All Things Yummy

I just spent 30 minutes clearing about 200 spam comments from the blog. Bah, I’m seriously considering moving off MovableType to something more like Wordpress or b2. More I use MovableType, more I realize that it basically is bunch of hacks put together. Just trying to get a calendar that can move between months is almost impossible. 200 spam comments - doesn’t quite compare to 1000+ spam emails I get a day, though. I’m sure I’ll get to the Blog Change in the middle of my midterms or something like that.

Oh yeah, I’m reading Dune. Interesting enough characters so far.

It’s been a while since I wrote here. I’ve been INCREDIBLY busy over last month or so… 4th year and Midnight Sun all coming together…

Anyway, today was fun. Class in the morning, then we drove the solar car to Economical Insurance. We finally have lots of new blood coming in to the team, so it’s a lot of fun. Then more classes, followed by dinner at an interesting (and pretty decent) sea food restaurant and work on our fourth year project.

So, me and Phil were sitting around, developing code on the robocup robots. Since the DiskOnChip we use on them are only 8MB big, we usually develop the software on harddrives that we manually mount. Problem, though, is that we only have one backplane, so we can develop and compile the software on only one of the robots. So, to actually be able to copy the new builds of the programs, we have to turn everything off, swap the harddrives, turn everything back on, copy the required file to DiskOnChip, then turn everything off again, then swap the harddrives back into the original configuration. Needless to say, it’s pretty tedious. Then Phil comes up with brilliant idea - We’re working on building wireless network! Why not just make a program that allows us to send files wireless between the robots? After 30 minutes of hacking, we ended up with a program that allowed us to easily distribute and copy files around just using BlueTooth… Ah… that made my week.

Heck, I’m so happy that I could even overlook the fact that I’m happy about coding a neat piece of code on a Friday night.

And so here it starts… again… for the 7th time. I’m in 4th year now, finally reunited with rest of the computer engineering class (first time since 1A) and finally with courses that I’ve chosen because it interests me.

Anyway, to the right is what’s been mine (and Phil’s) bane of existence over last week or so. We had to figure out how to power the damn thing, then consequently figure out how to communicate with it, how to access the internal Disk On Chip, how to upgrade the QNX kernel in it, and lastly how to make BlueTooth work on it. Luckly we’ve made some progress over last couple of days. I’ve also installed my dart board in the office. Even more reason to stick around!

I finally got around to updating my gallery, so go and take a look!

It was an interesting week. Lots of Midnight Sun work, lots of 4th year project, and I also got in touch with Jane and found Bobby’s blog! If it’s this busy during break, I don’t want to think about how it’ll be like once school starts… Ah well, life goes on.