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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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 which had to be fixed with this basement waterproofing company. I’m think my sister has the right of it: move to Montana and dig a whole in the ground and call it home!
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….
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…..
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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).
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!
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).
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 😉
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.
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!
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.
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…