burntpopcorn

Xtreme Yak Shaving

2025-02-06T17:44:00Z

I've created a new YouTube channel called Xtreme Yak Shaving. This channel is about software engineering and hopefully a light-hearted take on things going on in the technology industry.

The first video is about that terrible 1 Billion Nested For Loops benchmark, and how I created an ahead-of-time compiler to make Javascript 400 times faster than C or Rust.

Don't forget to like and subscribe :)

PDF To Foundry webpage created

2023-07-25T00:53:00Z

PDF To Foundry version 4.1.1 was just released yesterday. This should fix all the remaining FoundryVTT v11 issues.

On top of that, I made a spiffy new website for it, since I shut down the Patreon and all those posts are effectively lost. Check it out.

Pathfinder Encounter Builder Updated

2023-07-16T12:00:00Z

As part of investigating what things that are hosted on this website that people are actually using, I noticed a few people are still using the Pathfinder Encounter Builder that I created years ago. I have recently updated it to use React Hooks as well as gave it a shiny fresh coat of paint.

Five Goblins Encounter Builder

The naming was inspired by "Kobold Fight Club" which is a similar tool for Dungeons and Dragons which colloquially was called "KFC". Since "Five Guys" is another fast food restaurant, I decided to name it "Five Goblins" because goblins and kobolds are similar.

Additionally, I've created a script which will take the data from the PF2E system for FoundryVTT and extract it, so that the data now includes all of the creatures that have been created for the Pathfinder 2E system, instead of just the ones that were around when I created the tool.

Check it out at Five Goblins Encounter Builder

Blog Re-uploaded... again

2023-07-04T12:00:00Z

Earlier this year, my web host (Dreamhost) forced me to upgrade my web server to the latest supported version of PHP (or else!), which was incompatible with the version of Wordpress I was running. Thankfully, they didn't just upgrade the server without telling anyone like what happened with the RoboGames website a few weeks before the event. I updated the version of Wordpress to the latest, but unfortunately the theme I customized wasn't compatible with that, so I just threw a default theme on the website temporarily. I also noticed that the price of website hosting increased quite a bit since I started. And $12 a month for shared PHP hosting seems crazy when they have a VPS for only $10. So I'd like to move to something that's not shared PHP hosting. Also, I've not really been super happy with Wordpress for things like upgrading and security vulnerabilities -- I found several files that had been overwritten with some kind of trojan I didn't bother investigating.

Another instigating factor is not really using Facebook or other Social media anymore. With reddit being awful now due to the API thing, I'm kind of sad that a lot of the things that could have been posted on my blog are now in the Facebook silo or on some private subreddit. So I want to bring my blog back up and running again -- and hopefully better maintained than it was before.

Ultimately, I decided to rewrite my blog using a static site generator, partially due to advocating Infrastructure as Code and it seems like the perfect match. Jeykll seemed the obvious choice, but I don't want to deal with Ruby at all, so I decided to look at Hexo since it seemed exactly what I wanted. I got most of the functionality I needed, but decided it was kind of janky and not well supported for doing anything outside of a blog. I went down a rabbit hole of trying hello-world projects in Next.js and Gatsby since I thought having something React-like would be easy to work on since I'm pretty experienced with React applications. Unfortunately, they were more like statically-dehydrated React applications rather than HTML. What I wanted was more of a static site generator that uses .jsx files as a template engine. I looked at Zola because it was written in Rust, but it seemed not well-supported and didn't look like it supported very much customization but I didn't really look very deep. I ended up migrating most everything in the Blog to Hexo, but before going live with it, I decided it wasn't a great fit and eventually found 11ty.

11ty logo

So I rewrote everything using 11ty starting from the work that was done with migrating it to Hexo. They both fundamentally work similarly by using Markdown files, although 11ty is a bit more open-ended in that content can be of any time and it can be specified in the markdown file, rather than everything being a blog post. Doing image optimization was pretty straightforward rather than needing three separate plugins and a bunch of code. Youtube embeds were already an existing plugin and didn't require a third-party plugin with documentation partially written in Chinese. So far, I've really enjoyed the process even though it's taken many more hours than I thought it would. At some point I plan on moving the site to a static site host like Cloudflare pages which has the incredible price of $0. Although I would kind of prefer paying something so that at least it will be less likely to randomly go away and be forced to move to a $20/mo plan. After moving my email to a email forwarding site like mailwip and removing a few I'll be able to ditch Dreamhost. Although, like the xkcd comic, I haven't really saved any money in the long term given how much time I've spent on this.

While doing the migration, I took the time to go through all the old posts and make sure it was a little better put together. I updated my About Me page to be newer than 10 years old, and re-organized some of the top-level items into a "Projects" page. Some of the images I had stored got moved into a proper image gallery on the site rather than just a Picasa gallery export. And there was a whole bunch of detritus I found in this process that I didn't move over like banners that I used to hyperlink to on 20 year old forums. Some things like old 384kbps .wmv files are going to get uploaded to YouTube and embedded since that's a much better experience for the web.

Given the six-year gap since the last post, I'm going to try to have some kind of recap posts, either using posts from Facebook as source, or creating something from things that never even made it to Facebook. This should be in-between more regular posting :).

Botgeddon

2016-09-21T23:29:22Z

Botgeddon logo

On October 1st, 2016 my dad and I are going to be running the first ever Botgeddon event. It's happening at the Rocklin Mini Maker at Sierra River College. For more information, go to http://botgeddon.com.

Crazy Blind Daters' identities not so hidden.

2013-01-21T01:24:21Z

Last weekend, OkCupid has launched CrazyBlindDate, which is a website that allows you to go on blind dates with people in your area. There have already been a few discussions about it on Hacker News and other websites, so I'm not going to discuss the web site itself because most of those conversations have already been talked about. I checked out the site after getting an invitation in my inbox. On the landing page it presents you a list of people that you could go on a blind date with, which showed their first name, date and time of the date, a location, and a scrambled picture of the person. The reason a date is considered blind is because you don't know anything about your date, or what they look like. Providing minimal details about them is a good way to do this, and having some sort of picture of them to see that they are a real person.

Love is Blind

At first glance, I thought the picture was generated from multiple pictures and selected for parts of the picture that had the person's face on it somehow. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the sub-pictures seemed to be connected somehow, and suspected that it was probably a form of a 15-puzzle and it would be pretty easy to unscramble. After trying it out manually in paint.net, I was able to unscramble one of the pictures within a few minutes. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out how to get it to split the image into 16 layers that I could individually drag around.

Single Scrambled

At this point, since I'm a programmer, I wondered how hard it would be to write a program automatically figure out how to arrange them. I fired up Visual Studio and started a new project. The first step would be to get the images and split them into their 16 separate image parts. This ended up being fairly simple after figuring out how to use the imaging library in WPF since I haven't used it in a while.

var bmpImg = new BitmapImage(new Uri(baseFileName, UriKind.Absolute));
var baseImage = BitmapFactory.ConvertToPbgra32Format(bmpImg);
int pieceHeight = (int)(baseImage.Height / 4);
int pieceWidth = (int)(baseImage.Width / 4);
for (int x = 0; x < 4; x++) {
    for (int y = 0; y < 4; y++) {
        var bmp = BitmapFactory.New(pieceHeight, pieceWidth);
        bmp.Blit(
            new Rect(0, 0, pieceWidth, pieceHeight),
            baseImage,
            new Rect(x * pieceWidth, y * pieceHeight,
                pieceWidth, pieceHeight));
        imagePieces.Add(bmp);
    }
}

The next step was to figure out how related each tile was to the other ones. To do this, I took each pair of images and calculated the average color difference between the pixels that would be adjacent to each other if it was the correct placement. In the code snippet below, a is to the left of b, so using the far right pixels of a and the far left pixels of b. The idea for this is that if you took adjacent pixels in the original image, they should be close in color for the most part, unless they were part of a sharp edge, which shouldn't happen too often.

foreach (var a in Enumerable.Range(0, imagePieces.Count)) {
    foreach (var b in Enumerable.Range(0, imagePieces.Count)) {
        var aImg = imagePieces[a];
        var bImg = imagePieces[b];
        leftRightScores[new Tuple(a, b)] =
            Enumerable.Range(0, pieceHeight)
                .Average(i => ColorDiff(aImg.GetPixel(pieceWidth - 1, i),
                bImg.GetPixel(0, i)));
    }
}

After this was done, the goal is now to place the 16 tiles in the correct arrangement, which would be the one without any errors caused by having a tile next to one that wasn't its correct neighbor. I thought about using brute force to figure the best score from all of the possibilities, but realized that there were 16! ~= 20,900,000,000,000 combinations, which is more than is feasible to do. This means I need to turn to a heuristic. My first try was to be greedy and place a random tile initially in the middle of a larger grid (9x9), and then pick the tile that matches best with that one next to it, and then repeat until all the tiles have been placed. Unfortunately, that didn't work very well. My next idea was to use a recursive search algorithm that was able to prune large subsets of the search tree out, like the common solution to the Eight Queen's Problem we had to do in one of the computer science classes I took at college. Basically, you recursively try to place each piece in the next available slot, and stop trying if there are too many errors. Some simplified code for this is below (note that this is missing some variables that are passed in to make it simpler in this post)

private double RecursiveSolver(IList remaining, int[,] fullMap) {
    var score = Evaluate(fullMap);
    if (score < THRESHOLD !remaining.Any()) return score;
    double alpha = double.MaxValue;
    int[,] best = null;
    foreach (var next in remaining) {
        var mapCopy = (int[,])fullMap.Clone();
        mapCopy[x, y] = next;
        double s = RecursiveSolver(remaining.Where(i => i != next)
            .ToList(), mapCopy);

        if (s < alpha) {
            alpha = s;
            best = mapCopy;
        }
    }
    
    for (int xx=0; xx<4; xx++)
        for (int yy=0; yy<4; yy++)
            fullMap[xx, yy] = best[xx, yy];
    
    return alpha;
}

The threshold variable above is the only thing that needed tweaking. I tried doing it manually by hand, but if it was too large, then it would never finish since there were so many paths to take. If the number was too low, then it would finish really fast but with no solutions. To fix this, I dynamically determine what the threshold should be by starting with a small threshold, and gradually increase it until the algorithm finishes. I got the idea for this from iterative deepening, but it's not quite the same process.

double beta = 0.000001;
do {
    fullMap = new int[4, 4] { ... }; // initialized to -1

    RecursiveSolver(Enumerable.Range(0, 16).ToList(),
        fullMap,
        beta);
    
    beta *= 1.05;
} while (!FullyDone(fullMap));

And finally, with all of this, I have some reconstructed images.

scrambled

As you can see, some of them didn't work right, since the images had a solid colored border, which the algorithm thought were perfect matches. If I were going farther, I would try to fix this, but as you can see, it does a pretty good job of reconstructing the images. Note that I've blurred out their faces to protect their identities. I'm not entirely sure what I think about having done this, but it does make me personally feel less likely to use the service since I know that I can see their pictures, and that kind of defeats the purpose of it being a blind date if I can use their picture to select which ones I am interested in. The source code is available on github for those that are interested.

Battlebots, and projector

2009-04-26T12:25:32Z

I just got back from the BattleBots event this past weekend. It was pretty fun, and I got to see a few good fights, but it was somewhat stressful to have to run the brackets for the 15lb robots. On the plus side, they allowed recording of the 15lb weight class, so I got a few good fights, which I will put on youtube, like this fight of Blender Mini and a vertical spinner (I think it was exterminator). I hadn't planned on going, but Marc Devidts mentioned that BattleBots needed someone to manage the brackets, so I figured I could help out. I must say that given the choice, I would much rather help out at RoboGames, since there isn't a high-wired tv production crew in charge of things, and there are a lot more people that get to enjoy the fights.

Projector Room

When I got back home on Saturday, my dad had come to my house and surprised me by finishing up the decoration for my projector room. It's been a long time coming, but I'm glad it's finally finished, except for a few minor tweaks, like getting speaker stands and covering over the windows so they don't shine through the curtains in the day. Next on my list of things to do is the RoboGames event. I'd like to finish up the new version of Emsee Frypants for it, as well as make some tweaks to our Sentry Gun (like getting a new frame that doesn't weigh 90 pounds).

Smackdown in Sactown V

2009-02-24T02:08:28Z

Over this weekend, Joe and I decided at the last minute to take the carcass of Emsee Frypants and fix it up enough to be able to compete at the Fifth annual Smackdown in Sactown event. We were going to be there anyways since I was running the brackets, and we wanted to bring the Sentry Guns and our 30 pound robot to the event, and figured it'd be fun to take Frypants back for one last spin (no pun intended).

Fry me a River

I Also decided to throw together an all-new robot, which I decided to name Pretty Fry for a White Guy (which didn't actually end up competing). It was a series of bad things that happened Saturday night, and I kept Joe up really late to build it (sorry). Primarily, the problem was my machining abilities, or rather, lack thereof. On top of that, I was having receiver issues, brushless motor controller problems, and brushed motor controller issues. I borrowed a new brushless controller at the event, and decided to run it with only one wheel working. However, as soon as it got in the arena the receiver freaked out and the weapon motor got stuck on and it was out of control in the arena. It ended up losing one of the brushless motor screws, and overheating the motor a little bit (I think it's fine though), so I didn't end up getting to compete with it. The robot wasn't very competitive, anyway.

Frypants & Robot

Joe decided that, since he rebuilt it, he got to drive it. Normally I would disagree, but I figured why not, so he ended up driving it. In an unlucky first round matchup, Frypants ended up facing what I thought was the robot to beat at the event, Rector. After a minute or so, Rector was mostly disabled: the parts of the robot that were supposed to be inside weren't inside anymore. However, he was still able to move a little bit, and Frypants knocked himself into the edge of the pit on the final hit, and was unable to recover. Joe drove valiantly through the remainder of the losers bracket and ended up winning the event. Driving Frypants isn't the most difficult thing to do, I mean, point the dangerous bits at the other robot, and drive towards them; however, there are definitely hazards of driving in the Sacramento State arena with a weaponed robot (namely don't knock yourself into the pit), and he did a good job of driving, so I commend him for that. You can read Joe's report of the event at his web site.

Robot swarms and you...

2008-12-19T12:04:00Z

I was checking my RSS feeds today and came across this article about swarm robots, with this video attached:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJOubyiITsE

It kind of reminds me of an episode of Numb3rs where Charlie uses swarm bots to map out a train to allow rescue of the passengers. I know that it's well-meaning research and all, but I can't help but laugh at the video. Not because it's overtly funny, but rather because of how it all comes together, and because the look on the girl's face. Well, watch it and find out. Now, robot swarm, my name is Chris Hansen, why don't you have a seat.

Catchup post

2008-07-08T00:49:56Z

I know, I'm terrible at keeping up to date on these blog posts. What usually happens is there's something I want to post but don't want to take the time to do it right now and it gets permanently stuck in my queue of stuff to do. Then I want to post about something else but don't want to go out of order. Then it gets to be 9 months later and I post a large backlog of things. This is another one of those posts. After Defcon and Robogames last year, Joe and I were pretty tired of working on projects so we took some time off to do some non-project related things. It's a lot easier to get projects done when you're in college and only have to be at school 15-20 hours a week versus having full time job and obligated for 40+ hours a week. However, it's also nice being able to afford things rather than being stuck with a shoestring budget. I guess it's the old catch-22 of having enough time or enough money, never both. To celebrate my minimum spare time, I decided to remake the Tournament Software I use to run the robot tournaments with WPF (instead of PHP). The initial reasoning behind doing it in PHP was that was what I was most familiar with and that I wanted people in the pits to be able to look at the brackets, etc over wi-fi without having to bug me. However, that aspect never got used and the software was hard to work with if there was any problem whatsoever (entered match wrong, or someone shows up late). I've wanted to learn WPF for a while, and this was a good excuse to have a project to do that with.

Tournament Organizer in WPF

The new program is a lot easier to run, and the data is a lot more manageable. As a first WPF project it turned out pretty good, even though I'm not doing enough stuff the "WPF way" and didn't accomplish all of the goals I had for it, namely the ability to integrate in with video mixing software so that the matches could be recorded and high-quality overlays for who's fighting and who's next. I must say though, WPF is nice, and LINQ is even better. I used the software successfully at the CSUS event "Smackdown in Sactown" in April, and again at Robogames in June after making a few changes to support multiple brackets, among other things. Joe and I were kind of burned out of combat robots, so we didn't enter any. Both Emsee Fry Pants and Big Bloom were out of commission, and we didn't want to rebuild them.

Instead of working on another combat robot, we decided to focus our efforts on this years Defcon robot. We decided that it would be a good fit to have the shooting gallery event from Defcon at Robogames and suggested it to Judge Dave. He agreed and we decided to host the event by making the arenas for it and organizing the matches. Unfortunately, in doing so, we ran out of time to finish the gun before Robogames. Instead of doing a half-assed job with the arena and the gun, we decided that it would be better just to get the arena built properly and relax a little bit on the weeked, so we ended up just hosting the event and not competing in it. Part of the problem with the gun is we got a late start on the design process. We are trying to address all of the problems from last years gun, and the biggest one was inaccurate pan/tilt. To address this, we bought some stepper motors to replace the servos. The second was the cardboard facade, which is being addressed by a frame made of a non-cardboard material. The manufacturing of the frame was delayed a while, and by the time the pan/tilt was fully assembled, there was only a few weeks left until the competition. And then there was still the matter of creating another custom hopper for firing and mounting all of the electronics. All of the delays added up to us not finishing it by Robogames. However, it gave us a big head start instead of doing the same thing before Defcon. And believe me when I say it, this years gun will be really impressive.

However, in the mean time, we decided to do a smaller projects with less pressure. One of which is a autonomous slot car. Basically it is a car that can decide for itself how fast to go around the track based on an accelerometer measuring the cornering g-force. Joe sent of a while ago to have a pcb made for it, and after diagnosing and fixing a problem on it (the transistor was in the wrong place) got it working. This last weekend we took it down to Fast Track Hobby and tested it out to see how well it worked. For the initial prototype, we decided it would only react to changes and see how well it worked. As it turns out, the car needs to be able to memorize the course and be able to react before the course changes (or add a camera and detect it early; the former sounds easier though). It was able to successfully navigate the track without flying off and slowing down on the corners and speeding up on the straightaways, however we needed to turn the max speed down in order to have it not fly off on the first sharp corner after a long straightaway. We took some pictures of the course and the autonomous slot car, as well as some video

On another weekend, we decided to measure how fast Joe's Corvette was by creating a G-Meter. Instead of creating something fancy, we decided to just use the sample development board for the development kit we got for free (plus shipping and handling) for a freescale microcontroller that happened to have an accelerometer on it. I created a quick application in WPF on his laptop that parsed the serial data that it was sending and displayed it in a few hours, and we took it out for a spin on the freeways to see what it could do. I've also been listening to podcasts in my car in my commute. Some of the podcasts I listen to are TWiT, .Net Rocks! and NPR's Science Friday. In fact, one of my comments to .NET rocks was read on the show and I got a free mug from it. It's a nice big mug too, that can hold a lot of tea. For those that are coming to this blog from the show, I've done more robots than just the sentry gun below. Also I've been listening to audio books from Audible (one of TWiT's sponsors). Specifically the one I read (or listened to, rather) was The Time Traveler's Wife. It was a really good listen, and I hear they are making a movie based on it which I'd be curious to see how it turns out. At least Will Smith isn't in it, since he has a good habit of being in movies that bastardize the originals they are based on (iRobot, I am legend, Wild Wild West, and to some degree Hancock) and make them into more mainstream movies but missing out on the point of the originals. One of the problems with listening to audio books though is getting behind in the podcasts. That book was 18 hours worth, and it caused me to get around 2 weeks behind. With taking a day of vacation and 2 sick days off between then and now, it's made catching that much harder. This is the end of my catchup post. I've created a Twitter account that I've updated somewhat more frequently than this blog. You can follow me on Twitter, and maybe some day I'll get popular and catch up to Kevin Rose. I could also win the lottery and become a super-millionaire. Also, I'm hosting some videos from Robogames 2008 on my website. Right now it's mainly high-speed (aka slow motion, like they do on MythBusters), but the compilations on the bottom right are pretty good.

Defconbot video

2007-09-03T23:25:40Z

Over the weekend Joe and I made a video showcasing the sentry gun we made for defcon. See the defcon bot on the right side, or read the digg story

Back from DefCon

2007-08-14T16:49:38Z

We got back from DefCon last weekend. Our Sentry Gun didn't do very well (tied for last place), but the trip was a lot of fun overall. We knew before we went that we weren't going to win, so coming in to it with that mindset made it a lot more enjoyable.

The robot was mostly finished a few weeks before the competition, which was good compared to the 30 pound combat robot where we stayed up until 2 am the week before the competition and barely finished a functional robot in time. This was also nice in that Joe was going to summer school every weekday, so the only time we could work on it together was on the weekends. The biggest part remaining at that point was just optimizing the software, which I could do during the week and then do minor changes to the gun itself during the weekend, like getting a single power supply with appropriate connectors rather than having 3 separate batteries with alligator clips to power the gun.

There were a few hurdles we had to overcome to make the gun function properly. Originally the intent was to have a single fixed camera, and calibrate the gun based on that. However, the servos aren't very accurate when commanded to go to a particular position from another. Going to position 2000 from position 2300 was up to a couple inches off from position 2000 from position 1800. It was possible to change it so that we could manually make it go to the same spot from different approaches (instead of 2300 -> 2000 -> 1800 -> 2000, we did 2300 -> 1992 -> 1800 -> 2008), but after running the gun for a while, what was working a half hour ago to make the gun go to the same position, doesn't work now (now required 2300 -> 1990 -> 1800 -> 2010). To solve this, Joe glued the camera on to the gun itself, and I modified the algorithm to use this. The down side to this approach though is it takes a lot longer to go to a particular position because it has to move, then see where the target is, then move closer, then see how close it is, then finally move again and then see that it's in the right spot.

Another problem we were having was due to the way the gun was created, in that there is a servo that pushes a switch that triggers the air valve. Occasionally the solenoid in the valve triggering would cause a big EM pulse that messed up the USB <-> Serial converter we were using, requiring it to be unplugged and plugged in again. However, this happened when the servo was contacting the switch, so the valve was stuck open until the serial port could be reattached and the servo moved away from the switch. Luckily this didn't happen at the competition though.

The weekend before the competition we created a facade for the gun to make it look like a sentry gun from team fortress (well, Zach and Joe did; I mostly watched). The original plan was to make it out of pieces of plastic, but when we actually started to mount all of the parts it was way too heavy for the servos, so they decided to make it out of cardboard instead. It turned out really nice for being made out of cardboard.

The trip to Vegas was pretty nice. All three of us bought a Nintendo DS and Mario Kart DS before going and we played that on the airplane. I still don't like Southwest though, as the boarding procedure is what my family calls a "Cattle Call" to find seats. We found 4 seats near each other, and someone with a shirt that was something like "I've got the root password to your box" sat down next to Joe and Jamie. I commented that I bet he was going to Defcon too, and it turned out that he was.

We arrived Friday morning and Joe and Jamie went to get the air compressor and pick up the package from the hotel while Zach and I went to a talk on SQL Injection and out-of-band channeling. We got there late so we missed the introduction (luckily I knew what SQL injection was already, but Zach didn't). It was a very neat attack as it allowed data to be leaked out of the SQL server than would be allowed in a normal SQL injection attack, and in places that injection wouldn't even allow data to get out of the system. I'm trying to be vague here as not to confuse, but suffice it to say, I was pretty impressed with it.

After the talk, we met up and assembled the gun and took it to the practice area. It was both nice and awkward carrying the gun down the hotel lobby, as some people were like "woah what's that, that's cool" while we were walking down the halls, and then there was hotel security I was wondering what they were thinking. They didn't say anything though, so we proceeded to the practice area. We did a bit of firing and tuning to get the system to work a little bit better. When we were satisfied that it would knock down the targets, we packed it up and took it back to their hotel room.

Then Zach and I went to another talk about how to use FPGAs to speed up brute-force attacks. I was thinking it would be more of an introduction to them, and how they worked, but the speaker just skipped over that because "a lot" of the audience had seen his previous talk(s) (it was about one in four), so the talk was mostly "Here's me running this code on my laptop.. look how slow it is. Here's me running it on the FPGA.. look how fast it is," and the different things that all used the same kind of encryption (Bluetooth, and a few others). After that we went to a talk on how to hack the ECU on a car. It was a really interesting talk as he talked about the different settings in them, and the history of the different ways to do it: purchase a completely custom one, fake out the sensors, or reflash the current one, with the reflashing being the current method. He also explained what the different kinds of things meant, like the fuel mixtures at different RPMs and loads, and had a few analogies to the Dukes of Hazard. I think Zach liked that one the most, as he could relate to it the most.

After that Zach and I did a bit of walking down the strip (Joe and Jamie were already down the strip somewhere when we went to the talk). On the Defcon web site it said that Las Vegas is hot, and they were right. Even at 9-10 pm it was still hot enough to sweat. It was nothing like Sacramento where it gets cool in the night. We were hungry so the first stop was to get some food. Originally I wanted to go to Dennys, but we decided to see what else was there. We ended up making it to a place called "Strip Burger" which was on the Strip (not because they had strippers; I was slightly disappointed that there weren't). The burger was pretty good, and I got a raspberry something on the waiter's suggestion (it had mint leaves in it, which was slightly disturbing). Then we went and saw one of the shows on the road with a siren ship and a pirate ship - apparently women can cause another ship to sink simply by dancing in the show's alternate reality. It was incredibly cheesy and we didn't have a good view. We continued on and went into Caesar's Palace and saw a bunch of stores that sold things which we couldn't afford, and one of the talking statue shows. The animatronics were pretty neat. After that, we decided we would each get one of the "Yard Long Margaritas" or something to that effect (I think it was 40+ oz), and proceeded to drink most of them before getting back to the hotel.

On Saturday we went to the contest area again and set up our gun for the contest itself. In our first round we went against the winners from last year. Our gun had only shot down one target before they got to their last target, but their gun jammed and we managed to shoot down 2 more before they got their gun un-jammed and finished off the last target. Our second round we went up against a two-gun team that didn't seem able to hit targets by aiming at them, so it just sprayed bullets everywhere, and they managed to knock down more targets than us, so they won, even though we were 100% accurate. There was supposed to be black targets to discourage this, but there weren't any so they took advantage of that and beat us because of that.

Zach and I went to a few more conferences on Saturday. One was about how the radio signal used to tell GPS devices of road conditions works, and how to broadcast it. It was a really nice talk because the presenter was a good speaker and pretty funny to listen to. One of the things he mentioned was how it's possible to send fake alerts to a particular car that says there's a road is closed because of an air raid, or maybe bull fight instead (along with a bunch of other reasons). The next talk we went to was about identification devices (like smart card readers, fingerprint scanners, etc) to get in to buildings, and how easy it was to hack them (essentially unscrewing the plastic cover and installing a "tap" on it by cutting a few wires). He gave a nice demonstration of the device he made and how it worked. This speaker was a very good presenter as well and very funny.

On Saturday night we went and saw Penn & Teller at the Rio. We took a taxi from the Riviera to the Rio (which was my first time taking a taxi actually) and made it there about an hour ahead of time. Originally we were going to take the bus, but we didn't realize how long it would take. We had pretty good seats: close to the front row of the balcony, right in the middle. The show was as amazing as I could have hoped for; with the exception of one or two parts (I'm not really interested in juggling or fire-breathing).

On Sunday, we didn't see any more talks and instead went to Denny's for brunch, then took the air compressor back and then headed off to the airport. I originally wanted to have a later flight because I wanted to stay a little longer, but I didn't really feel like staying there by myself, so I went with them to the airport and just played my DS while I waited for my flight. It would've cost like $200 to move my flight up, so I decided it wasn't worth it and just waited a little longer.

Overall the event was a lot of fun, and we're definitely going to do it next year if we can. For our next gun we're going to try to build it with a more reliable control system (stepper motors most likely) and probably a gun that doesn't need to be calibrated, but rather just works, so probably something powered solely with air to fire and load the next pellet. I have a few ideas on how that's going to work. Also Joe is looking in to another camera, even though the one we have worked pretty well. I think the main upgrade would be a cleaner image and a controllable zoom so that we're not wasting 75% of the camera area on the surroundings of the arena.

Back from Robogames

2007-06-30T02:05:30Z

We made it back from RoboGames. We lost both fights with Big Bloom. The first fight was against Billy Bob, a vertical drum spinner, which took a bunch of big chunks out of our frame, however it seemed to hold up pretty well since it's half-inch thick, and the chunks were only a sixth of an inch thick at the deepest place. He cracked the polycarbonate piece on the top though after a big hit. We ended up losing that fight because the screws that hold the motors in came loose and the gears didn't mesh any more. In our second fight we fought a wedge. We didn't finish the melty brain on the final version, so it was a sit and spin. He charged at us and we made contact and threw each other around the arena a little bit, but we had some problems with using bluetooth to control it. It came disconnected after going out of range, or taking a big hit and bumping the power switch on the receiver. However, the bluetooth stack on the PC causes the program to freeze when this happens and you try to disconnect the serial port. I think that it's trying to close a port that it already closed, so it blocks infinitely. I restarted the program really quick, but we got counted out and right after that happened we gained control of it and it started moving again. Oh well. For the next version, we're going to use a standard Spektrum transmitter/receiver for r/c, and have the bluetooth only for debugging. The next project that we're working on is going to be the DefCon Bot. I've put a description of it up. It's not quite finished yet, but I should finish it pretty soon (the description that is). We finished getting the hopper mechanism working yesterday, so as soon as we receive the pan/tilt servos, we can start testing it out. I have been working on getting the algorithm to determine what order to shoot the targets down in. This is what's known as the Traveling Salesman Problem in computer Science, and is intractable for finding the most optimal solution (essentially unfeasable to do the calculations). However, I have created a heuristic for this and made a demo program that generates random points and gets a relatively optimal solution and "shoots" down the targets in order. At work, I've got a project that involves a GPS antenna on my desk. However, there's no real place to mount it, so I stuck the mounting pole in the corner of my cubicle. However, the side effect of this is that everybody that walks by asks me what it is. The most common thought is that it's a sprinkler.

Updated video

2007-05-02T03:06:25Z

Another little video after we put it the components on a 'frame' and got some decent motors for it. There's no mixing on the remote (so up-down controls one motor, left-right controls the other), so it's really hard to drive. This is also filmed on Joe's awesome camera he got for his graduation present, so it's a lot higher quality than the other videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-XJKWopqFw

Overdue Update

2007-04-30T20:33:22Z

It's been a long time since my last update, and I figure I should post something. Hopefully updates will be more regular. I've had a few things I wanted to post on my blog, but I didn't want to do it without posting a more comprehensive update, and didn't really want to post a comprehensive update, so nothing got done. A deadlock so to speak. Anyways, I'll start off with what's happened to me since the last update.

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:

Defcon bot picture

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjN8gnk0tL4

Control Prototype v2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY5oLoA00sU

Motion Prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVSVHaN4iuE

My Car

2007-04-30T17:14:13Z

Pictures of the car I got in June 2002:

1998 Mustang

First Place, Oh ya!

2006-01-14T23:36:49Z

Emsee Frypants and Marin Ant Wars First Place Trophy

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.

Rainbow

Destroyed parts of Rick James

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.

Joe's Robot Ground Clearance

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.

Programming up a storm

2005-12-02T18:35:07Z

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.

RFL Nationals

2005-11-17T16:05:26Z

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 :D

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 :)

Trackbacks have been disabled.

2005-07-27T14:29:04Z

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.

Emsee Fry Pants

2005-06-19T17:01:06Z

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.

Emsee Fry Pants "Attacking" FryBot

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).

An update of sorts.

2005-05-30T18:27:41Z

Dear Life,

I am currently playing World of Warcraft. Talk to you in a few years.

Sincerely, Kevin

MmmMmmmmm..

2004-11-12T18:20:54Z

Half Baked is the best ice cream ever. That is all.

Continuing on?

2004-11-04T10:50:01Z

In other news, I was parking my car Tuesday (ya ya, I know it's Thursday but I forgot about it) in the parking garage. Normally I go straight to the roof because it's easier to park there and I need the excercise anyways. It was raining that day though, so I thought I should park on one of the lower levels that wasn't the roof so I wouldn't get rained on. And when I say wouldn't get rained on I mean only get rained on for the 5% of the trek out of the parking garage. However, there were none. So I ended up parking on the roof anyways.

On the fifth floor however (roof minus one) I heard the nostalgic sounds of the CSUS drum line practicing in the garage. I can hear the bass drums booming (what I used to play), the snares clacking, the metronome beeping while they play their music. There is also an encore when they finish from the car alarms. Silly car owners who set their car alarms too sensitively. I mean, why should a car alarm go off when it feels a large percussive force? Sheesh.

Bush wins. Bleh :(

2004-11-03T06:16:24Z

I'm dissapointed that Bush won the election yesterday. I am not scared or worried or anything else that other people may say. We already have suffered through four years of his terrible administration. He lies to us. He thinks he's better than us. I'm disappointed that people think that Bush is "saving" our country for terror. Someone said to me, "how could anyone vote for Kerry after 9/11?" How could anyone vote for Bush after what Bush has done after 9/11 would be my response, but I wasn't witty enough to come up with that before he walked out of the room. I'm dissapointed that a record number of people turned out to vote for Bush because of this. I'm dissapointed that we didn't have anyone good to vote for as well. I'm dissappointed that Diebold machines were allowed to tabulate votes this election; without paper trails, with secret keypresses that allow people to manipulate the voting records, without any sort of audit system. I had a nice quote to post, but it seems I've already said it.

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.

Some News Footage

2004-10-29T19:36:57Z

I just uploaded coverage of the CSUS event on KOVR 13 that I just copied from my PVR today. It was recorded on the day of the event, but I was lazy. So sue me :).

Sadly, I'm not in any of it, but that's ok, you can kind of see my tournament bracket thingy in its broken state before the break if you look carefully :)

AI Update

2004-10-28T14:46:49Z

I got back from my AI class yesterday and found out that my program tied for second place along with 3 other programs (including the teacher's, so I don't know if that counts). Li'l Brudder made it on his own! (that was the name of my program, and watch this cartoon if you don't understand the reference). Speaking of which, Joe and I have been brainstorming on names for the Micromouse that we are working on, and that may be one of the candidates now :). Either that or Mouse star runner to be trendy :).

Also I went down to DMV got my personalized license plates today before going to work, so now my car is no longer 4xxxxxx and instead something cool :)

Misc stuff

2004-10-23T09:15:20Z

Some pictures I took of nationals I forgot to post

Pictures of Sac State event

Also I got a thing in the mail from the DMV to get the new license plate I ordered a while back, so I'll have a personalized plate now :)

Life Sucks :( :(

2004-10-22T11:05:50Z

Looks like one of my hard drives crashed today. I turned my computer on this morning and went in and took a shower before going to school, and when I got back it was doing scandisk and got stuck and my hard disk was making crashing sounds (motor trying to spin up then hitting something). It was the one with about half of my applications on it (some programs refuse to install anywhere but in c:program files), all of the source code I've ever written, including poker saver, fryblast, all the archives of imagic/igaming/mtgonline/etc and stuff from school, my trillian with all of the contacts renamed, logs from irc channels I've been in for 5+ years, all the games I had installed, including the "source" of all the fry_ maps, and my entire mp3 collection. Yes, I know that was a run-on sentence and it's just used to emphasise my anguish. Luckily I just turned in my pawn stop program tuesday or else I would've had to do it again. Also that I happened to use SVN for Poker Saver and had the repository on another hard drive, so I'll only have lost the stuff I've done between now and the last version. Also that my picture collection was on the c: drive too, because those are harder to replace. The source code I would've mainly used for reference and most of that knowledge is in my head now, and most of the other stuff is replacable except for the maps, although I don't think anything was going to happen to them any time soon. Most of the other stuff can be reinstalled. The thing that sucks is I just got a hard drive and was going to swap this drive out for it. If I hadn't been so lazy I would still have all my files. Murphy's law would've made the other drive fail though, so I guess it wasn't my fault.

Thankfully the books I ordered myself for my birthday from Amazon got here yesterday, so I'll have something to do while my new drive formats and all my programs get installed.

Another Update

2004-10-20T16:49:21Z

I got to looking at my notes file for stuff to put in my blog from the last entry and I noticed that a) there's a lot of stuff there, and b) it's been almost 2 months since I've made a serious blog post. I suppose now is a good time as any to do.

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 the brackets of the entire tournament, along with pictures~~ (editor's note: brackets have been lost).

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.

Marin Ant Wars

2004-09-18T14:12:40Z

I went to the Marin Ant Wars today held by Andy Sauro at his beautiful house and ended up going 0-2 and not qualifying for nationals. Oh well. I still won the rumble and got Andy's second place prize money since he donated it to the rumble. You can see pictures I took of the event if you want. I stopped taking pictures after a few fights because my batteries died and there were two video recorders going and someone else taking pictures on her digital camera. Hopefully these should become available soon. I still need to post what I was going to post about before, but I haven't got around to that yet.

FryDrumBot Reloaded

2004-08-05T12:02:31Z

I've posted some more pictures of FryDrumBot. I got the polycarbonate frame for it so I figured it was appropriate to post some early pictures :).

Update: Some more pictures added to the archive linked above. Joe came over today and helped me put it together, so it's all assembled except for attaching the gear/endcaps to the drum, and the wheel to the motor. Currently it's at 15.25oz on Joe's scale without drum bars or screws.

FryDrumBot update

2004-08-02T14:48:52Z

My friend Joe ~~who is super leet~~ from the CSUS Combat Robotics team (and we went to high school together) came over and modeled an inside frame for frydrumbot since the original way I designed was going to work. Overall the total weight of the inside frame in polycarbonate was less than 2oz which is good because I only had 2.5oz to work with. Hopefully it will still be stable though. Here are some renderings for your amusement.

Inside Frame

Complete frame/drum (no wheels or stabilizer)

I'm going to have it laser cut by a company called Pololu and it should be here by next week so I'll have a week to work on it at least.

FryDrumBot 1.0

2004-07-23T10:25:46Z

Just showing a picture of the work done so far on my new camera.. For those of you interested. Basically the alluminum tube has been machined down using the ME machine shop at Sac State -- thanks for letting me use it. Also I used my dad's drill press to make the inner end cap (the clear plastic/acrilic) with some device I don't know what it's called (a drill bit in the middle with an arm and a blade sticking on the other side. In the shape of an h). I might need to make a new one because this one slipped when I cut the second one and there is like two holes in it. The first one is better. I still need to sand the outside down and perhaps use some glue/epoxy/adhesive to attach the inner endcap to the bearing. The outer endcap is fine because it will be sandwiched in by the bearing. Basically all that's needed is to mount the inner stuff and add some teeth to it. I'm thinking about making some bars/spikes and welding them to the drum in a spiral pattern to save on weight instead of using a pair of long bars across the length of it. It shouldn't really need to spin as fast as some of the other drums though because it will have a higher KE simply by being as big as it is, so I don't think welding the teeth on should be any problem. Of course, actually making the teeth, and actually welding them on will be a bigger problem, as I don't know how to do either :).

Drumbot Shell

If you noticed I said I got a new camera today. I did. It's a digital camera made my Minolta, the Dimage S414. I saw it advertised on slickdeals.net along with a printer for $220 total after rebates. I didn't really need a printer, even for $20 more so I just got the camera and a 256mb CF disk and some batteries to get over $250 for the $50 coupon amazon was offering. I like it so far. It's nice and big and sturdy unlike the other tiny cameras that seem like they'll break in your hands. It's not too big or heavy though, it fits nicely in your hands (well mine at least). Although I like heavier things, perhaps that's why I like the Logitech MX700 because of its weight. Anyways, without further ado, here's the picture:

Also, I finally solved the google problem (see the post below). I had a filter running on the primes because I thought it would be much deeper into the depth of the digits of e, but it wasn't. I removed the filter and found the right answer right away :). The second problem was much harder, but I read a spoiler for it (it just beckoned me too much since I was already on the page), so I won't claim to have solved it. I was on the right track though.

Grr.. evil Google

2004-07-12T19:56:24Z

I saw this neat puzzle on google's blog. I mistakenly read the problem as the first 10 consecutive digits of e which are prime, which the answer is of course 1838606261 after a quickie c# program to determine that (I thought the number would be much deeper honestly). Grr.. I'll have to go into work on the harder problem now to figure it out. Thanks google for keeping me up so late working on interesting things! :)

Of course, I love google. Don't let the title of this entry fool you. I'd work there in a heartbeat if I lived in the Bay Area, I was finished with College, and they would hire me. Hopefully in another few years that will be a possibility.

Spammers

2004-07-09T12:21:53Z

It looks like spammers have been using spam bots and putting their web page in my referer thing.. That has to go so I'm going to remove it. Sorry to all the folks that liked it (I liked it mainly). 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.

Pokersaver Alpha 01 released

2004-07-03T14:18:18Z

I've decided to release version alpha 01 of poker saver. Right now all it can do is import the complete game information about Party Poker games only and display the game information back, with filters for game types, money type, and limits. Not much yet, but I can see it coming together. If anyone wants to, then you can download Poker Saver alpha 01. Simply extract the zip file to a new directory and run pokersaver.exe. It should be self-explanitory. Post any obvious bugs in the comments if you want to. I know about parsing bugs with Omaha and Real money no-limit games, so don't bother with those :)

For those of you coming to my page about FryDrumBot 1.0, I haven't started building it yet. I've got some plastic for the endcaps and the stabalizer (that's not in the picture), and all of the electronics for it, but not the drum yet. I plan to get that on Tuesday or so and finish building the entire thing by next Friday. I'll take pictures this time.

Another Screenshot

2004-06-22T19:38:32Z

I've been working on poker saver throughout the day. Just wanted to post another screenshot.

~~screenshot no longer available~~

As you can see, I've got the money and icon columns working to display the proper kind of information for their column. There is still a bit of work to do on this screen though. Currently the data is still from the SQLite database imported from the php script. I should be working on the C# importer tomorrow if I get the chance.

Pokersaver/favicon

2004-06-20T17:45:33Z

It's about time for me to add a favicon for this site. I lost the original .psd of the burntpopcorn logo that a friend made for me (thanks Scopes), and he lost it too, so I decided I would attempt remaking the image in the copy of Fireworks that I won. I couldn't figure out what font he used though, so I scrapped the entire thing and decided to just use the .gif and clean it up a little bit and resize it. It turned out ok so I'm not complaining.

After that, I decided to throw up a quick page and logo for Poker Saver. Also, I've added ~~a quick screenshot of pokersaver~~ for you to gawk at. Well, not much to look at yet, but it's going to own. What you see is loading the SQLite database using the ADO.NET provider for SQLite, imported using the PHP scripts I wrote for the original website version. I'm still not sure if I'm going to release it as open-source or not though. If I do, it would be under a BSD or Apache-style license, or maybe even a source-viewable license.

Poker odds calculator up

2004-06-16T15:10:02Z

I've put up a small utitlity just now to calculate odds and the required pot size for calling bets. You can go to it by visiting the link to it on the right. I've also added a link (unworking) to the site I've just registered, pokersaver.com. I plan to use it to write a c# program similar to Poker Tracker but more extensive than it, including tracking for games other than hold-em. Originally it started as writing a web-based application with a game playback feature, but after creating the database for it and everything I decided that there's too much data being sent to make it feasable for a web application. Mainly it's because the software is $70, and I think I can write something better than it. Only time will tell.

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.

Videos up

2004-05-28T05:19:24Z

Thanks to Ross Hironaka, I now have some videos of the Gilroy Bot Gauntlet. Click the Robot Videos link on the right side to go there. If anyone else has any other videos from the event, let me know and I can put them up on my web site, or link them from here.

Gilroy bot gauntlet

2004-05-27T16:38:26Z

I recently got back from the Gilroy Bot Gauntlet (held last Saturday) and did surprisingly well. I went 5-2 much to my delight, even though I thought I would quickly go 0-2 and then sent packing like I did at Robolympics. Fortunately this bot fixed much of the problems with my first one, even though I couldn't get the weapon finished on time and underweight. Instead of having the hammer, I found an insanely powerful magnet at HSC Electronics (a local surplus electronic store in Sacramento). I think it's Neogeominium or something like that. The magnet went inside the robot and had enough force to keep the robot to the ground, but not so much that I couldn't move. Unfortunately it didn't quite keep me on the ground and prevent me from getting flipped against, but that's besides the point. I also put on my carbon fiber flaps again and tested them out some, except they would simply lift my entire bot up so I drilled a couple holes and put some spacers to keep them from doing that. The flaps went on the front and the back so it was pretty effective at pushing around. This thing also has a lot more power than frybot 1.0 because it has 4 copal 30:1 motors instead of the dual tamiya gearbox I had before, and a lot more traction because there is no way for any weight to be anywhere besides the wheels. Finally it seems the interference problems were fixed by having a larger area to wrap up the antenna in.

Before the antweight event started, Steve (from the CSUS robotics team) with his robot Fusable Link sparred with my robot and mine seemed to fare pretty well. The magnet held me down and he couldn't really get good purchase on me. His was a good deal faster than mine and had a slight advantage over mine, but I was getting the hang of driving the robot against another one, so I felt good for if we fought again. Anyways, on to the main event.

First up, I went against Tenscilla Penbox (penbot?) of Team Thinktank, which has a very deadly horizontal sawblade on the front. Roy counted us off and let us go at it. I charged over to him hoping to get him before his blade spins up, but he gets a good hit on me and I go on top of the blade a little and it sends sparks all over the arena. I back off and hit him again, but his blade is still spinning pretty fast. One more hit and we both get bumped around some more. He's now towards the center of the arena more and I drive past him and back into him and push him across the arena and try to slow his blade by having it cut into the wall. I finally edge him into it and a lot of sparks fly and then I hear him tap out. Then I hear someone say something about the blade shattering. Wow, it looks like I don't have that bad of a robot after all.

My robot got pretty torn up by the blade of Tenscilla Penbox, losing pieces of my bottom and terring my wheel up massively. I didn't think to buy extra tires at Airbourne Hobby since I didn't think I'd win matches or take damage on my wheels like that. I go searching around for another wheel and William Sauro (?) of Team Fatcats gave me one from his big box of stuff. Thanks a lot for that since it let me continue fighting. It wasn't the exact same wheel, but it worked good. I had to delay the fight for a few rounds unfortunately though to get everything put back together.

My luck changed as I went against Corrosive, a VDD clone. I try a similar approach against this robot as against the penbox to hit early and often, but his sawblade is just too powerful and ends up knocking my flap off, doing a bit of damage to my duct tape, and eventually flipping me over. Oh well, even winning one fight made me happy so if I lose my next fight too I'll still have done better than I expected. He did a bit of damage to my robot so I had to replace all the duct tape and remove the burntpopcorn logos I had on the flaps since they were pretty mangled from both blades I've faced so far. See the video of frybot 2.0 vs Corrosive

After this, I go against roboslayer, a tiny wedge robot. I simply outpower him with 4 wheels, the magnet and size. I push him against the arena a bit, then finally go for the kill and push him out of the arena. After the fight, the driver of the robot congratulates me (thanks!) and asks who I would rather fight against in my next fight, shazbot or a vertical spinner (I don't remember which, sorry). I say shazbot since I think it'd be easier on my robot since I think I have a lot more power and size on him, even though shazbot could potentially flip me over with his bulldozer thing.

As luck would have it, the vertical spinner flips himself out of the arena and I end up facing Shazbot. I start off and end up pushing him against the wall and after a couple repeated hits I get under him and drive him out of the arena. The driver congratulates me and then the driver of roboslayer says I was right about shazbot being easier for my robot to beat. Shazbot is still a good robot, but I think that it has a weakness against robots like mine, although it did get kind of messed up by the vertical spinner and torched by the flames of mean burrito.

I look at the brackets for future fights and notice that I'll have to win 5 more fights to win the event. I look and see that I might make it to the end. For the first time I'm optimistic about winning, if only I can beat my next opponent, the mean burrito. I've always feared this robot because of the flames, but I realize after seeing his fights that my robot will probably not have many problems facing him this time since my insides are pretty well protected, and the flame can't really hurt my carbon fibre or foam wheels. Roy counts down and then announces us to start fighting and we go at each other. He gets under my flap, but not my robot and turns on his massive flames. I still have a little bit of purchase so I back off and run into him again. Eventually he ends up chasing me and I back into the side of him and push him out of the arena to my surprise. I may actually win this thing!

My next opponent is Steve with Fusable Link. I know that he has speed on me but I think I can drive him around by getting under his sides. I turn my robot to have the sides face his wedge and get out of the way for him to get past me and then back into his side and push him around. He pushes me around, then I push him around.. and out of the arena. Both of us are shocked and I look at the brackets to see what I would need to do to win. I would need to win against my next opponent, Kato (a wedge), then against the loser of Micro Nightmare and Hazardous Waste, and then against the winner of the match twice to win.

So I go against Kato, which is a Jimmy Crack Corn clone. They look almost identical, and the commentator had problems commentating the match when Pneu-Jimmy faced Kato. Kato ended up winning because Pneu-Jimmy's flipper didn't work, but the resemblance is very striking. We start and we face off in the center. He gets under my flap, but my body is still able to push him around a little bit. This repeats a few times and he gets under my sides and then I start noticing that my robot is getting slower and slower.. Oops, I guess I needed to charge the batteries up more before the fight. He ends up winning on the judges decision. I think I might've had a better chance if I had've recharged my batteries. Oh well, next time I'll remember to do it between every fight if I can. If I had've won that fight, I would've placed at least third and qualified for nationals with my robot. I don't know if I would've been able to make it to nationals though, especially if it's outside of California.

Overall the event was great, even though it was quite a long drive to Gilroy from Sacramento. It was ran smoothly and very enjoyable. The venue was large enough to accomodate everything (unlike the small area for ants at Robolympics) and there was plenty of pit space for everyone. Everyone there was great sports so it was fun even though I didn't win. Congratulations to Jim Smentowski (sp?) for sweeping both ants and beetles on his birthday. A few videos of the event will be up soon, as soon as they are finished being transfered.

Robolympics

2004-05-01T17:24:18Z

It's been a while, but I thought I'd post that my robot did very poorly at robolympics, going 0-2. There are no videos yet, but I can recap it. First I went against Senior PITA and getting a bit of damage against his drum, then going up against Punked out Puppy which did a lot of damage to the foam, bending an axle, and doing a bit of damage to one of the wheels. The bot is disassembled now, and I'm going to reuse the parts in my next robot, Silly Hats Only, which is going to use a pneumatically powered hammer as a weapon. I've got the pneumatic actuator, and am waiting for my dad to make me another carbon fibre frame. This time I'm going to go with 4 COPAL 30:1 motors and small wheels, and hopefully a magnet if the weight allows. The electronics/pneumatics add up to 7 ounces, so I hope I can get the frame (the previous one weighed 3 ounces total), 4 small wheels, a spring to reset the actuator, and an axe to fit in under 9 ounces. I'll be taking it to Gilroy next month for the Gilroy Bot Gauntlet, so wish me luck to win and get it under the weight limit :)

I've also recently installed Gentoo Linux on my desktop for an entire week. I wish I could've stayed longer, as I love the OS, but there really are no programs in the league of Trillian Pro (yes, I paid for it) or HydraIRC. I tried to get WINE working, but I was unsuccessful. Even so, I'd prefer native apps over "emulated" ones (yes, I know that WINE is not an emulator). I ended up switching back to windows. Hopefully in another year I'll try it again and staying for good.

results from sacbots

2004-02-22T16:34:34Z

I went 2-2. Here are the videos (no sound, need divx):

Win vs. Magical Hobo
Loss vs. Pushy Little Bugger
Win vs. Cardboard Box
Loss vs. Overdrive

Robot Competition

2004-02-22T02:24:11Z

With the help of my dad, I've built an antweight robot for robot combat like in battlebots or robot wars if you've ever seen either of those. It's built using foamcore/foamboard/posterboard and is covered with a layer of carbon fibre. Here are pictures of the finished robot:

Frame curing in the oven

Assembling the foam-core pieces

Armor assembly and drive assembly

Finished build

fry_laser2k3 beta 2 released

2003-09-21T12:13:35Z

I just made a few changes to fry_laser2k3 and compiled it for another beta. The changes include:

Brightened up lower lobby
Remove battlements entrance

You can download it on the maps page if you're interested. Also, I'm going to hold a playtest on it to see if it's more balanced. Hopefully it is.

Campus is big

2003-09-04T13:51:06Z

Traffic today went much smoother, but parking was only slightly worse since I had to park in the overflow lot instead of the non-overflow lot. I like that they have had traffic people waving people through stop signs since that speeds it up a lot. Too bad they stopped right as I walked to the crosswalk to get to the parking lot where my car was parked to leave. Campus is huge though. I forgot how large it actually was and my legs have started getting sore from walking all across campus going to the extra classes and finding information about other things. Oh well, I have the weekend to rest them :)

first day of school

2003-09-03T14:09:09Z

The first day of school has come and gone. So has the second. Parking was much more bearable than I thought it would be, as the parking lot hadn't filled up by the time I arrived there. Traffic was much worse though. On the first day it took over an hour and a half to get to the parking lot, whereas normally it takes 30-35 minutes. On the second day it still took a little over an hour, but it was caused by a major slowdown nowhere school, and an accident on the bridge going across the American River.

My schedule is kind of messed up right now though. 3 of similar Math classes (I can only take one of the three) are offered this semester. Ideally, I would have my first choice which would be adjacent to the other classes I'm taking, but this class is full and there's no chance of me getting in. On the first day to register I couldn't even get in, so I opted to go for the second choice at the time which is a teacher I don't really want to be in the class with because I don't really like the teaching style of the professor. The third choice is a class that conflicts with a class I signed up for and is only offered in the Fall. I think I'm going to have to take it next fall with the way things are going unfortunately. I'm also trying to get into a History class, but they're all full and I lost the lotteries to get into them, so I'll have to check back in a week. Otherwise I'll have 12 units and no safety net to drop a class that I don't like (and I might not like two of my classes because of the public speaking in them). Oh well, hopefully the rest of the semester goes well. It'll be the first one with nothing on Friday, so I'm happy about that.

email sucks

2003-08-27T10:01:06Z

With the recent SoBig.F worm/virus outbreak, my email started getting flooded with silly emails asking me to look at an attachment. Since I know better, I didn't bother opening them. However, it's still mildly frustrating to have to be deleting spam again since using SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin went to the rescue though, since by adding a high score to MICROSOFT_EXECUTABLE, I haven't gotten any more. Too bad virus detectors don't know that the SoBig worm doesn't send a valid From: address. Since the outbreak I've gotten numerous emails telling me I've been sending emails out (hint: I haven't). Since I can't say it any better, I think just reading this blog entry explains it just as well. Virus detectors need to learn how emails work. On a related note, yahoo needs to send out the bounce warnings without malformed email headers because they are crashing a php script I wrote that checks an email box. I guess I need to submit a bug to PHP now.

php coding contest

2003-08-27T09:54:05Z

I participated in a PHP coding contest a week or so ago and the results have been released. I got 6th place, so I'm happy :). In other news I'm developing code for the Spades Contest on codewalkers.com. If anyone wants to write one and test their scripts against mine, feel free to post a comment and I'll look at it.

vacation

2003-08-21T18:22:19Z

Me and my mom took a vacation for a few weeks at my dad's apartment in Utah. Boy am I glad I brought my laptop since there's not much to do there. Comcast was supposed to have cable modem service available before I got there, but it still isn't available (and I've been home for 3 weeks). Good thing too because my dad bought a house there so he wouldn't be throwing away money to the appartment complex.

While I was there I watched the first and second seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD. It's actually pretty interesting to watch the first seasons because I've never watched them in their entirety before and makes the later seasons make more sense. Seeing them out of order on rerun tv doesn't help much either since the series was almost over before I understood most of what was happening. Also while we were there, we went to a few resturaunts; one of which was The Cracker Barrel. That place has the best iced tea I've ever had. Seriously.

I got to do some coding too. I implemented a Genetic Algorithm to determine the best way to play Blackjack (whether to hit/stand against cards with what you have), aka the "Basic Strategy." Since I'm turning 21 in October (buy me something on my wishlist if you want to celebrate my birthday!), I've been reading up a little bit on gambling in general. I saw some of the tables there and decided to implement something. I'm sure that the statistical methods are more accurate, but I wanted to see how well GA's could do.

That about sums up my trip. It was fun, but not long enough. Nothing ever is (except work).

new site layout, blog system

2003-08-16T18:31:02Z

Well, as you might have noticed, I changed the layout of the site a little bit. It still remains mostly the same, but it's not nearly as radical as some of the other layouts I've done. Hopefully I can have a better post up tomorrow since I have a bunch I can write about (it has been a while since I've updated mainly since it's a pain to open up text files and edit them, then upload them. After creating dynamic sites for so long, you'd think I would've written one for this already. I figured it was easier to use something that was already written though, so I got bblog (see link at the bottom of the page) and plan to modify it to suit my needs. Currently the non-news stuff is hacked together pretty bad to use the older engine for the pseudo-dynamic pages, mainly the table macros so I wouldn't have to type all that. That, and it made the pages a lot cleaner to write and look at.

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

fry_laser2k3 in beta

2003-07-06T17:00:00Z

The web page was down recently, and I apologize for this to those that tried to go to it. The site should be back and everything should be up and running as it was before. If it wasn't, let me know.

I finished the first beta of fry_laser2k3, which you can download here. I don't want to repeat myself, so I'll just quote the maps page:

When I made fry_laser, many people (well, a few at least) said I should make a 9on9 version of the map. This is that attempt. It has all the features that fry_laser does, including the fall-through laser and the secondary activated capture point. It also has spawn tubes like in the map prodigal. The layout is fairly simple so it should be easy to learn.

I had a playtest on the map last week, and it had almost entirely positive reviews from people playing it, and I'll take that as a sign this map is pretty good, even though the playtest audience tends to be receptive of new maps. The only real problem with it in the current state is the ease of getting into the flag room going through the air lift.

new map more done

2003-06-08T17:00:00Z

fry_laser2k3 is coming along quite nicely, and I think I will leave it as that name and have the same features that it does (two capture points, fall-through laser with +1 if you have the flag). It's probably still going to be a bit defensive though. I also had a playtest on fry_trap that Virus helped put on (getting a server and getting people to come). Other than the "I'm confused" people because the map is mirrored instead of rotated (and it is kind of confusing), and a few people leaving before it was over, it went good. I don't think that this map will be popular because it's too long to get to the other base, and it's easy to defend. It was really designed to be a "fun map" anyways so I'll probably fix up the small bugs and release it as-is.

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.

Another update

2003-06-01T17:00:00Z

I feel bad waiting so long to update this page, but I'm lazy. So sue me. It's not like anyone reads this anyways.

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.

Good read

2003-05-04T17:00:00Z

Note: this was written on May 5th, but not uploaded until June 2nd
While browsing the infamous "Information Superhighway," I thought about visiting wilwheaton.net (one l, yes I know), so I did. Wil Wheaton is the guy that played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation if you didn't know. Anyways, I remember seeing him on an episode of The Screen Savers, and he was a really good host. So I've tried to visit his site more often since he seems pretty interesting. I've thought about sending him a fan mail, but I don't want to have him have to bother with yet another piece of it. Perhaps I should since I've started using Outlook Express instead of Eudora so that I could try out the encryption stuff, and he requests that you send signed mail so that it won't automagically get put in the spam bin along with the requests to give you larger and firmer breasts. I know I want some of those!

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.

sparky util mirc plugin

2003-04-22T17:00:00Z

I've finally released the sparky <--> mirc thing I announced a couple weeks ago. I've decided to implement it using the new addon/plugin feature in sparky's 1.43. ~~Anyways, you can download it here if you want~~. Read the readme and don't bug me if it doesn't work. You probably need mIRC 6.0+ to get it working too.

Class cancelled today

2003-04-21T17:00:00Z

Finally, a class was cancelled at CSUS. It's been 2/3 of an entire semester with 5 classes and only 1 cancelled so far. When I was going to ARC, I could look forward to several missed classes per semester :). Oh well, I got to go to work for an extra two hours and made some extra money.

Computer

While I was at work, I bought a motherboard and a processor (AMD XP 1800+) with my employee discount for the PVR box (mentioned below). I got home and assembled it using the case from my old computer. So far I haven't turned it on yet because of the shelf (mentioned below) made it hard to plug in cables, so I'm waiting to get some more free time and run it in the other room.

Case

another mega-update

2003-04-20T17:00:00Z

Well, it's been over a month since my last update, and a decent amount of stuff has happened since then, I just haven't gotten around to updating this page yet. So, in a pseudo-random order, here's my recent history.

car alarm While my dad was here, he also put in my car alarm for me since I'm not very good at wiring things, not to mention my innate fear of getting electromocuted. I managed to be little more than a peanut gallery while he was hooking up all the stuff. We still need to buy some relays so that I can have it trip my door-locks remotely too, but my dad is convinced that the simple solution for attaching the relays to the circuit won't work, so I'm not going to doubt him. ~~I've scanned the picture of the circuit so if anyone has any ideas on how to hook it up, let me know. Here is the picture. Thanks in advance :).~~ It's also the first time that my new car has been apart, so it was neat looking the way it was made.

new shelf Also while he was here, he put a shelf up for my computer. It makes it much more convenient for my desk situation because it literally doubles the space I have. Now I can put my laptop on the desk as well as my monitor and mouse for my desktop. Too bad the only linux drivers for my 802.11b card are Red Hat only binaries and I've got Slackware on the router box I'd put it in. No amount of fidgiting would make that one work.

Side Angle

Front Angle

Just the Shelf

custom pvr box I've wanted to get a Tivo for a long time, but I've never really wanted to pay so much to buy one and then have to pay a monthly subscription. At $250 for the 40 hour one, plus $250 more for a lifetime (for the box) subscription, it's much more economical to build a computer myself and run my own software on it. Not to mention it will have a lot more features like net connectivity, and not having to plug the phone line into it. The only thing it wouldn't have is the ability to tune two channels at once with directv like the directivo can. I browsed the net for software that I could use, and I've settled on running mythtv. So last Monday (April 14th), I got a 200 gig hard drive from fry's electronics (I had the name before they bought out Incredible Universe!) and put it in my current 1.333ghz desktop, removed unplugged the other hard drives, and then installed Debian on it. It took me a while to get the graphic drivers working for my geforce4 ti4200 after finally downloading the kernel source and recompiling since Debian Woody ships with a kernel compiled by an old version of gcc. Then it's a long time getting the sound drivers working for the onboard sound on my ASUS A7M266. In the meantime I went to Best Buy and got a tuner card (coincidentally enough it's the same one the author of mythtv got) and managed to get the drivers working for that thing. Finally, after turning off the KDE sound manager server, I was able to get the sound recording working through the program. So now it's a week later, and I let it run and had it record a bunch of shows while I went to school+work. I plan on reinstalling linux when I get the final box since I only partitioned it with 137 gigs since that's how much it recognized without the ATA100 drivers. I don't think I like Debian that much, so I'm probably going to put Slackware on it instead, although one of my co-workers says I should put a "real" operating system on it like Red Hat or SuSe. I might contemplate Red Hat, to get the wireless card working in it, although I've heard lots of bad things about it.

Anyways, that should be everything important that I'm willing to spill on this web page. Hopefully I won't forget to update (or be lazy and just not do it) so much and maybe more frequent updates in the future :).

Pretty Eventful Weekend

2003-03-15T16:00:00Z

This past Friday I entered the ACM Programming Contest at Sac State that started at 5. I initially was hesitant about going because the email I got said that it would be in teams of up to 3 and I don't really know anyone at college that would be interested in it. I first thought it would be a simple optimization problem like "write this program, and the team that submits the most efficient solution wins." However when I showed up, they said it was programming multiple problems and the winner was the team that submitted the most correct problems in the shortest amount of time. So I partenered up with someone else that showed up stag like I did (who happens to be in my CS 28 class as well) and we headed over to the programming lab to start. Unfortunately he knew java while I don't know the technical aspects of it that well, like how to do anything in it. Neither one of us had used the IDE that was installed on the linux boxes there, so I convinced him that we should just use c instead since he knew c as much as I knew Java. Anyways I busted out vi(m) and started coding away along with a bunch of help from my partner. We started on the easiest one first since the tiebreaker was based on the time taken to submit each problem and incorrect solutions, and managed to finish it within 10 or so minutes. And so we got the first balloon awarded that night (probably because there were only 3 lower division teams, and the other 8 or so open teams couldn't do that easy one). The second problem we did (involving making change) was in the category for both upper and lower division teams, and it was a bit more difficult, but still fairly straightforward. After triple checking sets of data we were assured that it was correct, and catching a couple mistakes, we sent this one off as well. The third problem we attempted was in the lower category and it took us a lot more thinking. It involved taking the difference between two times. So we work on this one and decide that converting the times to military time and then subtracting directly and then making sure it was still within 24 hours would be the most efficicient. After shortly debating whether 12am was midnight or noon and then reading the problem description we solved this one. We submitted it and started on the next problem before we got our response. After a few minutes of it, we got an incorrect solution response. "How could that be?" we wondered and continued to work on the next problem. The last problem was really tricky indeed. It was to calculate the mean, median and mode of a list of N numbers between 1 and 25 inclusive. Or so I thought, and we wrote a clever program for that problem. However after submitting it and getting a "run time error" response it was immediately evident that there was some bounds problems since I relied on only numbers between 1 and 25 being sent in. After re-reading the problem, my partner noticed it was N numbers, where N is between 1 and 25 inclusive. This made matters much worse so we decided to figure out what was wrong with the time problem. After a short while of rereading the description I stumbled upon the fact that the second time was always after the first, and that triggered in my mind what about when the times are the same. So I got the input data where the times were the same and it reported that there was 0 hours and 0 minutes difference. Thinking. Wait! That should be 24 hours not 0 hours, so we patched it up and submitted it. Yes! It worked, so back to the stats problem. So we decided to store an array of the (up to) 25 numbers and sort them and then compute the mean, median and mode. So we submitted it. No! Whoops, forgot to change the bounds on a loop from 1-25 to 0-n instead of 0-25 as it was before. That must be our problem. No! Lets try printing out this sorted array. Whoops, it's not sorting it at all! In fact it was sorting it reverse order by the array position. Quick referencing of the pointers in the compare function required by qsort() fixed that problem, so we submitted it again. No! This can't be happening. More test data indicated that when the true mode was the last number in the list was the culprit for the problem. Whoops, we forgot to have a case outside the loop to check for mode. After fixing this we submitted it again... and got a yes response! Yay. So we check the leader board and notice that we are in the lead with 4 problems solved and the other teams would have to complete 3 of the problems in the remaining 15 or so minutes so we decide to just sit the remaining time out instead of attempting the other 2 hard problems, since we wouldn't finish them. Anyways we go downstairs and after a few announcements we claim our first place award which was a nice plaque and choice off the table of prizes. Anyways they announced that competetors should join the ACM if they aren't in it already, but after checking out the schedule on their web page I notice that I have classes for at least 75% of the times that their meetings are at, so I can't really join this semester at least. They are making a battlebot though which I have wanted to do for a long time since first seeing the show air on comedy central although I haven't watched in a long time. I probably will start watching them again when they run a marathon of them or I get a tivo so I can fast forward past the WWF-isms that they keep putting in to appeal to a younger audience. Oh well.

So I get home around 11:30 and decide to watch the Stargate episode my mom so graciously recorded for me. It was really good and makes you wonder about the ramifications of precognitive abilities in the universe. Likely not possible, but it is just science-fiction. I don't want to spoil too much for those that haven't seen it, and for those who don't even know what I'm talking about, you should watch stargate. It's on Sci-Fi Channel on fridays at 6:00 and 8:00 pst. Or maybe 6:00 and 8:30. Check your tv listings :). I then go to bed since I've got to take a stupid writing test tomorrow that I need before graduating from college. I awaken Saturday morning at 7:00 since I have to be to the place by 8:45 in the morning. On a Saturday no less. Who schedules these things? Obviously not college students like me who like to stay up late. I get to the test and after trying not to fall asleep proceed to follow the instructions and fill in the bubble sheet so they can accurately demograph how stupid white people are. Of course I fill in "prefer not to state" in the race/ethnicity form, so I've foiled their attempts! Mwahaha! IMO race/ethnicity shouldn't matter on anything. The fact that English isn't your first language should matter, but not what colour your skin is or whether you put a u in color. So I read the essay prompt and realize that it should be simple for me. I have to write about whether community provided by the internet is beneficial and useful. I immediately disassemble all my thoughts that fly through my head and establish what I really believe on the subject. I remember things posted on one of my [ex?]-coworker's site, as well as a book I read in High School, and had to do a book report on. Personally I think that the Internet is a good resource and is very useful, but I know how bad it can be to your personal life. I realize how bad of an essay it would be to sit on the fence so I decide to write a mostly negative essay. So I start the outline I usually do and write out "introduction," "everquest," "intentions," "the net," "brainstorm," and "conclusion." I notice I have 6 points and that one of them can be used as a nice hook for an opening paragraph so I start off by mentioning Sandra Bullock and the cheesy movie she was in claiming it could happen to anyone. My second paragraph cites "evercrack" and people whose vain girlfriends leave them. For the third I cite that IRC sucks for emotion and people that lie claiming they are girls when they are in fact not. Fourthly I acknowledge that the internet can be good for brainstorming, and then conclude with a conclusion. I know it's recipe-like, but it works and is [hopefully] all you need to pass these tests. Some of my paragraphs were a bit jumbled together, much like the flow of this paragraph here, but this is just my silly blog, so who cares! So I proof-read my paper and decided it was good enough so I put my jacket on and handed my stuff to the proctor and left. Fun stuff indeed.

Then today (sunday) I was driving to my grandmothers house on I-80 and on the way I noticed this sign with blinking lights saying "High winds." Hmm I think to myself, and then I notice what looks like a hay bail spining around up in the distance off the side of the road. I guess the sign was right, but what an odd place for a tumbling bail of hay. Upon closer inspection of my thoughts, I realized what I was looking at. It was not in fact a bail of hay, but a smoking tan car rolling off the side of the road and into the ditch. Uh oh. My mom in the passenger tells me to slow down because she realizes what is happening before I do, so I do and slam on my brakes and make the tires squeal because of this, although I really don't have to because the car ahead of me is at least 50 feet ahead of me and he wasn't slowing down that fast, but I just paniced. So I pull off to the side of the road since I saw it and notice that the car is smoking really bad like the engine is out. My mom tells me to call 911. Right I think, now how to I turn on my phone. In my paniced state it took me a while to remember, so I did, and the hold-9 for 911 thing didn't work. About this time I see a guy run from the car a couple ahead of us down to the smoking car in the ditch. So I dial the actual numbers and hit send. But all the lines are busy so I have to wait. I notice that there are no people inside the car, and my mom mentions the people got out and are walking around. How is that possible I think to myself. So finally the 911 person picks up about a minute later and she seems a bit rude to me and I tell her that a car flew off the side of the road and is smoking and she says "on I-80 and reed?" and I say "no, before reed on the other side of the river." and she responds that help is en route. I say thanks and hang up. So anyways just shortly after that I see the highway patrol/chp pull up behind me and the group of people gathered behind my car looking at the smoking car in the ditch. Somewhere in here a guy walks up to my window and of all things asks me to back up so he can get his toy that his kid dropped underneath it. After this we realize that there are more than enough witnesses that saw more than I did since we were at least a quarter mile back and just saw it falling off the road, and if the CHP needs my witnessing they have my cell-phone number since I called 911 with it, and my license plate # since they have cameras in the dash and he was directly behind me. One thing I want to know is if the 911 people get the location of the cell-phone tower that is being used to accurately pinpoint where people are calling from so that they can have people on response faster. So anyways, I turn off my emergency flashers and turn on my blinker and I pull out onto the freeway again after a minute of waiting for the outside lane to clear enough for me to get enough speed up the hill. Anyways, dinner was great as it usually is, even though we quite literally had to go over the river and through the woods to get there.

Wow this was a long post. Hopefully I will make more frequent shorter ones in the future so I don't take this long to do them. Anyways I need to get to bed, so thanks for reading!

the game station

2003-03-04T16:00:00Z

In other news, my good friend and co-worker at CWNet has opened a business this past weekend. The Game Station is an Internet Gaming Cafe with a T1 line running to it and consoles as well. I've been there the past few days and it's pretty fun, although there hasn't been much business while I was there. So if any of you are in the Sacramento area, feel free to drop by. You can get directions to it here. It's pretty fun to play Battlefield 1942 with multiple people in the same server when you can see each other's monitors :).

My map in TFL

2003-03-04T16:00:00Z

Thanks to TFL-Uncharted and much support from Azlan, my map fry_baked is going to get played in the TFL tomorrow (Thursday). Also, it was my intentions to have it played 8on8, which I made known to Azlan who was in charge of getting it into TFL-Uncharted in which it got a lot of good feedback and then introduced into the "normal" TFL league. I've corrected this fact in the maps page which stated it was primarily a 9on9 map.

I finally did it.

2003-03-04T16:00:00Z

I'm selling an item on ebay. I've had my ebay account for several years and never actually used it for anything. Now I have, and hopefully I can make some money :).

On a related note, I hate how the phone I got last week to replace the crappy AT&T free2go pre-paid wireless (more on that later perhaps) needs to be recharged every other day. I liked the other phone (Nokia 5165) because I got the extended battery and the charge lasted for like 3 weeks. However I didn't really care for the menu system it had because there was only a single "command" button so it was confusing as to whether the button would call or hang up or call someone again. Oh well, that phone is not in use anymore and has been replaced by my new phone.

laptops and wardriving

2003-02-28T16:00:00Z

On another note, my dad pointed out that my laptop was in this week's Fry's ad and it had another instant rebate on it. So we both went, and my mom came too because she was the one that had to put it on her credit card because the stupid credit card companies deny me any other credit than the ridiculous $200 credit limit "secured card" that I have, which puts a block on $300 in my savings account. Explain that to me! To think I've spent several thousand dollars on that thing and I still get denied, even though I'm preapproved. And then I get a ding on my credit report making it even harder to get credit. /rant. We thought that Fry's would give us crap because it was only an "instant rebate" and not the advertised price, but they gave it to us no hassle, but not the 110% price match. We didn't really want to argue so we took it and went shopping. My mom ended up getting Season 1 of Highlander and Burglar, which I watched on my laptop on the way home. I also got a Blue LED case fan, but I don't know if I like it yet because the LED won't turn off at night (unless it has something to do with that other wire we didn't know what was for). I also find amusing that Fry's was selling gas masks. Good ol' capitalism.

I also had fun wardriving (if you want to call it that) on the trip. I found 9 networks available, but only 2 I could successfuly get in to. Not that I expected much though, because the car was going too fast.

Added foxbot .far file to fry_baked

2003-02-28T16:00:00Z

Thanks to DrFreak, I've added the foxbot .far file for fry_baked into the zip which can be downloaded here. You can also use these for sparkies utilities if you want. See original thread here.

Reuploaded site, new content

2003-02-15T16:00:00Z

Sorry about the downtime for those of you that wanted to browse and download my stuff. The ISP I work for hosted my web site for no charge and now they don't do that so I had to start paying for it or find somewhere else. I opted to pay for it since it's only $7.95 a month and if anything goes wrong I can just harass the administrator of the machine and get what I need done easily :). I originally planned on doing a completely new layout of the site from scratch to include a blog and everything stored in SQL tables, but I think that's a bit overkill for what this site is supposed to be. However, I'm merely going to rewrite some stuff in PHP to make it a lot easier to update on my part so hopefully there will be more updates in the future.

Got a new laptop

2003-02-15T16:00:00Z

My first offical "blog" type post.

I just got a laptop this past weekend at Fry's. I was debating on whether to get this laptop at Amazon.com, or to get one on ebay, or even to get one locally at one of the computer stores here. The HP xt125 was $900 after rebates at amazon, and I could get a custom made HP from their web site for around the same price and get a free second battery and also an upgrade to a 15.1" screen, but I would have California sales tax because they have a California store as well, making it a lot more. I decided to go ahead and head out to Fry's and see how much they were there. They had an HP ze4210 for $850 after rebates, which the only difference was it didn't have a CD-R/RW in addition to the DVD drive. However, I don't care about that because I would never burn a CD on my laptop since I have a much better one on my desktop. I figured it was only $25 more than the other one after taxes and I get to have it *now*, and the ability to return it just by taking it back to the store rather than having to RMA it and mail it back. Anyways, I really enjoy this laptop, and it gives me something to do between classes and on long trips, although I don't know when the last time I took one of those is.