Posts from — January 2004

OK, since a bunch of other people are, here’s who presidentmatch.com thinks my ideas are closest to:
Kerry 100%
Kucinich 97%
Sharpton 94%
Dean 90%
Clark 86%
Edwards 85%
Lieberman 75%
Bush 48%

Ironically I don’t think I’d vote for any of the “top 3″ if the election were today. Kucinich isn’t electable and I’ve never been a fan of Al Sharpton.

Did anyone else notice that 1/2 the candidates have last names the same as or variations of first names? This is a sign of hope for people like me and Pete.

I guess I’ll just hold off on deciding and see who wears the best looking tie to the debate.

I have a lot of homework to do tonight, but I keep getting sidetracked. Writing business requirements for software engineering is a task that is so subdivided it almost lends itself to interruption. Anyway, I installed awstats on my web server. This software analyzes the logs of my server and gives me a report about how many people are visiting the site, what they tend to look at, when they visit, how much they transfer, how long they stay, where they come from, etc. It’s quite a neat little package.

Anyway, I found that I have received 43 unique visitors to some photos I had posted a few days ago, which is pretty impressive. I’m curious to find out how many people visit this journal as well. I came up with a way to do it, I just haven’t bothered to implement it… but the day is coming. I would guess that if I post an entry here I’d get 25 unique readers (or at least anyone who loads the entry on a page) within a week. I really have no idea, though.

Another important statistic I got from this is that 70% of the people visiting my web site are using windows. This itself is not surprising (it’s actually much higher if you filter out my desktop computer, but that’s not the point). The more important thing is that Internet Explorer has a 47% market share on my site and Mozilla 44%. If you add Galeon (a mozilla derivative), moz and IE have almost the same share. My point is that, assuming nobody is using IE for Mac (bear with me), 23% of windows users visiting my site are not using IE.

This is a good start! I’ve persistently been plugging Mozilla Firebird for months now in my profile and directly to people. It’s simply a better web browser for both power users and just anyone who doesn’t like to be harassed by web sites. I’ve converted easily a half dozen people so far, and some of them have been going on to spread the good word.

I’m not doing this just to spite microsoft. They have said that it’s not economically viable for them to fix all the standards compliance problems in IE, so the next version with a really different core code will come out with Windows (code name) Longhorn in several years. With a 90% or so market share, this means that web standards will stagnate for the next few years if people don’t start thinking for themselves. Give firebird a try… if you don’t like it, tell me why! The development community is very open (I’ve chatted with their developers when I’ve had a problem with their browser). If not for me, do it for the Internet.

Joel Spolsky (founder of Fog Creek) has apparently started going through resumes for the two internship positions at his company (the ones I applied to). He wrote a rant about the poor quality of them on his web site. The gripe he listed that he could have with mine is “there is no reason whatsoever to send the cover letter as an attachment and then write a ‘cover cover’ letter in the body of the email.”. I didn’t quite do this, but my cover letter was an additional attachment. OK, so I messed up on that part, but it was the first cover letter I had written and putting the cover letter content into the email body text just seemed too informal. In a larger company where the person receiving the email is not the same as the person selecting applicants, I think having two attachments would be preferable.

The funniest line:
“Attention, the entire population of India: whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it’s always after the comma and never before it. Thank you.”

If I’m lucky, I’ll get into both “good” instead of “ok” piles and get an interview… I’ll find out soon enough.

I spent a ton of time working on the band newsletter last week. I didn’t really start until late Wednesday night, worked until 3:30 am thursday night, and finished printing and stapling copies for everyone about 30 minutes before I was supposed to leave. I ended up with 4 double sided pages and a respectable amount of content. I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback about it, so I think it turned out well. I’m hoping that distributing it at the band banquet will become a regular occurrence in years to come.

The band banquet went well. I got manager, so I’m now “in charge of the dorks” as Mike Hall put it. Lots of responsibility, but I’m excited about it. Sarah Knechel will be replacing me as publicity manager, and I think she’ll do a good job.

Well, I might as well answer the flurry of “how are classes?” questions I’ve been getting lately, so here are my first impressions for the semester, including classes, activities, and jobs:

Software Engineering: For some reason, I like software engineering (the study, not necessarily the class). Though the subject interests me, I’m worried about the class. Except for a few specific things, I’ve learned everything the class covers by working at Travelers. It’s good to get some formal training, though. The class is centered around a big class project which is designed to simulate working in and with groups on a large project. I don’t think there’s too much I’ll get out of the simulation that I haven’t got from the real world. The project is for the robotics lab that I’m going to be working in (more on that later), so at least it’s an interesting topic. I think many of the students in there are going to be overwhelmed by some of the complexities of mobile autonomous robots, and the more difficult parts of the project won’t work without intervention from professor spletzer. I’m one of the only people in the class with any robotics background, and some of the tasks have potential to be quite hard. We shall see

Compiler Design: I’m looking forward to this, I think Professor Pottenger is a great teacher, and he really loves the subject. He somehow manages to get the vast majority of the class to work really hard but also get great grades. He doesn’t let people slip through the cracks, which is good.

User Interface Design: I love reading about and doing user interface design in computers, as well as thinking about the design of everyday things (hint, I want that book for my birthday!). Unfortunately, this class was the least critical to my majors or minors, so I had to ax it to make more time for my workstudy jobs and to leave a sliver of time open for sanity.

Linguistics: I get the feeling that I’m really going to like this class. I have no idea why. I guess it’s related to my interest in how the mind works.

Computer Architecture: Learning about hardware stuff should be fun, and it’s something I’m not too strong in (though I guess I know more than the average CS major, but that doesn’t say much). It’s sort of strange to go from a small grad/undergrad class where we called prof spletzer by his first name to a class 3x the size where we don’t.

Marching Band: Done for now, but I’ll find out the results of the elections at the band banquet on Friday. I’m trying to get the band newsletter done for the banquet since it’ll be easy to distribute and people will have it on their minds then. I’ve been pretty happy with how many people have contributed articles… it’s mostly nonsense, but that’s ok.

KKY: Just getting started this week. I’m hoping we’ll be able to get a lot more done this semester since many people have more time now that’s marching band is over, I emailed several people about how we need to do this at the end of the semester.

ACM: Trying to make more time for it this semester. I’d like to organize a student projects presentation so we can all share the stuff we work on in our spare time. Tim and I are going to try to update the website soon.

Workstudy: I now have two workstudy jobs. One at career services, where I was before, and another with professor spletzer in his robotics lab. I can only have about 7 hours of workstudy per week, so I’m only putting in 2.5 at career services. If the robotics one goes well, I’ll be able to continue it as a full time job over the semester. My first assignment is to get a firewire camera working in C++ with some sort of programming library and then take the images and send them to OpenGL for processing on the graphics card (convolution matrix and such). I wish they were using a real-time OS for this instead of trying to work around Windows. It’s easier to develop on, but I don’t think it makes sense for real robotics applications that need to respond to their environment.

All in all, it’s been a good start. Time for class.

Got to visit with a lot of old friends tonight. I thought about this statement and realized that English doesn’t differentiate between “friends who are old in age” and “friends who I’ve know for a long time”. In Spanish, for example, “viejo amigo” means the latter and “amigo viejo” the former (unless I mixed them up.. I often do). Anyway, I can use both meanings of the term today, as I got to eat, mingle, and go bowling with friends in kky and alumni. It was a lot of fun (although I’m horrible at bowling), and I like being able to see a bunch of people as soon as I get back to school.

I brought a lot of stuff home, so it’s taking a long time to get set up here. Lots to get done tomorrow, as classes start Monday.

For the ‘computer enthusiasts’ in the audience:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~hsakr/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm

check out the videos, the sound quality is amazing

Pretty funny hack

It hasn’t been this cold around here in a while. I think the wind chill didn’t rise into the positive numbers (F) today. The temperature is dipping below 0 tonight with wind chills reaching -26.

My laptop is fixed! I don’t see how Dell could make a profit off this… they’ve replaced the motherboard, hard drive, and screen backing and mounting clips. That plus labor = $$$.
Oh well.