Last night, after attending the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology graduation ceremony–which took place before finals begin, by the way–we headed to OM, a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. OM serves Indian cuisine in a really unique atmosphere. Even though you are in a restaurant, it feels as if your table is the only one in the room. The food is even better. Below are a few pictures that I took with my Motorola Droid (its color balance is not very good when using the flash).
Well, until September 2nd that is. Summer began officially on Saturday at 6:00 PM CDT, when one was back home from the last final of the semester. It looks like this summer will be another one of those work as much as possible to have money for the next two semesters of college (aside from the social life side of things it has worked well in the past two summers).
This summer, running needs to be worked into the daily routine. Last summer, by the time work was over for the day the temperatures outside were not favorable for running (way too hot). And, as a typical college student one has a difficult time getting up early in the morning when there are no classes. The routine starts tomorrow (pending the cooperation of the weather, otherwise it’ll be another 4 to 5 miles on the treadmill again). Since getting sick right before finals week, and remaining sick for it’s entirety one hasn’t been up to running outside.
WordPress plug-in wise, Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1.2 will be released this week, right now it looks like Wednesday, the 19th, will be the release date. Again, just a bug fix release, but one that most will find useful. WP Trainer will be visible on this blog as a technology demo sometime mid June. Right now on is working with some older code of mine, updating it to newer libraries and such. The code is two years old, and more or less is being completely rewritten. It is serving as a refresher in using Mootools, which will be the main JavaScript framework used in WP Trainer. Since many things are changing for Mootools 1.2, major work on WP Trainer’s effects will be put off until 1.2 is released.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Spending abnormally long amounts of time on simple projects sucks. So there is this biology paper, and presentation we have to do for lab. Patenting of genetic information is the topic I picked, IP is fun isn’t it? After writing a much longer paper for freshmen writing on software patents I thought this should have been easy. It would be, if either I didn’t care about it or if it wasn’t 2 pages, single spaced. I guess they wanted to save a portion of a tree. The other thing making it difficult is that we must submit a digital copy so that if the TA suspects plagiarism he/she can submit it to turnitin.com. I don’t copy the works of others, and try my best to cite my sources properly.
However, I do have several problems with turnitin.com, their data retention practices, and their outright smug attitude. They claim to not keep full copies of the submitted content, but rather some fingerprint of it. That fingerprint would be something like a tiger tree hash used by peer-2-peer networks. These are a one way hashing technique, that should be unique (no two non-identical documents should have the same hash, identical parts should have the same hash). In p2p networks these hashes are used to perform multi-source downloading, turnitin uses it for matching potential plagiarism.
The problem is if a matching hash is found, if they keep true to their word that they do not keep original copies, or contact information, there is no way to compare the actual texts. Since no hashing scheme is perfect there is a chance for different writings having matching hashes. If there is a single bit error when performing or storing the hash, false positives have a much higher chance of occurring. If they do keep textual copies, they are in violation of the copyright of the writer. Since they are using this data for profit, they may also need to get permission to keep the derivative works (e.g., hashes of they generate).
As a side note, I found a microprocessor that is more backwards than the PIC in some ways. It is the Texas Instruments MSP430. Setting up serial communication for the PIC isn’t super straight forward, but the MSP430 is much worse.
Finally, I need to congratulate JD and his fiancée Samantha on their engagement.
-John Havlik
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Ok, so for about a week we did not have internet at the house, thus one had to rely on the slow at times Internet on campus. The good news is everything is fixed up now. The 20th birthday seems to be an uneventful one, with little significance except one year older, and the end of the teenage years. A week ago the desktop was brought back home from work. The previously quiet machine roars compared to one’s laptop. And, no it’s not really faster then the laptop either. Transcoding a SouthPark episode, ~23min in length, to a screen resolution appropriate for my Zen took about 2.6 times longer on the desktop. So that makes a Pentium 4 @ 3.0Ghz (with HyperThreading) about 2.6 times slower than a x9000 Core 2 Duo @ 2.8Ghz. By no means was the test very scientific as they don’t have equal memory sizes, speeds, or operating systems. However, it is a rough depiction of the performance difference.
Oh, and Cysis still works on the desktop. Last Friday I presented it to some friends who thought it looked amazing. Then I let them know that what they saw was on more or less the minimum settings. The disappearing rocks problem leads to an awkward situation when you shoot at an enemy and they don’t even flinch. After unloading a few rounds you realize that there is supposed to be a rock there.
Depending on my whim, this blog may be down for a little while this weekend. I’m planning on grabbing the latest SVN of WordPress, installing it and placing up Cran-Berry. It’s a spring refresh, not a May one.
-John Havlik
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What kind of professor assignees a homework problem on a topic that is out of the scope of the course and it’s prerequisites? This so happens to be the last part of the first question on an assignment that is supposed to take over 12 hours to complete. We get a nice “Warning! mathematical content”, in an Mythbusters fashion. One could not help but to write “No shit” next to it. Oh, and this is spring break, yeah I’m spending it doing homework.
As a side note, to anyone who actually thought WordPress 2.5 would be released on time on the 10th was a little shallow. Even worse where those who thought it would get released on the 17th, a week later. Looking at the Trac roadmap, 2.5 still has 250 bugs today that are unresolved (well some of them have patches awaiting approval). This morning it was over 300, on Monday 1 in 3 tickets for 2.5 were still open. Things are progressing, though a good number of tickets were moved to 2.6 as there was no patch or developer assigned to them.
For 2.5 this blog will be changing over to the Cran-Berry theme, which I’ll continue to tweak and release in April for mass consumption. Cran-Berry is based off of the the now stable Blu-Berry CSS and PHP core. Earlier this week I tweaked the CSS a little bit and fixed a problem with the comments. Major work on cleaning up the code has resolved many of the issues experienced in Blu-Berry. Like the name suggests, Cran-Berry is a WordPress theme with a red color scheme. As for Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1, it will be released sometime near the 21st of March.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]