Halo 3

So I got Halo 3 today (my dad bought it from the Microsoft company store :)). I just started the Halo 1 campaign a few weeks ago though, so I'm not going to try Halo 3 campaign until I finish 1 and 2.

Anyway, first impressions of it from playing multiplayer: the graphics are of course very good and the new weapons are really fun to play with. But — and I don't know if anyone else has experienced this — my eyes get really tired from trying to play Halo 3, and I'm much more confused and disoriented in battles than if I were playing Halo 1. I have the same problem with Halo 2. This could be because the FOV has decreased since Halo 1, or maybe because the graphics are more complex. Or it could be because I'm just generally tired today. Time will tell...

Robotics

For the robot this year, we have to use the accelerometers, gyro, and gear tooth sensors, if only for the fun of using them. I was thinking maybe next meeting (2007-09-19) we could add them onto the existing robot experimentally and start programming it a bit.

For example, we could add the facility to run in a perfectly straight line at an exactly constant speed as long as a certain button on the joystick is pressed by using the gyro to check and compensate for rotational error, and using the gear tooth sensors to compensate for speed error.

Or maybe we could implement collision detection using the accelerometers (this would be pretty hard, since how do you tell what's a collision and what's a quick stop).

We could implement bounce detection on the joysticks so things wouldn't be so jerky.

Maybe an emergency stop button that uses the accelerometers to compensate for the robot's momentum by canceling it out with force on the motors in the other direction.

Maybe a button to do a perfect 90° in-place turn by constantly integrating the gyro data until 90° is reached, while simultaneously using the accelerometers to make sure the robot doesn't move around too much (this last part would probably not work, since the accelerometers would always return some acceleration even if the turn is perfectly stationary).

Maybe even something as simple as using the front panel lights as a speedometer (this would of course be collected by integrating the accelerometer data).

GridMove

I've been using an application called GridMove for a few weeks, and it's pretty good. It's an application that lets you snap windows to a grid, so if you have a very high-resolution monitor like I do, you can have several windows visible at once without having to customize their positions manually. GridMove is really flexible because you can define your own grids. Here's a screenshot of one that I've defined, called "Main, 2 auxiliary":

New Facebook account

So after a few friends recommended Facebook, I thought I'd give it a try. And now, 15 minutes after I've signed up, my Gmail inbox is filled with "Foo Bar wrote on your wall" and I'm overwhelmed by Facebook's information-rich world.

People who otherwise have no online presence are completely free on Facebook. Every action they have made on the site is public to all their friends. It's the sort of openness that I like, but taken to an extreme in one sense (all information is exposed to your friends) while very closed in another (nothing is shown to outsiders). This is exactly the kind of closed group–forming that I don't like...but now that I'm part of the closed group, will it matter so much to me?

It's also, unfortunately, even more distracting and time-consuming than IM. I find myself enjoying the slow, convenient nature of blogging. And now I will go to sleep.

Summer homework

Now that work is over and there's less than a week left of summer vacation, I don't have much of an excuse for not having started on my summer homework. How many of you have done it?

<rant>By the way, why is it always English class that assigns summer homework? Do English teachers think they have a monopoly on students' time? (lol) In fact, I dispute the value of summer homework altogether, since almost everyone saves it until school is almost upon them anyway.</rant>

Update, 2007-08-31 03:15: I just finished A Hero of Our Time, and I'd already done Section 1 of the packet, so I'm at the same level as Milda! (Assuming she hasn't done anything since she posted that comment.) Also, to save everyone the trouble of looking for it, here's an online version of the book that, as far as I can tell, is the same translation as we have. You can't grep dead trees.

Update, 2007-08-31 04:07: Here is my copy of the book, with the entire thing on one page, as well as normal black-on-white colors. I suggest you save this page onto your own computer; our internet connection is rather flaky.

Update, 2007-08-31 04:44: Aha, staying up late has had its benefits: I'm now finished with Section 2 as well. Also, has anyone noticed that the packet has no Section 4? (That's good for me, as now I can claim I've done sections 1, 2, and 4).

Last day at work

It's my last day at SchoolSoft (now DreamBox Learning). I've really enjoyed it and learned a lot about working in a development team too (as well as making almost $5000, unfortunately somewhat less because of income tax). They also gave me a great letter of recommendation for my next job (which will probably be at DreamBox again next summer).

Everyone who asks me about my job is always impressed by how much money I make, but honestly, to me that's just a bonus — working there was worth so much more to me than just money.

Update

An update to my previous post: I did use nvidia-settings, but eventually I decided to eschew graphical tools for the power of manually editing the xorg.conf configuration file. So now my xorg.conf is clean and human-readable, with lots of comments, and I've resolved not to use nvidia-settings or dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg anymore.

Dual booting, multiple monitors, desktop compositing

On my laptop, I'm dual booting between Windows Vista and Ubuntu 7.04. I've been using multiple monitors for about a month on Vista, where they've worked fine. Up till now, I hadn't tried setting up multiple monitors on Ubuntu, but I just did using the very convenient graphical tool nvidia-settings. The setup was painless: run gksudo nvidia-settings, right-click on the external monitor, and enable it.

Now that dual monitor setup works, my Ubuntu install has almost all the features that my Vista install does: wireless networking, hardware acceleration for graphics, fancy Aero-like effects with Beryl, and multiple monitors. An extra convenience for dual-booting is that, because of GRUB, I can hibernate both OSes at the same time, allowing me to switch between them very quickly.

I haven't tried setting up Bluetooth on Ubuntu yet, so that'll be my next challenge.

xkcd: Compiling

I use this excuse at work sometimes (although no one really minds if I slack off for a little while):


Alt-text: 'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'

SQL injection attack in the UN

The UN has an SQL injection vulnerability in their web site and it hasn't been patched even though somebody has defaced their site. To have a look, append the MS-SQL Server query of your choice to this URL: http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?statID=105;

For example, if you request:

http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?statID=105;drop table sysobjects

then their server will actually execute the query "drop table sysobjects" against their database. Of course, the query won't succeed, since sysobjects is a protected table, but the potential for damage is incredible. The main issue is that they still haven't done anything about it.