May 4, 1999 15:11

Hello all this is my page that I am going to develop over the course of the summer to keep track of my Summer of '99 activities. I am really looking forward to this summer. I have got lots of free time lined up and I am going to get to work on some really cool stuff I think. In my ever copious free time I have been thinking a bit about things that I would like to do. I reckon I'll start from there.

My list as it exists thus far is: No problem right. =) Finals are not yet over and the summer hasn't actually begun but I think that this is doable. If over the course of time I discover that it is not then plans will change. I am few things if not adaptable.

As for right now I am putting some of the foundation that I am going to be working on out there. This webpage is a part of that. It helps me alot to keep stuff sorted out. That way I can see where I'm getting stuff done and where I'm not. It is hard to tell sometimes when your right in the middle of it, ya know?

One of my biggest things is going to be what I will be working at, the Java 3d robotics project. I currently am going to be getting paid for 20 hours a week on it and that ought to prove to be alot of java 3d. =) Just yesterday morning a final design document was turned in for the project concerning the work that was done on the project by Andy Trent, Danyel Bruggink and myself. All told those pages proved to be quite extensive.

For now though the main thing on my plate is a 240 project concerning minimum edit distance between two strings I think that I am going to write a short spiel on that so that I can understand it myself and who knows maybe it will be useful to someone else some day.
May 7, 1999 7:58 AM

I have no clue how do use emacs. I am currently editing this file using it and things are interesting to say the least. It seems to be a very complex and complete program, I just don't know how to use it. =)

Update for this morning. Well, yesterday Melissa broke up with me so it looks like the whole develop a relationship with her thing is out. That sucks. I am thinking that in its stead I would like to paint maybe. From what I hear there is nothing like love lost to fuel a man's artistic passions. =) I am wanting to do a mural for the house that I am living in. There are a bunch of cats that live with me and the litter box is in the bathroom. Subsequently there is a constant layer of litter all around; a fact which is for me reminiscent of the beach. I made a couple of little drawings on sheets of paper and ticky-tacked them to the wall, but the high humidity in there keeps making them fall down. I'm thinking that if I did something bigger not only would it be more grand and complete but I could also attach it with more permanence.

What got me thinking about it was that last night I went over to see my old house (1340 North Dixie) with Bridget Meyer who is soon to become one of the new occupants (in the fall.) Bridget is a housing and design major and good at it. She was talking about all the cool things that they are doing to the house and honestly I would say that it already looks better than it did when I lived there.

But it got my juices flowing and making me think that maybe I could do a little something to spruce up the place where I am now and make it a better place to live. Bridget's good for that whole inspiration bit. =)

Well, I am off now to hunt some breakfast.
May 10, 1999 9:50 PM

You know what I really wish I knew how to use emacs. I can see that it has put me in a special sgml editing mode but I have no idea what the ramifications of this are or how to find out. Not only that but I don't know how to tell it to word wrap. Ah well, that can go on the things to do list.

Speaking of said list I have some developments. I have been home for about a day now and thus far most of my time had been devoted to sorting through the pile of hardware that I brought back with me and trying to get everything connected properly. Thanks to the magical wonders of Win95 I can either connect to the internet or connect to my LAN. Nice, huh? I am thinking that it is because in the TCP setup for one I have to let it pull an address from (what the hell is the dynamic IP addressing program called? It was in my head til I tried to type it. Arrg.) DHCP (right?) anyhow, on the lan I give it a static IP and this screws with it connection to the internet (I'm thinking.)

I hope to switch over and use a Linux box as a gateway to proxy to the Windows machines but I am considering waiting on that since I have a copy of Redhat 6.0 on order and I'm planning on just wiping the Linux box and putting that on there so I'd just have to do it again.

On the java front I have yet again filled my plate fairly completely. Priority number one is of course the robotics project, but also I am interested in learning the servlet API and the databasing API. The databasing API might be useful with the robotics project since we are planning on giving the programmer the capacity to reference an object by an ID and issue a pickup ID command and have the robot query a database for which object ID is exactly and where it is. Andy was thinking that it was unnecessary to include something as complex as the JDBC and that may well be the case; I'll make a further determination later.

I am trying to think of something productive to do with this. My best idea so far I think is to set up an online database for the Honors Program which maintains a list of their BigSibs and lets the Little Sibs register online and pick possible Sibs. Sounds neat enough; it may mean though that in order to run it honors has to subdomain which I personally think would be cool anyhow. =) honors.tntech.edu; it has a certain ring to it.

In other news I am reading a book called Moral Development, Moral Education, and Kohlberg edited by Brenda Munsey and published by Religious Education Press in 1980. I've been writing about it a bit. I'll sent those notes to this account and put them on a page.
May 18, 1999 7:25 PM

I've been away for a while. I've been up to my ears in computer parts for the last five days trying to get my Linux machine to dial into the ISP and establish a connection but it firmly refuses.

It is the damnedest thing really. It will dial the modem correctly but it doesn't register receiving a request for authentication. I know that such a request is being made, the Windows TCP/IP software authenticates just fine. I really am failing to understand it and am giving up for a while. I have learned a helluva lot about how PPP operates on a Linux system and hopefully when I switch over to redhat things will be easy to set up.

I can dial the modem and make a connection but either the server is not requesting authentication or PPPd is not recognizing that it has received it. Another weird thing is that I can manually dial the modem and log in to the ISP but when I then try to run PPPd (which according to the HOW-TO ought to pick up the connection and start a session) it tries then to authenticate and then dies.

Anyhow it is very strange and as of late working with it seems to serve little purpose other than to frustrate me so I am going to devote my energies to other pursuits. Speaking of which I have a complaint yet again about this server. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful to the CSc department for the services that they have provided me. They have been invaluable in helping me with my work and forwarding my education. It has been a consummate pain in my side though the access restrictions that are put on their accounts. First there was a disk quote put on my Linux account with kept me from being able to save all my work, then there was a lockdown on the places where I could map my network disk space from so that I could only work in one room on campus. Then the software that they had installed was so out of date (it was the alpha of the JDK so it would have been free to upgrade.) Now I cannot telnet into this machine unless I go through another server on campus and I cannot FTP into it directly at all. This is really handy seeing as I have work to transfer in from home.

It is just very frustrating to be hindered so needlessly. I had other gripes about the CSc department on another page but a drive crashed in the server and there were no recent backups so all that was lost... But I am waning a bit bitter. To move on...

As I may have mentioned I got a couple of new toys when I got home from school. I have a HP8100 CD-RW which has been neat to play with and I got a hub which is just practical. Also I order a copy of the redhat powertools a while back but I haven't heard anything about them. Last I read they were having to revise them some to work with the 6.0 release and I reckon they're waiting to ship them til they get it working right.

Among the CD's that I have burned is a complete backup of my mp3 collection. I have quite a few many of which are just cd's that I owned that I just ripped and compressed since I don't have a cd player really and I got a nice set of speakers for my computer a while back along with an 8 gig drive. So I now have 8 cd's worth of mp3's give or take a few megs. I am trying to upload those lists so I can search them and let other people look at them, but again I'm having to try to weave my way through machines on campus. Here's that list.

I've got got some work started on the java stuff but I'll put that on the appropriate page.
Sunday, May 23, 1999 2:02 PM

Well, I am back at Tech now after a nice two week sabbatical at the Holcomb homestead. Honestly I did not get as much accomplished workwise as I had hoped. A big part of that was my frustration with my work and getting everything set up. I had hoped to go in, order redhat, configure it and do some work under Linux, but I redhat never did come it. I have learned some about emacs and one important part of its usage is the meta key which is equivalent to the alt key on a 104 key keyboard. The problem is that the terminal program QVT-term which is what is installed in the labs and what I am running at home captures the alt keystroke and uses it for its own purposes and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn that behavior off. For example my spelling is really bad because the spell checker is activated through a combination of a meta-x keystroke and I can't make a meta-x keystroke because my meta never gets past QVT-term.

I have however had some luck now with the PPP daemon on my Linux machine. I had the account information for a us internet account and I tried it last night and everything authenticated just fine. So I just put in for an account of my own and I'll be able to connect to this server through Linux. Another plus is that us internet's domain seems to be in the hosts allowed for this machine so I can come straight in.

I guess to recap my weeks at home I would say that the most interesting experience came at the very end. I went to the Barter Theater to see a play called Golf with Alan Sheppard. The play was about a day in the life of four old men. The play was interesting but what really made the evening was my company. I went with a friend of mine from high school named Lindsay Sproles.

On a related note through the course of my life I have met two girls who really did it for me. I can't figure out why exactly but just being around them made me feel happy. I have never dated either of these girls though unfortunately. I have always wondered what it would be like but either my advances have been rejected or I have not been able to get up the courage to make advances. =) It is these rare women though and the rare experiences that I have with them that keeps the fire of my hope alive that there is true romance in the world and all falling in love is not delusion. (Either that or it keeps my own delusion alive. I think it matters little in the end. It's all machio don'cha know.) ;)

Unfortunately both of these girls are at least a couple hundred miles away this summer so it seems that I destined to spend a bit more time dissatisfied. C'est la vie. Things have been coming together well in other areas. I still have faith; but expect that a satisfying life is something that is developed not given. I reckon I can hang in for another 20 years and get it all right. ;)

In vehicle news I did not manage to finagle a car out of my parents. I talked to my dad, with much trepidation, and he said that the way we are moneywise I could have my brothers Ford Taurus SHO and either I could pay the insurance on it and drive it or I could trade it in for a car with less motor and less temptation to speed and drive that. Honestly I could have afforded the SHO. The insurance would have been about $100.00 a month which is no real problem I would just have to no be as free with my money. The thing was that if I took it then my parents wouldn't have it to trade in on a new (used) car for my mom and honestly she has been wanting a car for alot longer than me and really drives alot more than me too. I would certainly like to have a car alot. I could go out and not have to worry about having to find someone to take me, but as for me really needing one, no, I don't. So it looks as though I'll be hitting the pavement for a while longer.

Oh yeah, one more thing before I go to work on the java stuff... I went and downloaded my families old webpage and archived it since it has been sitting on an ISP account the we canceled about two years ago (the page is similarly aged.) Here it is. Also I went and grabbed the online resume that I did for my aunt a while back. If you're an employer, hire her, she's cool. =)
Tuesday, May 25, 1999 9:50 AM

I still have no idea how to use emacs but I am logged i from my Linux machine at my house so at the least I have a meta key. I don't know much to do with it, but it is there. =)

This is just a brief update of the great fitness quest 1999. I went in yesterday and paid $36.00 for a membership to the fitness center and while I was there I had a body composition analysis done so that I would have a concept of where I was to compare to the end of the summer.

Things looked a bit grimmer than I expected them to: 

Body Composition Analysis
Futrex-5000 NIR Assessment

Date of test: 5/24/99

Sex: Male
Current Weight: 181 lbs
Body Frame: Medium
Height: 75 inches
Exercise Level: Light
Body Fat: 19.9%
Fat Weight: 36 lbs
Lean Weight: 145 lbs
Total Body Water: 49.10 liters or 59.7%

Recommended Maximum Weight: Maintain Current Weight
It is not abysmal or anything, but it certainly does leave alot of room for work. I think that when I had it done at the end of last summer I was at about 11 - 12% I'd honestly like to go to about 9 - 10% and be able to see my stomach muscles. I got some nice short sleeved dress shirts from American Eagle that would look really good open if I had the stomach to pull it off.

I am not going to be going too quickly though. I like taking care of my appearance and staying healthy, but there are limits to what is reasonable. Right now I am doing sit-ups and push-ups every day. I am also going to start going and playing around in the fitness center. I hope that there is going to be someone else around to do it with. At the least I hope to get in a couple games of raquetball or something active like that with someone else.

Well, I am going to go eat now. I still haven't quite got my schedule right to get up at 7:00 but it is moving steadily closer (as it must since I have to be at work tomorrow at 8:00 AM.)

Oh yes, in other discipline news I have managed now to sit still (well, not still exactly, but I didn't move physically all that much) for two consecutive nights. It is really challenging for me to do so and though I set out for 15-20 minutes I've only done 10 each night. It is a beginning though. I think that just overcoming my resistance to it and not giving in to the temptation to just go to bed is going to be hard.
Wednesday, May 26, 1999 8:09 AM

Well, I am yet again a loyal helpdesker; boldly serving the computing needs of the University populace. Though as of yet this morning I have printed something out for someone, reset a line printer and told a guy how to find operations. I reckon even superman had slow days though, how else could he get to be a reporter?

I wanted to do a brief update on Hackerkill '99. =) I am connecting to the internet from my house through a Linux box now. Granted can't get it to automatically dial the phone for me but it will cooperate enough to connect when I tell it to. One of the ramifications of running a network ready OS (unlike stinky Windows) is that while I am connected to the rest of the world the rest of the world is connected to me. The main thing was that I had no password on the root account for my machine so if anyone has decided to they could have telnetted to my machine while I was logged in and deleted everything that I have.

Granted that is an unlikely scenario but I have to have some degree of melodrama or else the game isn't any fun. =) How much fun is it for a person to work against a non-existent threat? Either I can be fortifying myself against the wiles of the hacking community on the internet or I can be sitting piddling away my time protecting myself against a non-existent threat. How boring.

I will say though that one of projects that I am toying around with for the coming semester is putting the honors program on its own subdomain (so you would go to honors.tntech.edu rather than http://www.tntech.edu/www/acad/honors/. It would be for more than simple aesthetics though. By putting honors on its own subdomain we would also have to put honors on its own server. That is there would be a computer somewhere separate from the rest of the general TTU webserver that would have the honors programs web pages on it. The way that things work currently it is not allowed for people to create CGI for the webserver that tech has. That means that there can't be any dynamic webpages. Everything there is has to be created by a person and placed on the site.

I've been trying to figure out if switching the honors program over is something that is worth the trouble. I think that I'd like to undertake it, but alot of that is my personal interest in getting to do a project like that. I don't want to do it if it is not really necessary (or at least truly advantageous) because it will be something that someone will have to take care of once I am gone.

Possible things that could be done though would be interactive pages. The HPEO forms could go on there and students could check their progress online and decide on ways to fulfill their requirements. The big sib and little sib forms could go there and little sibs could search through the online records and figure out who they would like for their big sib. Also dates and access to information could be done through this. Having a searchable calendar and a list of personal information about honors students would be handy. I don't know really. What I am going to do is research more into things called servlets which are java programs that run on a webserver and provide dynamic content to the browser. I know that somewhere on java's site there are some simple servlet examples to be run but honestly I cannot find them. It is very frustrating. If I understand how a servlet works then if I go to a servlet page from a non-java browser (like lynx) then I will still get the same content, but I can't find a servlet to test it out. =)

I did do something new last night. I got out of bad to sit. That is new for me. Before if I made it so far as to get into bed then in bed I staid, but last night I actually got up and sat for 10 minutes.

But now I am going to go do some java 3d.
Saturday, May 29, 1999 12:56 PM

Well here I am again, yet another Saturday spent in pursuit of an ever elusive goal; quality (in the Pirsigian sense.) Either that or a balm to my boredom; I have as of yet to decide. =) It has always been a dream of mine to be able to wax poetic and have the ability create from a teeming myriad of possibilities some of the few combinations of words which have the elusive quality of flow. Flow however is difficult to master. I fear that my general propensity for brute force tends to impenge on my finess. =)

Speaking of brute force I was thinking about playing AD&D today if the DM, who appears to have been whisked away, would show back up. I mention brute force becasue in general I play characters who resort to the sword before they resort to reason. This differs very much from how I exist in the real world and that fits with my hypothesis that for most people role playing offers them an opporunity to explore ways of being that they are not comfortable test driving in the real world. Like right now I am playing a cleric (a holy man) who worships a warior god, weilds a longsword and whose general mode of attack is to bleudgon. It is a nice escape though. I do hope that Christian (the man in charge) shows back up.

My real reason for coming in though is to work more on java stuff. I need to go and print more of the API spec so ta ta for now.
Sunday, May 30, 1999 11:21 AM

I am in today to work on a section of the honors handbook. The chapter at this point looks like this. It could use some work. Anyhow, I'll put the actual information about what I am doing on the page about that work.
Tuesday, June 8, 1999 9:45 AM

I haven't been doing much with this page as of late. I just got through with the handbook chapter and am glad to be done with it. I still have to go through and check little bits like the notes and grammar and stuff, but by and large it is through. What has really been eating up my time has been the robot. I've been getting in my 20 hours a week at least. The webpage for that project is getting to be too big, I'm going to have to split it up into smaller pages. Right now if I load it into the print preview to see what it looks like then it will load but the next operation that I do it Netscape causes it to crash.

Being done with the handbook leaves me open to work on other projects. I think that the next major thing on deck is helpdesk advancement. When I get started on it I'll put the progress here.