Trains

It's finished! Yay! We had our demo on Friday. Unfortunately, our stuff didn't work as well in the demo as it had the night before (famous last words). Our final project was "follow the leader," which was apparently very popular this term. The idea is basically to put all the trains in a loop on the track, and have them be evenly spaced out. So the difficult problems are merging new trains into the loop, and maintaining constant velocity.

The latter may not sound very difficult, but believe me, it is. The trains have speed settings, like speed 5 or speed 10. But that means nothing in terms of actual physical speed in cm/s. One train might go at 15cm/s at speed 5, another might only go at 10cm/s. So you have to be constantly updating the speed estimates for the trains and dynamically changing their speeds to keep them all going at roughly the same speed.

Anyway, we managed to get 8.5/10 on the project even though it didn't work as well as it should have, so I'm not too upset. It's odd though; the whole term, all these months of hard work, culminates in a 20 minute demo. The prof seemed distinctly uninterested; I can't blame him, either. Our demo was at 4:20 pm and he'd been seeing demos since 9 am. It's just odd to have all this stuff that you've been devoting your life to for months suddenly be turned into a number and become irrelevant. That's school for you, I guess.

And although I did learn a lot of stuff, most of it didn't really have to do with real-time programming. I became much better at low-level programming, learned about x86 architecture, designed some graph algorithms, and generally, I think, just became a bit of a better programmer. But the actual real-time component of the project was pretty small.

Anyway, with that, I leave you with one last screenshot. This is our track simulator, with 3 trains in the loop, and a 4th one merging in at the bottom. The red boxes are trains, and the circles are their "slots" in the loop. The program constantly computes the distance between trains and their slots, updates speed estimates, and adjusts train speeds. It also updates the slot targets when new trains are added, and computes merge targets for new trains based on their locations.

Cap'n! There be trains here!

Life

Feeling a bit poor these days, due to it being near the end of term and my having spent a bunch of money on things for next term, like my flight, my visa, and a month's rent. Needless to say, Christmas will be going on plastic :) But I'll become rich as soon I get my first paycheque at Google, so I should be able to squeeze through without too much trouble.

Will probably be coming to Montréal next weekend with mrwise. Hopefully I'll get to see a few of you NITIots. I'll post the details of when we're coming and all that when I have them.

December 09, 2004 (link)

Life

Watch out, NITIots! mrwise and I are coming to Montréal this weekend to grace you with our magnificent presence. e-mail me if you want to go out for beers or foos or something.

More poking and prodding by medical experts, including an annoying test next week where I can't eat anything for a day. On the plus side, the specialist gave me a prescription for B12, so I can stop feeling shitty while they do all this stuff :)

And I'm so gonna look for a bank account that gives me a free gun when I'm in the states!

Exams

They suck. I procrastinated an incredible amount studying for my CS 370 exam I had today, and now I'm glad I did. It was dead easy, not worth even the paltry amount of studying I did do. Mon examen de français est demain. Je pense qu'il sera assez facile; mon français écrit n'est pas très mal. Ce qu'il faut améliorer, c'est mon français oral. C'est un peu bizarre je suppose; je connais beaucoup de personnes qui trouvent l'inverse. C'est peut-être que pour moi, c'est plus facile d'obéir les régles de grammaire que d'oser parler.

CUPS

hub: you may want to dig around in Niti's CVS a bit. I remember writing a patch to CUPS that made it start up considerably faster, for an old version of ExpressionDesktop. I don't remember what happened to it, but my guess is "nothing." :) I'm not sure if it would still be relevant, but it's probably worth a look.

December 17, 2004 (link)

Moving

It sucks. I can't believe I do it every term. I spent the better part of this week packing my stuff, cramming it into my sister's Tercel, and dropping it off at a storage locker. I think the most impressive was when I got my entire bed, frame and futon, into the car, along with several boxes and a bike. I never knew Tercels could do that :)

I managed to sucker one of my friends into keeping both my computer and our file server at his place. Once he saw the music collection, it wasn't hard to convince him :) So I should be able to get at all of it while I'm down south, and my web page should still work. Anybody know any good streaming music servers? I think I used icecast when I was in England, is it still the best way to go?

School

My next exam is tomorrow. It's physics, and should be easy. I'll have to study a bit, but not much.

I'm currently procrastinating writing a paper for my music course. The prof extended the deadline so we could just hand it in at the exam (which, for that course, is on Monday). The extended deadline is, as always, a mixed blessing. I'm sure glad I didn't have to write the stupid thing while finishing up my real-time project, though.

Montréal

Had a great time seeing a bunch of you NITIots last weekend. It was good to catch up with you and rest a bit.

mrwise shows off his classy table manners

Descartes doing what she does best

While sitting here procrastinating, I came across some photos from the summer that I don't think I posted before, but which brought back some good memories...

Andrew and pmccurdy go at the beer at Oka

mrwise gives us his usual smile

WvMAPI

I intended to get in on the hackfest with wlach, but with moving and packing and everything, didn't quite manage it. Anyway, it's my intention to do some work on WvMAPI in my free time over the next term, for my "NDF" at Google. I'd like to do all the async stuff I talked about in my work report, add in the attAttachment stuff, and write some EPlugins for Evolution.

Some might say I'm insane, but I really want the satisfaction of cleaning it up, and I've gotten a number of winmail.dat attachments lately, so that's sort of prodded me along.

December 18, 2004 (link)

Stupid house

No fucking water.. AGAIN. Notice that no water means no coffee, which is an extremely bad thing! We're currently boiling snow water in pots on the stove, at which point we'll run it through a Brita and I can hopefully get my fix.

(And yes, andrew, the snow was yellow. How'd you know?)

December 30, 2004 (link)

Christmas

Had my last exam, trains, last Wednesday. I brought all my luggage to the exam, since I had to catch the 5:00 Greyhound out of Waterloo to catch an airport shuttle in Toronto at 7:30 to catch my flight at 9:00. After that it was serveral mad days of shopping and cooking, all culminating Christmas day in a feast for our family.

It was fun, but extremely tiring. Hopefully the rest of my time here in Calgary will be a bit more relaxing.

amps in a festive mood

My parents gave me a Rio Karma 20GB mp3 player. Unfortunately, it hasn't arrived yet so I haven't had a chance to play with it, but I'm looking forward to it. Plays ogg, flac, mp3, wma and has an ethernet HTTP interface (in addition to USB 2.0) to alleviate all your cross-platform woes :)

But possibly the coolest gift Santa brought this Christmas was the Gender Bender robot for my friend thapthim.

Gender Bender gives us a show

Skiing

Tuesday I went skiing with amps and my grampa, and it was a lot of fun. In addition it was a beautiful day and the mountains were gorgeous. I'd forgotten what crisp, winter mountain air was like, not having been skiing in several years.

View from near the top of Sunshine's angel chair

Sysadmin

My sysadmin duties for my family have begun. Spent last night doing an unconventional install of Ubuntu on my sister's laptop. Her cd-rom drive wasn't playing nicely so I had to use install floppies (blech) for Sarge and a statically-compiled debootstrap to get it going.

Today I updated my parents to Fedora Core 3, which went pretty smoothly, and before I leave I need to set up an APC UPS on the little router/DNS/SMTP server, which should be easy except it's running a 2.2 kernel, so some hackery may be required.

My parents do in fact run Linux, but that's not as amazing as it might sound, since my dad is a CS prof at the University of Calgary and he's a UNIX greybeard, so he knows what he's doing. Still, they have surprisingly few problems with Fedora these days, which is a good sign.

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Next: January 2005