Today was the first day of the college Tae Kwon Do class that I assist with. I always enjoy the first day of class because it gives us the opportunity to get to know a new set of students. I've been assisting with this class for at least three years now and I never get tired of it. It gives me a sense of satisfaction to be able to teach someone else a new skill. It's also interesting to see the different dynamics that are present with each new group of students. Each group we work with has a different "personality".
This will be one of the smaller classes that I've assisted with, and I have the feeling that this fact alone will lead to a very distinct group attitude. Hopefully, it will also allow us to become a little more personal with our students. With large groups, it is sometimes easy to remain detached and not get to know the students personally. With small groups, it's usually much easier to attain that familial repore with everyone.
Anyway, here's to a great new semester of class!
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Friday, August 20, 2004
creature of the night
I have yet to determine exactly the reasoning for the negative effect light has on the productivity of a programmer. All I can do is attest to the accuracy of such a claim. I do my best work after dark it seems, because that seems to be the time of day that it just feels right to be basking in the glow of the light emitted by a computer screen. I find the same is also true of days like today; it's rainy, cold, and dark. Perfect coding weather. If anyone has a reason for this phenomenon, please let me know.
[Listening to: Flower - Moby - Play]
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
playing for the other team
I've been tempted. Tempted by the allure of half-priced albums. Maybe it's the DMCA-hater in me, but I completely have to side with Real in their latest tiff with Apple. Apple (and their army of zombie monkeys) claims that Real crossed the line when they reverse engineered Apple's DRM to allow songs purchased from Real's online store to be played on the iPod. If you ask me, this is completely ridiculous; competition is only fair. I've been a fairly avid Apple supporter ever since iTunes came to window, but Real is right on this one. You shouldn't only have one choice when it comes to purchasing music online to use on your iPod.
Normally, I'm not all that keen on anything from Real. They left quite the bad taste in my mouth several years ago with their ad-ridden software. But I really believe that they're cleaning up their act. There are still quite a few ads scattered throughout the software, but it's really not nearly as bad as it used to be. But as I said, it's the price cut that's gotten me to download two albums so far. When the prices return to normal, I can't exactly say which store I'll choose to shop at more, but it never hurts to have options.
Of course, the whole format thing doesn't concern me much at all either. So long as I can burn it to CD, I don't care. If it's in a format that I hate, I'll just burn it to CD, rip it to a format I like (like MP3 or Ogg), and be just as happy. I'm just insanely skeptical of any DRM. The first thing I do with any music I buy online is to burn it to CD. That way, if someone happens to want to, say, change the terms of my license, I can always rip the CD to a non-encumbered file format. Yes, I know, the quality might be slightly less, but I never was that much of an audiophile to care anyway.
Normally, I'm not all that keen on anything from Real. They left quite the bad taste in my mouth several years ago with their ad-ridden software. But I really believe that they're cleaning up their act. There are still quite a few ads scattered throughout the software, but it's really not nearly as bad as it used to be. But as I said, it's the price cut that's gotten me to download two albums so far. When the prices return to normal, I can't exactly say which store I'll choose to shop at more, but it never hurts to have options.
Of course, the whole format thing doesn't concern me much at all either. So long as I can burn it to CD, I don't care. If it's in a format that I hate, I'll just burn it to CD, rip it to a format I like (like MP3 or Ogg), and be just as happy. I'm just insanely skeptical of any DRM. The first thing I do with any music I buy online is to burn it to CD. That way, if someone happens to want to, say, change the terms of my license, I can always rip the CD to a non-encumbered file format. Yes, I know, the quality might be slightly less, but I never was that much of an audiophile to care anyway.
like a christmas tree
I've been working lately on a unit conversion library with several tricky little calculations scattered about it. I just have to say something about the tool that's allowed me to keep my relative sanity. NUnit has saved me by catching at least five bugs that would've taken me hours later on to track down. TestRunner has also saved me some time by allowing me to run my unit tests from within the IDE, and jump straight to any lines that cause the tests to fail. Not to mention the fact that I can debug my unit tests as well using it. I'd used TestRunner before, but it sucked back then. Fear not, though; it is much improved since then and the only problems I have with it now are when I'm debugging every now and again.
There's just something satisfying in watching those little icons for each test light up like a Christmas tree. Green, green, green, green, RED! Oops! More work to do!
There's just something satisfying in watching those little icons for each test light up like a Christmas tree. Green, green, green, green, RED! Oops! More work to do!
[Listening to: PlayStation - Ending Theme (Gaming FM - Modern Console) - Final Fantasy VIII - ]
one of those moments
It actually happened. Yesterday, I had a moment where I really needed some information to write some code, and should've known the answer. I was trying to remember how to use density and/or specific gravity to convert between volume and mass units. This was obviously one of those things that I learned, way back in high school math or science, and thought to myself, "I'll never need to know that in the real world." I hope I never utter or think that phrase again.
For the record, to convert volume to mass if you know the specific gravity, and the volume you want the mass of has been converted to liters (here's why), then you can find the mass in kilograms by multiplying the specific gravity by the volume. Thanks, Google!
For the record, to convert volume to mass if you know the specific gravity, and the volume you want the mass of has been converted to liters (here's why), then you can find the mass in kilograms by multiplying the specific gravity by the volume. Thanks, Google!
Sunday, August 15, 2004
return to angel land
So, I got a little bored this evening and sat down to play some GBA. Tonight, I was feeling especially old school, so I started digging through my collection of really old, original Game Boy games. The game du'jour, as it were, was Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, a game I hadn't played in many, many years. I was amazed, however, when I found myself unable to put the thing down. I played through the entire game in just a few hours (granted, there are only 14 levels in all). It was still a blast, just as I remember it. And it got me thinking, why did the franchise die after two games? Nintendo tends to be the kind of company that milks it's franchises for everything they're worth. Don't get me wrong, it's very, very rare for one of big N's franchise-based games to be anything short of phenomenal. This particular series just seemed to me to be rather short-lived, especially since it was tons of fun, and continues to be one of my more fondly remembered games of the 8-bit era.
Of course, I can't really imagine playing Kid Icarus in a rendered 3D world and being much fun, but hey, I thought the same thing about Metroid before I actually got to play (no, make that experience) the beautiful Metroid: Prime. At the very least, the original Kid Icarus should have been included in the Classic NES Series for the GBA. I mean, come on, we get Ice Climber instead of Kid Icarus?! What gives? Who's gonna pay $20 for Ice Climber? Anyway, I did run across a rather cool (and nostalgic) website dedicated to Kid Icarus, if anyone's a fan.
Of course, I can't really imagine playing Kid Icarus in a rendered 3D world and being much fun, but hey, I thought the same thing about Metroid before I actually got to play (no, make that experience) the beautiful Metroid: Prime. At the very least, the original Kid Icarus should have been included in the Classic NES Series for the GBA. I mean, come on, we get Ice Climber instead of Kid Icarus?! What gives? Who's gonna pay $20 for Ice Climber? Anyway, I did run across a rather cool (and nostalgic) website dedicated to Kid Icarus, if anyone's a fan.
Friday, August 13, 2004
easy on the eyes
sick days
Ugh, what a week. I came down with a cold on Monday and it completely knocked me out of commission for three days. Nevermind the fact that I have no clue how I got a cold in the middle of August. I'm finally recovering a little though, so I've been back at work since yesterday. I did get to play plenty of DragonBall Z Budokai 2, which I picked up in Nashville last weekend for just twenty bucks. That game's a blast, but they did butcher the story quite heavily, but I suppose it was neccessary to sacrifice story for gameplay in this particular game genre.
In other news, I found out yesterday that I've been chosen for jury duty starting at the end of this month. Not that I mind actually participating as a juror, but it just seems like a huge inconvenience. Supposedly, I won't know until 7pm or so the day before whether I'm supposed to report to the court or not, which makes it completely impossible to plan anything with certainty. This in itself would not be bad if it weren't for the fact that the summons states that I'd be on call for four months. That just seems an inordinate amount of time to have to put your life on hold, regardless of whether I am ever actually even selected to be on a jury. Nevertheless, I'll bite the bullet and endure it; it is after all, my civic duty, is it not? And who knows, maybe I'll find out later on that it's actually not quite as bad as the stories that typically surround it.
In other news, I found out yesterday that I've been chosen for jury duty starting at the end of this month. Not that I mind actually participating as a juror, but it just seems like a huge inconvenience. Supposedly, I won't know until 7pm or so the day before whether I'm supposed to report to the court or not, which makes it completely impossible to plan anything with certainty. This in itself would not be bad if it weren't for the fact that the summons states that I'd be on call for four months. That just seems an inordinate amount of time to have to put your life on hold, regardless of whether I am ever actually even selected to be on a jury. Nevertheless, I'll bite the bullet and endure it; it is after all, my civic duty, is it not? And who knows, maybe I'll find out later on that it's actually not quite as bad as the stories that typically surround it.
[Listening to: Love at First Sight - Kylie Minogue - Fever]
Friday, August 06, 2004
beautiful day
Today is one of the more beautiful days I've seen since my vacation in May. I love days like today because they put me in a perpetually good mood. The only thing that could make the day better would be if we had a picnic table outside that would allow us to work outside. It'd be awesome to drag some extension cords out there, plug in the WiFi cards, and code all day while enjoying the nice weather. I'll settle for turning the AC off and opening windows though.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
nostalgia
It just hit me that for all the wonderful things the Internet has to offer, I find myself reminiscing back to simpler times. Times where NetCentral was one of the coolest places to chat online, before the commercialization of the web led to Yahoo! and Microsoft and their ilk buying up or snuffing out all the cool, non-commercial sites. Netscape was still at the top of its game, PowWow was the "hot" instant messenger-like technology, and Trumpet Winsock was the gateway to the world wide web because at that time, Windows was surprisingly agnostic when it came to the Internet.
This is not to say that we didn't have our share of problems back then. After all, there was the dreaded <blink> tag (which I could've sworn today's web browsers didn't even implement anymore).
Great...now I feel old again. :)
This is not to say that we didn't have our share of problems back then. After all, there was the dreaded <blink> tag (which I could've sworn today's web browsers didn't even implement anymore).
Great...now I feel old again. :)
Monday, August 02, 2004
making a port
I was browsing around the other day and ran across the infinitely cool Dashboard application for Gnome. This application basically throws up a window that displays contextually relevant information to the user. For instance, if the user was chatting with a friend on an instant messenger, the friends contact info, along with recent IM conversations and e-mails would be displayed in the window. Written in C# it is, in my humble opinion, quite a testament to the robustness of the Mono platform. After marvelling at how incredibly cool the app is, I realized that there was not a Windows version. A quick glance at the source code revealed to me that it would actually be relatively easy to port a large majority of the code over to Windows. And so, after two or three days of hacking away at it, I've finally produced a relatively simple Windows port of the application. Perhaps one day, I'll actually find somewhere to host it.
The core engine is not all that impressive in terms of complexity, but it does allow for a fairly robust feature set. The application is driven by three items, a frontend, a backend, and a renderer. The frontend is the bit that monitors the source applications and sends messages (clues) to the engine. Once the engine receives one or more clues, it queries each of the loaded backends for the given keywords. The backends are the pieces that scour their respective data sources for matches to the clues. If any are found, the results are sent back to the engine to be rendered using a renderer specified by the back end. That's it! So far, I've managed to port most features of the engine, as well as a Google searching backend, a Mozilla bookmarks backend, and a simple frontend that sends clues from the commandline. There's still lots of frontends and backends to be written, and I imagine that they are going to give me quite the crash course on programming plugins for various Windows apps, but I look forward to the challenge! And I'm probably attacking the most difficult plugin target first: Miranda!
The core engine is not all that impressive in terms of complexity, but it does allow for a fairly robust feature set. The application is driven by three items, a frontend, a backend, and a renderer. The frontend is the bit that monitors the source applications and sends messages (clues) to the engine. Once the engine receives one or more clues, it queries each of the loaded backends for the given keywords. The backends are the pieces that scour their respective data sources for matches to the clues. If any are found, the results are sent back to the engine to be rendered using a renderer specified by the back end. That's it! So far, I've managed to port most features of the engine, as well as a Google searching backend, a Mozilla bookmarks backend, and a simple frontend that sends clues from the commandline. There's still lots of frontends and backends to be written, and I imagine that they are going to give me quite the crash course on programming plugins for various Windows apps, but I look forward to the challenge! And I'm probably attacking the most difficult plugin target first: Miranda!
what's in a name
We sat down for quite some time last night browsing through BabyNames.com trying to think up some good baby names. I've always liked Lana myself, but my wife doesn't care for it, preferring instead to tack an "A" onto the front of it making it Alana. Two names that stood high on our list (or at least mine) were Ethan Riley Sharp for a boy, and Alana Hope Sharp for a girl. We've still got plenty of time to decide on a name, of course, but it was nice to start planning for that aspect of the coming baby, at least.
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