burntpopcorn

Woot!

I went to Marin Ant Wars V yesterday and got first place in the antweight division. I went undefeated, thoroughly defeating (and destroying) some the best bots in the competition. We even saw a rainbow on the way back. After I got home, I laid down and got a full night’s sleep, which I haven’t got in 2 weeks. Yesterday was a good day.

It was a lot of work making the robot.. er making Joe make the robot. He went to the event also with his robot Ground Clearance, getting fourth place (although would’ve done stronger if he hadn’t lost a judges decision in a match I thought he won. Oh well. Hopefully videos of the event will be up soon (on the MAW website) for those interested.

I haven’t really done much the rest of my winter break though. I’ve been pretty lazy. My dad came into town over the break, and I visited with him and did the whole Chrismas thing. I worked with Joe on our robots for the event. I worked on Fortress Forever some, and did some consulting for a web site (i.e. making stuff and them paying me money for it, not really giving advice). School is starting next week so I have to prepare myself for that (ugh). Unfortunately, it’s got some of the classes I put off till the end because I don’t want to do them. I’m taking History (ugh!), Spanish (double ugh!), Stats (ugh!), Senior Project (UGH!!), and a computer graphics class (yay!). Hopefully I don’t get too sick of school this semester, and I pass all my classes.

Note: I just erased the whole thing I typed out, so I have to start this over again. It was much better the first time

I’ve spent a lot of time coding lately. It’s probably because I want to procrastinate on my sociology assignment (read a book by final exam) and my philosophy assignment (write a 5-7 page paper on an “outside topic” in philosophy, and use a book as the source). Both of those are due in 2 weeks, so you might understand my want to procrastinate.

On Monday, I slept through my stats class (ya I know.. shame on me..) and decided to work on Fortress Forever. One thing lead to another, and I ended up working on it for about 10 hours writing code in c++ and using the tools and helping another team member get models into the game. One positive thing is I got a lot of stuff done. I guess I should hope so if I spent so much time on it . The capture the flag rule set is completed and I got the sentry gun code to rotate 360 degrees, which is always a plus.

On Tuesday, I went to all of my classes and got home and chose to work on an addon for WoW for my guild to help distribute the items from bosses that we defeat in a more timely manner. This was my first decent-sized addon I made, so I decided to use the Ace framework to make it a bit simpler. The addon code is written in lua, so it’s nice to learn all the intracicies of another programming language. Lua is pretty nice because it treats functions as a base level object so it makes some stuff a little clearer than when doing the same type of things in other languages.

On Wednesday, my alarm woke me up so I made it to my stats class on time and went to my job and mainly worked on a PHP script that imports the phone numbers from a daily report we get emailed to us. I wrote it a long time ago, and apparently it stopped working. In the past, this usually meant that the server that ran it every day forgot to do it, or something like that. In which case, I can just restart the service or turn the scheduled program back on which is simple to do. However, the mail server got upgraded or something (that’s my best guess at least) and the format of the emails had changed. My strategy to get the data from the emails in the past had been to just blindly read the entire mail and grab the information I needed. However, the upgrade caused attachments to be encoded, so I actually needed to strip out the attachments from the email and read them properly. It was a pain to do, but I eventually figured out how to do that propery and I ended up making something pretty robust, so I was pretty proud of myself. Later that night when I got home, I did a bit of work on a side job in PHP which I had done some parsing stuff for as well. Tonight I worked on the user interface stuff for it and got a bit done.

Thursday, I actually decided to play some WoW with guild. We had some attendence problems early on, but we filled up a little bit towards the end. We had some good attempts at defeating the boss we were stuck on this week, but eventually we ran out of an item needed to beat him so we called it a night. Afterwards I remembered I had an assignment due for my computer science 139 class (operating systems), so I started that up. I had a lot of it already thought out in my head, so it was a simple matter of writing it out and getting it done… and remembering exactly how to compile shared objects in linux. I won’t bore you with the details, but it took me longer to realize I was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken, than to do the entire rest of the assignment. With that done, I submitted it via email and read some web pages and went to sleep.

Today was the exception though. I opened the fortress forever code up when I got home and poked around at it a little but didn’t really do anything. I also opened up Eclipse and looked at the java code for the game programming class I’m in, but didn’t get anything done there either. Afterwards, I signed onto wow and played a while. We were really having membership problems and after a few hours finally defeated a boss that we usually beat on the first or second try. We did it with 30 people, and we usually try to get 40. We were a bit demoralized (and the second boss is really difficult), so we decided to call it a night. I spent the rest of the night looking at web pages and such. I opened up the side job PHP stuff again and did a little bit of work, but not very much. I guess I was burnt out from doing so much coding during the rest of the week. If I had’ve worked on my game programming assignment, I could say I did significant work on projects in 5 different languages on 5 different days. Alas, I didn’t, so I can’t. I still did a lot of productive stuff, so I’m happy for that.

In other news, I found out that the next antweight robot event is in January at Andy’s place in Marin. I’m looking forward to finishing the new version of my robot and eating the incredibly good food they have at the event. Hopefully I’ll even do good in the tournament and not get my robot tore up like at the last event.

I’ve recently got over a bit of business I had recently, so I have time to write one of these things now. My last week, I procrastinated and finally finished my robot for the RFL Nationals in San Francisco, which I qualified for a while back. I planned on making a new frame for it, and using the new drum that Joe is making me, but since I procrastinated that didn’t happen. Instead, we replaced the lid and the supports to keep the drum from hitting the ground.

Finished with the robot late on Friday, I attempted to get a bunch of hours of sleep in before driving out on Saturday to attempt to be there by 10ish. I was helping run the insect weight divisions of the tournament (the 150 gram, 1 pound, and 3 pound) in the smaller arena, so I needed to be there early to sign everyone up that wanted to go. Things went pretty smoothly aside from me accidentally clicking on the delete button instead of the edit button to change someone’s name since I made a typo. I fixed that up and things ran pretty smoothly. The arena was much better than at the last event in San Francisco which was nice.

The actual competition part for my robot wasn’t until later in the day, so I watched a bunch of the bigger robots compete, and it was a lot of fun. Lots of robots got destroyed, and that’s pretty much what I came to see, so I was happy. It came time for me to fight, and I got a bit nervous like I always do in my first fight. I went against a VDD clone (vertical disk.. like a sawblade) and one good weapon to weapon hit knocked him into the air and disabled him. The fight ended pretty fast, and I wanted to get a bit more action for the crowd, but alas, a win is a win.

My second fight in the night was against Steve (from sac state too) and his robot Fusible Link. Steve’s robot is similar to my old one in that it is pretty much indestructable, but with the difference that his is pretty fast too. My drum isn’t quite as powerful as I’d like it to be, so he outdrove me and I wasn’t able to do any real damage to him so he won. This kind of bummed me out, but oh well.

The drive home was fairly amusing because I was a bit tired and over-hyper like I am when I get that tired, so things that weren’t really funny became incredibly funny. For example, there was a sign that said “Cummings Blvd – 4 miles” or something similar, and all I could do was point at it and laugh. Joe laughed too, which made it all the funnier. However, the traffic was horrible for the first little bit. I guess there was some accident, and it caused the trip to take an hour longer than I wanted it to. We stopped at In-n-out on the way, had some food, and got some gas while the traffic got a bit better, and I finally got home around midnight after dropping Joe off.

The next day, the antweight fights were supposed to start at 10. It takes around 2 hours to get to the event in San Francisco, so I left around 8. This left me with getting much less sleep than I wanted to, especially for a weekend. Anyways, I found my other friend Zach’s place with a little bit of help and we went. Joe couldn’t come because he was having his birthday dinner or something with his parents, so Zach came with me instead. I got there a bit before the matches started and set up my computer for the brackets so people could look at them, then went into the pit area and put my stuff away (thanks Andy for letting me use part of your table). When I came back, I ran the fights for a while and then got to go myself. I went against another fast wedge named Kato, and lost as I usually do against him, with any of my robots. I had followed advice from Steve and trimmed down the supports on the front, but this caused the drum to hit the ground and it made it impossible to drive, and Kato to get an easy win.

With two losses, I was out of the tournament, so I proceded to run the brackets and enjoy the rest of the event since I didn’t have any stress of having to compete. There were a bunch of good fights in the bigger weight class, namely where a 220 pound robot got thrown over the I-beam, bounced off of it, then hit the robot that threw it and broke the major piece off of it. It’s kind of scary in a way since the robot that hit the wall is capable of ripping pieces of other robots and throwing the pieces into the wall with enough force to put a hole in the arena walls.. and it actually directly hit. Luckily it didn’t do too much damage to the wall and fights continued. I didn’t take any pictures of the event unfortunately, so I can’t post any.

On Monday I went to school and work and got back later in the day and the guy on my team for the game programming class I’m in at Sac State told me the assignment was due Tuesday. This kind of sucked since I thought it was due on Thursday. I sent a message to the other guy on the team and told him to finish his part up, and I finished up my part that night and went to sleep. The next day it wasn’t completely finished, so I stayed at the lab at school and worked on the project with the other guys. We finally figured out the retarded problem the code had and submitted it just before the time it was due. I’ll let it be known I hate Java. Java is the devil .

I got some really good sleep Tuesday night since everything is pretty much done so I can relax. Wednesday was a normal Wednesday.. went to school and work, then school again and went to Chipotle with Zach and Joe. Mmmmm.. Chipotles is sooo good. When I got home, I watched this weeks episode of Lost. Wow. That show is so good as well. Chipotles and Lost, a really good combination

Today, my dad got back in town, and he got me an embroidered shit with my website on it, which was really cool. He also brought back this CD which is a swing/jazz CD with covers of a bunch of songs and I’m listening to it as I type this up. It’s pretty awesome so far, so I’ll have to finish listening to it in the car tomorrow on the way to my statistics test. Maybe it’ll make me smarter and make me get an A on it.. well, I can hope at least

This won’t affect most of you, but I have disabled trackbacks on my blog. I’d like to give a big EFF YOU to all the spammers that spam my web page trying to get google pagerank (you won’t, since the trackback links don’t link to you), and spam my email with “new trackback received.” Off to delete 200 more now . It’s especially sick since almost all of them are transexual related, with about half of them refering to “tgirls.” Odd.

In other news, I’m still hard at work on Fortress Forever doing a bunch of pushing buttons on my keyboard in a funny language called c++. My WoW guild has been changed to Ataraxia and I have been doing a bit of web work for them as well. I also started going back in to work and hopefully making some $$$. No more robot news, except that I went to Marin Ant Wars with my dad and friend Joe. We had to drive in seperate cars because Joe picked up a trebuchet that he was given at the event by someone who didn’t have enough room for it any more. We took it back to his place and tested it out.. It’s pretty cool . I did pretty well at the event too, coming 5th out of 16.

I created a new fighting robot thanks to my dad and my friend Joe. It’s called Emsee Fry Pants, which is an homage to the robot MC Pee Pants since they’re similar and was part of the reason that the robot ended up as it did. If you don’t know, MC Pee Pants is also a character on the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF). I took it to an event this Saturday in Gilroy and placed second out of sixteen. I lost my second fight against Rebel, then fought through the losers bracket to face the winner of the winners bracket. I beat him, but it turned out to be normal double elimination instead of modified double elimination (what’s usually done since the losers bracket has to fight more fights). So I rematched Lethal Wedgie for the championship and got stuck on his wedge and pushed out of the arena. I’m glad I’ve done so well with Fry Pants at this event though. It’s much more fun to drive than all of the other iterations of FryBot combined since it’s decently fast *and* has a weapon.

A few things I learned at the event which made the robot do better towards the end than the beginning was that I should tighten all of the screws before every round, and make sure that there’s some kind of agent to keep them tight during the fight (like superglue/loctite/etc). Through the event, the endcap screws were getting looser and looser, and by the second rebel fight, one started to come out (it had been making some noise when it spun up like it was off balance or something). Tightening those screws made it sound like normal and do a little better . Also, during the first and second matches the bolts/screws that were used for teeth came loose and started hitting the ground when the drum was spun up. They were still attached because of the lock nuts they were screwed in to, but it was enough “damage” that caused me to lose my second fight (the first against rebel). Between rounds Joe put some quick-drying epoxy that he brought with him on the teeth and then screwed and tightened them in and the teeth coming out ceased to be a problem for the rest of the event. The final thing that I learned was that I could safely turn the drum up to full speed. During the second match with rebel, and the two matches with lethal wedgie at the end of the event, I ran Fry Pants with the weapon motor at full and the trim all the way up. Previous to this, I was only turning it up to around 3/4 speed and trim at the bottom. This helped a lot since it was able to throw Rebel upside down in the second fight, whereas only knock him in the air a little the first. Likewise, it tore up Lethal Wedgie’s lid pretty bad, and it made him cut a new lid out (at least that’s what it looked like from where I was standing).