You know something I find a little funny with C/C++? You take these classes on the language where they show you this nice, structured programming language that has classes and all kinds of nice little features, and it all follows a set paradigm.

Then you start trying to code in C++ for a real application, say in Visual Studio or something or, heaven forbid, using the MFC. Then all of a sudden, the picture of the nice, structured language that you learned about shatters, leaving you with this monster of a language with all these weird features and structures you've never seen before and nobody really explains-- they just use them, and in order to get your code to compile in your IDE, apparently you have to use them too. Like "stdafx.h" and precompiled headers, or #pragma once, and in order to use the containers in the STL, all your copy constructors have to take const parameters which means that all your getters have to return const values, but you don't know how to make your main code accept const values for everything and make that useful, so you have duplicate getters and copy constructors, and... I'll leave off with that there.

Then your code gets progressively uglier... and soon your paradigm has fallen apart in pieces and you have a hacked together piece of code that works, but you're not quite sure how. Either that or you had a nervous breakdown while you were trying to get it to compile and now you're on trial for homicide.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike C and C++. It's just that after a year or so doing most of my projects in C# or Java-- I've gotten used to the fact that they don't put you through the ring around when trying to do something relatively simple (like just print your object out the way you want to when you put it into an output statement! Ostream << operator, I'm looking at you!). At least, they don't usually.

I've made some awesome progress on my simulator for my thesis. I think I'm ready to move on to the hardware implementation (the hard part).

I put the simulator together using MASON, a platform which facilitates multi-robot simulator creation. I've included a few screenshots for you guys to see a bit of what I'm doing. The basic idea is I'm trying to use multiple autonomous robots to locate a "hidden" transmitter (i.e. the robots don't know where it is). The transmitter is sending out radio waves and the tracker robots need to find him via these radio waves.

( Cut for largeness )

And that's the very basics of what I'm doing for my thesis. So, the simulator is essentially done, now I just have to make it work on the hardware robots.

Back from the Networked Robotics workshop, and it was pretty good. (See here for more info: http://control.mines.edu/netrob09/) Got my paper presented, it'll be officially published soon, and I made some really good contacts for the job hunt. For any of you who weren't already aware, I wrote a paper over the spring/summer and sent it in to this conference where it was reviewed and accepted. So I went to Denver, Colorado (the conference was actually in Golden, but it's pretty close) for a week to present it and listen to the other presentations. There was a group there from Denmark which is developing a similar system to the MASnet system on which I ran my experiments. They're interested in how we built it and what problems we ran into and the solutions we had. So I'll be collaborating with them on helping them to try to figure out their issues.

I'll put up a link to the paper when it goes up on the IFAC website in the off chance that any of you want to read it. ;)

In other news, my server finally entered its death throes last weekend. Looks like a power supply failure of some sort. It started making a really loud vibrating noise coming from the power supply, which means it's one of 3 things: 1) the fan is chewing on something, 2) something has vibrated loose and is making the noise, 3) the capacitors are going bad. I bought it from a BYU surplus sale around 3.5 years ago for $40-- it's a P3 1.0 GHz with like 512 MB of RAM, and the hard drive is only 20 GB. So, needless to say it's not really worth trying to save. I took a look at it and I couldn't see any evidence of 1), and 2) is unlikely, which means it is probably 3) or a similar component failure. I could probably even take it apart and repair it, but power supplies are sensitive things, and I'm not really interested in putting in a bunch of time to fix it only to have it freak out and fry my data in a few more weeks.

Besides, I found an awesome new server from Dell for $400 including tax and shipping. This one has something like 16x the hard drive space and 6x the processing power-- not to mention like 8x the RAM and it'll have gigabit ethernet. Nice. :D

If you are running any of the most recent versions of Vista as of this posting or one of the Windows 7 betas/release candidates, your operating system is vulnerable to a new hack. See this link for a work around until a patch is released by Microsoft and for additional details:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/975497.mspx

Basically this threat allows a hacker to execute programs/code on your computer remotely. This can result in a loss of control of your machine.

I had previously not been aware that this was a vulnerability in Vista as well as the Win 7 testing versions, but it apparently is. I just received an attempted hack on my laptop. Fortunately my firewall caught it and informed me, but since I wasn't sure if the attack was successful or not, I killed my connection anyway and am currently running a scan. I had been reading in news articles that security experts were not aware of a virus exploiting this vulnerability out on the internet, but it's there now.

Just thought you should be aware.

When people put ellipses after every single sentence.

"I'm always trailing off...

I don't ever finish a sentence...

Does it make sense for ellipses to be here... ?

This is incredibly annoying..."

Used occasionally to indicate uncertainty or something is fine. But please people! Use them intelligently!

That'll teach him to break into people's homes.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bal-sword0915,0,4027961.story

And from the comments on Digg:

"All the DnD has conditioned us smite first and loot your body later." (http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Johns_Hopkins_Student_KILLS_intruder_with_Samurai_Sword?t=28273953#c28273953)

Hilarious!

In all seriousness, though, it's too bad the robber ended up dying, but I wholeheartedly support this student's right to defend himself and his property. That's the risk the burglar took when he decided to break into someone's house.

Indeed it is. That is all.

Dropped my laptop on Sunday before we headed home to Logan. Yeah... *headdesk* That was bad. Anyway, I thought it was fine for a while, until I noticed a problem that wasn't going away. Every time I boot the laptop up, it reverts the screen resolution back to 800x600. Yeah-- not so cool. But! Fix found already! Turns out that the display drivers got somehow borked, so uninstalling them and installing new Nvidia drivers fixed the issue. Whew! I was worried I'd hosed my laptop.

In other news, I got a new phone about a month ago. Works great, wonderful, all that. When I went in and talked to the Sprint guy he told me that he would give me an extra 10% off my monthly bill just for coming in and chatting with them about getting a new phone. Initial impression is: Totally Awesome Discount. So, adding that to the 15% off that I already have, that'd be 25% off my bill-- sweet! Except I got the bill yesterday and the 10% off has replaced the 15% off. >_> Displeased. So there will be me, visiting the Sprint store today, to give the man a talking to. I'm expecting he will likely be properly apologetic and try to get it fixed for me, since I don't think he intended to do that (I think the people at corporate pulled a fast one on him). But nevertheless I suppose I'll have to be prepared to dish out a hefty reaming if he tries to tell me he can't do anything about it. *sigh*

Anyway. Prepping for the upgrade to win7 is going smoothly so far. Just need to find some discs for Office 2007 so I can install it after the wipe (my discs are at my parents' place, which is out of the realm of going to grab them for the foreseeable future). I may just torrent the discs and use my legit key on the install, if that's all I can do.

Well, I discovered the other day that I have access to Windows 7 via the MSDNAA program here at USU. I wasn't expecting to be able to get it so soon. So I'm looking at upgrading probably over the 3 day weekend (labor day) so that I can have time to fix things if I mess anything up.

As a result, I've been going through all the myriad stuff I've collected on this computer over the course of the last 3 years, and let me tell you, it's a lot. It's probably good that I'm going to wipe it-- get rid of some of the random quirks it's picked up over time.

Right now I'm working on trying to locate some of my installation discs for a few of the programs that I have and use, but not extremely often. The type of thing I don't really think about being on the computer until I want to use it, then won't know what to do if it isn't there when I need it. :) So I've been compiling a list of all my files and things that need to be backed up. So far my backup files (not including programs) is about 16.5 GB of space. Good thing I bought that TB drive a little while back-- it'll be holding all this stuff during the wipe.

Anyway, here's hoping I don't forget anything massively important.

Well, I finished the independent study class, got an A (yes!) and now it's time to move on to the thesis. I've been doing some literature review stuff recently and getting into things, but now it's time to start work on the actual text of the paper. But we're going to do this right from day 1-- none of this juggling versions around between my laptop, work computer, jump drive, home desktop, etc. Stick this sucker on the subversion server and go!

The only problem with that (and I don't know how many of you have worked with LaTeX-- probably not a whole lot) but it creates a bunch of log files and left over gunk which it produces while it's compiling your paper. This is useful if you run into an issue with it while it's compiling or if something's not working quite like you want, but you don't want that on your version control system. Just like with committing a software project to subversion, you don't want all your compiled executables or object files to be in the repository-- those aren't the code, they're just helper files-- get regenerated from the code each time you compile-- and they get changed every time you compile. So you don't want that in there or every time you compile the code Subversion will complain at you about there being changes when you really didn't change anything, just recompiled it. Anyway, LaTeX has a lot of the same stuff. You only want the base source files: the stuff that's necessary to build the paper-- the other stuff is just extraneous and is generated every time anyway.

So, for your benefit as well as mine, I'm posting a link to a guide I found which delineates what you don't need out of all that stuff in your LaTeX directory.

http://markelikalderon.com/blog/2007/08/02/latex-subversion-and-hygiene/

Very well put, also has a little guide which shows you how to get subversion to ignore the helper files. (Doesn't really apply if you're on windows and using TortoiseSVN, but still useful to have nonetheless).

It will also be helpful to check out this link, which seems to have a bit more complete list of helper files which aren't needed in the repository:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Collaborative_Writing_of_LaTeX_Documents

And there's that. Hope that helps someone.

People who don't pay attention. I hate it. I don't care where you're not paying attention (although it especially irks me if you happen to be driving a car or not listening to me when I'm talking). What particularly bugs me about this is when I tell someone that something I'm about to tell them is important and then they have to ask me within 3 seconds after I've finished what I said.

However, this also leads to a hobby of mine (in the spirit of the XKCD hobbies): Insisting that I have no idea what somebody is talking about when they ask me to repeat what I said.

Me: *says something*
Other Person: Wait, what?
Me: Huh?
Other Person: What did you just say?
Me: ... Dunno what you're talking about.
Other Person: No really, what'd you say?
Me: What, now? You ok?
Other Person: *confused*

I've been spending a bit of time working on this one, and I'm very happy with it. It's taken from the lore of the Warhammer 40k universe, more specifically regarding lore from the Dawn of War games. There's more description included here: http://www.neromir.net/art/dispPic.php?picID=14

( The Purgation of Cyrene )

Rendered in Bryce 6.1 at 1680x1050, with the stars "hand-made" in Photoshop.

This is an older render that I posted last year sometime, I think. I decided to do some work on it a bit to make it a bit more suitable and a little less retina-burning bright, as well a fix a couple minor scaling issues with the dragon. This way, I can also use it as a wallpaper on my desktop without tiring my eyes out.

( Cut for massive picture )

Been looking at the stuff over at Digital Blasphemy a bit recently and really wishing I had a subscription to that site. That guy is really good. Every time I look at his space scenes I wish I could pull something like that off. *sigh* Oh well. He's also using a program that can get much more interesting space effects much more easily than mine can. Either that or I just don't have any idea how to do it... Maybe both.

And so is Dawn of War 2. Much better than I thought it would be since the beta.

( Cut for massive screenshot )

I finally managed to think of a decent icon for my Time Calculator program! So now I feel good about putting it up for download. The program basically allows you to perform arithmetic on minutes and seconds (or hours and minutes, however you choose to look at it), and convert easily from time to decimal (for instance 1:45 = 1.75).

It's available here: http://www.runicsystems.com/?page=programDesc&id=3

I talk a bit more about it in a previous entry (http://neromir.livejournal.com/76783.html). Take a look. :)

Well, I just got word that the incredibly stressful paper I was working on at the end of last semester has been accepted! Which is good. I think. Except that now I have to keep doing some work on it and then PRESENT IT. Which means I, personally, will have to get up in front of a currently undefined number of people (who know the field and whether or not I'm a hack) and talk about the paper and the research for a currently undefined amount of time (probably 45 minutes?).

Can you say nervous? I sure can.

So right now I'm trying to improve the paper a bit with some of the headway I've made over the last couple of months. Final version is due on August 1, and the presentation is in September or October-- don't remember at the moment.

Now I just need start my thesis proposal. *sigh*

I just picked up Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson. I'm extremely excited to read the completed version.

Besides, just look at that cover-- it's freaking awesome!

Here's my newest Dreadnought. I've included some half-finished pictures as well. The right weapon-arm is finished in both pictures as I decided I'd just do that first, before I did the main body.

( Pictures! )

I'm still here, reading your blogs-- just not posting on mine. :) Haven't got a whole lot to say these days.

My hobbies range from reading, video gaming, painting, programming, and all in between. Currently I'm fighting with the urge to play games, read more from my Honor Harrington book, continue painting my dreadnought (and then every other tank and Space Marine I own), work on one of my myriad programming projects, or try to come up with a nice site design for a website I'm putting together for my dad. Except that my artistic design skills are currently hiding in a deep pit, so I think I'd fail at that last one.

I also need a good icon for my time calculator program. It's a program I made to do math on hours and minutes because I got sick and tired of figuring out how much time was between two random times (e.g. number of hours worked when I started at 10:31 and stopped at 4:13). And it converts those times to decimal as well so I can figure out how much money I made. So if you any of you have any good suggestions for an icon, I'm all ears.

In other random news, I was able to play Mirror's Edge. Fun game, very entertaining, but very short-- on the order of the length of Portal. I would not pay full price for it, and the $20 that it's currently going for on Steam is probably a bit much as well.

Dreadnought pictures later after I finish painting it.

I just found confirmation that the Constructicons will be in Transformers 2. See here: http://vimeo.com/4719348

In the TV series, the Constructicons combine to form Devastator-- a massive, giant (even for a Transformer) implement of destruction. You've probably seen him in some of the clips for the movie-- he shows up briefly in the one I linked you to.

I'm so excited!!!! :D