News: irrelevant current data

Saturday, January 18th, 2009

Well! A new year already. This break I was working on organizing my media collection. I've been playing around with minishowcase, which is a very nice little AJAX web gallery. I was looking for something pretty much like Picasa, and this is the closest I've found. Light, easy to install, well coded, it is quite nice. I've always thought gallery2 and coppermine were utterly useless when it comes to gallery managment. minishowcase doesn't have all the admin features, but the UI is sweet! Just throw all your photos in a folder and bam, you have a nice interface to select galleries, and move between photos (with keyboard, just hit right/left arrow keys) without reloading the page (I'm looking at YOU Flickr! Grrr....). I also tried out ampache, which seems pretty nice as well. I think I'll upload my photo and music collections to this website (after all I do have like 150GB)...

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

Well I had a good time in Amsterdam for the FG2008 conference and then in Barcelona and Rome a few days afterwards. The conference was useful and the time off was fun. But I have gotten behind in research and coursework unfortunately. For some reason I've found it hard to get back into the swing of things. I really need to crack down and get a lot of stuff done. On a related note, I've thrown up my Face Recognition Evaluator, which is a MATLAB package for comparing face recognition algorithms.

Friday, September 13th, 2008

Wet, cold, stressed, sick, and exhausted would best desribe me today. 3 days until ICRA paper submission and my advisor has totally changed how the underlying algorithm should work. I have no idea how I'm going to get it coded, tested, and written about in 3 days. On the upside, Enrique is creating the PowerPoint presentation for FG2008 and I uploaded my Facebook Downloader program for getting face recognition data. This allows you to collect data from Facebook for research and academic purposes in the field of face recognition.

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Well, I survived my first real graduate conference in Vancouver, Canada. It was pretty fun, although I did hit a new low - I actually fell asleep during a presentation! At least I still have my record of never falling asleep during class...we'll see how long that lasts. My advisor and I took one of the more uninteresting days off, rented some bikes, and toured the town. I didn't find out until a little bit into this that he routinely bikes 15 miles in hilly Pittsburgh. And I hadn't been on a bike in 2 years...a recipe for disaster. If he didn't think I was a wimp before hand, I've definitely cemented the impression. It was touch and go for a while as I wasn't sure I'd actually make it. Thankfully he made frequent stops on my behalf, otherwise I wouldn't have survived. But it was fun, we biked about 25 miles all told that day and got to see a lot of the area.

I went to go install filethingie on my new webserver after like a year (I figured it was time) and to my surprise there was a new version out! It is awesome! All nice and AJAX, with background saves for editing files. I've decided to use it for this site for now. I hacked it a bit so that it can build my site with txt2tags and the default operation is edit instead of view, but otherwise it's quite nice. Well I have two weeks until the ICRA paper deadline so I better get cracking. Last week I had two nights where I only got an hour of sleep, looks like that might be a continuing trend. Sigh....

Friday, August 9th, 2008

Well it's been half a year since I last posted news and over a year since I last really changed up the website. Thus, it was time to redo the website. I ripped off a template design from Steve's Template that I sorta liked and then modified it to suite my needs. The new theme looks a bit dated, but it is a bit cleaner and definitely more logically laid out. While I was at it, I re-wrote the PHP code that generates my website for me. The old code was terrible, literally. The new code is much cleaner and better organized. However, it is still a bit kludgy. I have a new tag-line for the website: "Arcane Robotic Incantations." I'm not sure if I like it all that much but it's better than my old "Escapades in Arcane Programming." I have a hunch it is too esoteric; maybe "We's gots robots" would be better. In any case, there is still a lot to do on the website and once again it probably won't get done. But one can hope, right?

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

I'm always surpised at the long lengths of time I neglect this site (unfortunately). One day I'll either dedicate more time or admit defeat and give up. Or just have it automatically redict to a Rick-Roll video. Speaking of which, my KDC class (Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control) team rick rolled our professor this semster. He didn't get it, but the class laughed. Our prof thought we were going to get up and sing-a-long to this weird guy singing "I'm never gonna let you go". In other news, CMU is definitely putting me through my paces. The KDC course is really time consuming as our assignments are to simulate a 2D walking 5-link biped. It is really intense, but at the end of it we generate some cool videos which you can find on my youtube site. I've also written two papers, that due to some mystical bad luck (Murphy cough cough) wound up due on basically the same day. I was able to get them both done, which is good. I also failed my 3D vision midterm (got a 51% on the exam and yes that was below the class average). So I need to do a really good project and study hard for the final. Speaking of which, is only a few weeks away. Back to work, sigh...

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2007

Wow, a lot has happened in the past few months. But related to this site, I got a new webhost called Bluehost and just swapped this site over. It seems to be pretty good so far. I was getting cramped on my old server and this one has plenty of space for me to put up files and photo galleries if I want. Also, it has newer software such as the latest version of cpanel and file managers and such. The other new change is I ditched my old PHP content management system and am now using a new system based off the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). GWT is really nice, but it still has some weird issues. I'm still getting used to it and my CMS app is still really ghetto, but I've jury rigged it to work. Anyhow, I hope everybody has been having a great holiday!

Saturday, October 28th, 2007

I have pretty much settled into "da Pitts" and CMU. It's getting cold though. This poor Florida boy is not liking the cold sweeps of air moving down out of Canada. Tomorrow it is supposed to potentially freeze and go into the high 20s. Brrr! In Central Florida, it only freezes a few times a year max. And going into the 20s is very rare. Oh well...I tried to buy some hypnosis balls and swing them in front of my eyes and use self-hypnosis to convince myself that I liked cold weather, but it's not working so far. Actually I didn't buy hypnosis balls and try that, but somehow I doubt it would work. But if it gets cold enough, I might just give the crazy idea a try. So I mentioned earlier that I might try making my own CMS using the Google Web Toolkit. This is the first news item that uses the new half-baked CMS I've made with it. I really like how it is turning out. There are some frustrating things with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), especially with sizing and stilly tree items, but overally, it is a nice package. Sure beats doing it through straight Javascript. I really don't have that much yet (a few hundred lines of code in Java and PHP), but I have it so it loads in my existing page/file structure in a tree that I can browse. I can double click and open up pages that load in tabbed text area boxes. Since this site is done in txt2tags, a simple text area does fine. I could do it in HTML as well by using the RichText control. There is a lot that is still ghetto (not counting the fact I don't have creating pages or editing templates or anything) and hardcoded, but I'm proud of it so far. Of course, it'll probably crash when I try to save this page, but... Anyhow, when I slack and make time to work on this, I'll update it some more. I'm hoping to make it a bit more generic and release it as a very simple CMS (yes I know there is a CMS with basically that same name). Well it's late so time for bed. Gotta get up in 4 hours and I still haven't showered tonight. Sigh...This is going to be a very bad week for me.

Sunday, August 27th, 2007

So yes, an auspicious start to the whole "beginning classes at CMU tomorrow" deal. First I discover that apparently I left the lights on in my car - for an entire week. So yes, I don't have a volt-meter handy (gasp!), but I'm guessing the battery is much, much less than 12 volts. So much for that RI picnic I was supposed to attend this afternoon. Unluckily, I don't know anybody well enough to ask for a jump. Luckily, I now live in Pittsburgh were stores are crammed ontop of each other with absolutely no woods, lots, or any sort of green growing fields anywhere. Wait, why is that lucky again? Oh right, that's good because I have an Advance Auto Car Parts only a half mile or so away. Thank you Google and thank you Pittsburgh. And lo and behold, according to the Advance Auto website, they have a rechargeable jumpstarter for only $40 and it is in stock. Hurrah! Of course, when I arrive I discover that they lied and the jumpstarters were all sold out. OK, so I'll make do with a plain old car battery charger. Sure it takes 8 hours to charge, but it'll get the job done. And if I grab another car battery and an inverter, I can make my own UPS in the future. So I buy my battery charger, great. I spend 10 minutes unscrewing things to get my car battery out of the car, but I get it out and myself dirty in the process. Oh well, I get it charging and everything will be good to go tomorrow. However, that's not the end. I decide to have some spaghetti for supper and get a pot of water to boil and turn my gas stove to "LITE" - and nothing happens. Hmm...the range top is still pretty warm so the pilot light must still be on. How about another burner? Nope. Feel up the stove again and it's cooler. Drat! I must have extinguished the pilot light. It is times like these that I'm glad I'm good at software because hardware stuff sure doesn't like me. Now I have to decide, should I try to toaster oven to make some supper or will it break too? Hmmm...difficult decisions ahead...

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2007

Tonight was the Honors Banquet, which was sorta fun/sorta boring. It was fun because my sister and her boyfriend came in place of my parents (they are in Scotland living it up). It was also fun because I got to sit with Enrique, Chris, Christina, and Jason. My advisor Dr. Gonzalez was supposed to be there but he was in Jordan (see the trend!) so Dr. Georgiopoulos was my "substitute advisor" for the night. It was funny because when they called me up to get my medal (everybody got one), they didn't say "Dr. Georgiopoulos filling in for Dr. Gonzalez." Nope, Dr. Georgiopoulos was announced as Dr. Gonzalez. That was pretty funny. Some of the Honors in the Major undergraduate thesis titles were pretty funny too. One was about Superman and the legacy of heroes or something. It was boring because of all the speeches and the giving of the medals. I suggested they just do what the rock concerts do: just throw the medals out to the audience and let them catch them. The speeches were extremely boring except one by the student. As Jaryd (my sister's boyfriend) said, you can totally tell she thesaurus'ed the whole thing. Half the time she was bragging about her accomplishments (without making it seem obvious...and failing) and the other half of the time she was simply making stuff up that sounded so "dressed up" that it was incredibly cheesy and laughable. I think I laughed my whole way through it as she threw out words like "indubious" and phrases "consciously committed this moment to memory." Ahh me...at leas the cake was good; in fact, I stole a piece from the table next to us on the way out.

On the technical side, I was thinking over my pretty ghetto website and CMS that I made. I was thinking it could be so much better with a (gasp!) AJAX interface. I know, I know, AJAX is the newest buzzword. But what I want is a more "desktop-like" experience when developing my website, but from the web. For instance, auto-save anybody? Ever entered a post/website content into an edit box only for the page not to load and then when you hit back it's all gone? Anybody else do the "copy before you submit so you don't loose everything you typed for the past 15 minutes?" Ever wanted to edit multiple pages at the same time in tabs? So yeah, AJAX would be an awesome application of this (in my opinion). And not too many CMSes seem to have these features. So I'm investigating the Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java code to Javascript. That means you can develop your code in eclipse and then have it compiled to HTML and Java. I was initially suspicious (and still sorta am), but looking at it more, it seems not only a cool idea, but one with merit too. It would be cool to have an AJAX CMS with a PHP backend. I found this link helpful when trying to access PHP from my local machine using Google Web Toolkit http://www.drivenbycuriosity.com/mywp/?p=52#more-52. I never have enough time, so this is probably a passing fancy, but I thought I would share my initial (and favorable) impressions.

Friday, April 27th, 2007

I am DONE!!! No more undergrad (unless I fail a class, which would really stink). A lot has happened in the past month and a half. I finished my thesis, defended, wrapped up our Netflix project (nope, we didn't win a million bucks), accepted CMU's offer for grad school, pulled my first allnighter in college (on a project that wasn't even mine), missed an awards ceremony where the dean of Engineering/CS talked about me for 3 minutes (while I was supposed to be on stage), slept on the table in the lab, got a research job for the summer, and finished my finals (borderline A/B in one, B/C in another). So yeah, it feels really good to be finished. Now I have graduation, robotics, my job, a few papers to write, and have fun during the summer! Bring it on! But first let me sleep for a week ;)

Friday, March 9, 2007

This past week I spent all my spare time (well, almost all my spare time) working on my thesis for the deadline today. As of 3:30 today, I had 7 chapters, 94 pages, and a very tired Brian. And all Dr. Gonzalez could say was "it feels light"...sigh....must sleep....

Friday, March 2, 2007

Fun with my thesis, at least that's what I keep telling myself so I don't realize what I'm actually doing and break down crying ;) Working from 8 AM until 2 or 3 AM does not make for a terribly happy Brian. I have considered pulling a few all nighters, but I'm trying to stay on a reasonably night/day schedule, so I usually go home to sleep for at least a few hours each night. I think the worst one was when I passed out on the weekend and slept until 11 AM, then stayed in the lab until almost 7 AM. I decided to go home that night, or morning actually, to grab a few hours of sleep instead of just staying until the next day. I did get to see pre-dawn light and almost the sunrise. I guess you could almost qualify that as an all nighter. Go Mountain Dew (I don't like coffee)! On the plus side, my adviser Dr. Gonzalez extended my deadline until March 9th. Whee! An extra 4 days, how nice. I turned in chapters 4 and 5 this afternoon, so now I have to finish the code, write the test cases, test them, and then write chapters 6 and 7. Sigh...better get going...

Saturday, February 10, 2007

The crunch is on! My thesis must be finished by March 5th. I've got a new title now: "Automatically Determining Consequences of Unexpected Events." Not exactly related to what I want to do, robotics, but hey, it was a paid topic so I took it. Now that my first three chapters are being reviewed, I finally started the code...let's see...Thursday I think it was. I have the model pretty much completely designed, but I decided against writing it in case it changes while I code. I now have 800 lines of C++ code so far, thanks to forcing myself to write comments as I code and the marvels of modern IDEs and tools like Visual Assist X. I must admit, the coding is quite a bit more fun than writing the thesis. Oh, on a slightly unrelated note, Cameron and I came up with a thesis roadmap to a Lord of the Rings analogy. For a quick sample:

• Thesis topic decided: Inherit the One Ring
• Successfully defended: Dropping the One Ring
• Graduation: Boarding the boat

Yes, that does make me an official dork. On a completely unrelated note, I am saddened to hear that Jackson will not be directing the Hobbit. I hope the director who climbs on board will do as well a job as he did with Lord of the Rings. OK, enough procrastinating, back to coding my thesis.

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Wow! Today my adviser Dr. Gonzalez let me know that I had been awarded the UCF Presidential Fellowship! I emailed him back and said UCF was looking more and more attractive. We'll see if I get accepted to any of my other universities and if they can give me any financial aid (or if I get a national fellowship). But at least the "safety net" of UCF is looking pretty solid at the moment. Yesterday I handed in the first three chapters of my thesis to Dr. Gonzalez again to review. Unfortunately, those PhD and Master's students he has all want to graduate or propose their topics, putting me in the back of the line. Actually, now that I think about it, that may be a good thing - maybe he'll just pass my thesis off without looking at it too hard. Of course, that's just wishful thinking...sigh...

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

Robotics is coming along pretty well. Our robot Gamblore is back in one piece after swapping out the motors for newer, more powerful ones. The path planning is progressing smoothly, I have A* and Potential Fields both coded up and working pretty well in the little simulation I'm using. The one thing we are still waiting on is the compass, which should be arriving any day now (or any month now, knowing how the ordering system works at IST). All in all, things are looking pretty good. Nice cool Florida winter weather doesn't hurt either :)

Monday, January 22th, 2007

Hurrah! My backup safety school UCF has accepted me into their Computer Engineering PhD program. Now I don't have to be a bum under the 417 bridge. They said they would let me know if I got any financial aid later in March. I'm still waiting to hear back on all my other fellowships, etc, etc.

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Tonight I went to Winter Jam with a few friends (OK, if I want to be completely honest about it, my friend Enrique dragged me to it). We went downtown Orlando to the TDWaterhouse (or whatever it is now called). It was really really loud :) It was 4 hours, but it seemed like half of it some sort of plug for homeless kids, various movies, etc, etc. But I think it was worth it for Steven Curtis Chapman and Jeremy Camp (the other people weren't that great....Newsong was OK). I would recommend showing up 2 hours into it if you don't care about Britt Nicole (pretty bad), Hawk Nelson (blast you away hard rock), Newsong (decent), or Sanctus Real (one good song), homeless kids, the new Amazing Grace movie, or the preaching. But it was worth the $10 for Steven Curtis Chapman's Dive and Magnificent Obsession. I thought it funny that Winter Jam's sponsor is a giant sweet potato and they show a clip of how you can use sweet potatoes as like "God's food to man" in just about any recipe, including sweet potato pancakes. Ick!

Monday, January 8th, 2007

Today began my last semester as an undergraduate (I hope!). I did not get off to a good start. I was fifteen minutes late to my first class because I thought it started at 12:30. That's actually when it got out...I think I was remembering that because I was more focused on getting lunch after the class than remembering when to show up. Oh well...the good thing is it's group project based and a bunch of us in there know each other and formed a group. That's usually much better than being randomly paired. One of the guys is a real perfectionist too, much worse than I am. Enrique is also in it, so I know he knows how to program from robotics. I've also worked with Christina before and she's an absolute knock down, drag out superstar at making any mumbo jumbo sound good and be grammatically correct. Newegg also replied to me saying I could still do an RMA on my RAM (hey, just noticed it's the same letters, just jumbled up :). I also got two pages done on my thesis! OK, so they are the first two pages of my introduction, but still! Finally, I got an email from CMU saying they couldn't view my uploaded essays I wrote for my application. I emailed PDFs and DOCS to them, but that means they are actually looking at them! Whahoo! Now if they would just let me in and give me money....oh, and move to Florida or California or somewhere where there aren't 145 days where the temperature is below 32 degrees. :(

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

Welcome to the new year everybody. I've had a very enjoyable time the past few weeks watching movies, reading books, generally doing nothing, and regaining the ability to eat normal food after having my wisdom teeth extracted. Alas, the semester is almost upon me. However, my computer is not doing so well. My DVD/CD drive is failing I think. It ejects randomly, and I can no longer burn at full speed; it starts making this terrible burnt rubber smell before aborting. Also, Friday night I backed up my stuff (I use SyncBack freeware, highly recommended) before leaving the ISL lab to go to Robotics @ UCF. Good for me, because my computer promptly bluescreened when I got to robotics and then Windows wouldn't boot (error in ntfs.sys). Oh well, no biggie. I'd just boot off a Windows CD and copy the file over. Except it kept giving me errors booting off the CD. Blast! I had forgotten my CD drive was on the fritz. Hmm...So I have Ubuntu Linux installed on my computer, but not GRUB, so I can't boot into it (thank you Windows XP for overwriting GRUB the last time you installed). Aha! Maybe I can boot from USB? I have my 512 CF card from my camera and a Sandisk card reader. With some hellp from Pen Drive Linux, I was up and running DSL Linux in no time (btw, if you give a shot, you need to download the latest syslinux if you plan on running it under Windows XP). I was back in business! I mounted my Windows partition and then tried to copy over the ntfs.sys file. Arg! DSL linux doesn't support writing to NTFS partitions. So close yet so far. Hmm....How about grub? Yes, I can restore grub! Great, now my Ubuntu boot menu is back. Kernel Panic! No, it can't be! Arg! Maybe one of the other Ubuntu entries? A previous kernel version? No, still kernel panic. Hmm...Ubuntu memtest86+, sure why not - can hurt. What!?! My RAM is bad. Oh please let it be my 256 stick, and not my gig stick. Bother, it's my gig stick. Well that explains a lot, including why Ubuntu wouldn't load either. So that's all fine and dandy. I bought my computer about a little over a year ago and then the gig stick a few months later. Maybe it's still under warranty and I can return it for a replacement. Newegg here I come. You have GOT to be kidding me. I bought it on 1/4/2006 and today is 1/5/2007 - one year and ONE day later. You know, I've heard of all the horror stories about products that fail right after the warranty is up and I've even heard the conspiracies that companies design products to fail after the warranty is up. But hearing about it and then experiencing it are completely different. Even more interesting is the RAM stick I bought a year ago is no longer being sold by Newegg...something smells fishy here. So I dropped Newegg an email to see if I can still return it. In the mean time, I had to take the gig stick out and put in my old 256 MB RAM stick. 512 MB of RAM is sooooo painful! It's like I can't do anything without waiting 5-10 seconds for memory to be swapped to/from my slow harddisk. Oh well, maybe Newegg will replace my stick. And if they don't, maybe tomorrow will bring something cheery my way. Oh wait, I have to write an essay for a fellowship. Sigh.....

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

Well Merry Christmas everybody! If you are like me, you haven't done any Christmas shopping whatsoever and it's 15 minutes until Santa is supposed to come down the chimney (assuming he visits every house simultaneously). My plan is to jump him on his way down and get me some free Christmas gifts. I just hope Rudolf hasn't gotten any improvements to that blinking red nose. I'd hate to be a causality of a laser nosed reindeer.

On another note, I joined posted my first YouTube video a few days ago. It's entitled "Quest for a Grade." I was really worried about my grade in my Senior level Electronics I course. Since it looked like I might get a B after 8 semesters of a 4.0 at UCF, my friend Johann suggested I film the whole thing so he could see my reaction if I got a B. I thought it was a good idea so that's exactly what I did. Check it out, initial reviews include

• suspenseful...
• oh god this is so horrible to watch
• props on the suspense
• you created a heart felt expression
• i was very impressed, and amused

So watch it!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Today wasn't too bad as things go. I was expecting to be in much worse condition after having 5 teeth pulled (4 wisdom and one molar that couldn't be uprighted). I hurt a little bit, but the pain meds kept that under control. The worst part was the food. I had yogurt for breakfast along with some scrambled eggs that I basically swallowed. I had pudding and another yogurt for lunch. Supper consisted of a smoothie and some ice cream. So much sugar! Arg! I just want a burger or something cheesy. In an effort to satisfy my hunger for something non-sweet, I had some chicken broth. I am going to be so glad when I can eat real food again.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Yesterday night I completed all my graduate apps (all four of them, CMU, UCF, Berkeley, and of course MIT just for grins). In another hour, I'm going to be having my teeth pulled, sounds fun, huh? I have to have 4 wisdom teeth out, plus an "uprighting," where they use a mini crow-bar to pry a tooth that's grown in sideways to the upright position. Sounds like fun, off I go...

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

I traveled home today to begin the processes of getting my wisdom teeth extracted. I had a consultation today at 1:30 PM and basically the doc said it wasn't going to be fun. They want to extract all four wisdom teeth and then try a special procedure called an "upright" to try to bend my sideways 12 year old molar into an upright position. There is a pretty good chance it will crack and they will have to remove that guy too. So in another words, I am going to be having a lot of fun after my Friday appointment with him. He says they now have drugs where you are groggy, but awake and responsive, but you don't remember anything afterwards. I'm not sure if I should be happy or frightened about that. I think I'm a bit of both. I'm happy I don't have to remember that, but the fact that they have drugs that make you completely forget what happened is sorta weird. Hmm...actually, now that I think about it, isn't that exactly what copious amounts of alcohol does to you? Never mind, we've had this drug for a while now.

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

Now that I'm done with finals, it's time to hit up the graduate school applications. I'm applying to MIT, CMU, UC Berkeley, and my undergraduate school UCF. I'm about halfway done with that; I mainly just have to write my essays. Of course, that is definitely the hardest part. On another note, my new website backend is now live. As mentioned earlier, I'm using txt2tags as the backend for the site. It is a bit slow (I try to think of it compiling my website ;), but it's ability to convert (err compile) standard text into a bunch of different formats such as HTML, Latex, etc, is nice. One of the problems now-a-days seems to be the fact that data formats go obsolete so quickly. You know anybody who can open a MS Word from 12 years ago? Nope, me neither. In two decades, when I want to go look at my content, who is going to be able to read my PDFs or Word 2003 documents? Of course, that begs the question why anybody in 20 years would want to look at something I wrote now, but let's not consider that right now. The point I'm trying to come to is the fact that text is probably going to be standard a lot longer than any other format. Hence, the ability to use a simple markup language and then convert it to any other format you want. I may even write my thesis in it ;)

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

I'm halfway through with finals. My stats final was take-home (?) with "collaboration encouraged" (?!?) - oh well, at least it was easy. Electronics I was a really bear, probably the worst final I've ever taken. It was 14 pages long (according to the prof, I was too worried to actually finish the thing that I didn't stop and count). I studied for about 24+ hours in the 48 hours leading up to the exam, so I was pretty much set with my double-sided four formula sheets in size 6 font. The exam was still really difficult, although several problems were very similar to homework problems. Some of it was multiple choice, but hard multiple choice, meaning stuff we were supposed to somehow get through ESP or something. The good thing is I did finish it, except the bonus problem, which had two circuits with about a dozen transistors in them each. One was a half adder, I think. I do feel pretty good about the exam, although I'm not sure if I'll get a 98% on the final after the curve. That's what I need to get an A in the class....eeep!

Wednesday, November 28, 2006

Well today I finished up my site to about the level it was before with two layers deep. I sure hope this all works on the Linux server otherwise I just wasted a lot of time. It should, I've tested txt2tags before. Today I spent some time working on Gamblore's motors, but the joystick I was using to control it was pretty messed up. So Daniel is going to get another joystick to test with and I'll resume experimentation tomorrow. Other than that, not much except the normal "end of the semester madness." Lots of exams coming up, but I'm not too worried. I'm more worried about all my grad and fellowship apps that I'm trying to get done.

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

It seems I only get to do updates to my site now-a-days on holidays. Speaking of which, I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! We ate lots of chocolate chip cookies. My Mom, who is allergic to wheat, even made a separate batch out of rice flour. We also made a few cookies with only butterscotch chips for my Dad and Grandpa, who get migraines from chocolate. This Thanksgiving, I am quite thankful that I am not allergic to either chocolate or flour: bring on the cookies!

Is it just me, or do other people really dislike some aspects of PHP? The whole "if you mistype a variable, the compiler doesn't tell you" is pretty annoying. Sure, it's fine if PHP allows me to set a variable on the fly, but not when I'm getting it! It's always going to be blank. Oh well, go figure... On the plus side, I re-did my website again to incorporate txt2tags. As a side note, I should really count up the number of times I've started this website from scratch. Maybe that's why nothing ever gets accomplished. Anyhow, txt2tags is a pretty nifty program, although really slow because it's written in Python. I'm also going Web 2.0 with AJAX. OK, so not really, but I'm using two IFRAMEs so I can dynamically write stuff to the server and load it back into a new IFRAME. The poor man's way to do AJAX.

Thursday, September 5th, 2006

It's the third week of school and I'm still fighting the enevitable "school schedule", aka sleep 5-6 hours a night, do homework until 2 AM in the morning, work crazy hours, and get nothing done at robotics. I have a pile of homework in nearly every class, a pile of papers to read for my thesis/work, and an infinite amount of work I could be doing for robotics. To top it off, I have to worry about the GRE and my grad applications. Ahhh!!! Oh well...such is life.

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

I finally got around to updating my website. Today, while accompanying my parents on vacation going shopping in North Carolina, I reworked a lot of the scripts that manage this site. Now I can build a website two levels deep instead of just one. That means that now I can build a more complex site at least. Three levels will come later, but at the current time, I think I need to expand the site because at the moment it seems to have nearly nothing on it. Also, I got rid of the left navigation bar on pages that don't need it. I'm not sure if I like that, I typically like consistency when I design something, but if the page doesn't use it, it does open up some extra space. So it's a trade off.

Tuesday, July 19th, 2006

After 4 hours of working on it, I finally got my Ubuntu linux to load Hamachi on bootup, auto log me in, and then connect to my Synergy network. For my own benefit, I am going to document how I accomplished this:

  briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ sudo nano /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-custom

and then add the following under the daemon section:

  [daemon]
  AutomaticLoginEnable=true
  AutomaticLogin=briancbecker
  TimedLoginEnable=true
  TimedLogin=briancbecker
  TimedLoginDelay=1

Where briancbecker is the user you want to auto login. As for Hamachi, I'm assuming you got it installed, setup, connected to the network, etc. To start hamachi on bootup, you will have needed to edit your sudoer's file like:

  briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ export EDITOR=nano && sudo visudo

and add the following line at the end of the file

  briancbecker ALL=NOPASSWD:/sbin/tuncfg

(replacing briancbecker with your name again)

Now you can execute tuncfg (part of the Hamachi package) without having to enter your sudo password. I also assume you've gotten synergy set up as well. To make all this stuff start at log in, add these lines:

  # Start Hamachi and then Synergy
  sudo /sbin/tuncfg
  /usr/bin/hamachi stop
  /usr/bin/hamachi start
  /usr/bin/hamachi go-online BCBAPT
  /usr/bin/synergyc 5.24.207.192

BCBAPT is the Hamachi network you want to join on bootup and the 5.24.207.192 is the Hamachi IP (or static IP if you prefer) of the synergy server. These lines go in:

  briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ sudo nano /etc/gdm/Init/Default

before the line:

  sysmodmap=/etc/X11/Xmodmap

and

  briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ sudo nano /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default

before the line:

  XSETROOT=`gdmwhich xsetroot`

And there you have it. Hamachi should start up, GDM should auto log you into your Linux box, and then synergy should connect to your Hamachi server. Works for me under Xubuntu 6.06 running IceWM.

Monday, June 19th, 2006

Well today I put up a Paris & Europe page. It's my diary and picture blog dealy thingie. I'll post new stuff as I get time to write it up and get the pictures slapped up.

Friday, April 8th, 2006

Today is the big day: Christina and I leave for NCUR (National Conference for Undergraduate Research) in Asheville, N.C. (I sure hope there isn't an Ashville, N.C. because that's what a lot of my paperwork says on it). After running around campus between something like 6-7 departments, we finally got SGA to fund our registration, BHC to fund our hotel, OUR to fund our plane ticket, CE to processes the paperwork, and Dr. Gonzalez to pay for misc stuff. The whole getting to Asheville was somewhat of a pain. We had to buy our own tickets and I managed to get my ticket return date the first of May, which is totally wrong...Asheville is great, but not 3 weeks great. Luckily, I was able to swap it out. Max, Christina's husband, kindly took us to the airport. We got there about 40 minutes before takeoff and the e-ticket machine refused to give us tickets because we were too late. So we called a Delta representative and apparently their new rule is if you check baggage, you have to do so 45 minutes before the flight. Since neither of us were checking any, they gave us our tickets (relief).

The plane ride was good; when we got there we got a ride to our hotel through the airport shuttles. Our van dropped a couple off at the Biltmore Inn (which was really really fancy) and then dropped us of. Of course, the first thing we check is Internet (yeah, I know, very nerdy). No internet, and no breakfast. But we did get an efficiency (I guess the Extended Stay Inn expects you to stay for an "extended" period of time ;-)) The shuttle to take us to UNC was slotted for 7:30 AM, so we decided to go find some breakfast so we didn't have to get up extra early to go to Waffle House or something. It was 10:30 by now, so every normal store had closed. However, the guy at the counter said that Super Walmart was only a mile down the road. About 2 miles later and a couple times getting lost, we finally spotted Walmart. Unfortunately, this was Super "Fort" Wal-mart. It had a moat...well, OK, really it was the Swananoa River, but it sure looked like a moat. And the entrance was way around the other side, so about another half mile later, we finally dragged into Walmart. We got some stuff for breakfast and some fruit and stuff. On the way out, we saw a little path and thought it might be faster than the other way. It lead through a little park and then dead ended. So around 1:30 AM in the morning, we finally got back to the hotel.

Monday, April 4th, 2006

Wow, I can't believe it's been almost 6 months since I last updated this site. This semester has been a killer. I haven't had a lot of difficult work to do, but there has been so much of it that I don't have much time for anything else. I finally got around to putting some a basic version of this site up. I'm now using a completely different approach. I've tried the straight HTML by hand, my own Content Management System (CMS), a professional CMS, doing it all via PHP, using an HTML editor, and now I'm trying something completely different. Use a set of metadata files to generate a set of HTML files for this site. This has several advantages. First, it's all under my control, but a lot of the work is automated. All the navigation links and everything are generated automatically, which saves a ton of work. Also, I can customize the metadata with my own embelishments, further easing the pain. Finally, because I have to generate HTML files from the metadata files each time I make a change, it makes it easy to back up. Everytime I generate a new HTML file, I simply back up the old one in a zip file. Also, being a programmer, I like the concept of "Compile" and "Build." So I log onto the admin side of this site and click the "Build" button and all updates are posted to the site.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Silly hurricanes. 8 in 14 months. Hurricane Wilma, the most intense hurricane ever recorded - in late October? Tropical Storm Alpha? You just gotta be kidding me that we ran out of names and have to start using the Greek alphabet. Those math equations will never be the same for some, I suspect. Back to Hurricane Wilma. Stats: Cat 3, moving about 20 mph, swiping across Florida 100 miles south of Orlando. So not much here except lots of rain and wind. I wake up at like 10:30 AM (hey, got the day off from school, might as well abuse it, right?), and it's blowing like anything outside. Looking at the weather, I see that we are getting tropical force winds and the temperature outside is 63 degrees. What? Hurricanes and the first cold front of the year in the same day? What wacky weather we Floridian's must put up with. <Sigh> At least it blew out quickly, by 1 PM the sun came out, the sky was blue, and it was a very cool blustery fall day. And no, I'm not interested in "Beta" testing any hurricane related software or hardware or anything, thank you very much!

Friday, October 14, 2005

Let's see if this works.

Saturday, October 9, 2005

It is always interesting to see how the worst hack imaginable can sometimes actually get the job done remarkably well. Last night, in a 4 hour PHP coding stint, I wrote a small script to read in a schedule text file, parse it, and display the items, timeframes, people working on tasks, notes, and percent completed to display it on the robotics website. It's gotta be the worst PHP you've ever seen, but looking at the webpage, you wouldn't guess that.

Or take my C++ plugins project. In C++, you can't have a function pointer that takes variable arguments. So unless you resort to assembly language, you have to have one function pointer for each number of parameters. One for a function with no parameters, another for a function with one parameter, and so forth. So if you want to support up to 20 parameters, you have to have 20 different function pointers, the only difference being the number of parameters they take. But to further complicate things, there are different calling conventions. So you have 20 for the C calling convention and then another 20 for the standard calling convention. It's got to be some of the hackiest C++ code I've written, but it's the only way and it accomplishes the goals so I can't complain too much.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Yeah, so the package that I ordered on August 2 finally came today. The funny thing is they said it shipped twice, although I only got a tracking number on the second go-around. Smelled sort of fishy to me. Anyhow, I got this letter from the president saying they were moving to a new warehouse and shipments had been delayed. No kidding! Over a month and a half is a little extreme. Oh well, good thing I didn't need it, right?

Wednesday, September 22, 2005

I think I've got the incurable disease known as "absent minded professor" The sad part is I'm still a student! I breezed into my apartment tonight around 9 PM, changed my cloths, grabbed my PDA and keys...wait...where did my keys go? In the span of 5 minutes, I had lost my keys. Of course, I could just go out without my keys (suitemates might go out and lock the door after them), so I had to find my keys. After a couple minutes of looking around, I gave in and started cleaning my room, hoping to find my keys in the process. 15 minutes later I was starting to get worried. 30 minutes later I was getting very worried. Then I found them: in my nightstand drawer. Go figure. What a poor pathetic example for a human this Brian is!

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Wow, my Computer System Design professor has got to be the laziest professor I've ever run across. He is supposed to teach us about this little microcontroller chip, but what he does is copy and paste stuff from the 500 page reference manual, put it on his website, and then read it to us. And since he just copy & pasted, he would have to pause ever 10 minutes and go "wait, what does that do", and then he would look it up in the book, and read what it does from the book. Arg! We graduated from 2nd grade, we all know how to read! Teach us something!

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

This Labor Day weekend was our annual Tarpon Springs trip. It was a lot of fun. It started out with miles of clogged highways going 3.5 mph. However, we looked on the bright side: we were not fleeing from a hurricane. We went fishing, but didn't really catch that much (OK, so my Dad caught a 3 inch trout, somehow I don't think that counts). But we ate lots of Greek food and walked the sponge docks and shops, which was lots of fun. All in all, it was a great relaxing time.

Monday, August 22, 2005

First day of the fall semester. Hurrah! Unforunately, I was lazy so I didn't check when my classes where going to be until last night. Uh, oh, the site was down. Oh well, I can check it in the morning, right? Well it was up this morning, but very, very slow. 10 minutes later I had my class schedule. First class at 12:30. OK, so I get there around 11 AM and then do some computer work until class. When I get to UCF, that plan completely failed. My suitemate described it best: UCF looked like an ant pile that had just been stomped. I spent 30 minutes trying to find a parking spot in 2 garages and 2 parking lots. Finally I went and parked in research park (hehe, didn't realize that sort of goes together) and walked to campus. I can book about 4 mph, and I had 50 minutes to cover about 2 miles so I figured I was fine. And I was, but I arrived nearly completely soaked. Great start to the semester, huh? Anyhow, Enrique was kind enough to drive me back to my car after class.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

My computer is dying. First my mouse wires came loose. I tried to epoxy them together, but it doesn't work quite right. Then my AC adapter began to die, and my harddrive went on the fritz. Finally, my AC adapter gave up the ghost. Luckily, I was in the process of backing up my data when I discovered my harddrive, so I didn't lose anything. I did a chkdsk and it repaired some bad sectors, so I guess we'll see how long it lasts. Now I have a single 2:22 hour charge to last me until Thursday when my new AC adapter arrives.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Today I am testing the feasibility of swapping over from Typo3 to Nvu as the backend for this site. Typo3 is really grand, except for it is really pretty complicated and I don't want to spend more time figuring out how to fix the things I don't like about this site. Besides, Nvu has spell check!

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Haven't been updating my site very much lately, but I have a good reason. All of us at UCF Robotics have been cramming like mad to get our robot ready. Tuesday Tim & Daniel left for Michigan via a van, taking with them our two robots. The rest of us fly out today to join up with them. Then we spend a few days training and getting ready, and then Monday we compete. We fly home that night, and then I leave for my study abroad in France Wednesday. So I just realized that in the span of 7 days, I'm going to be on 6 different airplanes, and knowing how competition normally goes, with very very little sleep. It'll be fun! ;-)

Oh, and over to the left is the robot I've been working on (not by myself, of course!). It is named Calculon (after some Futurama show or something of the sort). Apparently the verb Calcular in Spanish means to calculate, but in slang, Calculo means something along the lines of "big but" (I'm putting it nicely). We were told that by some Spanish speaking people. But this is America! We speak English (well sort of, maybe it's Americanise). Anyhow, we hope our "big but" robot will do well. We'd be very happy if we got top 10 in all 3 sub-competitions (autonomous, navigation, and design). Wish us luck!

Sunday, May 23, 2005

Whahooooooowwwwww!!!!! I am sooooo happy! In the wee hours of the morning today, I wrapped up the Calculon's (that's the name of our robot) vision system for UCF Robotics! And on top of that, I got a little video that shows "what" Calculon sees (3.2 MB)! We have some videos we recorded of Calculon going around on a little obstacle course (remote control). I ran that through the vision system and saved each frame to a BMP. The vision system averaged about 13 FPS on 360x240 resolution (half NTSC), which is really good. So about a thousand images were generated and then I ran them through a BMP -> AVI converter. I also ran it through Windows Media Encoder to compress it. But man, after 8 months of solid development, it is finally coming together! A good thing too, since competition is about 3 weeks away ;-) Still, I was soooo completely stoked!

Just for those who might not know, Calculon is a wheelchair based autonomous robot. That means that while we can use a wireless joystick to drive it, the goal is for it to be able to drive itself and navigate through an outdoors obstacle course. The obstacle course contains stuff like construction cones, 5 gallon white buckets, spray painted lines, and other stuff. So a vision system is crucial if Calculon is to see buckets and lines and then avoid them (like an intelligent robot). We treat the video as a bunch of frames coming in and process each one individually. Without going into too much detail (I'll leave that for later), the vision system looks for buckets and orange cones. If it sees one, it colors it yellow so you know what it is looking at. A blue box is also drawn around it so it doesn't interfere with the line finding. The line finding looks for lines in the rest of the image. If it finds them, it draws over them with red. Super cool, huh?

Sunday, May 15, 2005

OK, so my wacky parents decided this afternoon to just hop in their car and come visit me...without letting me know in advance. The emailed me on their way saying they were coming. Unfortunately, I was down at the library picking up some new books and then went to Robotics. About 4ish I decided...well, I haven't checked my email today yet, I might as well go delete some more spam. So I went and checked my email and was like: "Delete. Delete. Delete. Oh, Urgent - Sunday, what's this? My parents are doing what!" So I hastily emailed them back and it turns out they were just heading back out of town after trying to track me down. So we met up and ate supper and had a good time. I got to give them a tour of the robotics lab, which was nice, too. Oh, and the aerial robotics team did their first test. It is candidate for America's Funniest Home Videos. I'll see if I can get a copy and post it tomorrow, it's hilariously depressing.

Saturday, May 7, 2005

Today my sister graduates with an AA from IRCC weeks before she graduates from high school. Yep, you heard right, she is graduating from a community college (or junior college as my grandparents like to call it) before high school. How does this magic work? It involves a lot of work and a good school that allows you to dual enroll (both high school and college). If you dual enroll enough, you complete your AA degree. And to top it off, the college graduation is before high school graduate, so you wind up with an AA degree before you have your high school diploma! My thought always was: why bother with high school if you already have your AA? ;-) Anyhow, I'm very proud of her, even if she sweated out those last two math courses (actually I don't know if she sweated it out, but her family sure did!) Anyhow, congrats!

Thursday, April 28, 2005

A word of warning: when learning a new language, never ever assume anything! Today for work I was trying to integrate a Flash frontend and Java backend using XMLSockets. Another coworker had been working on an XMLSocket's server in Java and had some XMLSocket code working in Flash (basically a chat-like program). Also, the Java backend was setup to work with the XMLSocket's program, so I was pretty much set to go. Of course, I had never worked with Flash before and had very little Java experience. So it was a frustrating experience. I had defined a communication structure between the client/server, but for some reason sections of the data was disappearing. I tracked it down to the function and then finally tracked it down to a single for loop. I almost went crazy trying to figure out why a single for loop would cause data to disappear. Then I had this realization: maybe my "i" variable was global! Sure enough, change the variable to "j" and bam, it works. Goes to show that even when you create a variable in a local function, it's not really global. Lesson learned: never assume anything about a new langauge!

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Wahoo! 3 finals down, 1 to go... Now if only that last one wasn't the hardest. On the up side I found this really cool MIDI player called Timidity++ that uses software rendering to produce awesome sounds even if your audio card isn't top of the line. Download it and a 100 MB SoundFont file and you've just updated your MIDIs a notch. Now if only singing synthesis would get far enough a long...

Thursday, April 21, 2005

So how on earth do you import movies into PowerPoint? Our group is doing "The Spin in Sports" dynamics project analyzing baseball, tennis, and curling (guess which one I got ;-). Anyhow, we have a bunch of cool video clips to import, but we couldn't seem to get it to work. Of course, QuickTime doesn't work (for obvious reasons). But mpeg should work, right? Nope, won't work... Neither will AVI. We tried on multiple computers with multiple versions of PowerPoint. Some sluething on the Internet told us to embed the videos in a webpage and then embed the webpage in PowerPoint. Sound needlessly complicated? Sure sounds like it too me. So I had to create a web page, use the embed tag to embed the video, and then add a Microsoft Web Browser control to the PowerPoint slide, and then add code to the DocumentComplete event, test the current location for nothing loaded (""), and then load the webpage with the embeded video. Ehew, what a pain. And I had this one WMV file that I needed to clip, but I couldn't import it into VirtualDub because Microsoft asked them to take the feature out. So I tried an external utility to convert it to an AVI, but of course, the utility crashed. I tested the utility on some other WMVs and it seemed to work. So I got the bright idea of simply converting the WMV to another WMV and then converting to an AVI. So yeah, that worked (figures, right?).

Friday, April 15, 2005

Wow, what a week. Monday and Tuesday I spent 15 hours in a 24 hour time span working on a poster to present my research on. Yesterday I got the poster back from the print place only to find out they smeared the ink - in the worst possible spot: the title. So I had to so some reconstructive surgery (read "I mutiliated it more"). Today I presented it with 150 other undergraduate students. Part of the time I got to walk around and look at other people's posters - there's some neat stuff going on around campus. I also met with my professor to show him the completed research project and he seemed pleased, so I'm happy.

Sunday, April 20, 2005

UCF Software team (which includes me) took 3rd place!

This past weekend I spent at IEEE SoutheastCon 2005, an engineering conference for undergrads. I was recruited about a month ago to go as part of the programming team. I said yes and forgot about it. Until last week when they told me to be ready to go Friday at 3 PM. So I'm like OK, well that's good. So I meet this guy named Jaime there who it turns out is also on the programming team (this was the first time I had met him). We waited for another guy named Malic and then went from UCF to Ft. Lauderdale. We got there around 7:30ish and checked in to a Marriot (a nice one near the beach) and then went to try to register and find the other 9 people from our school (none of which I knew). Unfortunately they had already shut down registration, so we wandered around talking to people. Turns out since we didn't come by and register earlier, another team took our seat in the programming competition. So we went to find the rest of our UCF group to figure out what to do. We found out the hardware team hadn't qualified and nobody knew where they were. Our faculty sponsor was nowhere to be found. We did get a hold of the other guy on the programming team to meet him. He was a CS major (we were CpE) named Jobby. He seemed to be a smart guy who had been a lot of programming competitions. Unfortunately we were not able to reach our chapter president back at UCF so we didn't know what to do. So we went back up to our room and got pizza and watched TV. We got a call later that night from Justin our chapter president and he assured us we should be in the compeition and he would sort everything out.

Saturday we got up early at 6:30 AM and went downstairs to register. That took a while. We also submitted our t-shirt design for the t-shirt competition. Ours had a picture of the robots in the hardware competition running around picking up little metal balls. Underneath it read: "Do you have the balls to compete?" And yes, we did have to wear these shirts, although I felt a little bit uncomfortable with that on my t-shirt. We ate at the hotel (no contenental breakfast) for an outrageous rate of $4 a pancake. We then went and met with Jobby and the three of us went over some Linux stuff to refresh ourselves. We also went out and stocked up on subs, water, and snacks.

The software competition started at 1 PM. Basically it worked like this: a team of 3 from each university has a workstation with one computer running Linux with basic editors. You are given 8 problems to solve. Your team tries to solve as many as possible in a 5 hour period (no breaks, no nothing) using C, C++, or Java. And you could do them in any order. We got there and each took a a few problems to read. After reading through our individual problems, we came back and explained the problem to the rest of the group. We then choose the easy ones first. I decided I could do one right off, but got stuck after 20 minutes or so. During that 20 minutes, Jaime caught onto a patern in one of the problems and we wrote like 1 line of code to solve it. It turned out to be correct and that put is in first place being the first team to get a problem right. The second one we spent a bit of time, but got winthin another hour or so. That put us just barely in first place. After that, we spent the remaining 3.5 hours trying to solve the rest of the problems. We were able to solve 2 more, but only using a brute-force method. Unfortunately, the program had to run under 2 minutes, even with 50,000 inputs, so we were not able to get those. So we gradually lost position as other universities overtook us. When they froze the scores an hour before the competitionw as over (so we couldn't see who won), we were in 3rd place. Immediately afterwards, we went up to our room and relaxed for a bit. Then we went to the awards ceremony banquet to find out who won. The banquet was really cheesy, just some wings and pizz for the students. The grownups got salads and meat and desert, which we viewed as totally unfair. The next hour and a half was boring as all as all the bigwigs talked and got awards. Then we got to the student awards. Our hardware team never even qualified (we don't know if they even showed up!), but it was fun watching the other teams get their awards. The top two teams acutally competed right then and there to determine first place, which was really cool to watch. I was pretty surpised with the results of the software competition as we held 3rd place. I thought that was really good considering none of us 3 on the team knew each other before we got to the competition and we didn't have a faculty coach and 2 of us had never done a programming competition before! We also won the t-shirt competition (they wouldn't say our slogan outloud, but we have an official certificate bearing the words: "Do you have the balls to compete", which is pretty funny).

That night back at our rooms, two guys were trying to get on the Internet. Unfortunately, you have to pay $10 per day for internet, so they plugged in their wireless cards to see if they could hop onto an unsecured wireless network. It turns out that the University of Alabama Huntsville were directly below us and had unsecured networks. So they hopped on, and then one of them couldn't resist the temptation any longer and started to hack them. He booted into Linux and started doing packat sniffing. Before long, he had AOL screennames, instant messanger conversations, websites they were visiting, and even passwords. It was scary what they were doing. The other guy then decided to start chatting with them. He signed on and started to chat with them which totally freaked them out (as he knew their names and stuff). He told them he was on a hotel computer and the hotel kept records of all the trafic (which was a lie). Anyhow, as he was chatting with them, he would insert things that they had already said in chatting with other people, which freaked them out even more. They never told them who they were, only that we were a Florida team. After a couple hours of sniffing their traffic and chatting with them, one of them mentioned that he was going majoring in internet security. All of us in the room absolutely died laughing about that, because our guys were hacking them at that very moment. I don't think they even caught on that we were using their internet connection to surf the web and chat with them! Anyhow, scary stuff.

Today we checked out, ate, drove by the beach, and came home. It was actually not nearly as bad as I had expected and our team did win, so I'm pretty satisfied. Now back to all the stuff I have to do this week.

Friday April 8, 2005

3B (Busy Beyond Belief), that's my new motto. I have a semiconductors exam today, a IEEE Southeastern Conference 2005 this weekend, have an exam Monday, a poster to design by Tuesday to present on Friday and a bent to polish for initiation on Saturday. Oh and I have to write an abstract for a paper, do two assembly programs, do a chapter's worth of Dynamics homework, start and finish a Dynamics project, and present my research to a professor all by the end of next week. Oh yeah, and get a completely working vision system ready by next weekend. 3B it is!

Wednesday, March 25, 2005

Wow, you'd think I just went on permanent spring break, huh? Well, I sure thought about it. The first Sunday I was home, I pulled out my hammock, got me some snacks, drinks, a good book, and man I was in heaven. It was a breezy sunny cool Florida day and I just relaxed and had a ball. The week was good, I honestly tried to be productive, but wasn't terribly successful. I did some Dynamics and Semiconductor work (not much), helped my grandparents clean their house, did some work on the barn (again not much), and did some programming & commenting. But mostly I relaxed and read and stuff. Very nice, I tell you. Alas, all things had to end, and here I am back and school with an exam staring me in the face on Monday and I am nowhere near prepared. Oh well, such is life...

Thursday, March 12, 2005

Halelujah! Spring Break has arrived! Need I say more?

Friday, February 26, 2004

What a hectic week. Hours spent reading a new semiconductors book because I didn't understand the textbook. 17 hour homework assignments. Meetings. Informal sushi dinner with coworkers. Massive studying for exams. Multiple hard dynamics problems. Work. Robotics programming. Failing exams. Sleep.........

Sunday, February 20, 2004

Wow, last weekend my parents came up to Orlando since my Dad had to fly to Washington for a business meeting. So we got together and they brought me a blender (mainly because I had asked if they had an extra one). I had this image of me making some smoothies every now and then. Boy was I wrong. I immediately tried out two smoothies, one with 4 whole oranges and ice and sugar and another with grapes, plums, juice and ice. Yikes they were bad. Then Ian my roomate went out and bought some stuff to make a fruit smoothie. That actually turned out pretty good. Later another roomate went out and bought some stuff to make an ice cream shake. That turned out nearly excellent. I bought more stuff too and before you know it, a week later and we've been making smoothies almost everyday. A week later we've pretty much perfected it and are branching out to freezes, malts, and floats. Our latest was an orange sherbet with vanilla and sprite. Wow, yummy. All this means the blender has unleashed a smoothie craze. Our other roomate kids us about it and tells us he is waiting for the day when he wakes up to see all 3 of us around the dining room table with cups littered everywhere, all of us with bloodshot eyes and tics, muttering "must turn on blender. must make smoothie. must make smoothie" The sad thing is he isn't far from the truth. And while he does like some of our smoothies, he claims to have a nica-smoothie patch to help prevent him from becoming addicted. Well, it's been ... <checks time> ... an hour since my last smoothie and I'm feeling the cravings come on, gotta go now!

Monday, February 14, 2004

I've been debating whether or not to upgrade my TI-86 calculator to a TI-89, which is nearly the top of the line as calculators go. It litterally does just about everything, including symbolic factoring, integration, and all sorts of cool stuff. Unfortunately, it has a $150 price tag. I finally decided I was going to buy it with a $10 BestBuy gift card (well, and my credit card to cover the rest ;-), so I went down to best buy and it was $147.99. But then I saw a package that had been opened, so it was marked down to $127.99. That pretty much swayed me - so I took it up to the register and they knocked another $18 bucks off of it! So I got it for $109 - totally awesome! Now I just have to figure out how to use it.

Monday, February 7, 2005

Tonight's cooking results was mixed. I had planned to make 3 meals: cheap frozen pizza, queche, and salmon fillets with vegetables and rice. The cheap pizza went as well as frozen pizza can go. When I went shopping for the queche, one of the ingredients was heavy whipping cream. I couldn't seem to find it, so I though, well wouldn't coolwhip count? Baaaadddd mistake. 2 cups of coolwhip mixed with eggs and cheese = absolutely disgusting. It smelled bad, tasted bad, it was truly nasty. That was a total flop. The salmon fillets however, whent like a charm. Some stir-fried vegetables and Uncle Ben's rice heaped around the salmon was delicious. Unfortunately, I ruined the pan I cooked it in because when I tried to scrap off the baked fish skins, I scratched it and it rust. Oh well...

Tuesday, Feburary 1, 2005

I ordered some more RAM (512 MB stick @ $80) for my laptop this weekend and am amazed that I can track it's progress across the US via FedEx's website. I've recently started to swap over from Visual C++ 6 to Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta and let me tell you, it sure is sweet. Although it takes up 15 times the RAM, it sure has a lot of nice features. Back/Forward buttons, awesome intellisense, debug break when value is modified, more optimization settings, line numbers (!!!), function folding, and list goes on. Of course, it's not completely perfect. It whines about depreciated functions all the time and generates massive amounts of warnings (some of which are helpful, but most not). And did I mention it takes up like 60 MB of memory too? Good thing my RAM is on the way ;-) Visual Studio 2005 Express Beta is free from Microsoft (for now anyhow) so you can try it out if you want.

Sunday, January 30, 2005

So my parents are going to buy the second most ugly car on the road, a Hyunde Element. Not only that, but they plan to fly from Florida to New York (yeah, that bitterly cold place up new Canada) and drive it back next weekened. And it just so happens that they'll be trying to get through Jacksonville next Sunday - right past all the hordes of people swarming around the Super Bowl game. Good luck! Oh, yeah, and here are some pics: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Oh yeah, I also noticed my Contact page was broken, so I fixed that. I wonder why nobody told me it was broken...hmm, let me thing about that :D

Saturday, January 29, 2005

My family came by today and my Dad fixed my car in about 2 minutes. Apparently, all that had happened was the tube that connected to my spark plug had fallen off, so I was running on 3 cylinders. I felt a bit stupid, but I'm glad it wasn't anything serious. I then saw my sister graduate from her semester long modeling training (yeah, never thought I'd have a model for a sister). Hopefully she can get some good jobs out of it. I spent the rest of the day and evening at robotics. I'm really liking my GUI for image processing and computer vision, but I was getting a bit limited with FLTK GUI and need to do some re-organizing in order to add some new features, so I decided to swap to the nicer, more professional looking wxWidgets. While I was at it, I decided to try out Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta (what a mouthful!). It was actually really good. It has some quirks and it is a memory hog, but it is miles ahead of Visual C++ 6 in terms of features. Still, it took me a while (all night basically) to get the basics ported over and wxWidgets setup. Now I have to port the GUI, something for next week, I guess.

Friday, January 22, 2005

This past weekend, my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Of all the things they wanted to do and all the places they wanted to go, they choose Epcot! Although a bit surprising, it certainly was a nice surprise. So after being in Orlando for a year, I finally went to a theme park. The whole clan gathered Friday afternoon (although I had to turn around a lot because I kept getting lost) and we went to Downtown Disney, which was a real treat. We ate at Captain Jack's and then went to Geradeli for dessert. Man, they sure pack it in - it was some of the best dessert I've ever had. The next day we went to Epcot early. Just as we were leaving on the bus, we realized that not everybody was on....oops, not even at Epcot and we were already separated. Good thing for cell phones! We met up at the gate and went in. Our first stop was Mission Space which was a really cool simulation ride. None of us really had any breakfast, so at least there wasn't anything to get all over the shiny controls ;-) However, we did feel a bit on the wobbly side when we came out. We at breakfast, did the big Epcot golf ball ride, the aquarium, energy, and some other stuff while we were there. Then we went to the countries. The countries were really cool. We ate at Mexico and had some really good Mexican food. We visited Norway, China, Japan, Morraco, USA, Paris, which was most of the countries. We ate at Morracco and watched the belly dancer do her stuff. Afterwards we watched the fireworks, which were pretty spectacular. By the time we left, we realized what Epcot stood for: Every Person Comes Out Tired, which was certainly the case. The next day some of us went back to Downtown Disney to walk around a bit and eat more Geradeli desserts. Then we all split up and went home. On my way home, I had some car trouble - I was almost home and it started shaking quite badly. Not good at all...at least I could take the shuttle to school and back.

Monday, January 17, 2005

My first business trip went well. I flew up to Washington DC to attend an NSF I/UCRC annual meeting. The NSF building is a whole lot bigger than I had imagined. The Marriott hotel we stayed was also huge (13 stories) and the top story overlooked the Potomac river, Georgetown, and Washington DC. You could see the Washington Monument from the hotel as well. It was a grueling first couple of days trying to get presentations and demos done. Our presentation was squished quite a bit and we had to scrap the demos because the computer we were presenting on was...well...let's just say very incapable. No internet? How am I supposed to demo my online website?!? Some of it was interesting and some of it was boring, but I took some notes and had fun. I got to ride the metro for the first time too - that contraption must have been built a long time ago, because it was rather rickety. Overall, it was a great learning experience. But now it's time to crack down on schoolwork <sigh>...

Monday, January 10, 2004

Happy New Year's everybody! I wish everybody a much better year than last year (which for some of us in Florida wasn't that good). Today I started school. I'm taking Intro to Computer Engineering, Semiconducting Devices, Networks and Systems, and Dynamics. Lots of fun, let me tell you. As one of my friends says: I'm ready for summer! On another note, I'm leaving Wednesday for Washington, D.C. for a conference. I actually have to present for 4 minutes - I think I'd much rather be in class!

Monday, December 20, 2004

I hope everybody is having a nice holiday shopping and doing all sorts of other fun stuff - isn't shopping such a blessing? OK, so maybe shopping isn't the biggest blessing in your life, but I do hope that everybody is enjoying themselves this holiday. I just got home yesterday and it's nice to be able to sleep in and not have to do much of anything. Hopefully that means I can organize my computer and do a lot of (badly needed) updates to this site. I've got a lot of cool stuff that I can put up, so perhaps if I get a chance I'll do that.

Monday, December 14, 2004

The week after finals! So nice not to have to cram for one weekend in my life! But I am staying at UCF another week to work and get some Robotics done. I'm making some real progress...well, at least with generating some cool feedback loops with the new Sony Handycam DV camcorder. Take a look at our new "Discover" application in a feedback loop.

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Whahooo!!! Finals are over!!! I'm so excited...conk...zzzz......We are sorry to interrupt this message, but it appears Brian is unconcious and drooling on his keyboard...Until next time...

Saturday, December 4, 2004

Finals are upon us. Run for your lives! Umm, err, well, maybe we ought to run for the library instead!

Wednesday, Novermber 24, 2004

Wow, what a day. First a meeting that never happened, then a 16 page Differential Equations take home exam due, then classes, homework, and more classes. I had a class at 6:00 PM, so I couldn't leave for home until after class around 7:00 PM. When I tried to merge onto I-95, I set a new record: I merged onto the interstate at about 20 mph becuase it was nearly total gridlock. Nice...That's what you get for traveling home the night before Thanksgiving. Oh, well, I'm thankful that I got home!

Sunday, November 21, 2004

Well, I tried to make no-bake cookies today. They are oatmeal chocolate cookies that you boil and then put on waxed paper to set. After they have set, you can eat them like a normal cookie. Unfortunately, being the engineer that I hope to be, I decided to "improve" upon the recipe. Why not add some marshmallows to the mix? And if you don't have waxed paper to put them on, why not use aluminium foil? It turns out that if you put marshmallows in the recipe, the cookies never set and you get a gooey glob of a chocolate cookie. And it turns out if you try to put them on aluminium foil, the cookies stick to it and never come off. OK, so I guess I should stop trying to be creative.

Saturday, November 20, 2004

What an insane week! Looking back, I've realized that I've spent no less than 12 hours at the UCF campus every day of the week! Monday I had a rescheduled class from 8:30 to 10:15 PM. Tuesday I had a very important work deadline to meet. Wednesday I had a massive assignment due. Thursday I had an exam I was not prepared for. Friday I had another extremely important deadline to meet. And Friday night I crashed and got me 10 hours of sleep...mmmmm....nice....

I also helped a friend hack my first attempt at an existing open source project. We added a password change option to SquirelMail using the Mercury Mail Server on Windows Server 2003. Awesome!

Oh, and yeah, my webhosting company upgraded some stuff to add some security measures and broke most of my php scripts. I had to coax my webmail and Typo3 back to life, but I think I've gotten it now. Whew!

Friday, November 12, 2004

Tonight was time to hit the Volusia County Fair! Every year my family gets together and we go to the Volusia County Fair for the night. We had lot of fun, watching some tigers misbehave during a show, eating all sorts of grease and sugar, and looking over the plants, animals, and farm equipment. Of course, my sister and my aunt were blowing through the rides like no tomorrow. I did notice they didn't go on the ride that dropped you from about 50 feet in the air. Anyhow, it was lots and lots of fun!

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Wow, I actually got to go to a social event tonight. Amazing! Must be a record for most engineering students. OK, so there was a reason: today is Veteran's day and I didn't have to go to school! Whoopie! Instead I spent 7 hours in front of my computer. Then I decided to go hit some balls around at the tennis courts. I came back for a quick change and then went to my church's spagetti dinner and entertainment, which was a mockup of the show The Price is Right. I hadn't heard of the show before, but if it's anything like what I saw, it is pretty pathetic. However, it was an uproar with all the twists, enthusiastic college kids, and goofups. Anyhow, gotta be up early tomorrow (6 AM, no Mom, 5 more minutes, please?), so gotta get to bed. Oh, yeah, and in the last 23 hours, I've gotten 42 spams. Cool, almost 2 per hour. Awesome.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Well, I've spent the last few days studying (ur, um, cramming) for my second Electrical Networks exam. Yeah, and it didn't go well...at all. I only finished 3 of the 4 problems (like I didn't even draw the circuit on the 4th problem), so I hope he drops one. The problems weren't too difficult, but they were really really long! So I was rushing around doing stuff as quick as I could. The other three problems I didn't get to double check and I'm pretty sure I didn't quite get the last couple parts. And I probably made some dumb mistakes too. All I can say is I hope he curves a lot!

Tuesday, November 2, 2004

Today I voted - and boy was I prepared. I had heard horror stories all around campus and from friends that they had waited 2 or 3 hours to vote. So I brought 3 books on my PDA to read while I was in line. I figured it would be a nice relaxing afternoon reading my books in the cool Florida fall weather. And boy was I wrong. I parked my car at 2:57 and walked in and got in line - a very short line since there were only 4 people in front of me. I didn't even have time to pull out my PDA book! I waited for several minutes, then got my ballot and went to the booth. I took a while to look over the ballot and understand all the legalese before voting. The machine didn't want to accept my vote, but after spitting it up a couple times I force it down. By the time I was pulling out of the place, it was 3:16 - I had spent grand total of 19 minutes voting. Not fair!

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Because I was sick and coughing a lot, I didn't go physically to church today, but I watched the live stream on the Internet. Last time I checked you couldn't srpead germs via the Internet (that would be scary!). I also fooled around with some more robotics stuff, and came up with these images. Pretty nifity, even it the method I was using only works with about 1 in 100 or so.

Saturday, October 30, 2004

I had a hot date tonight - litterally! I took my sister to the Melting Pot for dinner. It was our first time, and I sure was impressed. For those who don't know, it is a fondue restaurant (for those who don't know what fondue is, go look it up in a recipie book and make it!). We ordered mexian cheese fondue, which was slightly spicy. It came with corn chips, a mix of breads, celery, carrots, cauliflower, and granny smith apples to dip. I found the apples eaten raw helped cut the cheesyness. It was like nachoes like you've never had nachoes before! Then we ordered the cookies and cream chocolate pot. Man, I think I went to heaven or something when it came out. Choocolate and marshmallows mixed together with strawberries, bananas, pineapple, cheescake, marshmallows, crumb cake, and brownies to dip in. When we were done, we both just about rolled out of the place we were so full. Excellent place!

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Argh!!!!! Just when I was thinking the cool weather was nice with Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, I had to be reminded of the not so nice things of this season: the cold. I've been battling with it for the past couple of days, and I'm losing...I'm just hoping it won't be as bad as last year when I was flat on my back for 3 solid days - I litterly got out of bed to go lie down on the couch all day - and I got off the couch to go back to bed. Yeah, hopefully not that bad. Anyhow, I need to get more sleep to keep doing battle with it.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

You know you need a haircut when: Different friends on different occasions tell you so. Your parents tell you so. You could probably make a really good mohawk if you shaved off the sides of your head. Your haircutter comments halfway through cutting your hair that she's cut off 5 pounds and there are only 5 pounds more to go. So yeah, I broke down and got a haircut today. It feels much better, but it's still not short enough. I'll probably have to get another cut around Christmas.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Well, my friend Taj is writing a Linux distro (which is like way cool) and not being a great fan of Linux, I wrote some Linux experiences of mine down. See my Linux Rants page... On the subject of academics, when I went to school today, I got about 10 feet into the Engineering building before the alarm went off and a recorded voice told me that this was an emergency and to walk to the nearest exit. OK, so I did a quick 360 and was back out the door. About 30 minutes later, with multiple police and about 3 or 4 fire trucks, we were let back in. The reason for the evaucation? Somebody burned popcorn and set the fire alarm off. And these are the engineers of the future!?!? Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy!

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Well, the typo3 upgrade to 3.7.0 went remarkably smoothly, aside from some FTP server & client erors I had work around (my connection inbetween uploading files timedout, so I tar.gz the files, uploaded the package, and then unziped). However, RealURL will not work no matter what I do to it. I can get it working with page IDs, but not page names. I spent like 6 hours, and I've thouroughly fed up with it. It's not like it is rocket science either - I wrote some similar php code back in high school! Arg!! Oh well...homework time.

Friday, October 22, 2004

Whew, a lot of fanagaling to coax Typo3 to work. Apparently the contact form broke. Some investigating through PHP code shows a file got deleted, so I downloaded Typo3 source and replaced it. That works now. And messing around with my RTE, I managed to break it. So I had to mess around and try to get that to work again. But I managed. Now if I can get Typo3 upgraded and RealURL installed, I think I'll be a happy guy.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Cooking went better a bit better this week - I only managed to cook my okra into a pile of slimy green goo (those who are familiar with okra will testify that it is indeed pretty slimy). I took a statics exam today and I think I did pretty well. I have a Diff Eq exam Thursday that I am totally not prepared for, so I need to do like massive studying tomorrow. Off to bed...

Monday, October 11, 2004

The start of a new week, hip hip hurrah. OK, maybe not. I tried to to cook last night and stuck in a frozen lazana in the oven. Unfortunately, I messed up the cook time and so instead of cooking for 2 hours, it just sat there. So instead of being done at 8:30 PM, I had to re-start it at 8:30 PM to be done at 10:30. I also made some banana bread, which turned out OK - it needed some real bananas to make it a lot better. Oh, I finished up the DirectX code for the DLL that allows you to capture video from any webcam/DV camcorder. It's really cool and it can be accessed from any language - and the DLL is only like 50 KB to! I'll have to upload it soon. I'm also installing some stuff like webmail and file managers on this site so that I can more easily check my mail anywhere and keep all my files in one place (on this site).

Sunday, October 10, 2004

My parents came up to visit and showed me some pictures of our house and property after Jeanne came through. Man, it was really disappointing to see stuff you had worked hard for and built over many months and years strewn all over the place. We lost plywood sheets off our boarded up house that we never did find! They just blew off our 10 acres I guess. Anyhow, one of these days I'll have to put together a hurricane gallery with comentatry to remember this wild and wacky hurricane season by.

Thursday, October 5, 2004

I'm working on making some of our robotics stuff into a compiled DLL so that anybody with any language can use the code. This is mighty helpful when the source code depends on litterally gigabytes worth of librarys (DirectX 9, Platform SDK, PTypes, libpng, zlib, and our own libraries). My Engineering Analysis exam was a total joke. 2 questions - you could use the book and her handouts that told you step by step how to do the problems. Now watch her mark the whole problem wrong because I forgot to something stupid like not put it in the right format. Hopefully not.

Monday, October 4, 2004

Today I had my first Electrical Networks exam and I was a bit nervous because I didn't have as much time to study as I would have liked. However, I had plenty of time on the exam (that's a new one!) and was able to go back and double check answers and I think I might have actually pulled of a decent grade. I'll have to wait and see.

Sunday 10-3-2004 Pics:

Pole Barn Before

Pole & Panel Barn Before

Panel Barn Before

Friday, October 1, 2004

Only another month to go! Can we do it without another hurricane? I sure hope so! With our track record, we are due for another in about another week (they seem to come in waves of ever other week). One can hope, right? For Robotics, we decided to write a cross-platform video capture library. The Windows side will use DirectX and the Linux version might use Video 4 Linux or DVlib. I'm was in charge of converting our old DirectX code from BlackKnight into the library and I finally got it working (I think). It's really cool to be able to capture frames from any camera (USB webcam, firewire camcorder, etc) with just a couple lines of code,

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Shame on me. I had meant to do homework tonight, but I foolishly decided to start a book while eating supper. Bad idea - something I realized at 9 PM, 11 PM, and 2 AM when I couldn't put it down. And the thing was it wasn't even that good - it was like a fantasy soap opera. Don't know how he managed to do that, but it was sorta weird. OK, time to do homework for real.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

My Engineering Analysis class is pretty useless, but I do get to learn some semi-interesting algorithms. On such one is a root finder, so I'll upload the source code to that after I turn it in tomorrow.

Monday, September 27, 2004

OK, I'm am officially sick and tired of hurricanes. When Jeanne started making tracks towards our neck of the woods again in Vero Beach, our whole family headed across the state to our vacation spot in Tarpon Springs near Tampa. From our hotel, we watched this guy on TV in one of our shopping plazas in Vero Beach being virtual blown away (they are tied down with a rope around their foot for a reason!). Not fun to say the least. Then the hurricane didn't do what it was expected to and came straight through where we were in Tarpon Springs. So we spent another day without electricity. Our house didn't loose it's roof, but we had a lot of water damage. I'm think my sister has the right of it: move to Montana and dig a whole in the ground and call it home!

Saturday, September 11, 2004

I'd first like to take a moment to remember this day 3 years ago and take a moment to think about the US (and other nation's) troops around the globe. On a less serious note, there is another hurricane headed this way! Noooooo! (goes and cries). It's a mean one too: cat 5 with 165 mph sustained winds. That means there's got to be over 200 mph gusts! Whew! I'm glad it's not headed straight for us, but pray for the people in it's path. Today our whole UCF Robotics Lab went down to the Orlando Science Center with our gears and demos and setup an exhibition. I got very little sleep last night because I was working on a sample program that would identify ping-pong balls or other stuff in real time. After fooling around, I found out that one version picked up skin in addition to ping-pongs. Make the background black, and you get this really strange looking image of your head, arms and hands! All the little kids loved the Robotic Connect 4 game, and we also had the vision demo (mine), the SICK laser demo (a plot of the nearest objects in a 180 degree sweep in realtime (think radar)), and some of our robots. Anyhow, enough, time to go to zzzzz....

Monday, September 6, 2004

What a terrible weekend! Instead of going to Tarpon Springs for vacation, I instead headed down to my home in Vero Beach Thursday. I got there at 1:30 PM, and spent the next 7 hours hauling sheets of plywood, drills, screws, stakes, panels, equipment, and all sorts of other stuff around. When working late into the night, you know you are working way too late when the sun starts to rise. Actually, it was the first time I went 24 hours without sleep. Not a fun experience at all! Anyhow, we got on the road and went to a little town in Barberville, about 50 miles north of Orlando (well inland). My grandparents were there (they have a fern farm there). Anyhow, we spent the weekend there and went two days without power (not fun!). Even 50 miles away from the hurricane, we got very high winds that knocked down power lines and trees. In fact, we couldn't even get out of our driveway until somebody came down with chainsaws and tractors to haul away the trees. Here are some pictures: (Picture of the blocked driveway) & (Closeup). Today we came back to Orlando and we had power (and hot showers!!!!) and everything seems to be getting back to normal. Unfortunately, my home in Vero doesn't seem like it fared to well, but we'll see...

Almost Thursday, September 2, 2004

Well, it's about 40 minutes until Thursday and I'm about to evacuate...TOWARDS the hurricane. I'm headed home to help my parents board up. and then we are all headed out. So much for a peaceful weekend doing robotics, re-installing my system, and doing homework.

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

What an unlucky week. Another category 4 hurricane headed directly for us, my computer won't boot Windows because system files are "missing or corrupt." Arg! Well, at least I haven't lost any data quite yet. Linux to the rescue! I've moved all the data from my 5 GB partition over to my (now defunct) 20 GB Windows parition. Now I've installed Windows XP on that partition and hopefully can actually work until I have time to do a good job of a re-install. I guess that depends on how Hurricane Frances feels...

Sunday, August 29, 2004

I survived my first week of classes! Hurrah! I'm taking Differential Equations, Engineering Analysis, Engineering Statics, Intro to Digital Circuits, and Electrical Networks. In addition, I'm auditing Expert Systems Knolwedge Engineering. Today I worked more on vision stuff for the new robot.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

So tired...my 7:30 AM class is pretty early. The only reason I took it was because the professor was supposed to be really good. But unfortunately, they swapped professors on me! Arg! Would post more, but zzzz.....

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Long time, no news. I survived hurricane Charley (I evacuated from the middle of the state to the coast - which just seemed wrong!). I bought all my books to start a new semester tomorrow. I upgraded my ceiling fan light from one 60 watt bulbs to four 60 watt bulbs - what a nightmare. I had to install it and take it a part 3 times before it worked - and all because I forgot to pull the little 2 inch chain. I kept flicking the light switch and wondering what was wrong. Robotics is going well, and I'm making some progress.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Up at 6:30 AM, packed by 7:30, gassing up at 8:00, on the road for 2 hours, at my new appartments at 9:30, unpacked by 11:30, a brief Chick-Fil-A lunch, at the ISL lab at 12:15 PM, working until 5:30 PM, on the road for another 2 hours home, home at 7:30, super, some programming a business time clocking system for my father, answering some emails, and now at 11:00 PM, I'm dead tired. Goodnight!

Monday, August 9, 2004

This past week I have had a fantastic time vacationing in North Carolina. I hiked probably 5 miles on the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway, shopped until I was ready to throttle my sister, ready 10 books (the stack probably comes up to my knee), constructed a new website for my grandfather (http://christmastrees4u.com), ported Simply KoolB to RapidQ basic, and the morning I left the mountains, the temperature was 38 degrees Farhenheit. Totally awesome dude!

Friday, July 30, 2004

Well, I bombed my Physics II final exam yesterday. Out of 5 questions, I missed at least one and a half. And that one was a giveme question to - I just blanked on it. I'm praying there is a nice hefty curve, but we'll see. Hopefully I can do better on today's Calc III final will go much better. And right after that, my family and I are headed up to North Carolina for vacation.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

After church today, I spent 4 hours driving around to various public libraries tracking down some good books to read. I finally got my quota of 10 books, a collection of David Webber, L.E. Modesitt, Andre Norton, Anne McAffrey, and some others...ahh, yes...I feel good times acoming...unfortunately, I've got to wait until after this week as I have finals. Oh well...such is life.

Friday, July 23, 2004

The AC came back on the next day, so no more midnight cruses through the compiler. Today Dr. Gonzalez came back and started cracking the whip. Finals are next week and then I'm headed to North Carolina, where the highs will be less than the lows here in Florida (if that makes any sense).

Monday, July 20, 2004

Well, well, well....It's 1:30 AM (so technically it is Tuesday, but I'll let that slide) and I'm in the middle of a Florida summer with absolutely NO Air Conditioner! I can't seelp, and I'm miiserable...so I'm updating this site....Nothing better to do. Oh and being the future engineer that I am, I've decided to help cool myself down by getting a small trash can, filling it with cold water and soaking my feet. It's working some, but I want my AC back!

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

After months of griping (mostly to myself), I finally got a bit more serious with my spam filtering software. I REALLY don't like annoying things, and spam most definitely qualifies! Since 20 out of the 25 emails I get is spam, I'm very annoyed. Not even SpamAssassin and SpamBayes combined work to my satisfaction! So...I'm going to write my own customized spam filter. It won't tell my my sister's email is spam, and it'll archive spam in a great zip file, but never show it to me or put in a "likely spam" folder. Today I spent an hour or so figuring out how to access my mailbox from PHP (with a little help from some telneting). Spam is going down (provided I have enough time to code it).

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Whew, today's been a very busy day - non-stop activity from 7:30 AM to 9:30 PM. Now that I've got an hour to comp some food and upload another little project I worked out a month ago. It's 300 line C program that shows you how to use wxWidget's GUI library WITHOUT using the C++ interface. This means you could easily access it from assembly language, and...hold it - I saw your eyebrows go up! And yes, that means that you might see a Simply KoolB GUI compiler in the future ;-)

Sunday, July 11, 2004

Extremely impressive. I've been gone 2 weeks from this site and I don't have anything to show for it. Bad Brian! Hopefully I can get time to work more on the site - I do have lots of good little stuff to put up, actually. But first I have a Calc III test tomorrow to deal with.

Monday, June 28, 2004

Wow, things are busy, busy, busy. I still haven't gotten my little report on our trip up yet (haven't even finished writting it). Our new Calc III professor is pretty bad (we have one professor for the first half and another for the second half). I've got several sample programs I've written that I also need to get around to posting. Ahh me....hop to it Brian!

Thursday, Jun 24, 2004

Not much new...I've got a sample of dynamically calling Windows API functions at runtime (a friend of mine asked me about it because he wanted to use it for his interpreter). Other than that, lots of schoolwork.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Got a 93% on Calc III test, mainly because it was multiple choice and I guessed right on one of the problems! Wahoo! I also attended the UCF Summer Research Academey, which was pretty much useless except I got free meals. Now if I can survive 2 more days of it...

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

My trip to Michegan was very good! I've got a Calc III exam tomorrow, so I'll make this quick, but we got very little sleep, had fun, and didn't do nearly as well as we had hoped. But we learned a lot and we'll kick but next year. Pictures and more info comming soon!

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Tomorrow is the day! I'll be flying to Rochester, Michigan (brrr, it'll be cold!)! The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition is only a day away. Wish our team well!

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Well, that's it. This evening we completely packed up the robot and all accompanying stuff into a mini-van to take up to Michigan. Two guys will drive the van and the rest of us are flying out Friday. The journey is begining!

Sunday, June 6, 2004

I've studied my but off for Physics II exam comming up on Monday. Also, worked more with the robot - in a week I'll be in Michegan! Also, did a proper port of bxbasic. You can find it @ the QDepartment group Files section. Off to bed to get a good night's sleep before the big exam (wish me well!).

Friday, June 4, 2004

Wow! Tonight I set out to port Bxbasic (a basic interpreter written by Steve of Qdepartment) to my Pocket PC and to my utter amazement, I suceeded! After about 2 hours and hacking out features, I finally had a hello world program running on my Pocket PC. Looping 1000 times and printing "Hello World" took 26 second,s though, so it's not fast. After I get the latest code for bxbasic and do a more proper port, I'll upload what I have

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

Hmm, not a lot to report. I did well on my Calc III test, which is good. Now if I can just do well on my Physics II test next Monday...

Tuesday, June 1, 2004

Hurrah! The hurricane season starts today. Batter down the hatches and prepare for another round of hurricanes. On a more local note, I'm still waiting to hear back on my Calc III test...

Monday, May 31, 2004

Well, today was a pretty nice waste of time. Spending 5 hours in the middle of a Florida afternoon at a nice, comfortable temperature of 99 degrees with a comfortable humidity of nearly 100% - yeah, lots of fun. And to top it off, we never got the robot working (though we came close). So....now I'm a nice shade of red - an ouchie type of red.

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Lots and lots and lots of improvements and additions. User login is back, and those who registered at my old site should be able to sign in under their old names (make sure you sign in using your username as all lowercase). I couldn't import everything, so you might want to update your info after you sign in. Forums are back too, as is the Compiler Tutorial. Have fun!

Friday, May 28, 2004

The neural network stuff that Daniel has written for the robot looks awesome! I'm doing some last minute tweaking of the code, but for all intents and purposes, the robot is ready to do full-scale testing. I took a look at the design report and it looks first class. On a side note, I created some more Project pages. I also uploaded an FTP Chmod utility I wrote this past spring break.

Thursday, May 27, 2004

I posted my old Compiler Tutorial after somebody notified me that my old site got hacked. Oh well, such is life. Speaking of life, I have my first Calc III exam tomorrow. Guess I better go study for it...

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Today I did dishes, laundry, cooking, and all that other good housecleaning stuff. Then I went to robotics and cleaned up a bunch of old code. Then I did a bunch of nothings for a while. I also struggled with some wxWidget's sizers and scrollbars and finally wound up doing it all myself manually. GUI toolkits are supposed to make things easier, not harder! Oh well...

Tuesday, May 15, 2004

Today was my first day working for ISL. One thing I know: I'll sure learn how to operate Linux a lot better! No nasty "general protection faults." Instead, you get "segmentation faults." Except the Windows version gives you more (often useless) information. Whatever...

Monday, May 14, 2004

Somehow our Physics II lab TA thinks that we should know everything before we perform the lab, so we had a quiz right off. I had like 30 seconds to review the lab manual to study. After getting the quiz, I guessed on the first question, made up an explanation, left half of the second question blank, and had absolutely no idea on the third question. So I made up a reasonable equation and used it. To my utter surprise, it was right! So I got a 28 out of 30!

Sunday, May 16, 2004

After spending hours trying to figure out why I only got the first GPS point when the robot moved around, it turns out that a filter was on, filtering out all "bad" GPS points. However, it thought ALL the GPS points I was getting were bad. Once the filter was turned off, things started to work much better.

Saturday, May 15, 2004

Today we tried to test the robot, but the typical summer Florida weather didn't cooperate and it rained before I got too much testing done. So while it rained, I fixed some stuff and played around with it inside. Later in the evening, it stopped halfway out the door and we couldn't get it started agian. After an hour of the electronics guys debugging (or whatever you call it for hardware), it was a simple lever that got pushed. Oh well...better luck tomorrow after church.

Friday, May 14, 2004

Today I played a a set of tennis with some of my friends. Since I haven't played since like Novemeber, I wasn't very good, but I was surprised that I hadn't lost everything I learned. I also attended a lecture from a professor visiting from France on Context Based Reasoning. Sort of interesting. However, the highlight was UCF Robotics. Today I coded finished tying all the lose ends together and the software for the robot is essentially done! Time to start testing!!!

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Exciting stuff! I'm tying all the loose ends around the code for the robot. Hopefully this weekend we can take it out and see how it performs! Also, I got an Linux account at ISL. First thing I did was change it to make it look like Windows XP <Grin>. And my Physics II quiz was either really easy or a trick question. Hopefully really easy.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Just another day as a student. Classes to attend, meetings to go to, study groups to meet, clubs to particpate in, youth groups to visit, etc. It hasn't even been an entire week yet (only 3 days!) and I already have my first quiz in Physics II...ah, the joys of academics.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Wow, what a day. First I locked my keys in my appartment 35 minutes before class. After deciding to hike the mile or two to school, I was picked up by a kind friend (Enrique) and made it in time. Then I discovered that my right ear got really sunburned and is flaking. Finally, UCF Robotics is kicking up as we only have another month before competition and I'm having to put in lots more time.

Monday, May 10, 2004

Today I started summer classes: Calc II and Physics II. Back in the grind of things. My teachers seem to be pretty good so far. Oh, and if you'd like to get your hands on a free copy of MS Visual BASIC.NET, you can - by watching and rating 5 short (5-10 minute) videos on using VB.NET.

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Today I got back to UCF for my summer courses that start tomorrow. I had a great break and my Dad and I managed to put up about 25% of the walls for the barn. It's sloooow going without the right tools (using metal snippers to cut sheet metal and such). Now I've got to prepare for the heavy mental work...<sigh>...

Wednesday, May 5, 2004

I don't know about you, but barn raising is hard work. Today we drilled the concrete foundation and put tapcons in them (funny-looking blue screws). We kept hitting rocks in the concrete and slagging the drill bits.

Saturday, May 1, 2004

Today the barn raising began. My dad and I are building a small barn (with an office). We cut lines in the foundation and measured & cut the channels for the walls.

Staturday, April 21, 2004

With some free time, I started to put a new design together. I sort of got tired of the old one, and hopefully the new design will be a bit more simple. Also, I noticed that my old site didn't load at all in Netscape 4.x. So no more CSS or other fancy technology.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Finally! The semester is over and I'm headed home for a couple weeks before the summer term begins. Lots of time to read, build barns, and work on my projects.

Sunday, April 18, 2004

OK, boys and girls! Step right up to get the new release of Simply KoolB. Today I prettied up some code, fixed some bugs, and generally finalized things. The Windows version (now in Beta 2) now has an installer and uninstaller (in addition to the zip package). I've worked out some bugs on the Linux version and prepared a bit more offical tar.gz pacakge.

Saturday, April 17, 2004

So somebody has told me that Page 2 on my Physics 13 work is actually a copy of Page 1. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I've (hopefully) corrected this so that Page 2 is really Page 2 (quite a novel idea, huh?).

Friday, April 16, 2004

Today was the big day: the Great Navel Orange Race. The whole class was to basically build a boat to race across the UCF reflection pond, retrieve a floating orange and then bring it back. Our team was the first heat to go of like 15 or 20 (with 11 teams per heat). We came in 2nd place in our heat, which was pretty good. We took 4:40 minutes (we estimated 4:05 or something). You can see some CAD drawings of our design here.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Today I paid my dues to become a Tau Beta Pi member - I get initiated on Saturday. I also went a head and did my next and FINAL (do I hear hallelujahs?) WebAssign homework 13.

Monday, April 12, 2004

OK, physics homework 12 is up. Sorry it took a bit longer, but I've been pretty busy. Also, don't expect me to be online or respond to emails this next week and ahalf as I'll be cramming physics as much as possible.

Sunday, April 11, 2004

Happy Easter everybody! After a really hard week, I finally got some time this weekend to kick back and work with Simply KoolB on Linux. After spending probably 5 to 7 hours getting everything configured, I was free to spend like 3 hours actually programming. Anyhow, I've got a alpha version up (I don't know if it even deserves the name alpha quite yet...) If you try it out, let me know how it goes.

Thursday, April 1, 2004

My homework 11 physics work is now up (and I'm not fooling you, either!).

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Hurrah! I got an 85% on my physics test! I really didn't deserve it since I totatally bombed two questions (like ALL the numbers are wrong). I'm now committed on Sundays to UCF Robotics, so I'm afraid KoolB is sort of on hold until final exams are over.

Friday, March 26, 2004

Today I was able to really optimize and restructure a lot of code for the UCF Robotics BlackKnight robot. In fact, I was able to up the frames per second from 1.5 to almost 10! And that's for all 4 cameras - pretty good, I think.

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Yep, after 9, almost 10 straight of doing physics homework, I finally got all 8 (yes, eight) problems! Whoopee! OK, so I'm not quite that excited about it. I had hoped to do some more programming tonight, but I guess it's time to turn in. Anyhow, you can get a copy of my physics work here on my Physics I page. Me go bed now...zzzz

Tuesday, Mar 23, 2004

So much for Linux port of Simply KoolB this weekend! After trying get my laptop touchpad mouse configured (I normally use a plug-in USB mouse) with Mandrake 9.2, I managed to break all my mice. So I decided to install Lindows to see if that would be any better. Well, yes, it supported both mice - but it installed a 1 GB swap file and ran out of room, damaged its own superblock, and wouldn't boot right. And of course, it installed lilo over my existing bootmanager (XOSL), so I spent quite some time recovering from that. Finally, I was able to get Mandrake 9.2 installed again, and it works with my touch pad. But now my USB mouse won't work! Arggg! There are GOOD REASONS why I use Windows!

Friday, Mar 19, 2004

After a really intense week that ended in a Calc 2 exam, a Chem exam, and a Physics quiz. To top it off, I've found out that we are restructuring the code for the camera capture and processing for the UCF Robotics KnightVision system. Well, finals are comming up in 4-5 weeks, so it'll be all over one way or another.

Monday, Mar 14, 2004

Well, after a wonderful relaxing spring break, it's back to the salt mines...On the upside, I've made progress with the Linux port of Simply KoolB. Stay tuned...Thursday, Mar 4, 2004 Hurrah! I am so happy because I got an 80% on my Physics test. If I keep this up, I might pass the class with an acceptable grade. To celebrate, I coded on my robotics project until 1 AM in the morning.

Wednesday, Mar 3, 2004

Thanks all who have reported bugs or commented on the beta release of Simply KoolB. Based on some bug reports, I've fixed a bug that causes the IDE to go into an infinite loop when you try to run a BASIC file with errors in it. So grab the latest here.

Tuesday, Mar 2, 2004

OK, so yeah, today I downloaded my Simply KoolB package at school to test it out on a Win2K machine and I belatedly realized I had somehow forgotten to package the compiler in the zip file! So dumb! So I've updated it and fixed a minor bug in the IDE. Grab it on my Simply KoolB page.

Monday, Mar 1, 2004

Unfortunately, I don't believe I did very well on my physics test. The good part is that I understood the questions and knew how to do most of it, which is an improvement from the last test. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do all the math and probably made lots of little silly mistakes. I'll see exactly how bad the score is Wednesday or Friday.

Sunday, Jan 25, 2004

After saying I could probably walk 15-50 miles without rest in my Engineering class, I decided to test whether I could actually do that or not. So today after church, I headed down the Seminole County Trail, a nice paved trial. The first 3 miles felt good as it was a bright, crisp, cloudless Florida day. At 5 miles, I was feeling a bit of discomfort, but not enough to slow me. At 7 miles, I was definitely developing some blisters. At 11 miles, I was seriously rethinking why I decided to do this. At 13 miles, I had multiple blisters on each foot and could barely walk. At 14 miles, every body part cried out to rest, but I was so close I just kept putting 1 foot in front of the other. That last mile was extremely difficult, but I made it! It took me a little over 4 hours, so that's about 3.5 mph - not bad. On the flip side, I now walk like a crippled old person. People probably think I need those little walkers!

Friday, Jan 23, 2004

Halleluja! Yesterday I spent 2 hours in the library with classmate working on Physics homework (due today). We got a lot of it done, so we went home to finish it. However, we had no clue how to do this one problem. So after we submitted everything else online, we phoned each other and tried to work on the problem. 4 hours later at 10 PM, we gave up - not good since the problem was worth 30% of our grade! Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of a way to maybe solve it. This morning I tried it and after an hour or so got it right! Praise be to God!

Tuesday, Jan 20, 2004

Today I coded more on the UCF Robotics system. The system is know capturing the data from one camera, displying it, classifying it, and displaying that. Of course, with my poor Celeron 2GHz laptop, I'm only getting 5 frames a second! Now add 3 cameras to the one I already have and well, you get the picture...

Monday, Jan 19, 2004

Because this weekend was a long weekend (today is Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday), I went home. I had a very nice and relaxing time. Now it is back to the grind. Hopefully I can catch up on all I need to do in terms of homework.

Wednesday, Jan 14, 2004

I meet with Dr. Gonzalez for my ISL project on Cased Based Reasoning. I got the impression that he thinks I should be moving a bit faster, so I'm going to have to finish up that 628 book...and I'm only on 398. Read, Brian, read! Homework, Brian, homework!

Tuesday, Jan 13, 2004

Today I worked more on my part of the UCF Robotics Team Vision System. In fact, I was up until 10:30 PM working on it. Of course, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided that the pictures comming in from the DirectX camera camera should be upside down and in the format BRG (not the standard RGB). Took me while to figure that one out! After I succeeded in hooking up the camera input to the system, I decided to turn in.

Monday, Jan 12, 2004

Today I was going to go to a Bible Study, but totally lost the directions. After driving around for a while trying to remember them, I finally gave up. I was not happy! On the bright side, I was able to work more on Simply KoolB. I'm getting closer to an alpha release.

Sunday, Jan 11, 2004

I am getting over most of my cold, although I still have a nagging cough. Hopefully I'll be 100% well by the end of the week. Anyhow, my first week at school went pretty well. I'm taking Physics, Chemistry, Calc II, and Engineering. Physics seems like it will be the hardest.

Friday, Jan 2, 2004

Happy New Years everybody! A few days ago I got a bad cold, so I hope everybody is doing better than I am! I hope this new year will be productive for everybody!

Monday, Dec 29, 2003

Well, today I started to read my 628 page book entitled Case Based Reasoning. I have to read it by the beginning of January. Nothing quite like procrastinating, is there?

I also downloaded ObjectDock, a really cool taskbar replacement. Its just like the MacOS X dock, only cooler! You can add 'docklets', custom little programs that run in the dock, like weather updates and battery status. You can even download the SDK and program your own! Check it out at www.objectdock.com

Sunday, Dec 28, 2003

It has been nice to just relax at home doing almost nothing. I've been playing more with KoolB & the IDE. I had to cut back on the IDE because it went over 1,000 lines, but everything is all in nice shape. Now for some documentation and an installer...

I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas and are going to have a Happy New Year!

Sunday, Dec 21, 2003

I'm finally home from UCF. I've spent 8-12 hour days working on our UCF Robotics BlackKnight vision system. You can see what I've done at http://robotics.ucf.edu/projects.html. I wrote the app you see on the bottom, with the picture of the cone and grass. Lots of work! Anyhow, I'll probably be wroking more on KoolB this Christmas.

Friday, Dec 12, 2003

Whew! Been a while since I've updated this site...been busy with end of the semster activities..AKA finals. I hope everybody has had a good Thanksgiving and are getting into the Christmas spirit! Just because I haven't been doing much publicly doesn't mean I haven't been working. Expect some code to be released soon!

Friday, Nov 21, 2003

Finished my Ukraine Agriculture paper & gave the presentation. Glad to have that finished!

Tuesday, Nov 18, 2003

Whew! I got a last minute plea to give a presentation on "Exploring Your Future" to a bunch of middle schoolers. I had basically a day to write a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation describing how to prepare to be an engineering student. It went reasonably well, actually. Now I'm exahusted...bed...zzzzz.

Sunday, Nov 16, 2003

Today I received a lovely letter from somebody who will remain anonymous that told me how great my Resources section is. Of course, at the time Resources was a blank page. However, the someobdy who will remain anonymous got his/her wish and there are some web development resources up now.

Wednesday, Nov 12, 2003

Today I completely bombed my Calc I test. I am NOT looking forward to getting the grade on that!

Tuesday, Nov 11, 2003

Arg! I dislike long, drawn out math problems. I spent 2.5 hours solving a grand total of 3 problems. I hope I can do better than that tomorrow on the test!

Monday, Nov 10, 2003

At the suggestion of Jared, I made the navigation menu a little shorter to accomodate visitors with small screens. Let me know if you like/dislike it.

Friday, Nov 7, 2003

I finally broke down and got a hair-cut. It feels much better - now I can go for another couple of months.

Saturday, Nov 1, 2003

My family came to town and we went to see Luther in theaters. Surprisingly, it was quite good! I would recommend it to most anybody. It does an excellent job of showing how the Protestand Reformation sparked off not only religous freedom, but the beginning of modern history.

Tuesday, Oct 21, 2003

Yes! Chapter 2 is finished! Read it to get ready to start building a real compiler in the next chapter. Learn how compilers & interpreters work and set up all the tools you need (C++ compiler, assembler, etc).

Friday, Oct. 17, 2003 (Late)

Been attending the UCF Robotics team the last month or so. We are finally forming groups and I've decided to help with the vision system. So I'm going to be up to my ears in pixels and graphics!

Friday, Oct. 17, 2003

Whew! I spent a solid week trying to build a pasta bridge for my engineering class competition. We used lasagna, fettuccine, and tube noodles and melted sugar to build a standard arch bridge. Although not terribly strong, it looked like a bridge...unlike most of the other contestants. We got our picture taken, actually! Anyhow, our bridge weight 371 grams and held 2,200 grams, so it held nearly 7 times its weight! Not bad...but not particularly good, either!

Monday, Oct. 06, 2003

Today is my sister's birthday...sweet sixteen! So I sent her an online card and a knitted penguin. That's why there hasn't been much activity...I've been up at 2 AM knitting like old grandma used to do. Anyhow, the Compiler Tutorial is comming along. Chapter 1 is in final form, just need to convert it to a couple more formats. Expect it soon!

Sunday, Sept. 21, 2003

Well, it took almost an entire day, but I managed to add a print link to the pages. This way you can swap between a page optimized for navigation and one optimized for printing. The only difference is the left navigation bar goes away on the print version.

Saturday, Sept. 20, 2003

Well, my parents and grandparents came for a visit and we had a lot of fun. On a more serious note, I started to work on the Compiler Tutorial section. Still have a lot of work to do, but you can see most of the first chapter.

Friday, Sept. 19, 2003

Whew! I survived the first round of mid-mid term exams & quizes. Now for a relaxing weekend with my family (its family weekend at UCF). Oh, yeah, updates for the website. Right, Brian...

Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003

Official unveiling of the site. Nothing works except some of my Academic pages. Specifically, most of my Resource Geography notes are online for the test tomorrow.

Friday, Sept. 12, 2003

Yes, I love it! They gave my group the wrong co-ordinate in my Intro to Engineering class, so we wandered around in the woods with a GPS for hours! Ahh, the joys of being an engineer!

Jan. 31, 2003 - KoolB Linux release!

This is the first beta release of KoolB for Linux. With the same functionality as the Windows version, you should feel right at home. The only real difference is that some of the libraries are lacking a little. However, since neither the Linux nor the Windows versions of the libraries are complete yet, I think this is acceptable.

Interested? Download it! I need lots of beta-testers to iron out its many bugs. I also need people who want to create libraries and so forth for KoolB.

Jan. 22, 2003 - First Beta Release of KoolB!

This is the first beta release of KoolB! With support for external functions and directives, you can now start creating real life programs, not just example programs. There are an abundance of new features:

• External functions (WinAPI, custom DLLs, etc)
• Directives ($AppType, $Optimize, $Compress, $Include, $Asm, $Const, $Define, $IfDef, $IfNDef)
• You can write DLLs in KoolB now!
• $Asm directive to write inline assembly language
• Optimization to remove unused functions
• Ability to $Include files
• Automatic compression of your program or DLL
• hInstance and CommandLine$ pre-set variables
• Some incomplete libraries
• Some more precise compile time
• Many bug fixes

Limitations in the KoolB: too many to list!

Interested? Download it! I need lots of beta-testers to iron out its many bugs. I also need people who want to create libraries and so forth for KoolB.

Dec. 11, 2002 - KoolB Version 12 for Linux Released!

Thanks to Ryan and his persistent requests for the Linux version, I'm now releasing a Linux version. The Linux version has the same features as the Windows versions.

Limitations in the Linux KoolB (in addition to the Window's limitations):

• Strange results with storing/retrieving numbers in UDTs
• Sleep will only sleep for whole seconds, like 1 or 2, not .5 (1/2)

Interested? Download it and check out the sample program in the Examples folder. They are the exact same ones as the Windows version, so you can compare how the two versions work.

Dec. 7, 2002 - KoolB Version 12 Released!

Yippee! Yet another release - this time its version 12 (like duh, what else comes after 11?). The latest in this release is:

New features in KoolB:

• Can create subs & functions that take any number of parameters
• Can call them anywhere in the program (even recursively)
• Can use function in expressions
• Can return a value by storing it in Result
• KoolB can now (with some modifications that come with $AppType DLL), create DLLs with those subs & functions you've created

Limitations in KoolB:

• You can only pass parameters by value, not by reference
• You can only pass simple data types by reference - do not try to pass UDTs or arrays
• You cannot create arrays or UDTs inside functions
• Subs & Functions without any parameters must still use parenthesis (like C)

Interested? Download it and check out the Functions/funcs.bas program in the Examples folder.

Nov 11, 2002 - Minor updates

It has been busy lately, so not much has been going on. However, I've gotten some minor updates on the site and also a start on the next KoolB version. Will keep everybody updated as things progress.

Oct 25, 2002 - KoolB Version 11 Released!

Yes, I agree that the best part of the development cycle is the release - and that time has come again. So what's so exciting about this version?

New features in KoolB:

• Boolean expressions (And, Or, Not)
• Releation operators (=, <>, <, >, <=, >=)
• If statements with ElseIf as well
• While statements
• End statement to terminate program

Interested? Download it and check out the Who Are You sample program in the Examples folder.

Oct 23, 2002 - KoolB Pages are up now!

All the KoolB pages are up and running right now. That means you can now find out more about KoolB. And yes, the download links work too. Although they are not complete, they represent most of the KoolB content.

Oct 4, 2002 - A picture is worth a 1000 navigation methods!

Thanks for all the 'easter-egg' & 'green has to go' comments that helped me decide how to improve the site. I improved the navigation with some mouse-over button images. I also added an official logo for the site. Is this an improvement?

I also added a counter to the site last Saturday - and in less than a week, I have gotten 100 hits! Most of it is probably spam bots searching for my e-mail address, but it is still encouraging. If anybody is actually looking at this, this site is under construction and is not complete by a long shot, so don't expect all (or any!) of the links to work.

Sept 24, 2002 - Yet Another Redesign!?!

I didn't like the old design much (too dark & drab, not to mention very buggy on other browsers & platforms), so I changed the design to something more simple and cheery. If you puke when you first load the page, drop me an e-mail :-)

Sept. 9, 2002 - Whoope! Release 10 of My Compiler

A pre-release of KoolB Version 10 is now available. Head over to the download section to check it out. Be sure to run the example programs (the popular request one is really neat ;). If you find any bugs, be sure to report them. Thanks.

Sept. 7, 2002 - Yep! Another Revamp of the Website

I took a Web Page Design course this semester, so part of the course is to re-design this web site and add content to it. Hence, the great adventure begins.