So grades came out recently and I looked mine over. Y'know what's odd, there seems to be an inverse relationship between my grades and how difficult a semester is. This bodes well for next semester I guess...
I apologize to anyone who was actually hoping I'd post about the workings of OlinDocs. I've entered vacation-mode and it seems unlikely I'll get real things done until next week. It's worth noting that my brain sometimes considers this stuff as fun, so it could get done...
The title to this post describes something I partook of yesterday and today (by the Borisian definition of day). I hadn't done it in a really long time. There's apparently a big difference between free time where I read something for fun or play video games or even take a nap and free time where I just don't do anything. My mind even managed to go for hours at a time without thinking of how to make OlinDocs work or efficiently or what things I should learn over the summer or... etc.
Moral: Nothing is rather nice; even for someone who near-worships efficiency.
If nothing else, at least this website has given me a lot to blog about.
I will get to the internals. Really. You'll get the juicy python and javascript. But. I just added a feature so maybe I'll babble about that instead. Or wait. I can do some javascript and my new feature. Hoorah!
All right. So I set up a wiki. I set it up to allow people to describe documents. I originally considered putting something directly on OlinDocs in the results, but, honestly, more than 10 results is a ways to scroll without each result being twice as long by virtue of a description paragraph. Also, now other people can do the work instead of me. Yay!
I'm using Netcipia for my Wiki needs. It can host blogs, pics, and of course wikis. You get 2 GB of space, unlimited users can use your wiki for unlimited time, you get a place name (placename.netcipia.net) and you get a decent amount of control over your place and who can see, edit and comment on it. Hot. Right now I just have it fully open; hopefully I don't have to change that ever. I'm not sure if you have to be an user of netcipia in general to edit... if so I'll just make an account for general anonymous OlinDocs use.
Despite Netcipia going all buggy yesterday for a couple of hours when I was testing some new code and making me think I was wrong, I decided that I heart it anyways. (That harrowing experience felt something like working on a circuit for hours only to find that the chip your using had been dead). Anyhow, I wrote them for support and they fixed it. It was kinda neat cuz they said you could write in English, Spanish or French; since I know all three to varying degrees, I wrote in all three for them. w00t!
So. Now I had a wiki set up. I used some python magic that I'll talk about some other day to build myself a database that had links to unique wikis for each document. (This does assume that no two documents with the same name and file extension will coexist, but I'd already made that assumption by putting all the documents in the same directory). So. That rocked. Now all of my documents were linked to wikis that could be used to describe or comment (a different section) on them. Cool.
That's kinda nice, but I wanted this all to be searchable for the advanced search page. Lucky for me, Netcipia had me covered and all I had to do was point something at olindocs.netcipia.net/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebSearch?text=$$$ ($$$ represents the search term). Cool.
So. HTML/javascript time: [value="Go" id="wsearch" onclick="window.open(prep_wsearch())" type="button"]. (imagine those are the correct brackets for me ok?) Cool. This makes a button that looks like this: But what does it do?
Well that's the javascript part. I have this little text input box next to the button. It has an ID. I can call it's ID.value to get what's in the input box. then I join that string with the 'olindocs.netcipia.net/.../WebSearch?text=' string and, well, a window is opened at that address. w00t! Feel free to look at the site or its source code: advanced search. There's lots more stuff in there, but I'll get to that some other day as this post is getting unwieldy.
OK.
Here's my website that I was super-excited about: OlinDocs.
This website is for archiving documents made at Olin in a way that's easy-to-find. The goal is to have an answer to "Remember that expo poster someone made? I think it was about chaos and music or something..."
So you head over to OlinDocs and you type Expo into the search box, you go to refine and type chaos and you're good to go. Hot.
So. Obviously I need to get some more documents. Right now it's Meta plus anything I had handy (read new b/c the rest is on my external at Olin and I'm not for the next two weeks) that was worthwhile. If any of you have stuff that you'd like me to put up, send an email to boris@students. I need two things for document submissions.
1-The document
2-Some meta-info
I'd like the meta-info in a file titled db_params.txt it should follow this example:
Class Name
Semester (eg s07 or f06)
Teacher Names (First Last, First Last)
Author Names (First Last, First Last)
Awesome. I hacked together some neat python scripts to put a database together for me, so it's fairly painless (I'll probably post about this and the other mechanics of the site later). Oh yeah. If you're sending in any group documents, could you please run it by the other people first? Sweet.
Edit: If any of the meta-info doesn't make sense for your document (eg it wasn't for any classes), just put it down as - (a dash) and include a note in your e-mail. Thanks!
Oh man. So excited.
Make me happy. Send me stuff. Expo stuff, final deliverables, Capstones, OSS papers... I'm waiting for cool stuff. I might even make the mistake of reading through far more of it than is healthy. Anyways. I'm gonna stop ranting. Sooo excited.
Oh man. I'm working on this really cool website...
It's kinda consumed my life a little bit. I've worked on it for 6 of the last 20 hours. I was asleep for about 9 of those...
Oh well. It's gonna rock. I'd really like to share now, but I need some people to give me a thumbs up first...
Sorry for the tease. I'm just really excited and wanted to tell people. Although only kinda. Anyhow, definitely within two days.
Wow. I haven't written in quite a while. I'll blame projects. And graduation. And packing. And this neat website I'm making. And video games... OK. Fine. I've just been being lazy.
Soooo...
Graduation.
...
I don't even know.
This year I was much (much) closer to the graduating class and it seemed like just about everyone that walked across the stage was a key part of Olin. How can we exist? It seems silly. What is randomness without Lee? What are a billion other facets of Olin life without the people that are attached to them?
I can't believe how sad I got during graduation. It's quite a shock to realize that the people I spent time with sometimes multiple times in a single day will be people who I might go years without seeing.
Then again, I also got pretty happy. These people. These friends I know and trust are going out to the world. I have no doubt that they will do great good. And that makes me... uhmmm... proud. I feel like pride should be the territory of parents and such, but that is how I feel.
Class of 2007: My hat's off to you. Thanks for everything.
Here's a sneak peek of my expo presentation for tomorrow. It's about gaining insight into pedagogy by using an analogy to communications.
The general gist is that teachers are considered transmitters and students are considered receivers. In between, you have a lossy channel. That should make the first three pics make sense... at least a little bit.
The last slide is from our implementation of the model for simulation purposes. The waveforms on the right are the filters that the students/receivers use to decode/understand the information sent/taught by the transmitter/teacher. The transmitter/teacher is represented by a big q-mark because it/(he/she) is attempting to use the best possible filter/(pedagogical method) to encode the data.
Interestingly, best can be defined in a multitude of ways. Two examples of possible goals I'll talk about in my presentation tomorrow are (minimizing the total data loss rate)/(maximizing the class' total learning) and (minimizing the maximum individual receiver data loss rate)/(maximizing the minimum learned by any student).
G'luck parsing those sentences.
Time for bed and then expo.
*Exhales*
I'm done with SigSys. I'm done with everything but Meta actually. I ended up really liking my SigSys end-game. I wrote a sweet paper. It's 6 pages long, but highly skimmable. Read the intro to the analogy if you're going to read any of it. It's about a model of the classroom that implements communications ideas. The goal is to be able to better understand pedagogy by linking it to something that is already pretty well-understood.
Man. I really like that paper.
Moving on to things I don't like: stupid people. What the hell. I just don't understand what these people were thinking. This article is about a Vegan couple that's being tried for involuntary manslaughter for the death of their baby who was kept on a diet of soy milk and organic apple juice. Things like this make me so angry. How can they call this involuntary? Ignorance isn't supposed to be protective. As parents they had a duty to know what their child needed. They consciously and purposefully failed to do what they should've done. Arguably they didn't know better, but it was their responsibility to know better. People are frustrating.
I'm really quite good at this whole procrastinating thing. Instead of any work today, I've been all sorts of other things. I've played lots of Magic and Smash, eaten like 5 snacks, watched TV, and, of course, wasted as much time as is easily feasible on the internet. Part of what I worked on was my internet image.
Lifehacker had an article on the googleability of one's name. Mine returns 50 hits (w/o quotes); the first 22 are me. I love my name. I claimed my blog on Technorati, pinged some sites using Pingoat, and set up an account to get site statistics for my blog at StatCounter.
I'd wasted a couple of hours pretty well, but I wasn't done. No ladies and gents. I searched for every variant of my name imaginable. "I wonder how well do I show up with just my last name?" etc. Oh man. I was there forever. Also (for any hippies out ther) I came across an environmentally-friendlier version of Google called Blackle. The idea is that people save energy by reducing their monitor's energy output. Cute huh?
I ended up finding out that some dude with my last name (Stefan Dieseldorff) was on IMDB. He evidently produced a 60 minute film called Kreator: Hallucinative Comas. It doesn't seem like that movie was well-received. Actually, it barely seems like the movie was received at all.
Anyhow, Technorati alerted me to the fact that my blog had been linked to by a sneaky member of the Olin community who's blog is not on PlanetOlin. Speaking of PlanetOlin and other rss readers, I doubt my blog counter will end up getting anyone other than me... oh well.
And now folks, I leave you to do some work. Before I go to sleep I will have finished Signals & Systems work. This means that, after my final at noon, I will only have one class left. Meta. Oh Meta. History paper. Communication paper. Final deliverable. Presentation. I might be missing something? *sigh* I feel sadly unmotivated... Time to get to work. I'll do The SigSys project writeup. That seems awesome still. I'll problably be posting something about that either soonish or around expo time.
So I haven't posted in a while. I've been being really lazy/recovering from school. Oh wait. it's not over. back to work. But before I get back to work...
MindMeister rocks hardcore! This webapp is great! you can make lists of lists with details into a nice mindmap that can collapse or expand etc. Super-nice. And useful since I've got lots to do. I'm currently working on the circled part (click to make it bigger if this is as illegible as I expect).
*sigh
Me and Mr. Red Bull have some work to do.
ZOMG. I hear my blog is the third hit on google if you search "cascodes." *searches...
Oh man! It's true!:
That's insane. Haha.
Big plans for rice. We're getting another rice cooker! In the near future, we'll hook up Bryce's 3-cup model to give our 10-cup a little boost (we run out every day). We'll see if we end up using both of the 10-cup versions. If not, we're still planning on running this out of both dorm buildings next year so we need two anyhow. Oh man. This is nuts. Just for reference, we've eaten about 90 pounds of rice since after spring break. Super-intense.
Great happiness! I'm not moving my blog to Wordpress after all. It turns out that if I put in the html tags [em] and [b] manually, my formatting shows up just fine on rss feeds. Unfortunately, the blogger defaults use things like [span style="font-weight: bold;"]. Oh well. I can do it by hand. No big, I like Blogger better anyways for now.
Kind of random, I need to train up for the Super Smash Bros Tournament!! I'm sooo out of practice; I have no idea which three characters to play. I think I'll do falcon, pika and jiggly? I dunno. I really want my ness in there, but I'm mostly sucking big-time with him at the moment. Samus is also really nice at this point, but I should probably stick with the three I named. The other cool thing could be Samus, Link, Yoshi. That'd be so many style points... then again, I have a way of getting mad style points with falcon and jiggly anywho.
Not random enough? How about a book recommendation? Everyone should read the Death Gate Cycle (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman). It super-awesomely-fantabulous. These aret he people that brought us Dragonlance and the darksword trilogy. But this is far, far better. This is what fiction should always be like. It's a 7 book series (really a 4 book series with 3 more books added) and the 7th is my favorite book ever. I don't normally count it b/c it requires one to have read the other 6 for it to be so good. Another couple of good books are The Stand, the Dark Half, and Insomnia (all Stephen King). Those are awesome too. OK. enough random add thoughts for now.
People are so predictable. It was a normal evening. All of a sudden people realize that the water's out. Oh noes. What now? Well... people start to feel exceptionally thirsty. People actually became thirsty because there was no water to be had. It's pretty weird to think that thirst is caused by both how hydrated you are and your body's best prediction of future hydration. It makes perfect sense and is an obvious survival tool, but it still seems silly. That being said, I noticed that people were reacting in that silly way, but it didn't keep me from doing the same. Oh well.
Oh man. The end is near. One more circuits postlab. One UOCD design review. One FBE presentation and one FBE video. For sigsys: a short writeup of our project and one homework assignment. And for Meta... Well OK. Maybe the end isn't so close there, but that'll get done too.
