Musings of an Engineer

Just saw a cute cartoon over at xkcd and wanted to share it. Engineers/Mathematics majors will get a kick out if it.

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I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.

Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.

I don’t read too many news stories that effect me in a way that this one has. I’ve known now for a while that Microsoft was trying to get their new Office Open XML document format ISO approved. I figured that Microsoft’s OOXML format was good enough, and that it would be a good thing to have an “Open” format as an international standard… Boy was I wrong.

I suppose in principle, a ISO open format would be a wonderful thing, but OOXML is definitely not ready to become that format. In her article, Stéphane Rodriguez lists 13 different scenarios where the Whitepaper results from Microsoft don’t seem to actually be valid. She even goes as far as listing the exact steps necessary to reproduce the results. From a programmatic perspective, OOXML is amazingly bad. A programmer could probably spend a good couple years trying to write code that would be able to work with these remarkably unpredictable XML documents. Some of the elements in the VML part of the documents aren’t even valid XML elements!

Wow, Transformers, probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time! I thought Michael Bay and ILM did an awesome job making the Autobots and the Decepticons look amazing detailed and believably realistic. The story was good and the action sequences were even better!

I guess someone made a short film titled, “Transformers Preview Review” which looks at all of the material that was out before the movie and tried to make some predictions. I’d say for the most part, it was valid. A point that I thought was really interesting was that the Transformers movie was setting up for a trilogy. I suppose this makes sense, because most of the huge blockbuster films over the last few years have been three movies. Some of them that come with built in fanbases (i.e. Spiderman, Batman, and Transformers) create a new movie with new characters and pretty much drop all of the references to the original series. I guess Michael Bay was told that he could only have 4 vs. 4 or 5 vs. 5 or something like that, rather than having an epic Tranformers battle.

I thought it might be nice to put up a quick update of what's been going on lately.  I have tons of stuff to talk about, so I'll have to post some more later.  And no, I don't especially love Vanessa Carlton, I just liked the sound of the words.

Anyways, for starters, I am currently employed at ABB part-time over the summer. This is pretty cool because in order for me to make the same amount of money every pay, I would probably have to work about 2.5 times more hours than I work here (Here being where I am right now). Not to mention the work isn’t too difficult (Note the last parenthetical statement). Also, this summer, I finally embarked on the Great Journey (read Circuits II), hopefully it will turn out like I expect it to. Speaking of the Great Journey, I bought a Xbox 360 back in May, and it is leet. I tried to buy used, to save some bucks, but that was a bad idea. Out of the two used ones I had, neither worked… Regardless, I now have a pretty all white Core system, and the Halo 3 beta kicked serious butt!

So, i was just sitting here, really trying hard to find something to do (that didn’t suck), and I started typing a really long section of commented code in to my VB app… Then I realized that essentially I was writing what I should write in my blog. so, here it is.

‘I am wri9ting this because I am suppored to be working right now e’I reall don’t know how Long I can type snsles chars in to the VB editor ‘because i have still 1 hr and 57 minues, oops make that 56 minutes left ‘before I should leave. I reawlly want to gome and break out the 360 but mom wou ’ld be so pissed that i bought one.

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So, I guess this is my first post of 2007. The year so far has been a good one! I started my co-op position and its going quite well. The job can be fairly boring sometimes, however so far there have been quite a few challenges. I’m living with my cousin and his wife, and I am eternally grateful for them taking me in, room and board in the Cleveland area is way expensive! I usually am home on the weekends to see my family and catch up on the household chore-like things. It has been very cold lately, like single digits and below with the wind chill. Mark Nolan says “Arctic Air” from Canada has come down to visit… I don’t care much for Canada’s air.

I found a funny blog article about programmers and programs being depicted in Hollywood Films. It’s pretty much true, I just wish movies didn’t depict computers in such a naive and complex way. Alwell…

10. Most code is not inherently cross platform Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit! If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.

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I just really finished setting up the new server. This is a Intel Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD running Apache2, PHP 5 and MySQL in Ubuntu. It was a challenge to set it up, just like the first time on the ol’ K6, but was certainly worth the time and effort. I always learn a lot when I spend some time with my servers. Anyways, I will post some more interesting content soon, but for now I am just troubleshoot/optimizing my server and doing homework… I think I might be having a little problem with gZip in Apache, so if you notice weird behavior like you have to load the page twice before it shows or anything like that, let me know. Now… if I could only get some more upstream bandwidth… Alwell. Peace out!