So I graduated high school almost two months ago and turned 18 less than a month ago. I've been really busy lately working for this startup as a summer job. This fall I will begin my education at UC Santa Cruz.
Software
I haven't really been working much on thinksynth lately, with all the coding I have to do at work. We have the synthesizer parsing its language and making cool sounds, but the current plan is to make it into a library so that frontends will be convenient to write.
I've been playing a lot of NetHack lately; it's such an addictive game.
Boy I haven't written in ages.
Computer Science
I finished the AI course at my school. Scheme was our primary language of programming and we had an Othello tournament in which our Othello AIs competed in. I'm currently taking a class in Computational Geometry and it is quite interesting. I've decided to take a break from Scheme and code in C++. I've written a lot of stuff in Scheme lately.. Functional programming is quite interesting.
Software
A lot of work done on the software synthesizer my friend and I are writing. We had it working and producing some music (no graphical frontend though) at one point, but we decided to rewrite the engine completely in C++ so that it would be a lot easier to design and maintain in the future. The current engine in C++, although much cleaner, isn't working yet. I've also completely halted development on GtkHx as Hotline is a dead-end and I no longer wish to spend my time working on this dead-end project. Although I've received an offer for it to be taken over, no one has stepped up to the plate yet.
Well I haven't updated this diary in ages.
Life
Life has been really great lately; I'm no longer depressed,
I've got a lot more friends, and I'm happy. School is still
stressful as usual, but I'm managing. I'm hoping to have an
internship this summer, but so far I haven't had any job
opportunities. I should start actively looking for a job. I
still have a job at Euclid Computers, but they don't really
have me do much, so as a result I'm not really getting paid.
They're going to have me set up a new server soon, though,
so that will be cool.
Computer Science
I took compiler design last semester at school. We were
writing a Pascal compiler in C, but I never finished, since
it was merely a one semester course. I already had it
generating parse trees using my own parser/tokenizer, and it
was just a matter of code generation .. Right now I'm taking
programming language design, which is a pretty interesting
course. We've studied all sorts of languages, language
principles, and different programming paradigms. I'm
currently learning functional programming with Scheme.
Software
I made a really cool new friend at Linux10 and he and I
basically meet every weekend now. We were working on a
language for this synth we were writing using my
compiler/language design knowledge, but then we stopped and
were working on a "War on Afghanistan" game which is still
unfinished. (I'll post screenshots later.) Last weekend, we
resumed work on the synth, but with greater ambitions. The
synth is going to be part of a music sequencer we're writing
. We're probably going to have it use SDL and GTK+. GtkHx is
still going, but with less committment. I have threaded news
completely done and I'm mainly working on some minor feature
requests/bug stomping right now.
Well, I haven't written in a long time..My last entry talks about AP Computer Science (APCS) final project. Well asusual we didn't quite finish it. We worked on it seriously the day before it wasdue and decided that we were out of time and dropped the SDL frontend. We had it working where 8 people could connect and move snakes around and decided to stop there. It was late and we were sleep deprived so we decided not to implement game functionality. I also had the AP test for Comp Sci, it was quite easy..I just got the results back recently and I got a 5 (the highest grade) =)
Life
So school is out now..Having quite a boring summer as usual.
I have a job working at Euclid Computers, I'm
writing Perl stuff for them like graphing orders/clicks and
fun stuff like that ... My grandfather passed away
yesterday.. I didn't know him too well; he came to the US
when I was 5 and lived with us for a short while until he
started living alone and his health was continously
degrading. Last I saw him, he was a complete vegetable ..
Well, I finally got through the Debian NM process and I'm a Debian developer now. Yay..
I visited Europe a few weeks ago. We took a plane to Paris and immediately rented a car and took off to Waterloo, Belgium. We stayed there a night and visited nearby Brussels. We then went to Brugge, Belgium and stayed there a couple of nights. Afterwards, we stayed in Delft, Netherlands for a night and then we stayed in Amsterdam for three nights. Then we travelled to Koln, Germany and stayed a night there. After that, we went to Frankfurt and stayed there two nights. We then went to Munich and rested a night there. Then we stopped in Bazel, Switzerland for a night. Afterwards, we drove to an airport (forgot which) by Paris and stayed in a hotel there for a night and then we flew back to San Jose, CA. It was a pretty cool vacation..
GtkHx
GtkHx is now up to version 0.8.13 and a kind person has
redesigned the GtkHx
website. I haven't worked on it recently but I've got
some cool ideas for it. Just need to overcome my
unwillingness to work..
Hardware
My workstation recently started randomly locking up in X. I
thought that my GeForce II MX finally decided to start dying
on me so I bought a Radeon VE to replace it but it didn't
fix the problem. When I was upgrading packages, my machine
just restarted and it would restart everytime I ran apt-get
dist-upgrade, each time damaging files. Someone on
#debian-devel pointed out that the files might be damaged
because I was using ReiserFS with kernel 2.4.4. Sure enough,
that was the problem. I upgraded my kernel by sticking the
drive into the server and building it there and then
installing it on my machine. But X still locked up randomly
with either card. I thought that perhaps my RAM was bad
again (I've had experience where my RAM decided to stop
functioning.) I bought replacement RAM, but it didn't solve
the problem. So then, I thought it must either be my
motherboard or CPU. Now my workstation has a Slot A AMD
Athlon. Fry's no longer carries any Slot A boards/CPUs, so I
had to get myself a completely new motherboard and CPU (1GHz
AMD Thunderbird =) ) and now everything works well.
I also recently upgraded my server's 400MHz PII to a 550MHz PIII. The motherboard in the server was built before PIIIs even existed, but it seems to work fine.
Some more work done on our AP Comp Sci final project. aaronl and I have split up the jobs so that he does server game logic (the game is handled on the server-side, of course), AI client, and portability issues, while I will do socket and I/O multiplexing stuff, curses client, and SDL client. I've started exploring SDL today and I find it extremely cool especially since it supports MacOS, Win32, and BeOS in addition to Linux. We have a basic server that handles all connections and a working event loop for it and curses/SDL clients with working event loops but we haven't really started on actual gameplay but this is pretty good progress.
I haven't posted anything here for quite a while. GtkHx development is progressing very well and I'll probably release GtkHx 0.8.10 sometime soon...aaronl and I are still working on the WordTris game and have made great progress but it is not quite ready for release yet...Currently we're working on a multiplayer networked snake game for AP Computer Science final project. I just took the exam for AP Computer Science recently and found it extremely easy; I just hope my score will be good...Life's been really turbulent and messy lately, but I don't have much to say about it here. At the moment, my server is down because Pacific Bell sucks, although they haven't given me trouble for like a year now.
Haven't posted a diary entry in a while...I'm working on a WordTris game with aaronl right now. I finally made a release of Tiger and I am discussing future cooperation with the author of TiLP (formerly GtkTiLink) and GtkTiEmu. I've also done some work on GtkHx and adding support for some stuff that Hotline 1.5+ servers support, such as threaded news. I added IPv6 support to hx/hxd, but I still need to make the tracker work with it as it stores server address in 4 bytes -- for IPv6 it will have to be 16 bytes. I still have to add IPv6 support to GtkHx <-- it isbeing a bit weird...Currently, I am reorganizing the code. Life is pretty good now.
So I got my cat back (read previous entry for information) and I'm very glad. He's changed quite a bit in the couple of months he has been missing. He's a bit more fat (someone seems to have fed him quite well) and his fur grew longer. Also, he is not as afraid of strangers now (I guess he learned not to be as he has to depend on strangers to help him.) I'm quite relieved that I got him back.
I haven't posted a diary entry in a while. Life has been
very busy. I got an IBM ThinkPad 570E for...New Year's I
guess since I don't celebrate Christmas or Hannukah or any
such religious holiday. I got it for a few reasons -- my
organization problem mostly. I hate paper and I can't
organize paper. I can now take notes in emacs heh. Second,
after school I can accomplish a lot of programming work but
I can't do it using a lame Java SSH client on Windoze and my
school has a nice wireless network. Third, I need a laptop
next year anyway =P Anyway, I put up a screenshot of my
laptop in action here.
I just had finals last week -- I did okay on all of them
except for Chemistry, which I totally bombed on. Chemistry
doesn't make much sense to me, at this point in time.
Yesterday, I was contacted regarding my cat.
Apparently,
someone found him 10 days ago and just gained his trust a
couple of days ago and they found the report I filed a
couple of months ago and brought him to the shelter and
contacted me. He has been wandering around the same area he
ran away for a couple of months now -- the person who
brought in my cat said that he asked neighbors about the cat
first and they said they have been aware of it wandering
around for a while now. The description of the cat fits
that of my cat's perfectly, it appeared in that area around
the same time mine got lost, and they found him in an area
right by the apartment complex he ran away from, so I am
pretty sure that this is my cat. I will go to the animal
shelter as soon as I get out of school to check if it is
really my cat, and if it is, I will take him home.
I have done a lot of work on GtkHx recently. I put all
functions using blocking connect() into other threads so
that they wouldn't lock up my main thread while trying to
connect. I am also working on implementing the new threaded
news protocol. I've made quite a few other change too. I
predict that I will be able to make a full 1.0 release in a
2-3 months, if all goes well and I fight my laziness.
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