Tim’s Blog

At 2:19 am this morning, someone visited this site using their AvantGo cellphone/pocket pc/palm pilot. If that person can leave a comment telling how it looked, that would be great. AvantGo has a great webpage desctibing how to make pages designed for their products. I looked at it briefly and decided it was too much work considering only one person has ever visited my webpage with a handheld device.

Last night I started to write another update but firefox decided to crash. That kind of irked me. So now I will attempt to recreate what I have already written.

nVidia recently announced their new chipset, the nForce4. Finally there is a consumer motherboard that has both PCI Express and support for a 64 bit processor. Now all I need is a couple thousand dollars to buy a motherboard with the nForce4 sli chipset, an Athlon 64 4000+ processor, 2 gigabytes of OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev. 2 RAM and 2 nVidia 6800 Ultra (PCI Express) graphics cards. MMmmmm… That would be nice. Oh well, the computer I have now still runs great.

I finally feel pretty good about my electrical engineering class. I now feel confident in my ability to use Kirchoff’s and Ohm’s laws to find the current and voltage in different parts of a circuit of resistors. Hopefully the test I have tomorrow will go okay.

I decided to tweak my website. I have been rather busy lately and have been neglecting my website. I finally visited it today and realized that the database file containing the information about visitors was larger than the database file containing my blog. So I decided that I should write an update. As I was thinking about what to write, I decided that I needed to put up a counter on the main page. So I spent a couple minutes researching
how to count the number of lines in an array and I put up a simple counter located at the bottom of the menu bar.

Since I was logged in to the server, I decided to also cut down the number of entries shown on the main page. It was getting kind of long. So I am in the middle of making a index.html file similar to the index.php file that is present in all websites powered by wordpress. I have come to realize that I am modeling my site similar to wordpress. It would probably be easier just to download wordpress, but it is more fun to do the coding myself.

Eventually I want to have a graph showing the number of visitors per day. I looked up how to do it in php, it looks kind of difficult. When I compiled php on my server, I neglected to install the gd package which allows php to generate graphics. This was mainly due to that fact that I was not sure if I had libpng or libjpeg installed. Therefore, without a reinstall of php, I cannot easily add a graph using php. I was thinking about making a java applet to graph the data, but that sounds too much like school work. Maybe I will work on it later when I am feeling more motivated.

This unfortunate message was sent out on the pnw-first email list: “Titan Robotics (team 492) is short on cash. Barring a very successful fund raising drive, we’re not going to make this one.” Unless a member of the TRC has a suggestion, I suppose all I can do from here in Montana is hope that the TRC manages to scrape together enough money for another FIRST season.

That’s right. It’s snowing. So far there is about 4 inches of snow on the ground. I took some pictures. I suppose that this is how it is in Montana. I had better get used to it. They had machines clearing the sidewalks almost immediately after the snow started. Supposedly snow in mid-October is normal. I remember a couple of years ago Snoqualmie opened up before Thanksgiving. That was a big deal. Hopefully Bridger Bowl will not open up until just after Thanksgiving, I would hate to lose snowboarding time because I don’t have my snowboard here.

I have been kind of busy. I have also been procrastinating a lot. In fact, when I think about it, I do not have more to do than before, I am just procrastinating more. Oh well. That’s college for you.

I had to write a long paper for my english class. It was a standard 5 paragraph, 2-3 page paper. The teacher was talking about how the paper had to be really good and how we had to really dig deep and get good ideas. Then she went on to explain to us about how to write a 5 paragraph paper and how to formulate a thesis. Wow. Mrs. Hood taught this to me a long time ago, like in 8th grade. The teacher then started to tell us about some of the common mistakes of a ‘high school’ writer. It was very similar to the speech that Boxy gave us about common mistakes of a middle school writer. Needless to say, the rough draft of the essay took me about 1.5 hours to complete. One of the main differences between high school and college english is the style of writing expected. I decided to push the limits on profanity on one of my recent papers. I got a 100%. I have since realized that the grade I receive on a paper is in direct correlation with the amount of profanity I use.

I have continued to participate in the BarnacleSat meetings. I still know virtually nothing about satellites and what exactly we are going to do. I have come to the realization that a satellite is something like a robot. Only much much more complex. Unlike a FIRST robot, there is no ‘hacking’ to get a piece to fit. Or hoping that a certain voltage will be enough. Or not knowing the exact current draw of the entire robot at any given time. Right now we are going to the other 2 satellite groups at MSU and asking them about their satellites. In FIRST we spend no more than a couple of days planning the robot, hopefully only 2-3 so a rolling chassis can be assembled within the first week. For a satellite, the entire thing has to be planned out, not only mechanically, but also electrically. If I don’t get too intimidated and leave, I will definitely learn a hell of a lot from this.

In other news, I took another math exam last week. I feel fairly confident that I aced every question except one, and I am pretty sure I got that one right as well. I made sure that I explained all my work so they can’t take away any of my precious points. Hopefully it will all turn out OK in the end.

I decided to run a small application called driftnet on my computer running linux. It sniffs the network for pictures being transferred and displays them in a window. In hindsight, I suppose that running it on Saturday night was a bad idea. I should have run it on a school night when people are looking at more academic web sites. I was kind of surprised that the program found any pictures at all. It supposedly only works on non-switched networks. I was under the impression that the network here was switched. Oh well.

My grandparents and Carly are here for family weekend. Yesterday we went to some dinner where we were served mediocre food and were given a speech that was somewhat pointless. It was given by the dean of students and basically bragged about the school. I am already going here, I don’t need to here how great this school is. Then this morning, I went to breakfast with them. I am not used to having breakfast on the weekends. I usually am lucky to wake up in time for lunch. But I was forced to wake up at 9:50. After breakfast we went to the football game between MSU and Portland State. We came back and tied the game in the last 4 seconds after being down 10-21 at halftime. Then we won in overtime. After the game we went out to dinner at Applebee’s followed by listening to a comedian back at the University. It was a much more productive day than most of my Saturdays.

I am almost finished assembling the robot for electrical engineering 101. The board itself looks pretty neat. From the looks of it, I am going to be able to a whole bunch of fun stuff with it. I am particularly excited about the four digit led numbers. Unfortunately, I just looked on the EE101 website and found that we are going to use the MC9S12C32 microcontroller, but it is going to be mounted on the M68MOD912C32 module which will include pre-programmed programs. That really disappoints me. I want to program it myself. Pre-made programs are no fun. Of course if I follow the directions of the university and try to graduate in 4 years with a degree in computer engineering, I won’t learn C until the first semester of my junior year. I may try and take it next semester just because I want to know C. I decided that once I figure out how to program this robot, I want to put on a gyroscope and make a balancing robot.

I have been getting involved on a student led project to build a satellite. The satellite will hold some DARPA provided payload and will be launched on the side of a Delta rocket next winter. The satellite is going to be small, about the size of a football and will weigh no more than a couple of kilograms. The team assembling it consists of about 15 students of all grade levels and majors. Right now we don’t really know what the satellite is going to do or what its mission will be. The project name is BarnacleSat because it will be launched in a capsule attached to the side of a Delta II rocket. I would point you in the direction of the BarnacleSat website, but it seems that they just finished installing Apache and don’t have it back up yet. UPDATE: Nevermind, it is already back up.

In other news I got back my first computer science test today. Considering the average score was very very low, I am proud of my 86%. However I completely disagree with the format of the test. The test was hand written so we did not have the use of a compiler or the internet. That is incredibly stupid. I can’t think of a time that I will be programming without a compiler and the internet. Tests should be in the format here is a problem, solve it with the use of a computer. Oh well.

Well I watched the presidential debates. Ouch. I was surprised how much both candidates sucked. It is going to be a very close race. The one thing that I am most concerned about is the exit strategy for Iraq. It seems to me that neither president has a strategy at all. Both of them say that they are going to get the soldiers home as soon as possible. What a bunch of bull shit. Neither of them has a plan to get the soldiers out quickly. I suppose that I will just have to pick the lesser of two evils. I taped the debate on my computer and watched it again afterwards, then I had an interesting debate with a couple of republicans. One of them was very well informed and beat me horribly.

One thing that really ticks me off is how some people say they are going to do something then back down, for whatever reason. As you may have guessed, the fact that I am writing this update now means that I am not camping. Erik found out that he had a meeting with a psychiatrist at 4:30 today. That meant that we would not have enough time to get out and get hiking before it got dark. And he decided that he wanted to be here for Sunday so we could not go tomorrow night. I need a car so that I can go whenever I want to and I don’t have to rely on other people to give me rides. Oh well. I will just have to keep trying to get people to take me backpacking.