Oh, the light! It burns, it burns!

work work

Sat, 01 May 2004 18:59:49 GMT

working on my thesis... sigh, and a project for manipulation class... i'm kinda screwed i think.

Usually finals time is nice, because i'm already done with everything, and so I get to relax and just concentrate on a couple tests. It's the time that my hard work from the rest of the semester pays off so i don't have to study toooo much. But this year I guess my slacking is paying off. Well, not slacking, but looking for jobs and such instead working on schoolwork.

I also need to decide between staying at CMU or going to Sandia. Both very good options in my opinion. Too bad Argon isn't also an option as long as I'm dating Sylvia (security clearance issues. Grumble.) Already turned down Amazon (wah, that was painful) and Boeing.

Anyway, stress is mounting. This make me feel better. And this makes me feel better yet! [edit: updated links to my own server since original died.] Yes, I am a stupid boy ;) It's a damn shame this turned out to be a hoax.

PS the twins just noticed our grill is now missing. Hmm, I wonder where it could have gone. There will be some futher investigation after dark. Preliminary scouting didn't turn it up directly, but I have my suspicions.

Carnival

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 02:22:16 GMT

Well, another Carnival has come and gone. Probably the last I'll attend as a student, although that's far from certain yet. (if Dave (my advisor) has his way with me)

Although I didn't get to help out much with booth again this year, I did get to pitch in on move-on and tear-down, arguably the times when we need the most concentrated man power. Though compared to the total amount of the work that goes in to a booth, this is probably only really a small portion.

I know the guys really had their hearts set on getting a trophy, and they did extremely well, though it was not to be. The usual big booth houses, which have significantly more brothers than we do, all had amazing booths this year. Carnival in general was one the sharpest I've seen. Even the non-greek and blitz booths were approaching greek-quality.

In particular, I wanted to mention that our move-on this year was one of the best I've seen. Although we got screwed by the carnival committee holding up our slot until it was almost dark, which cost us a lot of time and productivity, once we got moving things really flowed. There were only two fairly minor mistakes in the plans/plan execution, and everything fit together flush and plumb. Amazing. In the past we've had to spend significant effort to skew and bend frames into alignment. This year it was a well oiled machine, and this on one of our most ambitious booths, a two story behemoth. I couldn't be more proud.

I just hope that the guys won't be too disheartened by not getting a trophy this year. It takes time to build up the experience and manpower on these things, and we're definitely gaining on the competition. 4 years ago we only had 3 walls, a floor, and a prayer it wouldn't rain (it didn't ;) This year we had 2 very solid stories, and lots of design and detail work.

I notice more and more booths doing electronic/computer-based games. (For non-CMUers, the point of each booth is to run a game that the little kids who come to carnival are supposed to be able to play... hopefully the college "kids" will enjoy it too.) So usually this involves throwing things at targets, but this year several groups had either computer based games or at least computer displays as part of the decor.

I did most of the looking around the midway on Saturday since I had an important demo on Friday with Matt Mason (head of Robotics PhD program) and Peter Lee (head of CS department). That went pretty well, so they've got a job offer in the pipeline to get me to stay as staff and work on Tekkotsu for a course Dave wants to teach. I must say, there are tempting elements of it. Hmm.

Pictures!

See also Gail's pictures.

Zeta Formal

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 03:35:07 GMT

I meant to write this last weekend, after Zeta's excellent formal. Many thanks to skydiamonde for being such a stunning date. Also many thanks to screwtape8 for giving me the opportunity to go with her!!! :) Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten a camera, and Jen's is film, so no pics. :( I'll just have to say she had a really great dress, and typically I'm only lukewarm towards formal dresses...

I was definitely in the mood to dance, and wasn't let down. Though I think I outlasted the Zetas... most of them got pretty pooped by near the end and dropped out suddenly, leaving me, Jen Lin, and Jackie K. alone on the dance floor. So, of course, I did what any pimp would do, and put my arms out and started dancing with both of them. I mean, what am I supposed to do? The only other option would be to admit defeat and sit down!

So after a few seconds of grins from the audience ("yeah, that's Ethan all right"), apparently Steph (or her date) decided I needed some competition, so Steph, her date, and another Zeta (??) came up to create another threesome. Shortly, another girl joined them to make it a foursome. Since I had been the center of a fivesome at the previous Sig Tau party:
...so I figured I'd let them win, this time ;) Besides, Steph's date seemed like a cool guy, so I was glad to have given him the excuse to strut his stuff as well. ;)

So by the end of the song, several other groups had come up as well, and pretty soon the dance floor was moving again. <takes a bow> Thank you, thank you! I am Ethan, trend setter and party animal!

See, I have to document this all now, because you can bet I'm never going to be getting that much female attention ever again after I graduate. :( I really shouldn't be getting it now, for that matter. One of those quirks of the universe.

So after Zeta formal, Jen K. and Jackie K. were having a little post-party at our place, a yucca I believe. Ben showed up as well, finally stealing my date back again, much to my disappointment. :( But before we had settled in at my house's party, Jen, Ben, and I had promised to make an appearance and Scott's party, which featured Mystery Science Theater 3000 on DVD. Then back to "my" party, and eventually to bed, alone, because a certain wildorchids is still stuck in Singapore. Siiigh.

political spam

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 17:25:45 GMT

In case not many other people got this, have a read:

From: BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com
Subject: Please Consider My Experience When Voting in 2004
Date: March 26, 2004 6:29:09 AM EST
Reply-To: BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com

Resume of George W. Bush
February 26, 2004, 05:15 PM

Past Work Experience:
I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I produced a Hollywood slasher B movie. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas; the company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock. I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money. With my father's help and name, I was elected Governor of Texas.

Accomplishments as Governor:
I changed pollution laws in favor of the power and oil companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Union. I replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog-ridden city in America. I cut taxes and bankrupted Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money. I set the record for the most executions by any Governor in American history. I became U.S. President after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes with the help of major Enron money and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court.

Accomplishments as President:
I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury. I entered my office with the strongest economy in U.S. history and have turned every single economic category downward -- all in less than two years. I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history. I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most resented country in the world, possibly the largest failure of diplomacy in World history. I am the first president in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record. I set the the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one year period. I am supporting development of a "Tactical Bunker Buster" nuke, a WMD. I am getting our troops killed, under the lie of Saddam's procurement of Yellow Cake Nuke WMD components, then blaming the lie on our British friends. I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. president. In my first year in office over 2-million Americans l

Records and References:
I have at least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine. My Texas driving record has been erased and is not available. I was AWOL from the National Guard. I refuse to take a drug test or even answer any questions about drug use. All records of my tenure as Governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed, and unavailable for public view. All records of SEC investigations into insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view. All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

Please consider my experience when voting in 2004.

Show you care about our country's future and forward this to every voter you know. Protest is patriotism.
----------------------------------------------------

Edit: On the one hand, I figure this is mostly true and think Bush is a moron. On the other hand, it's political spam, a new species for my inbox. Even if I agree with the content, I'm loath to encourage it. Hrm.
And no, I'm not really sold on Kerry yet either. All I've decided is politicians suck.

bad politics

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 05:23:09 GMT

Hung out at the Barnes and Nobles today, got a *lot* of writing done. It's amazing how productive you can be with coffee and no distractions. ;)

The real reason I post today, is this little story from slashdot.

In short, VP from MPAA writes the California Attorney General's opinion for him, which he was then apparently intending to forward on to fellow lawmakers as his official statement.

Since when did we turn our government directly over to the special interests??? (I know, a long time ago) At what point does campaign contributions and donations just become outright bribery? Grrrr.

A nice quote from in the slashdot comments:

No, this isn't illegal. Take a look at what Cheney did with the energy task force. Having Enron write their own energy laws is like having the fox guard the henhouse, but there is nothing illegal about it. Government has been having "industry leaders" draft legislation affecting their industry for years now. That's why large corporations can pollute the environment with little or no responsibility. When the industrial polluters are writing pollution laws, business is good for everyone, except those unfortunates that live downwind.

'selective draft'

Sat, 13 Mar 2004 20:37:49 GMT

Interesting... and I just finished sending my resume to a bunch of defense contractors. Does this imply my phone is going to be ringing off the hook in a few days? We'll see.

Seattle-P-I - Agency initiates steps for selective draft
SFGate - 'Special skills draft' on drawing board; Computer experts, foreign language specialists lead list of military's needs

I'm betting they mean the services need geeks in the field to work and maintain the equipment. Probably not my idea of a good time. I want to build new stuff, not fix stuff. And personally, I'd rather do it in a nice air conditioned office, not in the middle of a desert. *shrug*

And finally, the link of the day:
Turns out you can't actually see the Great Wall of China from space, for those of us who been told you could. China now says this is a myth, and they're probably authoritative, you know, since it's their wall and all.
BBC News

spring break

Sat, 13 Mar 2004 02:44:30 GMT

Today's link is thanks to arwenn:
It's not the onion, unfortunately
We should've let the south secede. At least then we wouldn't have to put up with their idiocy screwing up politics for the rest of us. Be sure to take a look at the second place middle school division.

Anyway, lately i've been sending out resumes like crazy all over the place the last couple of days. If I don't hear anything, it'll be pretty disappointing. But on the up side, I did get a call from Amazon, and I'll be having an interview with them next week.

For anyone who think they know their C/C++, I suggest taking a look at "How Not to Program in C++"
I dropped by Barnes and Nobles yesterday, bought a mocha frap, and I got almost all of the ones I tried to figure out - there were a few that were just too much code to look through to be worthwhile, so I just looked at the answer for those.

Here's one of the ones I missed (mostly because I didn't look carefully enough)

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    printf("Hello ");
    fork();
    printf("World!\n");
    return 0;
}

So what does it output, eh smartie pants? (and why!)

Here's a pretty cool piece of trivia regarding bit fields:

#include <stdio.h>

//use named bits for clarity
struct access_privledges {
    int read:1;
    int write:1;
    int execute:1;
    int violate:1;
};

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    //initialization
    struct access_privledges ap;
    memset(&ap,0,sizeof(ap));
    
    //let's give ourselves write access
    ap.write=1;
    
    //now, let's check to see if we have access
    if(ap.write==1)
        printf("We can write\n");
    else
        printf("We don't have write\n");
    
    return 0;
}

So, what do you think is going to happen?
It warms my heart that gcc will give a warning for this problem, even without -Wall. But that would make it too easy. Let's pretend you don't see the warning in amongst the hundreds of other warning you already have in your code, because you're a Real Programmer, right? :)

And finally, here's my favorite bit of C minutia, which I picked up a few months ago, and unfortunately isn't in this book (although it has a lot of other good tricks to watch out for - 113 others actually)

As opposed to the others, this one actually produces the result you would initially expect.
However, look closely at that printf.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    //initialization
    unsigned int i;
    double arr[4] = { 149.1, 162.2, 536.3, 4964.4 };

    //let's display the array
    for(i=0; i<4; i++)
        printf("Element %d is %g\n",i,i[arr]);
}

You may notice that I said i[arr] instead of arr[i] as most sane people would use. Sure you could do that too, but the 733t among us would rather use the symmetric ability of the [] operator. That's right, you heard me. [] is symmetric! The two forms are equivalent! That's completely valid! gcc won't even bat an eye, even with -Wall.
When I showed this to Tom, we spent a good 10 minutes playing with it, but couldn't break it, even with nastiness like arrays of pointers. Perhaps it's not so horrible from a correctness standpoint, just from a readability standpoint.

hah

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 21:31:09 GMT

So, I haven't posted in forever. Mainly because I keep telling myself I need to get a block of time when I can do some grand update to include all the stories i've been meaning to tell.

This isn't it. You are about to be disappointed.

I just wanted to share that I was looking for a command line utility that would let me display a file in reverse.
So, on most unix-based systems, you can type 'cat <filename>' and it will dump the file to your screen.
I also already knew, you can type 'rev <filename>', but that only reverses each line, individually. It doesn't have an option to display the last line first, and in regular order.

So, with a bit of googling, I discover: tac! It's just like cat, but in reverse, get it? Hahahah, what will we geeks think of next?

I told you you were going to be disappointed. ;)

she made me do it

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 03:17:10 GMT

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
ejtttje goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as a samurai.
agh tricks you! You get a block of wood.
aphra99 tricks you! You get a pencil.
arwenn gives you 1 pink coconut-flavoured gumdrops.
dkellis tricks you! You get a thumbtack.
fleaplus gives you 5 pink chocolate-flavoured gummy bats.
gfunkmacdadio gives you 1 light blue spearmint-flavoured miniature candy bars.
skydiamonde gives you 11 red cinnamon-flavoured jelly beans.
wildorchids gives you 4 blue grapefruit-flavoured gummy bears.
yunicorner gives you 17 yellow grapefruit-flavoured pieces of bubblegum.
zelashoe tricks you! You lose 34 pieces of candy!
ejtttje ends up with 5 pieces of candy, a block of wood, a pencil, and a thumbtack.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

long week...

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 05:42:31 GMT

I'm keeping my head above water, but barely.

Turned in my 18-220 homework this morning, didn't have time to finish the last couple of problems. Spent a couple hours after class recovering at home after class. Went to Sushi Kim with Sylvia for dinner. Took a nap and woke up again around 10... was tempted to stay in bed and just call it a night. Probably should have.

But instead I got up again, posted an OS X precompiled binary of the new release of doxygen, got a couple Java telnet clients working (I like this one, to be later integrated with Tekkotsu), and moved the next group of 10 people from the old Tekkotsu mailing list to the new Yahoo group, and sent them the appropriate emails. Oh, and I installed the latest OS X 10.2.8 system update too!

Not bad for a few hour's work! Of course, I had also wanted to finish writing the recommendations for the PGSS students - I really need to get that done ASAP, I feel bad about letting them down - they're going to be applying to colleges soon.

But I'm getting (more) tired now, so it'll have to wait one more day. We'll see.

In other news, Sig Tau has the highest CMU Greek GPA: 3.43 (highest GPA for the fourth consecutive semester I might add)
Any cute girls looking for academic help know where they should be hanging out now ;)
Simply amazing. I'm very impressed guys. Now stop studying and throw a party! ;) (although the Halloween party isn't too far off... I should start thinking of a costume...)

Computer Vision Homework #$#!!!

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:47:13 GMT

Computers can just stay blind for all I care. If god had meant for computers to see, he would have given them eyes. Errr, I guess that doesn't quite work here.

Well, the TAs are nice, i think the ball is rolling now. It better be, my extension is up tomorrow. As well as the TOC (technical opportunities conference - campus job fair) so I need to have time to brush up my resume tonight as well. But yeah, I was definitely trying to do the homework the hard way. Now that the math is out of the way, I can do the coding, which is much more enjoyable.

Funny story - the class I had today has two professors - one does the lecture and one does the recitation, although he sits in on class too. Anyway, the one who was lecturing mentioned the topic we were about to cover is the other professor's area of specialty, so if he tripped up in the lecture, the other prof would be sure to point it out. Having said this, he started walking backwards to go to the board and stumbled over a chair.

Unfortunately, I think the other prof was too busy laughing with the rest of the class to actually make good on pointing it out. The lecturer is a pretty laid back guy, he got a good

Well, it was funny at the time... what can i say, it's not like you want to hear about my problems with matrix algebra.

First Post!

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 06:24:08 GMT

Frequent slashdot readers might appreciate the irony of the title. Yes, I'm a geek. I'm sure this journal will have lots of geek content. However, I'll try to restrain myself from simply mirroring links from a certain well known nerd news site though.

Now that I've tweaked the colors, created a background, picked a picture, and generally kicked the tires, I suppose I should write something. Getting too tired to actually comprehend the computer vision homework anyway. The first part of the homework wants a proof of something seemly obvious. I hate those kind. I just want to write "well, duh".

Anyway, news of the day is FMR (Formal Membership Recruitment - aka sorority rush)... I really want to rant about what a over-legislated and shallow process that is, but I've already been arguing with wildorchids enough about it as it is. I like that the potential new members (PNMs) are forced to visit all of the houses, but I dislike all the additional rules that they've stacked on top of it. It seems the point of all the additional rules is to limit and censor all information other than the propaganda each of the houses gives out themselves during the restricted times when PNMs are brought through. Fraternity rush is much more open and gives the rushees plenty of time to get to know the house and make a well-thought out decision.

Speaking of which, Sig Tau had formal association for our 7 new associates today... Good job guys! :)

OK, time for bed.

Hey, it's me!

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:35:46 GMT

Thank you wildorchids, I'm sure this will do wonders for my productivity ;) Hi everyone!