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In the interest of being able to easily change the outdated buttons along the top of the page without going back to Illustrator and regenerating the image files, I recreated them in CSS! Sort of; I had to change the font to one that Google had.
Anyway, I've only changed them on the front page, in hopes that people could check and see if it works in their browser, and let me know if it doesn't (or if it does, if you just want to be friendly!) so I can fix it before rolling it out to the universal top bar.
So, uh, do that, if you want to!
Also, a few weeks ago, I implemented a history view because I often have a hard time finding old posts to refer back to them. So, if you remember a post you haven't been able to find (yeah, right!)... you probably still won't be able to find it! (because you have to know the title! and those are often vague or obscure or complete nonsense!)
2011.05.30 in school
I can now collapse the RPI folder in Aperture, which now stands at 8,440 photographs over four years - almost perfectly consistently gaining 2,000 pictures per year (1354, 2015, 2013, and 2900, respectively). Here's one of my recent favorites:
We're all college graduates now!
Tomorrow marks the last day NASA will try to get ahold of Spirit, the eldest of the pair of Mars Exploration Rovers.
Dad and I listened to the landings way back when I was just one semester through high school; Spirit's end-of-life is just days before I'm due to graduate from college. The discoveries of both Spirit and Opportunity have provided Martian wonders to observe and ponder throughout the last seven years: dust devils, panoramic landscapes, portraits (both self- and otherwise), meteorites, and many more.
It's hard not to anthropomorphize Spirit and Opportunity, as they've been such good friends for so long. Randall, as usual, does it best. Still, when they landed, we were promised 90 sols. Ninety. Spirit's official death will be after 2,628 sols... I'd say that's a life to be proud of.
I recently took a trip with Connor and Carol to the home of both Connor, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation: Rochester, NY. One of the first things I noticed about his house was that it was decorated in the most awesome way possible: with a variety of ancient cameras, on every shelf and coatrack. Apparently his parents acquired a box full of antique cameras at a yard sale years ago, and put them all around their house.
One day while we were sitting at his table, Connor grabbed one of the cameras and started playing with it, trying to figure out how to make it work. We got it working pretty quickly, as even though it's about as old as all three of us combined, the basic concepts of photography haven't changed much.
Connor decided that he wanted to see if we could take pictures with it, so, after shopping around (and after contemplating cutting down some rolls ourselves), I found a single roll of 120 format Kodak Portra-160 which had been cut down to 828 format.
I loaded it up in the dark, accidentally rolled past the first frame, and then took the remaining seven exposures over the course of the following week. PhotoGarden had some fun trying to figure out what to do with it — developing it wasn't a problem, but printing it was going to be impossible. They said they could scan it, but it would be expensive because they'd have to do it by hand because of the odd size... I took it home and scanned it on my film scanner instead.
I very quickly noticed a focus problem: there wasn't any. I'm not sure what's up with this... maybe the camera was dropped at some point in its long life? Maybe I'm using it wrong? I don't know...
You'll note that this picture, at the camera's closest focus (2.5'), has the distant background in focus, which is bizarre (and suggests that the lens is way out of whack):
This only reaffirms my attachment to modern digital photography; the slow turnaround time and expense aren't worth the added romance of film!
I also really don't understand how people use non-TTL-preview cameras (i.e. anything not SLR or EVF); not being able to adjust the focus through-the-lens just seems insane to me, and must have made things — especially macro photography — very difficult to pull off.
Yep...
The game I've been working on all semester, SAND, is "done" (in the sense that Gamesfest is tomorrow, not in the sense that we're even remotely finished with it). I made a quick trailer for it which is a little bit bizarre because it only shows off 1v1 multiplayer, while the game doesn't work at all without 3v3. Still, it gives a pretty good idea about what the game looks like, if not how it plays.
If you're using Safari, it should show up below, otherwise view it at YouTube. Crank up the volume (you have to hear Pete's awesome music!) and quality and give it a watch.
This Thursday will mark four years since our little group of CHS kids returned from the Bahamian "Big Yard". This year's trip just got back, and it reminded me that I still hadn't done anything with the journal-book-thing I'd been compiling so many years ago. Since it's clear now I won't be printing it, I figured I'd just post the PDF here!
So, here it is! I don't know what kind of sillyness lies within, as it's been years since I've read it, but enough work went into it that it's worth keeping somewhere!
A year and a half ago, I wrote a little bit about RCOS, mostly explaining what it is and why it's so important in the context of RPI. Recently, though, I've had the opportunity to experience another of the virtues of RCOS; one which the faculty will never see, and which the younger students can only dream of.
The first two months of this year were spent frantically submitting job applications via all possible means, responding to multitudes of emails, fielding phone screens from quite a few companies, and finally ending in on-sites. The majority of this went exactly as you or I would expect; however, looking back over all of these conversations, I noticed an interesting pattern:
They don't care about school.
Sure, they wanted someone with a Bachelor's. But to all of them, that part seemed to be entirely uninteresting. Besides brief, passing references ("What was your favorite class?"), there was nearly no discussion of formal education. I could likely have had an English degree and they wouldn't have cared; my answer to "What was your favorite class?" was often something in ARTS or COMM, and that didn't even begin to phase them. Grades didn't even come into the picture.
What did we talk about? We talked about Notebook, we talked about Seed, we talked about the code that runs this site, we talked about all of the random stuff on my GitHub. We even talked about RCOS explicitly, because they like to hire people who do things.
The thought of a single place to go to find people who actively participate in software projects outside of what is required to graduate, and to have the added benefit of being able to instantly investigate their code had some of these engineers and hiring managers salivating. I had one manager ask me about explicit internal details of one of my projects — things he couldn't have known had he not looked at the code, and things that would have been impossible for him to know had said code not been open-source.
The takeaway from this is simple, and bipartite:
- The work you do in RCOS can help you get a job. If there's code, and it's great, you're already better than almost every other candidate, regardless of school, major, or grades.
- The work you do in RCOS should be of quality representative of yourself, because employers will look at it. In addition, there better actually be code to look at, or you're simply forfeiting this opportunity.
2011.04.01 in code
Just in time for the end of the semester, Milkyway@Home, Matt's distributed computing project, has been ported to run on iOS, complete with the ability to download tasks from the Internet and submit results back to the project.
You can now contribute to humanity's understanding of the universe — on the go!
Visit the forum post if you want to install it on your (jailbroken) iOS 4.0+ device.
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