Sam's L33t Journal

I finished my Comp. Mod. final today, and that went well. I also know what I'm doing for Expo: I'm giving a presentation on OpenLayers, an open source project I helped found as part of my job last summer. (I checked with my boss to make sure that was all okay under my NDA, and it is.)

I had an appointment in Wellesley today and had an interesting conversation with the cab driver on the way back. Apparently, she had previously worked as a software release engineer. So I had a conversation about software design and object-oriented programming languages with the cab driver. :-D

Last, but not least, here's a picture of me and Liana at the Snow Ball:

Again, I plan to write, and, again, I'm scatterbrained.

I feel awful. For the final project in POE, our group is making a robot that dances to music. I'm on software, and I'm totally failing to find any libraries (preferably in Python), that will let me play music and analyze the waveform in some manner such that I can do beat detection. Very frustrating...

Plus, I've got a report for social psych (on the Rawandan genocide) due in less than two weeks (and I haven't started it). I've got some other reading for that class as well. Plus, I've got a lot of computational modeling homework due on Monday.

I've been having an annoying recurring dream where I sleep in and miss a class, can't remember the work that was assigned, and (just to make things as absurd as possible) can't even remember the topic of the class. It's one of those dreams that's obviously a dream while I'm dreaming it, but seems like a memory when I wake up (until I think about it and realize that it's extremely inconsistant with reality).

I took the train in to MIT on Friday to return some stuff to the Anime Club library. I remember being startled out of sleep when the conductor shouted, "South Station, final stop!", and getting the impression that I had been thinking / dreaming about something terribly important, but I couldn't remember what it was.

I read some more of Cryptonomicon. I had to put the book away on the T because I couldn't keep from laughing out loud.

There was a mech design challenge this weekend, so people were building hovercraft from random junk, remote controlled propellers, plastic bags, and blue foam. The end results were pretty nifty...

Quite busy. And I'm a bit sick today, too. Stupid cold. Summing things up quickly (although somewhat messily):

Yesterday:

• I went to Wellesley for that Social Psych. class; still don't know if I'll get into that.
• In Principles of Engineering, we started on the first lab, building USB based circuits with a PIC micro-controller (PIC18F2455) and frobbing a program written in quasi-assembly (so far we've just programmed it to make an LED blink on and off, but still, I get to learn some assembly code).
• Also, I bought Star Fox: Assault (because, dude, Star Fox, although that review has it right; it adds nothing revolutionary to the series).

Today: Blue Screens of Death and the fixing thereof, being sick, an afternoon nap, getting my wireless setup to like me again, and getting a bunch of work done (although not as much as I would have liked, what with the computer trouble and the library not having a copy of our math textbook (my copy isn't in yet)).

I'm playing in Krazny Oktybr this Saturday (it's a LARP set on a Soviet sub; think "Hunt for Red October"). I'm looking forward to it; I've heard that game is crazy fun.

I've wasted spent a lot of time in the past few weeks frobbing with my computer, customizing various things on Firefox and so on. If you're interested, here are some of the cooler things I've found:

( Nifty, I think... )

So, our Software Design projects have begun to use dictionaries, a data structure that is very powerful and, in Python, easy to use. Because of this, we're finally beginning to get into really interesting projects. Today, I wrote a program that performs Markov analysis on a text and generates a text of its own, based on the likelihood that a given word will follow a previous phrase.

Analyzing "The Tale of Two Cities" (from Project Gutenberg) for the rate of occurrence of words following each unique two word phrase, seeding the output with the key "recalled to", and running for 200 words produced the following:

life?" And the friend I purpose to myself the love of Heaven, will he will not prewaricate to you, Doctor, if it was a dreadful anguish to him!" cried the sawyer. "Every day, in Wolf-procession through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer. "If you knew it. You see I am going to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me." "No, no, no," said the boy, or about his face. I have noted in myself that my memory is exact and circumstantial and unshaken. I try it with flint and steel sparks well off the wine, and what with the Cruncher family, until Young Jerry on a stool in Fleet-street and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were compelled against his face. He cannot easily touch his three- cornered hat to give as little occasion as possible for talk and envy, was the likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see the common one, a prison of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have in the air, and to tempt it forth to find yourself mistaken, it might be, at any time, you know, for who can say of it

(On a related note, an Olin student created an AIM bot AI, Oliabot, that "learns" language through Markov analysis. If you have time, you can talk to it and it will learn from what you say.)

I received my assignment today, and got my first choice project.

We spent the morning working on image editing using Matlab and filters. I also began working on the image completion problem (the cat sample problem, see previous link), but that one's going to take a while.

( Some Technical Details )

In the afternoon there was a lecture that was supposed to serve as an introduction to the country of Israel (mostly stuff I knew already).

A few unrelated points:
- The cabin I stay in is nice and air-conditioned. (Unfortunately, however, it is infested with cockroaches.)
- The food at camp is also really good (there are tomatoes or Israeli salad (chopped cucumber and tomato, mostly)) at every meal.

Currently reading: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick