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…
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!
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!
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!
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!).
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
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…
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…
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.
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!
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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!!!
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!