every time there’s a new prime minister in office the letters are destroyed unread.

The Perils of Talking Too Much

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:07:00 -0500

photo credit: mkorsakov via photopin cc

All too often I see people who simply talk too much.¹ Wether what they speak is nonsense or even meaningful things, there’s a limit to how much one can tolerate.

By talking too much – and too often – we miss out on many things. We don’t let others speak (which to my understanding is common courtesy), and worse of all we lose our capacity to empathize with others. We can’t read faces well while uttering words out of our mouths continuously. Loosing that feedback is what prompts us to speak without pause and with no care for what the people around us may feel. It’s what turns you into a prick. We’re just too focused on ourselves to care about others.

New Secularism

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:48:00 -0500

photo credit: Pablo Moroe via photopin cc.

Before Darwin it certainly was very difficult to be an atheist or a nonbeliever – that is, an intellectually fulfilled one.¹ At least that’s how Richard Dawkins usually puts it and I quite agree with him. It was not that the scientific method² didn’t exist at the time, it was that the mystery of life was too big a mystery to even consider tackling through the ways of science. Yet that was what Darwin did.

A Book for my Son

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:21:00 -0500

In the latest Generational podcast episode Aaron Hillegass told Gabe that he wrote his Objective-C book with his ten-year-old in mind.

I found this to be quite interesting and truly inspiring. By writing the book “for his son,” he made sure anyone could actually read and understand it, but also he was deeply motivated to get it right. I wouldn’t want my son to read a crappy book.

A Brave New World: The joy of discovery

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:44:00 -0500

This post is in fact a Day One entry. I treat my Day One journal as a sort of personal blog. A blog with a readership of one – at least in the present. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, I write about my life and for my kids, which are too young to read. I hope they read this in some distant future. I think that the things I might forget are probably the things they’ll want to know about. That is why I write.

Writing my thoughts down

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:52:00 -0500

photo credit: chiarashine via photopin cc

As is often the case, ideas come about in the most unexpected moments. Lately, I’ve found myself taking notes while walking to work, while waiting for a coffee in front of a bending machine, or like now while getting dressed for work.

It’s become a habit of mine to write what I think, when I think it. My iPod touch has enabled that. I could well have pen and paper with me at all times, but I’m not used to that and nothing beats the digital format.

Careless email writing

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:16:00 -0500

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent via photopin cc

I read the other day an email that desperately needed some editing. Writing without editing is pretty much the same as speaking with little attention to what we are saying. The great advantage of the written form over the spoken one is that you can go back an edit. Not editing what you write is both a poor use of the written form and a sign that you don’t care much for the person that will read your message.

'Cooking' Ideas

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:02:00 -0500

I love to cook – or one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is – because it’s a manual activity that, quite often, lets my mind wonder about. While cooking I can think about my problems,¹ about the future, about a world different from this one. I can hear my thoughts in a undisturbed way. It is like a moment of pristine inspiration. Me and myself. Nobody else.

My reflection in a mirror of prose

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 07:02:00 -0500

I like to write, for writing reminds me of who I am, who I want to be, and where I come from. It is no mistery that I enjoy it, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I often get compliments on my writing, but still, I think there’s a long way to go before I feel more comfortable with it – I still struggle over single words or sentences.

Lately, I’ve been rediscovering myself in many different ways. I find myself more aware of everything – and that is probably not the most interesting thing – if not by chance, by fate, but I do feel different. I certainly am not the same person I was a while ago. I write more, which means I exit my body more often.

Four Paragraphs Long

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:37:00 -0500

I don’t really know what this post is about or even why I decided it should be blog post in the first place. All I can think is that I really liked it. I thought it would be interesting to share it with others. Not that it would be useful or anything, simply a pleasant read.

It’s not meant to mean anything in particular – at least in any philosophical way. It’s just something I conjured up the other day before going to bed. After I read it a couple of times, I knew it was a true gem. Only four paragraphs long, yet so deep with frustration and love. The love of a father towards his son, and of those little – apparently insignificant – moments that stick with you for the rest of your life. Here it is.

Always Late to The Party

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:11:00 -0500

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

It always seems I’m late to the party. For several years I pondered on the idea of joining Twitter, but it never really made much sense to me – at least at the time – to join a social network where there were hardly any friends of mine¹. Big mistake, that actually is one of the cool things about twitter. Unlike Facebook, it does provides an open space suitable for engaging in discussions, albeit short, of all sorts with interesting people who don’t really have to be your “friend.”

It turns out that shortly after joining twitter most people² were already considering abandoning it in favor of App.net. For the time being App.net seems like a niche thing, and most people seem to continue on twitter. Whether that stays that way for the next year or so depends on twitter and their recent policy changes that could well endanger the platform as we know it today.

Convert Image to PDF with Automator and Imagemagick

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:30:00 -0500

I often use Imagemagick for image manipulation¹. However, for simple conversion of an image to another format or similar things I have to go to the terminal and type something like the following

convert somefile.png somefile.pdf

Which is quite simple, and much better than opening preview -> export²->select pdf-> and hit save. But typing that for more than one image is also tedious. So, I decided I’d better create a service that would essentially do the following.

It would take the selected finder items, mainly images in png, jpeg, or whatever, and convert all of them to pdf. Simple.

My blog post writing workflow with Dropbox and Hazel

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:44:00 -0500

It may seem that, for the most part, I’ve been blogging about blogging. No matter how pointless it seems, I do think that this could prove useful to someone, in the same way I have benefited from others while setting up this site¹.

One of the things I like about having an Octopress driven txt-only blog is that I have the liberty to set things my way. The topic I am addressing here is that of writing blog posts on different devices² with the help of Dropbox³ and Hazel. I’m still working out the whole remote blogging thing, this is but the first stage of a soon-to-be remote blogging workflow with Octopress.

Spanish keyboard and Aperture

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:36:00 -0500

My new keyboard.

It's been quite a while since I've grown accustomed to switching back and forth between an english keyboard at home and a spanish keyboard at work. Like anything, at first it takes a while to get fully accustomed, but all in all it isn't too bad. This week my English keyboard at home died, so I bought a new one this time in Spanish, because that was what they had at the store.

One of the things I don’t like of the spanish keyboard ¹ is that most (if not all) applications design the shortcuts assuming an English keyboard. Therefore, what could be single key shortcut in the English keyboard becomes a double key shortcut in the Spanish keyboard. And that’s not all.

a service for writing day one footnotes inline

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 22:31:00 -0500

I recently wrote about inserting footnotes in Day One and how it could be achieved with the new markdown support. I realize that ideally Day One should support multimarkdown footnotes, but this has not arrived yet. It could well be planned for a future release, but I’ll stick to my solution for the mean time.

One of the tedious things about my solution to footnotes in Day One is that you have to do everything manually. The insertion of the footnotes plus the formatting, not to mention keeping count of the number of footnotes. For one or two footnotes this doesn’t seem like a big issue. But for several more it gets complicated.¹ You have to put the superscript (^), the number of the footnote, the horizontal line (which I think necessary) and the footnote itself. Therefore, I thought I could automate this–somewhat.

Footnotes in Day One

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:51:00 -0500

My favorite journaling app, Day One, just got updated to version 1.7.2, and it includes some really great new features.

It now includes more multimarkdown syntax like strike through, fenced code, and other nifty things. However one of the things I still find missing in Day One is multimarkdown footnotes. I’ve grown so accustomed to footnotes, that I don’t think I could live without them anymore.¹

It makes a difference to know the backstory

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:29:00 -0500

selbstporträt by Vincent van Gogh .

I think that everybody, to get the screaming out of their heads do different things […] beautiful losers and genius lunatics […] there are people who make things that we really, really admire, and love and feel some kind of a resonance with because the work itself is fantastic, but there’s another level to what they make when you know the backstory […] There are a lot of people whose work I admire that I think partly what brought me to them, in some ways, is knowing that backstory.

– Merlin Mann, Back to Work Episode #84 - Every Genie is an Actuary.

As Feynman spoke once of the science knowledge of a flower,¹ I restate here in another context. There are many interesting questions that come from the knowledge of the backstory of the work of those we admire, which only adds to the excitement and mystery of the work itself. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

I'm writing the site I want to read

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 23:32:00 -0500

photo by striatic.

If there’s something I learned from the famous talk “149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!” by John Gruber and Merlin Mann, was that one should make a great effort to write as if the people you admire we’re going to read your work. This is true even if the people you admire are fictional, or like in Gruber’s case, an idealized version of himself. I like to think that this piece of advice is as valid for writing/blogging as it is for anything else you do in life.

It's all about writing

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 22:56:00 -0500

photo by fiddle oak.

In the past year or so I’ve read a lot about how different people get their stuff done, specially when referring to writing. There are some people who just wait for inspiration to knock on their doors, whereas others simply force themselves to write every day. Inspiration is a tricky thing, but no one can’t deny that when it comes, it certainly feels good. In the words of Cristian Mihai

On the human intellect and prehistoric people

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:53:00 -0500

photo by JackVersloot.

I recently finished reading “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean M. Auel. It is a beautiful story of the human struggle for survival. In the time of mammoths and cave lions, a young human girl finds herself orphan because of an earthquake. Her survival instincts are put to test at their maximum, but she knows very little of surviving on her own. This desolate picture changes when she is rescued by a group of Neanderthals, the “clan of the cave bear”. She looks like them a bit, but at the same time she is too different to be accepted without it raising a few concerns.

Doing nice things

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:57:00 -0500

I wrote this roughly over a month ago, but by now it kind of feels like ages; don’t know why. I’ve tried–without much success–to catch up on old episodes of the back to work podcast¹, this is something inspired by one of these episodes.

Why I care about blogging

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:47:00 -0500

photo by Mike Licht.

It’s been about two and a half years since I started blogging. It was on a blog called Between the Candle and the Star (BTCATS) which I still keep, but feel I’ll be leaving aside indefinitely¹, and continue my writing on this site.

My original intention with BTCATS was to have a place were to write about something I had managed to solve or fix so it could be helpful to others. The blog has moderately met this goal. However, on the first year or so, I barely published a handful of posts. About a year ago, shortly after my son was born, things started to get interesting.

Hello world

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:52:00 -0500

This is my first post on my octopress powered blog.

Links of Interest for January 31, 2013

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The “Links of Interest” is a type of post I’ll start to do on a regular basis here. Every now and then I come across something interesting in the web that I’d like to share with my readers, but that doesn’t necessarily merit a blog post or I really don’t have the time to write one. This type of blog post is inspired by [Brett Terpstra’s “Web Excursions”][1] system. As he explains, he prefers a single post with multiple links rather than a ton of individual “link list” posts. I do too.