Never thought I’d see the day. Somebody at Microsoft just lost their job. Check out the homepage of Microsoft Windows Server System. Pay particular attention to the title graphic’s lower right hand corner. (Thanks to Scott for pointing this out to me)

Enjoy.

Edit: sorry for the length. Didn’t realize how much I had written…

Classes are winding up for the year. Had my ECE 270 (Circuits Laboratory I) bench exam last night. Went simmingly. I was out in maybe 25 minutes, having successfully measured the whopping 3 circuit parameters we were looking for, and circling whether the graph got bigger or smaller as I turned the frequency knob. Not a bad lab course overall, just not that challenging. Also finished my project with Dave for ECE 352 (Digital Design Fundamentals), and submitted that this morning. We had our last ECE 230 (Circuit Analysis) lecture with our professor yesterday, since he’s on his way to Seville, Spain, at the moment. Also had our last American Indian Studies 172 discussion this morning with a small group presentation that I think went pretty well. 4 days of class left this semester, plus 4 finals (1 in class instead of it’s 7:45 am timetable slot, fortunately), and that’s it.

The answer to this week’s Engineering trivia question is… the Science Olympiad. A big thanks goes to Jeni for reminding me to look at the question, and another thank you to Polygon, since that’s where I learned the answer. I won a College of Engineering mug or pen (the mug is really cool with the CoE fountain logo on it), that I have yet to pick up due to the aforementioned projects. Condolences to Tim who’ll have to wait for next semester…

I’ve relocated my laptop. See earlier post if you were unaware that I had one. For those who were unaware that it was missing, rest assured it never actually was missing… I had had it with me the whole time, just not where I thought it was.

I’ll be upgrading my laptop soon. After talking to my parents today I might be purchasing my upgraded laptop as soon as tomorrow, or at the latest, next week. Still debating whether I should open it and start playing with it now, or save it for Christmas, since my parents are helping me out a bit with paying for it. Any thoughts?

I am insufficiently coordinated to play air hockey. This was determined last night when Lauren beat me without breaking a sweat. At least I didn’t score as many goals on myself as Tim did his first game. All told the night was great; I went to the Memorial Union to join Jeni, Lauren, and Tim. (I think this paragraph gets an F as a newspaper article. Something about the information pyramid being upside down…)

I found a cool picture of the campus at night, as seen from (I would guess) the Engineering Research Building, while logging into My UW today. Probably everyone else has already seen it, but since I rarely log in, it was new to me, so here it is:

Finally, on the subject of pictures, I stole this one from Lauren, since I never got around to actually asking her to send it to me. Hopefully that’s kosher. The picture is me releasing my entry in the secret contest of approximately November 12. Not sure if this was the first or second such release… first one landed on the 2nd story roof. The egg survived though, and Craig (left, in black) and I tied for second place behind Tim (not pictured), whose ingenuity easily outshone us all. He lowered his egg safely to the ground by a rope made of the trash bag. At any rate, here’s the pic:

Edit: Disregard the previous title of this post. Embarassingly, the title/command was syntactically incorrect.

For those who didn’t spend their misbegotten high school study halls sending email messages in raw SMTP via telnet, the title is a command telling an email server that we would like to send out an email from the address enlight1@cae.wisc.edu. Which, incidentally, is exactly what the Maquina Fountain is finally able to do again. I finished my email code this evening, and, except for one test case, it even works! So to those on the enlight-members list, I apologize if you get bombarded with “Come clean out the filters” emails next spring when 8 billion petals fall from buds directly into the fountain, but hey- at least it’ll stop flooding the sidewalk.

For anybody who followed the above link to the “Art of Engineering” page that may be wondering if this is truly anything new, seeing as that webpage reports such capability already existed, let me bring you up to speed. (If you’ve already heard the story, by all means skip this paragraph.) The fountain used to be able to send email, around the year 2000. Then everybody who knew anything about it disappeared, leaving their code, a model of the fountain, and little else behind. For the past couple years Enlight has been recreating the original work to get the fountain up and running again, doing things like rewriting all the code, physically repairing the aging sytems that run the fountain, and actually documenting how it all works. As part of that process, I wrote my email code, and so now that piece of the puzzle is ready to be restored. So hopefully I won’t waste your time repeating that tale anymore, and hopefully you’ll have a little better frame of reference when I mention working on this or that for the fountain.

Ok, everybody who skipped the above paragraph, start reading again.

Ende.

Maybe this will help, a bit, Jared:

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by doubling our joy, and dividing our grief.

-Joseph Addison

We’re here.

No, not mipmaps. Just a lot in a small space (hopefully small):

• We’re starting to get some nice ice growing on the fountain:
  
  
  Once we can get the heater to run through the night consistently without tripping its GFI, it’ll be awesome.
• On the topic of the fountain, progress is being made in teaching it to speak SMTP. I have my module mostly complete, and have also found Giddings & Lewis’s official SMTP email block, which I am poring over to find the bug in mine. It was interesting, though slightly disappointing, to find a functional block from G&L that does, in fact, work, after putting several hours into writing my own.
• Google’s Russian definition of concatenate contains the word treehouse.
• I lost, yet again, to Jared in racquetball last Friday. A bit disappointing that I was up 7-3 and still lost 15-11 or so. That’s at least the 2nd time this year I’ve done that, though last time was worse: up 13-2 I still lost 15-14. I suppose it’s only fair, mason. Makes up for nearly every math test since 7th grade 😉
• Sunday night I decorated some Christmas cookies with Jeni & Lauren (and, briefly, Erin). We’ll find out tonight if any survived for the Enlight meeting… (I take full blame for the horrible attempts at rendering a fountain and the Enlight logo onto a tree and a bear, respectively. I quickly realized I’m not capable of such things and desisted.) Later Jeni and I were confounded by a tangram puzzle that I think is impossible. And Lauren solved the triangle problem in just a day. A lot less time than it took me (about a year and a half, I think. Anybody remember when I first brought this to school?):
  
• Nate had a very original, inventive, and truly inspired idea last night. But he doesn’t want me to share it. So for the record, Nate had his first idea in a long time, but it died of isolation. (kindof like the died of loneliness joke… I tried.)

I think that’s about it.

I’m so thrilled that my computer finally works again (after 36+ hours) that I decided to stay up an extra couple minutes to write about it. After all the hassle described in my last post, plus at least 2 hrs of figuring out why more packages wouldn’t update today, as of 1:30 am everything was finally done! My computer is back online and running (so far) happily.

In other news:
I’m working on a code module for the Fountain to enable it to send email messages. That should be pretty useful, once done, for getting status information like “sidewalk water overflowed, come fix it,” or “the mister DID work last night, go check it out,” or “pump 2’s vacuum sensor says there’s a problem. get ahold of tim, stat.” etc. without having to physically be at the engineering campus or in the tunnel. Plus, in working on this I am gaining a much better understanding of how PiCPro’s networking code is supposed to be put together, and why our previous code worked so precariously. Hopefully once this simpler module is complete, I can take a look at the whole server’s code and update that to work the way it’s supposed to.

Long-winded, frustrated technical post alert. Sorry, but sometimes I need to rant about geek things. (At least this one’s not trite, ey Katie?)

I forgot just how much of a PITA it is to update my kernel. I run Gentoo linux on my desktop at the moment, and decided recently, on Jon’s urging, that it would probably be a good idea to get it back up to date. Sounded easy, especially when he suggested just nice’ing “emerge -u world” in the background, so I decided to start doing that this afternoon. Well, unfortunately there’s a bit more to it than that. Seeing as I have 342 packages to upgrade (all to be recompiled from source, since Gentoo is a source-based distro), I get interrupted about every 20 packages with some problem to sort out the portage can’t handle automatically. First it was mysql. Can’t autoupgrade from 4.0.24 to 4.1.14. So, following a handy wiki, I had to first upgrade to 4.0.25, then backup and delete all my settings, then remove 4.0.25 completely, then install 4.1.14, then replace all my settings. Took like 20 minutes of manual intervention. Not a huge deal. Rolling further along. This package wants me to delete some directory, so the thing dies, then that package has an illegal /usr dynamic library link (???), so unmerge it manually, then I get to hal (Hardware Abstraction Layer). Turns out hal needs a kernel upgrade. Shit.

So I emerge gentoo-sources to get 2.6.14. No big deal. Copy over my old .config, update the new settings as needed, give it a quick once-over to make sure everything is still ok. Looks good. Compile that, mount my suse boot partition (since that’s where my bootloader actually is), copy the System.map and vmlinuz files over there, update grub/menu.lst, then reboot. Big mistake. I forgot in the heat of the moment that my motherboard has a network chip that’s not supported by the standard kernel sources. (There’s a driver in development at version 0.9, but the author says it’s still buggy…) Plus, NVIDIA’s custom kernel module dies every time you recompile, so I get uncermoniously dumped at a console full of module loading errors. Great. Cue 45 minutes of rebooting into SuSE, downloading the updated, nasty kernel module from SysKonnect, rebooting into the console of errors, patching my kernel tree, make modules && make modules_install, modprobe sk98lin, oops that didn’t work because the retarded non-functional default sk98lin tried to load already and died… reboot, readd /etc/init.d/net.eth0 to my startup scripts, reboot, finally on the net, now download & install updated nvidia drivers, reboot.

X finally comes up and lo-and-behold my entire GUI environment is dead. Seems portage thought it’d be a great idea to emerge parts of gnome 2.12 before hal (the package that caused this whole mess), so now I can’t reload gnome until everything is done updating. At the current moment, it’s compiling #6 of 243 remaining packages. Splendid.

If you actually read that this far, I hope you’re sleeping happier than I, and less fitfully than my poor computer.

Well, as of yesterday it’s official: Amphisbaena, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest team that I am a part of, will be representing UW-Madison at the 2006 ACM-ICPC World Finals! (See proof of our accepted status) That means a trip to San Antonio, TX, as well as some rather intense study of algorithms & programming strategy coming up next semester. The contest will be April 9-13 at the Hilton Palacio del Rio, and is sponsored by IBM and hosted by Baylor University. I expect the contest will be extremely tough, but on the upshot, it gives us a second chance to beat South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, which, if you recall from my earlier post, is my dad’s alma mater, and furthermore beat us at the regional competition.

Awesome!

Prince Rupert’s Drops

Just saw these on hackaday.com. Very cool little things. You can read up on Prince Rupert’s Drops at Wikipedia, but the basic idea is this: Drop molten glass into a cold bucket of water. A tadpole-shaped piece of glass is formed in a way that produces a huge amount of tension within the glass. On the big tadpole end, you can hit it with a hammer, and unlike ordinary glass it won’t break. (Due to the high tension and the egg-like shape distributing the force.) However, if you even scratch the tiny tadpole tail, the entire thing explodes into tiny little shards, almost instantly. (The exploding front propagates down the tail toward the head at ~4200 mph = Mach 5.5)

Even if you didn’t read the above paragraph and/or didn’t care, check out this video of Prince Rupert’s Drops exploding from museumofglass.org. It’s awesome.

It’s not every day I screw up as badly as I did last night. That problem I was working on? Definitely didn’t read the statement closely enough. My 10 equations would have been great, except that at least 3 were based on a component of the circuit that I was supposed to remove, per the problem. That kind of thing makes me feel really stupid, especially given how much sleep I lost over it…

On a better note, here’s a humorous quote from my ECE 230 prof. just now, as he introduced reactive power (aka imaginary power):
“With all the government regulation of power recently, more and more economists are getting involved in power systems. The problem is, economists don’t understand why they should have to pay for “imaginary” power. If we call it reactive power, they don’t know what it is, so they’re willing to pay something for it. Economists aren’t real good with complex numbers…”

P.S. This is the 4th time I’ve edited this message to try to get it formatted decently. Lessons learned:

• Blogger.com sucks at HTML. Use real tags, less <span>ing just to make things bold.
• Don’t use mail2web.com to send a post to Blogger via email. It adds advertising.
• Don’t try to do anything on a PocketPC. Are you listening Microsoft? Internet Explorer 4.01 should have died years ago. It should not ship with Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.

That’s all.