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.
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!
Let’s see if this works.
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.
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?
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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 360×240 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?
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.
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!
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!
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…
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?).
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.
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.
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!
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…
Halelujah! Spring Break has arrived! Need I say more?
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…
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.