Posts from — March 2005

I watched a bunch of The West Wing two days ago, and got caught up on the show. It has been quite good… it’s a lot of fun to watch candidates who are actually good-intentioned, relatively honest, smart people run for president. That’s why someone called The West Wing “political porn”… both the republicans and democrats on the show have at least on candidate that isn’t afraid to actually talk to the people and be honest even if isn’t the best thing to do politically. It’s not completely far-fetched, they do have to bend to pressure and politics a lot, but it’s a lot more fun and uplifting to watch than actual politics.

Python presentation went well today. I wish I had more time to code in python, it’s always really fun. “Maybe next week”… the mantra of this semester. It’ll be true eventually. Still no updates on the summer.

I’m going to resist the urge for MEGA UPDATE, so I’m going to describe the last 5 days in one horribly grammatically incorrect run-on sentence:

(Read this in one breath, it’s hard but doable)
I was planning on going home with Karen H on Saturday to surprise my parents for Easter, but my family preempted me and surprised me on my birthday, showing up at LU and taking me and my friends out to dinner at Jack Creek Steakhouse AND CANTINA… it was a lot of fun and I decided to just go home with them for Easter instead of having too many surprises in one weekend; the trip afforded me time to relax and spend time with my extended family.

whew…

A few other notes:
- Doug got me an inflatable 8-ball, which I’ve yet to inflate, but is cool. He also got me an action figure of the black knight, which I need to try to integrate into my Pyhton presentation this week.
- My room is a mess again, hopefully I can take care of that tomorrow.
- No developments on the plans for the summer yet
- I have a lot of great snacks and candy in my room… life is good

Tonight I started working on a program to analyze my gaim log files. I’m writing it in python instead of perl since I’m doing a presentation on python next week. The project has a long way to go, but the results are neat to look at so far. I used some simple html tricks and cubic spline calculations to create smooth, professional-looking graphs.

Example screenshot

Once I finish, the software should work fine in windows or unix, as long as you have python installed. The graphs in the above screenshot are conversations by hour in a day, month in the last couple of years, and hour of the week. Obviously there’s a lot of work left to be done, but it works pretty well so far.

Python is a lot of fun.

Oh, wow, it’s past 5am, time for some sleep.

I just downloaded The Section Quartet, a string quartet, playing selections from Incubus. It’s really well done, I recommend it if you like Incubus.

I can’t tell if I don’t like Modest Mouse or if it’s just going to take me a while to like (a la Flaming Lips or Porcupine Tree, both of which took me months). Since I’m back in linux, I’m back to downloading music. I need to improve my music cataloging script, maybe I’ll do that a bit this weekend.

I’m finally back in linux, after some fighting with my desktop today. It’s really nice to be back.. back to my applications and my way of doing work. I admit that I didn’t give Windows a fair chance, but I’m just more comfortable here. Amarok has python scripting now, I’m excited to try that. The fun thing about debian is that all the applications improved slightly since I last used them. I wonder when I’ll get around to that homework…

On a grad school app, or any other application, is there any reason for me to fill out optional ‘demographics’ data such as sex and ethnicity? I can’t remember the last time being a white male helped me out. Ideas?

The project that I alluded to a while ago was “Run” (working title). It’s meant to provide distances and calculations for running routes of short to medium distances. It only works in firefox right now, though I’ve put some work in to getting it on IE. If anyone wants to help make it work in IE, please let me know, I need help with that. You’re welcome to try it out, but please don’t test it with more than one location per day (using the same location as much as you want is fine, it caches it).

Try it out, it’s quite neat.

Magicspatula Run

Tonight I wrote an RSS feed for the LUNA Sale board. The XML can be accessed here, general project information is on my wiki.

For anyone who doesn’t know what RSS is, I took a screen shot of RSS Bandit to give an example of how it allows you to browse the listings:

Let me know if you try it out and have ideas for how it should work differently. The feed updates every hour. I should write a nice XSLT style for RSS like Microsoft does. Maybe I could render it to make it look like LUNA… (wink)

OK, I’m completely exhausted and barely able to type, so I’m gonna brush my teeth and get some sleep.