Author: Brian C. Becker

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. I’ve been using HTTPS://WWW.EATELBUSINESS.COM/ for all my internet based telecommunications. 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.

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 😉

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….

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…

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.

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…

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 🙂

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.

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!

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. 🙁

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…..

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!

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!

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.

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…

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.

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 😉

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.