05.29.06
Posted in General at 9:02 pm by Nick
First, happy memorial day. Hope it was good for everyone. I went to a picnic and got to see a bunch of family, so that was fun and entertaining (despite the 95 degree weather).
Looks to be a very busy week, though not nearly as bad as next week. I had a fun week last week, but I slacked a hell of a lot. Lets see if I can manage to finish out this year with a lick of sanity. Luckily both of my high school finals are on Friday, so that is effectively my last day (though I’ll be continuing work past that). Let me know if anyone is up for doing anything on June 5th (the Monday it all ends) for lunch or something.
Now, onto Simon and Garfunkel. Last night I stumbled upon their stong The Sound of Silence and these lines caught me eye:
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
I found myself listening to this song constantly for almost and hour just pondering over this. Can you even imagine a world without communication? It would stop everything. It would stop business, the economy, and all relationships. It would stop the world, and it would stop love.
I suppose my point is thus: we humans seem to rarely listen to eachother (that is, truly, deeply listen to eachother). Try listening to eachother. Really listen. Pick up the emotions behind someones words (or lack there of). Understand their point of view. Focus on their facial expressions, body language, and thier actions. Much of the time there is far more to a message than the words. Just listen and watch for it. You’ll gain not only a deeper understanding of their message, but a deeper understanding of the person providing the message.
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05.23.06
Posted in Programming, ALPHA, Computer Science at 10:50 pm by Nick
Time: 1 hour
Total: 77 hours
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With a tad bit of spurring from Wade I turned the code in my AIM info into a real working program. This inspired a friend of mine to attempt to write a “sanity program” in Ruby. The code itself seems almost poetic, though it accomplishes nothing. Interestingly enough the program actually reflects moods, and when I lower the homework/academic levels to lower (and currently unrealistic) numbers the program stays sane longer.
The original code is still within my info, though since it looks bad I will not post it here.
You can find the sanity program (executable and code) in its entirety at http://ew.xidus.net/download/sanity
[edit]
After reviewing the code, there is one thing that I think definitely needs changing. I am referring to these two lines:
short percent_to_help_sanity = (NICKS_CARING_FRIENDS*10) > 100 ? 100 : (NICKS_CARING_FRIENDS*10);
short percent_to_hurt_sanity = 100-(percent_to_help_sanity/2);
According to the way it is written, the higher the help_sanity, the higher the hurt_sanity as well. That doesnt really make sense, though it worked before because it checks the sanity range first. A more accurate line for hurt_sanity would be:
short percent_to_hurt_sanity = 100-(100/(percent_to_help_sanity > 0 ? percent_to_help_sanity : 5)*2);
So, best case scenario, percent_to_hurt_sanity would be 98+. Worst case, 60+ would be hurt_sanity and helpping it would be impossible.
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05.21.06
Posted in General at 9:14 pm by Nick
Twas quite the crazy day. Jumped in the car and headed for CF from Iowa City. Arrived and immediately left for open houses with Mandy. We ended up listening to Tripod for a portion of the trip, so I’m slowly spreading the word of the amazing Australian band. Their music is quite humerous.
1. First we went to Steve McCrea’s open house/retirement party thing. Lots of good sweet food, and the house as flipping amazing. Mandy left a note saying we were going to hijack the house 
2. Next we went to Aviva’s recital. Sadly we couldn’t stay for much of it. We had to leave after two songs, and I didn’t really get to say much to Aviva or Wade. Nice work on the music Aviva!
At Aviva’s we picked up Ryan and went to his house for a bit of downtime. We left rather quickly, but not after listening/watching some amusing songs/videos on the ‘net.
3. Next we went to Devan’s open house. Twas very nice, and I got cheese cake. It was a little strange seeing the owner of The Core outside of his store.
4. Across the street was Maggie’s and Aditi’s party. That certainly was interesting. Some amazing food, and they both sang which was cool (awesome job!). At this point we really started picking up the pace since a lot of people had their open houses start at 2pm.
5. Next up was the open house for Brendan/Caitlyn (sp?) Rose. I don’t know them very well, this was more of Ryan’s party. Mandy did feed me the (gummy) worm from Ryan’s dirt cup, and they had free Four Queen’s ice cream (which I failed to take advantage of). I also got Ryan in trouble somewhat after I confirmed that he was lying to them about leaving the house open (I did tell him he should close the garage door).
6. Off we went to Andy Fee’s (or is it Fi?) grad. party at Hartman. We parked a ways away from it and Ryan decided he didn’t feel like walking so he drove Mandy’s car up to the place. Mandy and I walked through the wilderness. Its very nice out there. The grad party had some good pictures (and walking taco’s, another good food which I (due to previous eating) failed to take advantage of).
7. Next we went to Megan Rutzmoser (again, sp?) party. Here we found Dwayne, Schaeffer, Wes, and Paul. Twas quite interesting. Again with awesome pictures and amazing food (white chocolate covered strawberries, mini pizzas). Dwayne hit his head on one of the lights which was amusing (happens somewhat frequently with us tall people). Ryan rode halfway in the trunk to this party, and was again in the trunk for the next.
8. Lastly we visited (albeit briefly) Amanda’s. Very nice house! There was some Frisbee going on that I didn’t participate in. Twas pretty tired and relatively stuffed at this point.
Later Mandy and I went to her house to work on a paper. I ended up having dinner there (twas quite good), and I got them to order some parts off New Egg to upgrade their computer a bit (256MB ram and 20 gigs 
now they will have a total of 512MB ram and a brand spankin new 80gig hard drive).
So now I sit here, tired from a busy day of essentially doing nothing but socialize. I think I’ll turn in and sleep for a bit. Hopefully I can work on some papers before school tomorrow (which starts at 1:19pm ).
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Posted in General at 9:13 pm by Nick
Fienup e-mailed me and said I got a 103/110 on my final at UNI. I’ll have an A in the class if I can get the last assignment done. This is somewhat exciting since I felt terrible when I left after taking it (it took 1 hour and 45 minutes for an open book, open note final).
Also, I went with Dan and my dad to see the Da Vinci Code movie. Twas quite good. It followed the book very well and the movie was very crisp. Some of the scenes were dumb (like where the chick tried walking on water as a joke). Overall I’d say it was a great movie (a movie that did the book justice). It should make a lot of money.
I do think, however, that some of the little kids that were in the movie theatre shouldn’t have been there. The movie wasnt overly graphic and contained no nudity, but the scenes where Sila’s chastised his body (especially when he changed which leg his crazy leg thing was on) were not for small kids.
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05.14.06
Posted in ALPHA, KaladeaMUD at 10:26 pm by Nick
Time: 1 hour
Total: 76 hours
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The rest of my project will be devoted to planning out KaladeaMUD and quite possibly sticking it into a Wiki. While I have much to do (and little time for programming), I hope to read more of Bartle’s book and figure out more of the issues.
I also figured there is quite a bit more reading I need to do in general. I should check to see what introductory economic majors at UNI use and read most of it. The worst thing for an online game is a super inflated currency. Hopefully come next year I’ll begin programming on it again, and this time with a battle plan.
In the mean time I will, over the summer and perhaps sometime soon, be learning both Ada and Lua. Lua looks to be the best scripting language to tie into Kaladea, and Ada is the language of choice for CS III. Now, I have pretty much skated through CS I and CS II without much strife or personal investmet. I doubt CS III will be the same way, so I’m looking forward to learning a new language.
In other news, I have one assignment (one extra credit assign if I can muster it) before I take my last final at UNI. To get an A in the class I need a 92% on the final. However, to settle for an A- I need to get a 66% on the final, and since the class average was 71% I’m guessing I should at least get that.
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05.07.06
Posted in General at 12:43 pm by Nick
Due to Nick May’s request, you can now subscribe to comments. I tested it briefly and it appears to work, so we’ll see how it goes.
On a different note, I have changed the font that I program in. I review several, and I went with Anonymous because of it pretty clearn and crisp appearance, and its fairly easy to tell the difference between l and 1. This is also due to David Haley, since one of his Rarely Asked Questions is about his programming fonts.
[update]
All comments from non-users (that is, everyone but me) now require a security code image to work correctly. In recent days I have been absolutely annhilated by comment spam(150+ over the weekend), so hopefully this should help.
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05.04.06
Posted in Programming, ALPHA, Computer Science at 5:01 pm by Nick
Time: 3 hours
Total: 75 hours
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Recently I’ve been catching up on school, which means my Computer Org. homework. For assignment 6 we had to write up the quicksort algorithm to sort and array in MIPS. This is an annoying task, but I finally got it worked out due to my awesome professor. I decided to write up the algorithm in C++ and use template’s so it could work with many datatypes.
The algorithm is a very fast recursive way for sorting arrays. For example, on Sidhe, it took 14 seconds to sort 5 million random integers from 1 to 10,000. This is very good performance!
The code was tested sorting floats (numbers with decimal points), characters (A-Z and a-z), and integers. All elements were thrown into the array at random. The output files below are 500 random element arrays. Also, in the link found below you can find the code for both the C++ version and the MIPS (assembly) version.
Code and output -> http://ew.xidus.net/download/qsort
I also posted on Gammon’s forum about this. The post may eventually contain responses on the code above:
http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=6526&page=999999
[update]
David “Ksilyan” Haley gave me an example of passing arguments through templates instead of using defines, which you can find at: http://david.the-haleys.org/programming/misc/quicksort-template.cpp.html
Also backed up locally for reference at: http://ew.xidus.net/download/qsort/files/ksilyan-qsort-template.html
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