bitman

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 05:51:35 GMT

In case anyone was wondering, I am still alive and doing well. I have not posted anything in over a year not because nothing has happened in all that time, but because there has been too much. If I can't say enough to do it justice, I never find the motivation to say anything at all.

And in case anyone was worried, I don't intend to delete my journal. The whole point of a journal is to be able to look back and laugh at how naive we once were. I'm a chronic archivist who can't bear to lose any information to the ravages of time, no matter how I feel about it now. I suppose it's only fitting that I ended up working at a database software company.

Perhaps I will post more in the future. If anyone is interested, I can summarize the past year, but for myself I think I have said enough. I can still be reached by email and through comments, though I'm a bit slow to respond as some of you have noticed.

Vale!

Change is part of life

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:19:49 GMT

Another successful school year concludes with tomorrow morning's 8:30 final. I may be changing jobs very soon, moving out of the book-shelving industry and into the computer industry. This is a very smart move for a Computer Science student like myself. And best of all, my experience with Linux and C/C++ will totally pay off. I was afraid for a while that I might end up somewhere like Microsoft and have to learn how to make drag-and-drop user interfaces in .NET. Or something.

All-in-all it's been a heck of a quarter. Spring quarter is always the worst, because you had already run out of incentive to work about halfway through Winter. That's why I plan to graduate a quarter early next year and just skip Spring quarter entirely. Well, that and I'll have enough credits, so why not; I mean, really, I only have 17 credits left to complete, but I would have to take about 5 or 6 senior-level CS courses at once to cram them into one quarter. So I'll spread it over 2 quarters and take it easy. Easy... yeah right.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a library to close. Vale!

Cats and dogs

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 23:26:07 GMT

Arg! It's raining cats and dogs outside and I didn't bring even a jacket to school today. It was just so sunny and warm yesterday, and I couldn't find my jacket this morning... I'm doomed. Hopefully the bus isn't late today.

Tamirindo warning

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 06:53:49 GMT

If you ever happen to find yourself buying random flavours of Kool-Aid, do not buy tamarindo. Kool-Aid should not be dark brown like apple cider. Or smell like... bark. Or taste like... tamarind...

Consider yourself warned.

Spring quarter schedule

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:20:26 GMT

Spring Quarter 2004 Schedule

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
9:00
9:30			MATH 390 AB CMU B027
10:00			MATH 390 AB CMU B027
10:30
11:00
11:30		LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212
12:00		LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212	LATIN 103 C PAR 212
12:30		CSE 401 A MEB 238		CSE 401 A MEB 238		CSE 401 A MEB 238
1:00		CSE 401 A MEB 238	Work	CSE 401 A MEB 238		CSE 401 A MEB 238
1:30		CSE 403 A EE1 037		CSE 403 A EE1 037	CSE 403 A EE1 037	CSE 403 A EE1 037
2:00		CSE 403 A EE1 037		CSE 403 A EE1 037	CSE 403 A EE1 037	CSE 403 A EE1 037
2:30		MATH 390 AB SIG 134		MATH 390 AB SIG 134	MATH 390 AB EE1 125	MATH 390 AB SIG 134
3:00		MATH 390 AB SIG 134		MATH 390 AB SIG 134	MATH 390 AB EE1 125	MATH 390 AB SIG 134
3:30
4:00	Work			Work
4:30
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00				MUSEN 302 U MNY 268
7:30
8:00
8:30
9:00
9:30				Work
10:00				Work
10:30

This schedule was generated using bitman's Schedule Builder.

Everything is very compact. :) There are no huge gaps like this last quarter, I don't have to get up until 10:00 most days, I only stay at school late 2 nights a week, and I get to do band. Now as long as I don't have everything due on Thursday mornings I should be fine.

Life

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 00:31:55 GMT

Finished my last final of the quarter just now. Waiting for the bus... Looks like I skated through 2nd quarter Latin pretty well (and it's the hardest of the three).

Programming languages was fairly easy. I now have a bit more of an understanding for the features that C lacks, and an appreciation for the features C does have that make it beautiful. Oh yeah, and C++'s template syntax still looks ugly to me. ML did it much better.

Operating systems was fun, but hard to take seriously. I didn't really learn anything I couldn't have thought out on my own, given enough time, but the professor was so knowledgable, with plenty of anecdotes, so the material seemed really interesting.

Theory of Computation was probably my hardest CS class (Latin trumps all classes). I learned all about these "Finite Automata" things which are really good at representing regular expressions (in a way, they are regular expressions). And then there are these "Push-Down Automata", which are a bit more powerful (they have a stack!). Finally there are Turring Machines, which can do anything we would label a "computation". Practically the only thing they can't tell you is whether or not another Turring machine is going to run forever. Pretty weird, huh?

Sadly, anime.fm went off the air some time ago due to lack of money. It was a very sad day for everyone. But I've found another internet radio station for all my J-pop needs: Japan-A-Radio. It'll do; I'm not picky.

I've switched to Linux full-time at home. I realized that the only thing I really needed to stay in Windows for was to keep Kazaa Lite running all the time ('cause I can't ever find any of the obscure files that I'm after on any other network). But now that I'm back on dial-up, it's a moot point. Plus there's giFT now.

So now I'm running Debian unstable with a few things pulled out of testing (like Subversion 1.0! w00t!). I like Debian very much, now that it's installed and running. If I had made my own distro, it would be much like Debian, so it's really easy to figure out how to do something -- just think about how I would do it... except that many of the utilities have cryptic names, but that's Linux. "apt-cache search" is my friend.

I haven't posted much this quarter. On one hand I've been busy, but on another, I have Lori now to share everything I do with. I guess I don't really need LiveJournal as much as I used to. This isn't goodbye or anything; I'm not deleting my journal and anybody can still contact me in one of many ways. I just have another life and it's winning right now. So,

See you, space cowboy...

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 22:37:51 GMT

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Lori, Libby, and I made truffles last night. They don't exactly look like truffles... but they sure taste good. And we had fun getting chocolate everywhere.

Worst workday ever

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 23:28:45 GMT

I gain no solice when I turn out to be right after my judegement has been offensively called into question. I resent being put in a situation where I must solve problems which my superiors believe I am not able to handle, when in fact I am quite capable.

And I am sorry for the person who is stuck in a long line behind somebody who is taking a very long time to serve, because of a technical problem. But I will not tell that person that they must wait for you simply because your transaction will be faster. Not to their face. Shame on you for even asking.

Thanks everyone for letting me vent this.

Jewelry that plays music

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 20:58:53 GMT

I saw somebody wearing a Rio player on a lanyard around their neck. Music players are getting so small now, I can imagine them being disguised as necklaces. The chain of the necklace can conceal the headphone cords up until either side of the neck. The player itself could be disguised as some sort of gaudy ornament.

I can see this becoming fasionable in the near future. (For guys and girls!) Just you watch.

On a totally unrelated note, I've been having spam problems lately. Somebody's been spoofing my sourceforge address and so I'm getting tons of returned spam, all in Russian. I've got it forwarding to my UW account now, which has excellent filtering, so I only see a few spam a day from there instead of hundreds.

The new W32/MyDoom-A virus has been flying everywhere on the campus networks. I even recieved a copy yesterday. I took a good look at the virus file in less before trashing it (someday I will pay for my complacency -- assuming that using UNIX to read my mail makes me immune to infection). There were some strings like ABCDEF... and 0123456789 in there, and a list of .dll's at the end, but mostly it just looked like binary garbage.

Today I got an automatic message from one of the campus servers telling me that this virus was recieved IN MAIL FROM ME (in caps even). Apparently the new virus .dat files have propogated now. Anyway, the headers indicated that it originated on Qwest's network (phone company -- they do DSL too). I don't use Qwest's internet service, so it wasn't from me. I hate spoofing.

What this needs is a brand new email protocol that (1) requires that you send mail through the server you expect to recieve responses at, (2) verifies the sending server's identity, and (3) requires SSL or future equivalent for all transactions. The first ensures that a mail server can hold its users accountable for the messages they send, the second ensures that other servers can hold the sending server accountable, and the third just makes sense now that we have such good encryption technology.

It would almost certainly have to break compatability with SMTP, but it would so be worth it. POP3 and IMAP would be unaffected.

Google weirdness

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 02:23:41 GMT

Okay, so a few days ago I noticed that Google's homepage looked a little bit... different. All of the links at the top (Web, Images, Groups, etc) became more compact, and some of them were replaced with the text "more »". Have I stumbled upon some sort of "magic cookie" that makes everything appear more compact? Is Google discriminating based on my user-agent string, serving a slightly different page to Firebird users?

Has bitman finally gone crazy?

I mean, it's not as though I mind; I like the compact interface much better. What bugs me is that I can't reproduce it anywhere but at home.

Update

Okay, so I tracked it down to this seemingly innocent cookie:

.google.com TRUE / FALSE 2147368759 PREF ID=33e7cf87274a7184:TM=1033083790:LM=1033083790:S=hlSuDrbFAkmzbiIq

I still have no idea how I aquired this cookie. It's handy, though, so I think I'll hang onto it.

Winter class schedule

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 08:22:01 GMT

I just realized I haven't posted my class schedule for this quarter yet.

Winter Quarter 2004 Schedule

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
9:00
9:30		CSE 341 AB EE1 125		CSE 341 AB EE1 125	CSE 341 AB MOR 220	CSE 341 AB EE1 125
10:00		CSE 341 AB EE1 125		CSE 341 AB EE1 125	CSE 341 AB MOR 220	CSE 341 AB EE1 125
10:30
11:00
11:30		LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309
12:00		LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309	LATIN 102 C DEN 309
12:30					CSE 451 AA MOR 225
1:00			Work		CSE 451 AA MOR 225
1:30		CSE 322 A MGH 231		CSE 322 A MGH 231		CSE 322 A MGH 231
2:00		CSE 322 A MGH 231		CSE 322 A MGH 231		CSE 322 A MGH 231
2:30		CSE 451 AA MGH 231		CSE 451 AA MGH 231		CSE 451 AA MGH 231
3:00		CSE 451 AA MGH 231		CSE 451 AA MGH 231		CSE 451 AA MGH 231
3:30
4:00	Work
4:30
5:00
5:30
6:00					Work
6:30
7:00				MUSEN 302 U MNY 268
7:30
8:00
8:30
9:00
9:30
10:00
10:30

This schedule was generated using bitman's Schedule Builder.

And now some brief thoughts on my classes:

CSE 341: Programming Languages: This class is so much fun. We're learning ML right now, which is like the most polymorphic language ever. I soak up new programming languages so easily that I'm doing really well in this class, even though I've already missed class 3 times -- once due to freezing rain, once intentionally because I needed more sleep, and once because my alarm was set to 7:00PM (stupid AM/PM dot). I expected them to teach us LISP, but apparently that got dropped from the curruculum this quarter. How can I live with myself without having at least a little LISP?
CSE 451: Operating Systems: Fun but time-consuming. Our first project involved adding a system call to the Linux kernel. Fortunately the labs had VMware set up to make testing the modified kernel really easy. I really didn't have the time to learn how to use bochs or user mode Linux. We also had to write a simple shell program that used the new system call, as well as fork() and friends. And all in C! I rock at C! My shell was all uber-well-designed, too. They suggested using strtok() to do the command parsing, but strtok() sucks (it's own man page says to never use it, but if you do...), so I did my own parsing using techniques learned from working on KevEdit. It was almost overkill for such a simple assignment.
CSE 322: Introduction to Formal Models: Ever heard of finite automata? They're apparently these abstract things that know how to recognize languages. Thought you knew what a language was? Well, in this class a language is just a set of strings. For example, the English language would be something like the set of all meaningful English sentences. That's a freek'n huge set. The C language? That's the set of all possible C programs. So what a finite automaton does is take in a string one character at a time and tell you whether it's in some language or not. It's pretty easy stuff, but only mildly interesting. We've just now started on regular expressions.
LATIN 102: Latin, take two: OMG, I thought Latin was hard last quarter. This quarter my teacher actually cares about us doing our homework every day. I mean really, how can one expect so much from sleep-deprived college students? In addition to the test at the end of every week, now we have biweekly vocab quizzes. It's crazy. I actually have to spend more time on this class than the hour and a half of time on the bus each morning that I alloted for Latin last quarter.

</dl>

The lessons of life

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 06:08:35 GMT

When the instructions on a pizza say "make sure that neither the pizza nor the paper tray don't touch the sides of the oven", you had better make certain to pay attention. Even if your oven is exactly the same size as the pizza and you really don't feel like cutting it in half, don't ignore the warning. It's there for a reason.

You know you have too much laundry when you have to stop after six loads because you ran out of quarters. To be fair, we only have two loads left to be done. It's so nice to have clean clothes again. :)

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 10:02:42 GMT

As of this moment, I am officially free of cygwin. Until now, I depended on cygwin to provide a unixy enough environment to build KevEdit under Windows. Now I have MSYS, the minimal shell environment for MingW. Not only does it build and run KevEdit's configure script better than cygwin, but it also works with the precompiled SDL libraries so I don't have to compile SDL myself.

Cygwin has so many weird behaviors, like not being able to find libraries in obvious places for reasons I've never quite figured out. You also have to be careful not to build your program so that it depends on the cygwin DLL, since that file cannot be distributed very freely. Vanilla MingW with MSYS doesn't have any such problems.

And MSYS uses rxvt, a fast minimal xterm client that I loved using in Linux back in my 486 days. rxvt has trouble hooking into stdin and stdout correctly when running some (DOS?) programs, but I can live with that. It's so nice finally having the select-to-copy and middle-click-to-paste features in Windows now. DJGPP could never deliver that. To be fair, I had rxvt working in Cygwin at one point, but it was hard to set up right.

Sorry if all that was a bit obscure, but hey, so am I.

Oh the agony.

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 08:27:18 GMT

Lori was editing a story written by one of her friends, and this sentence cropped up:

"Something had just taken afoot, and no one was even aware to what would be looming their shadow of death and plague upon our green Earth."

I believe it speaks for itself.

Linux in the lab

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 19:22:37 GMT

Spiff. The computer science lab now has almost an entire wall of linux machines. Okay, so it's only 6 machines, but nobody else seems interested in them, so it's okay. I haven't recieved any information about these systems, but I was able to log in, so I guess I'm allowed to use them.

Anyway, there's no GNOME or KDE installed, so I'm getting used to AfterStep again. Ah well, the first thing that popped up when I logged in was twm, clock, and an xterm window. Talk about lame!

And the damn xsession script was written in csh, and I don't feel like learning csh or porting it to bash. Ah well.

For some reason Mozilla scrolls really slowly, too. It's not a remote X session, so I don't get it. Meh.

Let's review my week so far, shall we?

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 19:21:17 GMT

Okay, so Monday morning I woke up to find my shower inoperable. That is, I could not pull out the knob that turns the water on without great effort (and fear of breaking the thing), and even then no water gushed forth as one would expect. No doubt about it, the pipes were frozen. Fortunately, the sinks and toilet still worked, so I was not worried and immediately hurried to my first day of class.

My classes are going to be interesting this quarter. In "Programming Languages" I will learn all about ML, Scheme, Squeek? and several other languages you only ever vaguely hear about. But no LISP! Previous takers of this class spent almost half the quarter on LISP. I'm disappointed.

I did look up the best method to defrost frozen plumbing on the internet (incidentally, "frozen pipes" is a better search phrase than "frozen plumbing" for this). The most popular method is to apply heat via hair dryer. Some people suggest using a torch because it's fast, others suggest not using a torch because it is dangerous and you have to water to put out a fire (that's why you're using it -- ironic, eh?). Fortunately, when I got home, turning on the water brought forth a tiny trickle of water, followed by some hacking and coughing, then a full stream of water. Monday day was not as cold as yesterday. The management for my apartment also stuffed big orange fliers in everyone's doorway explaining that 2-6 inches of snow were expected the next day and that we should all run a trickle of hot water through our faucets to keep them from freezing. Since they pay the water bill, I had no problem complying.

Moving on to Tuesday, yesterday, I woke up to a winter wonder land with snow still falling. (When it snows in Seattle, it snows at night. It does not keep snowing during the day; this is just not right.) Arrived at school, found school closed, waited 1 hour for bus that runs every 15 minutes, and finally got home 5 hours after I left, having accomplished only purchasing most (but not all) of my textbooks.

And finally today, Wednesday. What did I find when I woke up this morning? No power. Again. This time I had a nice battery powered clock ticking away, so at least I knew what time it was. I didn't trust the freshness of the batteries, though, so I still called the telephone number that gives you the time. (The telephone service almost never goes out with the power for me. It must be buried, redundant, or something.) It was correct.

So I left for school the same time I always do: 8:00. That gets me to school just in time for my 9:30 class. Except that today the bus was something like 20 minutes late, traffic was terrible, we had to reroute to avoid some nasty snow-covered hills, and did I mention we had freezing rain last night so all the tree-limbs were covered in ice and falling down everywhere? Long story short, I arrived at 10:30, just in time to completely miss the entirety of my first class, with an hour to go before my next one. Fortunately, lecture notes are online. :)

My feet are cold and wet and I'm going to be here until 9:00 PM. Good think I brought extra socks; I'll have to be careful when I use them, though.

I have been branded.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 03:50:31 GMT

LJ Barcode

I fail to see the use of a barcode that encodes my username (if that is what that does), but it looks cool anyway.

Snow in Seattle

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 20:10:44 GMT

Here I am at school, having traveled by bus for 1 + 1/2 hours and arrived 15 minutes late for class and I find a note on the door stating that class is canceled. My next move? Find a computer in the library where I work and pull up the University of Washington homepage. I find this announcement:

UW Seattle remains open, but due to continuing weather conditions classes will be cancelled as of 12:30 p.m. Department heads may consider early dismissal for staff consistent with the Inclement Weather Policy. UW Bothell will suspend operations at 12 noon today, and all Bothell campus classes have been cancelled as of 11 AM. UW Tacoma has suspended operations and all Tacoma campus classes have been cancelled. This message will be updated if campus conditions change. Updated: 11 AM

So as of 45 minutes before I arrived here, classes will be cancelled. Okay but I still have to go to work at 1:00. Wait, no, they just announced over the intercom that the library will close at 12:30. When classes stop, apparently everything must close.

I'm going home.

Here's a post showing what the fountain on campus looked like yesterday. Everything is covered in snow today.

Also, check out the campus webcams. The one for Red Square is covered in snow just now, but you can see the Tacoma campus.

Sed tamen est

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 20:12:06 GMT

I've had such a busy time recently, I don't have much time to keep my journal up to date. And I have people to talk with about my exploits, so I don't feel the need so much to record them here. But I really should, and I have some unallocated time just now.

Last week I implemented a floating point adder hardware unit from basic components (integer adders, shifters, and gates) using the SMOK environment.
If you haven't used SMOK before, don't. It's a tool developed by grad students here at the UW that lets us undergrads simulate hardware using fairly high-level components. It's probably pretty decent as a C++ library, but the user interface is terrible; it's very easy to use, very easy to do things by accident that you don't want to, and prone to random crashes. Plus the documentation is out of date, apparently. For example, to connect two components with a wire, you click on an input on one component, then click another component. If there is only one input, just clicking one component then another will connect them, requiring you to click in an empty place if you want to do something to a different component without creating a wire.

SMOK has a heirarchy of "containers" that you can embed within on another. When you embed one container within another, you see all the components inside of it, albeit scaled to a very small size with fonts scaled disproportionately so that it just looks ugly. The best part is, when you're in the highest level container and you try going up a level, it actually does zoom out, realizes something isn't quite right, and crashes. Now that's kwality. Oh yeah, and it's next to impossible to control the wires that connect everything, so they just turn into a huge rat's nest.

In another class, last week I worked on a group project comparing several different data structures using fairly meticulous tests. We finished just before the electronic turn-in deadline (as in, within the last minute), but we got it done is the important part. It was fun finding out that my data structure scaled very badly (slowing way down at about 8 Megs of data) because of changes to a base class that one of my partners made to speed up his structure. :P But we fixed it, so all is well, though it was an ugly hack. I hate those.

I still take a stab at KevEdit now and then. I've started posting to the forums SourceForge has provided for the project. The mailing list has been depricated due to spam, having a 98% spam, 2% bitman post ratio. Seriously. There's an interesting post about doxygen (source code documentation) in the Developers forum with a link to the very sparse documenation I've generated so far. And some posts inviting people to post more posts. I was going to hype it on Z2, but I don't feel like it right now. I am subscribed to these forums, though, so I'll get an email if anything happens. Anything at all.

If you've used KevEdit, you're probably familiar with the text (object code) editor. It's crammed with many features: open, save, copy, paste, syntax highlighting, music playback, ZZM import, and tons of things I've even forgotten about myself. Not to mention the exact same code is used by the help system, the load word dialog, and a bunch of other dialogs. And somehow I managed to cram almost the entire thing into one giant monster of a function (called editbox, for no especially good reason). So I set out a while back to break the whole thing into many many distinct, well-defined, easy to use functions. Right. Except that there's no way to do this in stages, so until I'm done with it, it doesn't do anything. I think it's almost done (I can't remember), but I haven't written the part the displays everything to the screen, so I can't test it properly yet. Maybe I should have started small, rather than trying to convert the whole thing at once...... hmmm.... I can still try that.

Anyway, that much really has to be done before I can really move on to adding new features (like I want to do, and everyone else wants me to). But all the code is at home; I don't commit broken code to the CVS repository. And when I'm at home I have other things to do: dishes, food, games, and doing stuff with Lori.

Speaking of CVS, I've been trying out Subversion in the form of TortoiseSVN just with local repositories on my own machine. I don't have any remote subversion servers I can use as I do with CVS, so it's no good for must things. But I realized that I've been archiving most of my saved games since the dawn of time every time I uninstall something, and it's been a pain figuring out which is the most recent copy. I also like to keep backup saved games in case I've done something badly and have to regress, but it's usually not necessary any more. I think ZZT and Unreal got me started on it, and now I'm paranoid. Finally, I never need these files on any machine but my own, so it's a perfect chance to try out subversion.

Subversion has some really cool features, like the ability to mess with the repository heirarchy without actually having it checked out. I thought I might have trouble checking things out into a heirarchy that doesn't match the repository exactly; games get install in many places depending on disk space issues, but my repository has a much cleaner structure. Since CVS just stores everything as individual files in individual folders, it's easy to make it check out just a subfolder of a repository. Subversion puts the whole repository in a database, though, so I thought you might have to check the whole thing out together. It turns out to actually be even easier to check things out piecewise in Subversion, and more intuitive even. I was quite impressed.

I haven't even mentioned Thanksgiving or Lori's birthday and already I've spent an hour on this. I wish I had more time to spend with Lori. As it is, most of our quality time is spent playing Diablo II together at midnight while the rest of the world sleeps.

Lori helped me breed a golden chocobo in Final Fantasy VII. I have finally developed an appreciation for the Chocobo races, now that I know I can stuff them with greens to give them uber stamina and decent speed. A mastered All sells for so much that I can finance them no problem, and I can always master more. Then I can do dishes while my chocobo takes names on the race track and collect items, GP, and stuff. The battle arena turned out to be much easier and cheaper than I expected (I hoard my GP since it's so dang hard to aquire). Now that I have Cloud's final limit break and Knights of the Round (the longest attack ever; I have time to wash five bowls before it finishes), I can probably finish the game. But I still haven't touched emeral or ruby weapons, and I have so many other things to do...

I like this song.

Oh yes, and "sed tamen est" (the title of this post) is a nice Latin way of saying "that's just how it is," or more literally, "but still, it is." I think it's going to be my new motto for a time.

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 18:52:49 GMT

I saw some random person in the computer science lab using my Schedule Builder (and LiveJournal). It's weird seeing total strangers browsing your webpage. Woot!

Ah, registration

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 14:16:46 GMT

I just registered for next quarter. Registration opened at about 5:56 as usual, so I was able to register for everything I wanted before things got sluggish at 6:00, when it technically opens.

Here are some interesting things I found while waiting for it to open:

Read exampleuser's journal. You know you want to.

The lj_backend community gets metaphysical on us, explaining the role of the Jesus logging server in our lives.

My new class schedule for next quarter.

That is all. I'm going back to bed.

New * on campus

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 21:08:31 GMT

There have been plenty of new additions to the University of Washington this year: a new Computer Science building, new computers, and probably some other things that don't matter.

The new CS building is called the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering, likely named for He Who Gave the Most Funding. Aside from the name (also the "Microsoft Atrium" in the middle of the building), it's a pretty kick-behind place. There's an "Online tour" if you're interested in pictures. I'm thinking of using these Architectural plans to build a level in Unreal Tournament because it would be such a cool place for CS students to frag each other. Look, it's SimTower!

Doesn't this look like something out of Quake?

But I'm mainly interested in the computer labs in the basement; a very well-lit, air-conditioned basement. Nice big 18" or so screens at 1600x1200, plenty of space for books & paperwork between each computer (no longer crammed together like sardines). There's so much bandwidth that I can bring headphones and listen to AnimeFM while I work on KevEdit or my homework. It's very good.

The public lab in Mary Gates hall has something like 30 brand new Macintosh dual-processor G5's running OS X with everything I could possibly want installed, except vim, and the 9:16 ratio screens that look like 2 screens in one. I was even able to get KevEdit to compile on one of them! That makes me a Mac programmer now!

I've been spending too much time on KevEdit now that school has started. I think I've had a "responsibility rush." I'm even updating my LJ again. Poor Lori wants more attention and doesn't know what to do. :(

One of those "back to school posts" Kev Vance was complaining about

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 05:57:22 GMT

Ah, another school year begins. My first day was rough, but things should get better from here on out.

Latin is going to be the most difficult subject for me this year. Foriegn languages have always given me trouble, and for some reason, I chose Latin. Damn memorization of vocabulary. A bit of irony: when I learned sign language, there was no written component because it is not a written language, whereas Latin has been reduced to little more than writing. So between the two, perhaps I may achieve some completeness?

Of my two computer science classes, I only expect one to be a challenge. The instrutor for the other class (data structures) tried to scare us with "your java homework assignments will be graded on UNIX machines, so you'd better learn enough UNIX to at least test them there." I'm so afraid. Really. Yeah...

Knowing full well that my first day of school was going to be a 14 hour day (plus commuting, but that's another story and shall be told at another time), this weekend I went clam digging with my wife and her parents at Longbeach, Washington. Saturday night we arrived at sunset (low tide was about 9 PM), pulled out some lanterns and clam guns, and found five clams for four people in just under three hours. I knew nothing about clamming, but even I could see how pathetic that was.

Defeated, we left in search of an open restaraunt in an attempt to recuperate and stopped at the first place we found. All the waitresses were in training (just about) and I suspect there was only one chef, because the food took over an hour and a half to arrive. Fortunately, I brought very old shoes with me; my feet were totally soaked.

Sunday, we stayed in town for most of the day, and on a whim we ended up back at the clam fields and decided to give it another shot. The tide was only beginning to go down, but we thought that one or two clams might just show up. Lori found the first clam almost right away, and after about a half hour we had collected as many as the day before. Then they really started to show and we caught eight clams short of four people's limits (that's 15 clams/person * 4 persons - 8 clams = 60 clams - 8 clams = 52 clams) in the hour left before sunset. Pulling out the lanterns again seemed like a wretched idea to everyone, so we packed up and headed home.

One of the bridges we had to cross was closed that night (we found out on the way home), so we had to make an hour and a half detour to the next bridge down. I slept through this. We arrived home at 1:30 AM Monday morning.

Lori set my alarm for 7 AM and we slept.

Somehow despite this, Monday didn't suck at all until about 11 PM when I arrived in downtown Seattle five minutes after the bus to home, which only runs once an hour. Thankfully, another bus that comes within 6 block East + 3 blocks North of home arrived in a half hour, much to my surprise.

I still have one more textbook to buy, because the professor forgot to tell the bookstore to order it.

Remind me to do a post about all the new computers on campus. There's drool running down my shirt.

Finally, I've been working on the autoconf/automake setup for KevEdit, and it's just about finished. I've used it to build KevEdit in DJGPP, Cygwin, Debian, RedHat, and partially on BSD. I'd like to create a dummy display so that I can at least compile it successfully on systems that lack SDL and DOS. But then I'd like to do many things.

Next, if I can find the time for it, I plan to start reorganizing KevEdit and ditch the old Makefile build system. That should be exciting, let me tell you.

Oh yeah, and libtool is overkill. Cygwin has some trouble with it and it makes DJGPP compiling twice as slow. So I won't use it until absolutely necessary.

Sorry for the longwindedness, but I haven't said much in a while.

No XYZZY

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 04:22:50 GMT

If I wanted a personalized licence plate, both BITMAN and ZZT would be available to me, but not XYZZY. So says the Wasnhington State DOL Personalized Plate Query.

I just can't bare to spend $30 a year for the privledge.

Married life

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 17:49:17 GMT

If anybody noticed that I haven't been around lately, it's because I married Lori last weekend and have been on my honeymoon until just last night. The wedding went off spectacularly and everyone was very happy with the ceremony. Disneyland was excellent fun for the honeymoon, as well as California Adventure, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld. The best part was that just as the weather started getting sour here in Washington, we took off for sunny California. And when the fog started rolling in down south, our honeymoon was over and we flew back to Washington where the weather is at least decent now.

Tans and sunburns for everyone!

I have so much to say, and so much more to do: washing of the week-old dirty dishes, sorting of the wedding gifts, writing of the thank-you notes, going of the to work, the list goes on. I'll post pictures as soon as I figure out what I've done with them.

It's good to be home.