New photo layout
I spent a good part of yesterday redesigning my photo page(s). I’ve been using the Gallery script for quite a while now, but I decided that I wanted to write my own PHP script to deliver the pictures. I really wanted my photo pages to validate and sit within the current site template, which I probably could have done through Gallery, but it would have taken much more time than it was worth. Another problem I had with Gallery was that it was just too big and offered more features than I needed. The PHP script that I whipped together sits within a validated XHTML template that I created and cycles through the current directory to display the thumbnails (with links to their larger pictures) for all of the pictures in that directory. If ever I create a new set of photos or want to add to a current set, I simply need to plop the pictures into the directory and point to the PHP script. It’s really kind of slick and if anyone else is interested in using it, let me know and I’ll send you the code.
I’ve also removed the original image files to reduce the amount of space that the photos take up. I’ve resized all of the files (using netPBM) to a size of 500×375 and moved the thumbnails down to a size of 50×38. The photos and their associated thumbnails used to take up around 200MB of space — they now take up ~20MB. You can find the new photo page here.
On its way
My current notebook has been sold and the Apple PowerBook has been ordered. It should be here on Thursday. Nice little present to play with after my final computer engineering exam Thursday afternoon.
Oh the memories
Anyone who grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System will definitely appreciate Nintendo - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It’s a fairly inclusive collection of early NES memorabilia, add-ons, and otherwise useless products with entertaining, albeit sometimes overly passionate, commentary. It’s a good ride back in time.
Senior Design
Our Senior Design demo for the EE department went very well. Much better than than the presentation/demo we did for CISE. As promised, I got some pictures and video of the project. The video is very short (I took it with my digital still camera), but it does show off all of the project components: voice-recognition, IR transmission, and RF transmission/reception. Given that the voice-recognition is trained around my voice, it is kind of neat that it works fine for Sean (as is shown in the video) — it works fairly well for guy voices in general. You can find the pictures and video here. I’ve put up AVI and MPG versions of the video as at least one person was having trouble with the AVI.
Pain(t)ball
I went paintballing for the first time today and had a lot of fun. A buddy of mine is REALLY into the whole thing and lives on the outskirts of Gainesville where his place is surrounded by a rather large, dense, forest. He actually had six guns and masks at his house and his own CO2 tank. Impressive. We had six guys and played capture-the-flag most of the time. We played for a full four hours and went through roughly 2000 paintballs. I was obviously not looking forward to getting hit, which fortunately, didn’t occur too much. Save the knock I took to the head and the ass, I’m feeling pretty good, especially considering the beatings some of my friends walked away with.
How dare they
Most of the people that frequent this site know that I’m a big Linux fan and have been for many, many years. Most of you also know that during some semesters (including this one) I have been unable to run Linux because of courses that require the use of programs that will only run on Windows. I’ve been waiting so long for the day that my course schedule didn’t dictate my operating system. I have one more final exam and I’m done with computer engineering (as a degree, not as a way of life :). I start law school in the fall and have been anticipating the purchase of an Apple PowerBook for as long as I can remember. I know all of my friends are sick of hearing about it, but damn it, it’s too sexy to not talk about.
Back to the story. I received an e-mail from Santa Clara today concerning their deal with Dell and how I can get a PIECE-OF-SHIT Dell Lattitude notebook at a discounted price. After noticing in the e-mail that it said that this particular notebook has been “successfully tested with ExamSoft and SmartPrint,” I did a little research. It turns out that ExamSoft is test-taking software used by most law schools so that students can take all of their in-class exams with their own notebooks.
It may come as no surprise that this software will only run on Windows! That’s right, I’m again being told what operating system I have to use. Unbelievable. I’ve researched this quite a bit and it turns out that there really is NO way around it. There was quite a bit of information about this topic on the net as it has been a problem for a few years (ever since law schools started to use this software for exams). One of the best sources of information I could find on this subject was at MacInTouch.
Apparently, all ExamSoft does is lock up access to the computer (i.e., no disk or net access) so that you can’t cheat. Some law schools, realizing the absurdity of requiring their students to run Windows, have reverted back to an honor system. Unfortunately, the law school I will be attending (like most others) requires that ExamSoft, and subsquently, Windows, be used if you want to take your exam on a computer. Most of those who have taken issue with this have gotten around it by, you guessed it, purchasing the cheapest Windows-based notebook they could find and using it only when they have to take a test. This will probably be my solution as well because I’m so bent on getting a PowerBook and get so livid just thinking about running Windows for three years (*shudder*). Hopefully I can find a notebook that will do the job for < $500. Donations are encouraged. ;) “I ain’t 2 proud 2 beg.”
This whole thing has seriously turned my stomach. Ridiculous.
Out of our hands
I had my senior design presentation last night for the Computer Engineering department. The presentation went fine; the demo could not have gone worse. Allow me to explain. Most of you guys know how much time we’ve spent on our project, a voice-controlled IR/RF remote. EVERYTHING had been working fine for a couple of weeks and we had been tweaking it daily. The point is, we essentially finished the project and were quite proud of it.
Sean and I go to our presentation (Jorge and Ty, the other two guys in our group, weren’t required to go as they are EE majors). We were the last ones to present last night which meant that 13 people went before us. Three and a half hours after arriving, it was our turn. We walk up there pretty confident, especially after seeing the presentations that went before us; our demo would blow those out of the water. We had a really cool project idea, and it actually worked.
Our presentation went off without a hitch. Sean and I spoke fairly well. It was time to demo the finished product. We had everything setup: the RF receiver circuit in the back of the room connected to a lamp, a 27″ Sony TV we borrowed and brought up to the room, the IR transmitter, the RF transmitter, and the microntroller board connected serially to my notebook running MATLAB (for the voice-recognition). The micrcontroller board was reset and I began running our voice-recognition software on my notebook. What happens? What is the worst thing that could have happened? The MIC started picking up SHIT from SOMEWHERE and was just flipping out. We coded up a threshold for the MIC so that it wouldn’t respond so easily to ambient noise. This had worked perfectly for the ENTIRE semester and usually required me to speak relatively loudly into the MIC for it to begin recording and to subsequently realize the spoken command and respond to it. Not the case now; not when we needed it most. No one could explain this; the room was completely quiet as per the evil stares I gave to the audience as if I were going to kill them if they so much as breathed too loudly. In short, it didn’t work at all and we were at a loss for words. We’ve done this in so many different rooms and houses and environments. We just don’t know what could have been causing it. It was obviously some sort of electrical interference; something outside the range of human hearing. We were able to show off the IR and RF by manually sending the commands to the microntroller board, but the voice was a no-go. I came out of that room angrier (outside of relationships) than I think I have ever been in my life. We put ALL SEMESTER into this project only to have it BREAK unexplicably on us when we needed it most. Of course, it worked fine as soon as we got out of that room. Whatever. I just don’t know what to say. Unbelievable.
We have another presentation for the Electrical Engineering department tomorrow evening. We’re not worried about it breaking during that demo because we’ve done it 4342323 times in the room that the demos will be held, unlike the Computer Engineering demo, in which case we weren’t allowed into the room until demo day.
I plan on getting some pictures and digital video of the project in action tomorrow, before our EE presentation. I also plan on sending the video to the guy that ran the CE presentations, just to prove to him that everything works and that something in the room was throwing it off. He believed us and was impressed regardless, but I would still like to show him that the project is fully operational, if only to help me sleep better. :)
You might live in the ghetto if…
…you’re talking to your buddy on the phone while you’re on the patio and you look out onto the parking lot of your complex and see some ass-clown with a golf club and a ball. He proceeds to drop the ball onto the pavement and hit it. The ball nails a Ford Explorer; I can’t contain my laughter. I’m fairly certain the guy saw me. Does he stop? Of course not. He hits the ball a few more times, apparently trying to get it over the fence surrounding the pool area. He fails.
I’m going to miss Gainesville.
Too much spam
In my endless effort to combat spam, I’ve implemented the Hiveware Enkoder from Dan Benjamin. The Enkoder completely removes my e-mail address from the site, at least as far as e-mail-harvesting robots are concerned. Dan writes:
The Enkoder will encrypt your e-mail address and wrap the result in JavaScript, hiding it from e-mail-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Just paste the resulting JavaScript into your website’s HTML. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to e-mail harvesting robots.
Instead of merely breaking up and printing out a standard mailto: tag, The Enkoder generates a unique and random key and ties that to an encrypted array containing your address for even better protection.
And now, the Enkoder uses a genetic algorithm to generate the JavaScript so it’s different every time. Because the JavaScript changes each time you run the Enkoder, it is virtually impossible for spammers to parse and decode your address.
I have been doing a kind of half-assed version of this for a while by using “justin at justinblanton dot com” on the contact page, but that method obviously disables the ability to simply click on the address. With the Enkoder, I can retain the “justin@justinblanton.com” phrase and the link.
Yes, the Enkoder requires the use of JavaScript, something I’m usually against as a rule (I like to the keep the pages as ‘clean’ as possible), but I feel that the immediate benefits warrant the aberration.
On a related note, if you plan on implementing this yourself and decide to use the Enkoder Form, it won’t produce the correct output in the latest Opera release (v7.1; perhaps earlier versions as well). You’ll need to view the source of the webpage and copy the code from there. The author has been notified of this slight quirk.
Zwan
Zwan will be on SNL tonight. Zwan’s debut album, Mary Star of the Sea, is my favorite album of 2003 so far. Yes, I realize that SNL is shit without Will Ferrell, but, we are talking about Zwan here, a band fronted and controlled by Billy Corgan (formerly of Smashing Pumpkins — one of my all-time favorite bands), who is certainly the most prolific songwriter of my generation, if not the best. Don’t miss it.
Switchin’ it up
You’ve no doubt noticed the new stripes and title across the top of the site. I originally wanted some sort of gradient bar (#CC0 - #FFF) at the top but didn’t want to use an image. I decided to try do it with CSS and after playing with it for while I realized that I liked the stripes without the ‘fading’ between them and so I only used three (instead of the eight that were to be used to achieve the gradient look). I used the Color Blender from Eric Meyer to get the middle color. Great little tool. As always, any feedback is appreciated.
I’m 13 again
As I mentioned in my previous entry, I just purchased a Gameboy Advanced SP. As I also noted, I knew I wouldn’t have much time to play with it until this semester was over. Well, I’ve found time; whether I’m riding the bus to campus or waiting for something to compile, I’m finding time to play. The device is so unbelievably amazing. Not only is it five ounces and tiny, but the sound and display are brilliant. The battery life is the best I’ve ever seen in any device. Ever. I’m more than halfway through Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advance 3 and have also been playing Mario Kart: Super Circuit — I haven’t recharged the battery once. Ridiculous. Speaking of Mario Kart, I cannot get over how faithful this revision is to the original N64 title. I haven’t been able to play it much because of this damn 8-bit computer I’m designing for Digital Design, but from what I can tell it’s going to be one of my all-time favorites, if only because it so closely mirrors its big brother.
I denied myself any type of console system while in college because I knew that my propensity to get wrapped up in competition and/or beating the game would deter me from school. It was a smart move, but one that I regret. Either way, this Gameboy should hold me over for a while as there are 488 titles available for it, not to mention the fact that it can play original Gameboy games. I still have my Tetris — greatest game of all time — cartridge from 1991 when the Gameboy first came out.
A welcomed distraction
In a very stupid move, I purchased a Gameboy Advance SP yesterday. I say stupid only because I’m not going to have time to play with it too much as this semester is beginning to wind down and things are hectic to say the least. Ugh, I can’t put it down.
I also grabbed Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advance 3.
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton spoke at UF today. It was so incredible to see him in person. I had goosebumps half the time. He spoke mostly on globalization and why we, as a species, should strive to become what he calls an “integrated community,” rather than just interdependent nations, as the latter doesn’t put enough emphasis on the fact that we are all equal. I don’t know what to say. It was just great. It was Bill-freaking-Clinton!
Unfortunately, I don’t have much to show from the appearance. In the Alligator, our school newspaper, it said that “no cameras, video cameras, or bookbags” would be allowed in. So, given this, I didn’t bring my digital camera, but as we were standing in line we noticed huge signs that said, “no cameras, video cameras, or bookbags.” Needless to say, I was (am) pretty freaking pissed. I did happen to get a couple of pictures with the camera on my phone, but they look like SHIT, as was expected. You can view them here and here; I promise that it really is Bill at the podium. :)
