Older blog entries for CentralScrutinizer (starting at number 2)

Went to the frat party. Got a little tipsy before hand. I was still as nerdy as ever, though I was more verbosely analytical of myself. My momentum management was not so good either. The party almost sucked, as there were only 3 girls there for quite a while. Eck. Girls finally arrived at 11:30/ish, and things got better. I didn't get the goods up to go talk to this tall girl, but I will figure that out. Helped my friend most of this weekend, makes me feel good to help him with his girl problems. Girls are stinky, yes that means you.

I didn't code near so much as I'd hoped. Watched too much TV. I did get my website a bit more to where I want it to though. I was going to create a Zope ZClass to implement the 'sections' of my website, but that quickly got out of hand, so I'm implementing it a lazy way. Almost sat down to write real code, but have yet to do so.

Quake 3 Fortress came out. Good time sink.

I did a diagram of my Test Suite idea on Saturday. Since none of you commented on it last time, I expect lots of you to to check it out and then let me know what you think. That means you. Don't try and hide, I see you through the telescreen.

Started in on reading So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish again. I like Douglas Adams, even if this one isn't so outlandish. I thought about starting to read things I've heard about like Neal Stephenson (?), nerdy stuff. I just know I need to balance fiction, non-fiction, and technical stuff better. :)

I missed "Code Rush" :(

As a guy who's in college in America, I must weigh in on the college education debate. 1) I went straight from high school to college, but I wanted to be a music major at first, so I had little choice, plus my parents. I have not thought enough over whether it's good or bad I went straight through. I think I've learned the same 'life stuff' regardless, just had to juggle school along with it. B) SMU isn't cheap ($25K/year). I'm afraid only 33% of my professors have been worth it. More evil is the fact that I would not give the two CS professors I've had a Ph.D. They lacked the 'curiosity' that I see in my friends, in free software hackers, in smart people in general. Maybe they're old, maybe their academic, who knows. C) I've felt the temptation to go get a job and quit school numerous times, but the main reason I'm here is to get a paper degree, and to become smart. I know I'm going to have to rely on myself to get uber-smart, but that's the way life is, ya know? Ergo, D) SMU is pretty much a vacation school. There aren't a whole lot of sadistic professors here, and the ones that are get weeded out quickly. So I'll slide through here, get a degree that looks decent on paper, and go get a job that will buy me all the toys I desire. I'm sure that this irks the hell out of some of you, so tell me and I'll become a better person.

And finally, I may leap back into the world of stand up comedy. There's an open mic night here at SMU, and I think I may leverage that. Need to get my cajones built up though, know what I mean?

I realize this has become one of those really long annoying diary entries, and that it has little technical value. Sorry. I now yield the floor to the person whose diary entry proceeds me.

Massive props to those who poked my site. Makes me feel neat. Also props to Joey for certifying me. Whoop. Can I be the official Advogato troll? :)

I overcame NFS today. Evils associated with TI's obfuscated network. This guy helping me was trying to mess with 'netgroups' or some Sun/HP-UX construct like that. Oye. Turns out he may be quite intelligent; he showed me the hardware emulation rigs they have (scary) and he had a lot to do with the Compaq dual ThunderLan (tlan) cards. He could be just making stuff up though. It's for certain that he can talk your ear off though.

I've been thinking on ways I could start writing more code, be more 'uber'. One thing my friend Hai does is to just write something to prove to himself he can do it, like a texture mapper. I might do this in the applications/system realm; I think it'd be fun. My other two ideas come from the Software Carpentry competition. I'd like to write a modular test suite, with some ideas I've had in the past. I'll detail that in a second. My other idea is to real software quality testing on big stuff. Like toruture testing. I imagine something like Apache already has this in place, but I'd like to run long tests with lots of possible mangled input and do fail testing, produce lots of statistics, etc. Perhaps that could feed into writing the test suite.

The idea for the test suite is that you have a core, which provides generic testing services like logging, scripting, statistics, etc. It knows nothing about the kinds of tests being performed. Above that you have two (maybe more) kinds of modules. 1) test modules which test a piece of hardware, a webserver, a GUI application, etc. 2) extensions which probe the hardware, webserver, etc. I know that's a really rough description, but input is appreciated

Going to an 80's Frat party tonight. Gonna yell "Freebird!" all night. Shun me.

I thought I should get in here while it was still 'cool'. Yay for something more intelligent for slashdot. (See my my homepage for a low-blow against slashdot). I'd like to actually get my name on some more software before I registered, but I've not much time to code these days. Someday I'll be a 'master'. Until then, watch me grow, and just tap me on the shoulder when I'm being an idiot.

I'm a student at Southern Methodist University. Not a very strong CS school, for those who wonder. I sometimes ask myself who gave the professors a Ph.D. Eck.

Right now I'm co-op'ing (?) at Texas Instruments. I just got done working on some hardware diagnostics for Windows (bleck). That one almost killed me. The good news is, I get to work on Linux finally. I'm typing this on an Ultra2 Creator workstation that really hauls. If only it were Debian instead of Redhat. :)

I hope to someday be as smart as the likes of graydon, but so does everyone. But I can say that I've worked with him and I knew him before he was a pseudo-celebrity. ;)

Signing off, heading home.

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