Advanced Data Visualization
Visual Who: Animating the affinities and activities of an electronic community. The basic concept of my first UI assignment.
The Robot Lab
I have to admit, playing with a robot arm is pretty cool. It’s dumb as shit; it will do exactly what you tell it to, so you need to be kind of careful. Making a robot arm pickup different sized blocks and drop them into the right boxes was interesting. Everything is more fun at three in the morning. Now I need to finish up that assignment and hand it in before midnight. And then some relaxin’. I’ve compiled a lot of the stuff I’ve written for the paper this year and will probably be putting it up in the near future.
And the fun begins…
I’m just about to head out to a computer lab for a few hours; it should be fun. We get to play around with these robotic arms, writing logic circuits for it and so forth. This assignment’s due tomorrow night at midnight. There was operating systems due earlier today, the database assignment yesterday and the algorithms assignment on monday. Wazoo. And then the weekend comes. I get to interview the two teams vying for AMS exec for the paper on saturday, it should be a good time laughing at them.
Crossword Puzzles
Lately, I’ve been doing more crossword puzzles than I used to. If I’m on campus early in the day, I can grab a copy of the Toronto Star for free, it has a pretty good one (online version, not sure if it’s the same one or not though). There’s also this crossword that I do sometimes, although I find it a bit too easy sometimes because it tells you if you have the letter right. And even more crossword puzzles, including the first one.
New Layout
I finally got sick of that semi-default layout that I was using. So there’s something new, it looks nicer. It appears to be about the same in Safari, Mozilla and IE 6 on Windows, although not exactly. It’s awesome that everyone has decided to implement style sheets differently, so nothing looks the same. I thought css was supposed to help fix that cross-browser problem. I’ll keep tweaking things at any rate.
A Good Computing Reference
I just found the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing today, it seems like a pretty handy thing to have around if you’re doing much with computers. My operating systems assignment had taken me on a short quest for a good definition of semaphores.
Strangle, The Bastard
A review of the recent STB show. Dave, Matt, and Steve shall be given tacos. Provided tacos are redefined as something else. Maybe I’ll redefine the rest of the language while I’m at it. Or just go to bed; class at 8:30, I will return to the house about twelve hours after that.
Screenshot
This screenshot has many purposes. Or at least a few anyway. First one, take a look at the personal ad on both The Onion and Modern Humourist, I smell a conspiracy. The shot also shows off a few of tweaks I’ve made to OS X and also the incredibly cold weather (-16C in the afternoon) we’ve been having. And today is a nice day. Blah, snow is alright, the cold is shit.
Themed Mac
Various things for changing the look of your mac:
ThemeChanger - allows theme switching
Max Themes - a number of cool looking themes
Swizcore Studios - more themes
ResExcellence - tons of mod info
Unsanity - great interface tweaks
AquaFix - restore original aqua theme
Hacking Safari
Here’s a thread describing some hacks for Safari.
Asymptotic Notation
They’re big on computational complexity in computer science, go figure. An nice way to describe computational complex it with asymptotic notation, basically a rough estimation of how long something takes to run. I was working on my algorithms assignment and came across some asymptotic notations that I hadn’t seen before. To tell you the truth I didn’t even know they were called asymptotic notations; they started us off with big o notation, and then handed us big omega and big theta notation. Now they give me this squirrely w notation (which I discovered is actually called little omega notation) and little o notation, which are very similar to their bigger brothers but different enough to warrant a name change. Anyway, I hadn’t bought the textbook yet but needed to learn what these new notations were but the internet saved me again.
Wiggidy
Now the question is: what did I do for a week? And the answer is: not all that much. I did some drinking, I did some school work.
Shady Math
I was trying to figure out how to get a rough estimate of a factorial number without a calculator and came across an example of numerology at its best. The conclusions are great — basically he proved the existence of God.
Safari
I’ve been playing around with Safari a bit, and agree with a lot of the comments that people have made. The one big thing people are complaining about is the lack of tabbed browsing. I’m pretty sure this will get implemented, how could they overlook one of the key reasons that so many people have switched to Chimera? I think it’s because of they want people to try using the SnapBack feature as opposed to tabs. It works much the same way I tend to use tabs, i.e. opening up a bunch of links from a weblog in tabs so that I can still go back and finish reading the site. That’s how the SnapBack works, you can go off down some trail, leave a marker and be instantly teleported back when you don’t feel like being there anymore. I think it’s a good method for browsing weblogs and such, but something people wouldn’t have bothered trying if the tabs were available. That said, Apple will still put tabs into the browser because they’re very useful (especially the bookmarking groups of tabs).
I can’t say a whole lot about the rendering engine they decided to use, based on the Konquerer engine rather than Gecko. They went for lean and mean, but might have pissed off the people whose website code no longer works properly. I know for sure that Java things seems to be working better for me (I was never able to do this crossword puzzle in Chimera).
Next up, I don’t think the browser has 128-bit encryption. Or if it does, it’s just not rendering either of the pages that I use encryption on properly. Namely my banking website and my school’s course/marks website.
Last thing I want to comment on is the bookmark managing. I think the new system is great, it’s what I’ve been looking for. It’s the way I’ve been trying to use bookmarks (with IE on windows and Chimera on mac) for a long time. I use a lot of bookmarks, it’s the crux of my browsing but Chimera has piss-poor bookmark management. I ended up using Bookit, so i didn’t have to deal with Chimera’s lackluster sidebar.
Gary Carter elected to hall of fame
Gary Carter was elected into the baseball hall of fame today. He was my favourite baseball player when I was a kid, although I’m not really sure why. I vaguely remember watching the 1986 World Series that the Mets won, that might have been it; I also might have had a lot of Gary Carter baseball cards to begin with and the name got stuck in my head.
To read
An online copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I remember a computer professor talking about the book in first year, I should probably read it.
Adaptation
I just finished watching Adaptation (IMDb, official, weblog) and had to jump onto the internet to see what was going on. I started reading this thread and felt it summed up the movie pretty well. Some people love it, some people hate it; it’s brilliant and it’s crap. Everything all rolled into one and each to his own getting what they can out of it. I was laughing throughout the last half of the film, laughing at him doing everything that he said he wasn’t going to do. I thought it was brilliant writing, but I’m a sucker for multilayered self-indulgent stories about people trying to write a story. And it was entirely self-indulgent which is where a lot of the humour lies. It’s worth checking out, deffinitely one of the better movies that I’ve seen recently.
Western Trip
I was really impressed by the use of flash for this site detailing a voyage through the western US. It’s just a cool way to do a travel log.
Why RIAA Keeps Getting Hacked
The Recording Industry Association of America already has a target on its back because of its take-no-prisoners stance on file sharing and piracy. That explains why its site gets hacked so much. But why does it continue to be so easy? By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]
This is me taking a stab at using NetNewsWire to update the site. The point of the article is sound: the trumpeters of digital security and the evils of the internet are obviously clueless about the way it works and how to provide basic security for their site.
Drugs for everybody
Hey Bob, I’ve got an idea: if we invent a new type of illness, we could push a whole bunch of new drugs on the people we say have it. Alright, so you’ll work on ‘female sexual dysfunction’ and I’ll start my work on the ‘writing with your right hand disease’.
Go free speech
Personally, I think it’s about time we ushered in an era of censorship over science. God knows this democracy thing isn’t working. God forbid that a structural engineer may know the weaknesses of a particular type of bridge. Go back to your wartorn countries and build your faulty bridges that will kill dozens and inflame the hatred for the western devil.
Headline Fun
Headline: New Years Celebration’s Free of Terrorism. Tomorrow: January 2nd free of terrorism; September 10th: Free of Terrorism. I don’t think terrorists seem particularly tied to any given day on the western calendar, but that may just be me. New Years parties do result in a large gathering of people which provies a potential target, but what about all the other large gatherings of people throughout the year?