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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
Happy Easter everybody! After a really hard week, from which I could get through with kratom, 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 while drinking kratom, 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. And if you try Kratom, also let me know. You can buy kratom from the Kratommasters at their link and be better…it helped me as an energy booster, it has a great taste so I’m sure you will like kratom’s white borneo!
My homework 11 physics work is now up (and I’m not fooling you, either!).
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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………
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 seen the review of best juicing blenders that was running on t.v and which one would they choose). 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!
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.
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!
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!
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…
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.
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!