I finally graduated from Sacramento State in December and got my Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. It was a lot of work, but in the end it was worth it. It wasn’t really all that difficult, just a lot of work. My aunt and cousin came out to Sacramento to watch me walk during the cerimony, which was actually relatively quick.

I’ve also just recently quit playing World of Warcraft. The expansion pack really killed the game for me, just a lot of work and not that much reward for doing it. I mean, it’s really just a giant treadmill to keep people entertained, but it wasn’t really entertaining anymore, so I’ve quit.

Last month I got a Nintendo Wii. After deciding I wanted to get one, it took a few weeks for me to finally find one. I ended up getting it at Wal-mart during their Sunday sale early in the morning. It’s a lot of fun to play, especially wii sports. I also got Zelda along with it, and later bought Paper Mario. Zelda wasn’t quite as fun as I was hoping for, and I haven’t beaten it yet. Paper mario was a lot of fun and I beat it in a few days, although there was way to much text for it in my opinion. It’s also a lot of fun to play wii sports on a giant projector, so if you ever get a chance to do that, you should.

It’s kind of nice being out of school, although that means that having a job is the next step. Initially I put my resume up on monster and contacted one company that did web applications in Davis, but I didn’t get chosen for the position. I also put my resume up on the Sacramento State Career site and got one interview from that; I didn’t really want to do what they offered, so I passed on that. I also went to the job fair at Sacramento State and got two interviews out of the process, although nothing panned out from that either (one was consulting and the other was mainly for an internship).

I was browsing the Career Newsletter at Sacramento State, and saw a position at Schilling Robotics in Davis. I had heard about Schilling from my friend Zach, who works there. I had been asking him when they were hiring computer science students and he said they weren’t. However, this posting was new so I talked to him about it, and he gave my resume to the right person, so I got a phone interview with their recruiter, then one with the person I would be working for, then finally an on-site interview with him and a few more people. Apparently I impressed them, as they offered me the position. I accepted, and I start May 7th. I’m really looking forward to it, because it is something new for me (as a job), to do more c++ work rather than web development. Also my experience with working on microcontrollers for doing robots will hopefully be useful in this job as well.

There are two big projects I’m working on this summer. The first is the one Joe is more excited about doing, the “Defconbot” as we call it. Basically the goal is to make an autonomous robot that will shoot down white targets against a black wall. Joe is somewhat involved with helping out on the software side (he really wants to make ‘cool’ drawing for the targetting), although he is primarily doing all of the design and fabrication of the robot itself. For the gun, we bought an air compressor and are essentially making a blow gun. The plastic BB’s will be loaded into a barrel, and compressed air will force it out of the barrel. The major mechanical point will be the feeder to get a single BB into the barrel at a time, and the valve to control when the air is on (as we don’t want to waste air). Currently we’re using an air sprayer as a valve to do the hand-testing, but ideally it will be some sort of electric valve, rather than something we make ourselves.

I’m mainly working on the software side of the project, since my mechanical & electrical engineering skills aren’t as great as his, and I’m a much better programmer than him, and a cooler guy in general too. I wrote some software in C# that grabs the video stream from a webcam, detects the objects, and also some software that controls servos using the serial port. This will be used to aim the gun at the targets. The two pieces currently aren’t hooked up together yet, as we don’t have two servos powerful enough to hold the gun yet. However, here is a screenshot for those that are interested:

The second project we’re working on is our 30 pound combat robot named “Big Bloom.” The concept is that it will spin in a circle using two wheels, and brake them at certain points in time so that it creates a translation across the arena when we want it to move. It is going to be controlled using bluetooth, and I have a few videos to show the progress on this. As usual, I’m doing the software side and he’s doing the mechanical/electrical. Anyways, the first video is the initial test of getting the wireless signal to the microcontroller (using bluetooth). The second is similar to the first, only I have it controlling motors as well. The last video is a small prototype I made a long time ago to see if the motion is possible, and how difficult it is to do. It basically just goes in a straight line, then stops, then goes in another straight line — this is all controlled by timers, so there’s no remote control.

Control Prototype v1:

Control Prototype v2:

Motion Prototype:

One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that.

(emphasis mine. courtesy: electoral-vote.com)

I don’t want to speculate that there was any sort of fraud or foul play, but it certainly seems like it. CNN conveniently changed their exit poll numbers late on the night of the election to match what the Diebold machines were spitting out. I’m also dissapointed that 11 states passed measures banning civil unions and/or marraiges for homosexuals. So much for equal rights. I shouldn’t be too dissappointed though — California passed the same bill four years ago (I voted against it in the first election I was eligable though, so don’t blame me). There is a lot to be dissapointed for.

On a happier note, I released an update for poker saver today. So go check it out if you play poker.

School has started during the interim. Parking was only bad for the first week thankfully, and not near as it has been in previous semesters. I’m taking 5 classes this semester, and would probably be taking 6 if the last class wasn’t at 7-8:30pm. I got all of the ones I wanted for the most part. These include Math 110B (Algebra of some kind), Math 170 (Linear Programming), CSC 134 (Database/File Systems), CSC 196L (Artificial Intelligence), and History 17B (American: Civil War to present). I look forward to going to the AI class since it’s the most interesting of them and the projects are fun to do. The last one was implementing a program that used a minimax game tree to play a game called ‘Pawn Stop’ that the teacher invented. My program plays pretty strong and I hope to win the tournament he set up for it next week.

During summer I accomplished a goal I set to read the Xanth series over again. During the first week of school I was finishing up the last book of it (Up in a Heaval), that are in paperback at least. All 25 books of the series. That and reading I, Robot and On a Pale Horse, I had a lot of book reading that I did. I guess I made up for all the years I didn’t read at all unless I had to during junior high and high school. I’ve toned it down since school started and have only read Masters of Doom since then, which I’d recommend for anyone to read. I’ve also ordered a couple books to read in the future, which should be here this week hopefully.

My dad came in town for my birthday last week and we did a lot of things while he was here. First we went to Nationals in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun since I wasn’t a competetor at it and could just watch and relax. There were a lot of good fights during it and lots of carnage. My only complaint would be the inconsiderate people that were in the stands. Mostly people who let their kids do whatever they wanted which usually involved hanging on the bleachers and bumping into me and trying to push me out of the way. One parent had the audacity to tell their child not to get stepped on (implying that me, who hadn’t even moved a leg for at least 5 minutes when his kid crowded into a space next to me that didn’t exist). Another person literrally sat on top of the bag that was next to my dad that had his camera in it (there wasn’t that much space between him and the next person either!). Luckily the competitors are much better people than this, at least from what I’ve noticed.

My birthday came during the week and I couldn’t go to a traditional Black Angus dinner like usual, and instead just went to Baker’s Square for a lunch. I got a watch for my birthday, which I wanted to have since I don’t really like pulling my cell phone out of my pocket to see the time, and it’s akward to be without the time when I forget to charge my phone. I also got a 160gb hard drive that I haven’t gotten around to installing yet. I’d kind of like to build an SATA raid array, so I might use this for my pvr instead, although I’m almost out of space on my desktop hard drive.

On Friday we went to see Team America: World Police. It was pretty funny, especially the Team America theme song when they bust out of Mount Rushmore, and Kim Song-Il or whatever his name was talking in general. They sure get the Asian stereotype down .

On Sunday we went to the Sacbots event at CSUS, “Smackdown in Sactown,” as it was dubbed. I arrived a little later than I would’ve liked, since I had wrote a program to handle the brackets and display everything on the projector screen so that it was easier for competetors and the audience to see what was going on instead of having things mysteriously happen with brackets posted on a wall somewhere. There were a few hangups with getting the program working since I couldn’t seem to get apache running on my laptop (it was working fine on my desktop). I ended up running it remotely over the internet. A second thing was that my digital camera was taking pictures significantly larger than the pictures I was using to test out the program, so my computer nearly locked up every time it tried to render everything. I ended up turning off images and running it without them until the break and then scaled them down using a program Joe recommended and uploaded them to the program. It worked great after that, and people even complimented me on it .

Since I entered a robot into the event, my dad handled getting the bot ready to fight, which was pretty nice because I was handling the bracket system and never had to worry about my bot since he took care of it. I did pretty well this event. Upon Steve’s (Fusible Link) advice, I ran copal 50:1 motors at 22.2V using two 3-cell LiPoly batteries connected in series. Coincidentally, my first fight was against him. However, he has since upgraded to the mythical maxon 17:1 motors which are impossible to get anymore and was much faster than I was. Much faster. He beat me pretty handedly. After that I fought Wild One and won in a record 7 seconds (he said one of his motors wasn’t working). Then I fought Shark Bait and won, and then beat Hurricane. I don’t remember the details of either fight, other than I won. Then I fought Havok and lost. His drum didn’t really do much damage to me, but it had enough oomph to lift me up in the air a little bit throwing off my traction. I kept trying to get him towards the pit but in the end he caught onto me and pushed me in instead. Oh well, 3-2 is a good record for me, since I would’ve been going against Grilled Fajitas next (Ross Hironaka’s Flamethrower), which is a really good robot and ended up getting fourth place, losing to his other robot, Mean Burrito (also a flame thrower). Here are thebrackets of the entire tournament, along with pictures.

Finally, I’d like to pimp out a few programs I use regularly. Firefox web browser, which is a much better program than Internet Explorer in that it has much better security, more features (tabbed browsing, find toolbar, popup blocking), and I like it better. Also is HydraIRC, which is a better IRC client than mIRC in my opinion. It is much better looking and seems to be faster and more responsive in general. It lacks some things like scripting, but other than that it has more features like the channel monitor and docking tabs. Also the channel list is much better because it’s a tree instead of just a list and that makes it much easier to be on multiple IRC networks/channels compared to mIRC.

Also, Poker Saver alpha 02 is coming along nicely for those of you that are interested. Also, I’ve got all the parts for FryDrumBot, including the aluminum tube, but I’m not sure if it’ll be the one I’ll use. Currently it’s 3″ diameter, 1/8″ wall, and 1.77oz per lineal inch. The electronics weigh 6oz, and the two endcaps weigh 2oz total, and the wheels weigh 2oz total, so that leaves 6oz for the drum, stabalizers and chassis mounts, which isn’t quite enough. I may end up buying a thinner wall for half the weight (but less momentum), or a smaller diameter which will cut down on the weight of the endcaps as well.

As an aside, I’ve recently purchased Programming C# by Jesse Liberty and published by O’reilly to help me learn C# enough to do this project. It seems like it’s geared for people with a lot less programming experience than I have though, so I don’t know if I’d reccomend it to other experienced programmers. It definately has a lot of information in it though.

For robot updates, I’ve bought makings for another robot, which is going to tentatively be called FryDrumBot, which won’t be anythin like anything I’ve seen as an antweight, and hopefully it’ll be good too . Also, I’ve got plans for FryBot 3.0. Basically, it’s going to be the same as FryBot 2.0, except with wedges built into it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the pneumatics kit right now though. Maybe I’ll make a third robot or find a way to fit it into FryBot 3.0 . I’m going to be working on my robot history page today, so it shows history of my robots.

Hope you like it. Now you can comment on the pages too, so I can see if you have to say anything.

I’ve recently switched browsers to Mozilla Firebird away from IE. I still pop open IE
for small quirks like opening up movies without saving them, and the fact that certain
plugins don’t work properly. Apart from a few web pages, everything looks normal, which
Netscape 6/7 failed to do when I used them before. I used to use Netscape “back in the
day” when I still used windows 3.1, and really would prefer to use something else besides
Microsoft products because eventually I want to be able to make the switch to Linux from
Windows. I also think it has more features than IE does like the / search, and the download
history. It still has a bunch of little quirks, but I’m sure I can get used to it.

Finals are done, and that means school is done too. When I started writing this, I had
just finished school, but now it’s a few weeks later and I’ve already got my grades back.
It was a fun semester and fairly easy because 3 of the classes (MATH 108, CS 028, and PHIL 060)
were very similar to each other, with each going over most of the same stuff at the
beginning as general knowledge and branching off to their respective areas for more detail
with MATH 108 going into more detail on proof, and then set notation and then more
detail on functions. And then CS 028 going into a tiny bit of set notation followed by
computer science related concepts like logic circuits, and recursive functions, and
langauges (i.e. regular expressions, finite automata, and grammars). However, PHIL 060
didn’t seem to go any furthur. It seemed the entire class was learned the first 3 weeks
in MATH 108, but with different symbols. MATH 102 was fairly easy because I had already
read a book about Number Theory before, and it was much similar although I didn’t understand
the book and taking the class made me understand it much better. CS 130 was also an easy
class because I had read The
Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena, which is very in depth and the CS 130
class was a subset of the book. I was actually surprised that the class didn’t go farther
into detail on problems like NP-complete, and things like that. If you care about the
teachers I had, I thought Taylor (MATH 108) was a really good and entertaining teacher,
although I’m sure the dynamics of the other students in the class helped with that. Also
she gave good lectures, but I’ve heard that she’s hard (I didn’t really think so though).
Krovetz (CS 028) was very organized and a good teacher overall.

One thing I thought was interesting about CSUS was I thought I might see some people I
haven’t seen since high school, since I went to American River while most of the other
people in my class went either to Sierra or directly to CSUS. The whole semester I
didn’t see a single person from my High School at the college. I only saw one person from
American River that I had in a couple math classes there. Other than that, I did see someone
working at a place I regularly go to for food that went to High School with me (and I like
to think we were friends). Perhaps next semester will be better.

I finally got my PVR set up, and I ended up moving it into my room without a network cable.
My dad brought some long rolls of cable from Utah that don’t have ends on them, so I’ll
need to get some connectors the device that crimps them and feeds the wires in. I also
had to get a Svideo -> RCA connector at Radio Shack for $20 (wow!) since HSC didn’t have
any, and I didn’t want to make one myself. It actually works pretty good now that we
get more channels through Comcast since they converted service in our area (again), so
I’m really only missing out on Tech TV, a few others, and the movie channels without making
the IR blaster.

I’ve also been working on a new map, which I’ve tentatively called fry_laser2k3. Basically
the intentions of it were to make a 9on9 version of fry_laser, but I don’t know if I’ll be
able to do have all the gameplay additions without making the map too unbalancing for
offense or defense. It’s shaping up pretty well, with having almost all of the base
constructed except for the spawn, and potentially another small “buffer” room. So really
just the midfield and cloning the bases after that, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

Back to the point. While I was at his site, I read about how he was publishing a new book
and wanted to know what the best way to advertise. Anyways he mentioned about reading an
article on kuro5hin entitled Tip Jar as a Revenue Model.
I read the article and it seemed pretty interesting. I do agree that it doesn’t seem like a
good way to get a lot of money compared to actually getting books published in “dead-tree
format” as he calls it, and that he probably got a lot more money than normally would be
generated because of how many people gave him money simply for being one of the first
people to try the method. I don’t want to repeat the article, so just go ahead and read
it yourself if you’re interested.

He put up the article not to give a plug out to his book, but I was interested since he said
that almost everyone that commented on the content of the book thought it was good. I don’t
think that he would be he would lie like that to generate revenue since you don’t have to
pay for anything if you don’t like it, so I did a little bit of sniffing around to find out
where it was and ended up reading the first three chapters before I went to bed and then read
the rest in the morning. In my opinion it’s a really good read, and I put $5 into his “tip
jar” via paypal. I’ll probably even buy a copy of the printed copy if it ever gets published
on say amazon.

PVR Update: I got mythtv working again on my new mobo but I still
can’t get the on-board video card working properly (it’s an s3 prosavage ddr). I ordered a
new GeForce2 MX with tv-out and it should be here within the week and then I’ll be able to
watch the stuff I’ve recorded. I’ve mainly recorded stuff on commercial tv because I haven’t
made the IR Blaster to control the DirecTV receiver I have. Actually my dad will probably
make it for me and ship it to me since he’s much better at making things than I am. I don’t
want to fry my motherboard . Also the other thing I’ll need to get is an svideo to RCA
adapter/cable since I don’t have svideo on my tv or vcr which kind of sucks. Hopefully I’ll
have it done soon though.

I’m actually also thinking about swapping motherboards with the PVR box because it has 6 USB
slots and my computer only has 4, but I don’t know if the A7M266 board will support the
Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, or if the PVR box even needs the extra oomph of it and can settle with
my 1.333GHz Thunderbird processor. I really ought to put a comment box down here again so
I can get feedback on the stuff I write.