Musings of an Engineer

I’ve been pretty busy with programming projects for school lately, and I thought I would share them. They are nothing to fancy, just something to play with and look at. The first program is a CAD style program, it allows you to draw different specified objects, move them, change colors, etc… It was to practice GUI and Inheritance in Java. The second program is a simple OpenGL program that displays a textured rectangle on the screen and moves it around using a sine function. It will grow if you right-click it, and shrink if you left-click it.

A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity (finally) to play the new Battlefield game’s demo, BF:2142. It is created with the same engine as its predecessor, and is an OK game. BF2 has, for some unknown reason, progressively run slower and slower on my computer. And I seem to not be alone by checking some of the Battlefield forums occasionally. 2142 also runs fairly slow on medium-low graphic settings… Needless to say, I am disappointed. Mostly, because the game runs like crap-o-la on my machine, and it probably shouldn’t.

So just browsing digg, and found an interesting article about a fellow Ubuntu user.

“After a rather fine night out on the town, I came home in a rather inebriated state. Put the live disc in, and recklessly choose to install Ubuntu, and did so by wiping the entire hard drive (previously XP). This sort of switch has sortof thrown me in at the deep end, but I have no regrets and has to be one of the best drunken decisions I have ever taken…”

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Last week I had a project to do for my Computer Graphics class. This project required me to generate an image using ray tracing with POV-Ray, and provide animation for it. It wasn’t very hard, and it is a really neat way do render some 3D graphics quite quickly, with fairly little code required. Some of the images generated by POV-Ray are really amazing.

More POV-Ray Renders:

I found some fun pictures to share, a few that include geeky things, and one that mixes Laplace tranforms with sex… :lol:

• Worst iPod Fake
• A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math & Language
• Creepy Mario & Luigi

Enjoy!

Last Monday, the popular college social site, facebook, made a change in how the data was presented. When I logged in, I was pleasantly surprised to see a “NewsFeed” that displayed all of my friends activity over the last several hours/days. But I quickly noted that it seemed not as many people were happy about this new feature as I was. Groups such as “I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK” were beginning to form, and by the middle of the week, one group had amassed over 700,000 members! They called the new features ‘stalkerish’ and did not like that they took up so much room. Over and over I repeated to myself, “What are these people thinking? All of the data was already there, now it is just consolidated! Web2.0 people!”

So, sometimes websites are kinda frustrating… I suppose partially because I don’t completely understand php, html, javascript, AJAX, css, Linux apps, etc… But, I suppose learning can be fun, but it can also be demanding. Especially when you know what you want, but can’t figure out how to achieve it.

Anyways, a few changes to the site. Lightbox now works correctly, AJAXWP is no longer integrated, due to too many problems it was causing, but the pages will fade in if you have a Mozilla based browser.

In the beginning, right after Al Gore invented it, the internet was boring. Over the last few years, the internet has become filled with really cool stuff. Like Yoda paraphernalia, and computer cases straight out of Mars/Hell. Just thought I should share and test out lightbox and the image manager.

Ubuntu, such a foreign sounding word… but I could almost say, it is my most favorite word as of right now! Ubuntu Dapper Drake has transformed my AMD K6-2 400Mhz machine into a more powerful webserver than I could have ever thought possible! Using XAMPP and eAccelerator to serve the pages quite speedily. It’s still not comparable to the new Mac Pro with 16GB of Fully Buffered DRAM, but hey it works for me.

So my brother decided he needed a laptop, but of course he wanted one that would game too. So he decided to get on eBay and find one. On his first attempt, he ended up with just a e-mail that stated that the auction wasn’t valid due to the sellers account being compromised. After that mishap, he started to look for more believable deals. So he found a Dell XPS Gen 2 for sale in one of the 48 contiguous states. A few days and $1,200 later, the laptop arives. I’m a little worried it might be broken, piece of junk, or maybe just really used. Holy crap was I wrong! This laptop doesn’t have a mark on it. Windows XP MCE 2005 freshly installed, all we did was plug it in, start it up and away we went.