Entries by Tim

Hey everyone. I've grown to really dislike serendipity, so I've switched over to Wordpress, and have converted my site to be just a blog (I rarely use Trac, and never for anything interesting, and those apps really needed to come down off the store).

See all the new WordPressy goodness here!

Writing some code today, and I realized there's a list of features I've come to depend on in programming languages. Some of these are relatively "new" features in the world of languages, but I still get crotchety if the language at hand doesn't have:

• Anonymous functions or lambdas (in C, function pointers are kinda close)
  
• Array mapping
  
• Type-checking comparison in weakly typed languages
  
• Some kind of "friend" or "visible-to" accessibility indicator, for unit testing
  
• Oh yeah, a good unit testing framework
  
• Ternary if-then operator
  
• Named arguments
  
• Optional arguments
  

(Today's rant sponsored by PHP 5.2, which is missing several - but not all - of the features on this list.)

Two things, real quick:

• If you're on a Mac, and you're using Time Machine, and you listen to a lot of music, and you wonder why your backup drive is getting like 300 MB of data every ten minutes, it's because iTunes is updating your music files with the "Play Count" field (see the Wiki article on ID3 for more), and Time Machine is detecting that as a file change and duly syncing it to your drive. That took me a while to figure out.
  
• I need new blog software! I haven't written on here in like five months because I simply cannot stand the interface any more. Uploading media is a pain, sorting entries into multiple categories is problematic, and it's just kind of plain ugly (and I hate going through "themes" or "skins" or whatever the kids are calling them these days). I'm leaning WordPress, but commentary or advice is welcome. (It's a huge bonus if the platform you recommend has a Serendipity importer.)
  

One more note - as I was posting this entry, the trackback script choked and died in Chrome. So I guess that's another reason to switch.

So when they say winter quarter at Rose is hectic? They're not kidding. I just found my first solid chunk of downtime since I came back to school two weeks ago. What have I been up to, you ask?

For starters, the Festivus, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations that occurred over my last break were all most excellent. This year was the fifth consecutive Festivus celebrated within the group, and it was by far the smoothest a Festivus has ever gone. The Airing of Grievances was trouble-free, the introduction of a white elephant gift exchange went smoothly, and our Feats of Strength involved that classic game Set. For Christmas a few days later, hordes of relatives (from both sides of the family) descended on the house for almost an entire week all told. (Most hilarious was our cousin Keith, who's two and just being ridiculous all over the place. He got an iPod Touch for Christmas. He's two.) Lastly, New Year's went well overall, despite some illnesses on part of a couple of the partygoers. Mario Kart is never so hilarious as when played sleep-deprived at 4am. Continue reading "A couple updates"

So the other day I bought a guitar.

A lot of people have been telling me that this seems really random - since when did I want to learn to play guitar? It's understandable, given that I didn't really talk to that many people about it ahead of time, but I've been looking to take up another musical instrument for awhile now. I wanted something more portable than the piano, which I played for a couple years way back when, but still relatively common and popular (so not the ocarina in my closet).

The MSU trip I took awhile ago was really what put "guitar" in my head. The instant I got there, we all sat down in the middle of a basketball court and like four different people all pulled out guitars, and everyone was having a great time. I thought, why not take it up myself? Continue reading "Not an impulse buy, I promise"

Walking back to the dorm from a Learning Center shift the other day, I was chatting with one of the office staff who lived nearby about our respective majors. He was a double (CS/SE); I was a triple (CS/SE/MA). The difference between us, I discovered, was that he filed a plan of study and I had not.

Actually, the difference was that he knew that a plan of study had to be filed in order to have more than one major, and I did not. He also knew that this plan had to be filed by the end of your junior year. I was aware of none of this, and subsequently had a slight panic moment. Continue reading "I've been told I'm insane."

Our floor is a pretty boisterous one, and the guys who live here are prone to getting into certain predicaments that most dorms might not encounter. So when I hear someone running down the hall screaming "We have to go to the hospital!", I figured it was only a matter of time, really. But that shouldn't stop me from going to see what the fuss is about. Continue reading "In stitches"

It all started three weeks ago.

A bunch of friends from Rose and I were all just hanging out in the Apartments, when for no particular reason I decided to suggest that one guy here (also named Tim) and Chris become friends on Facebook. I had my laptop with me, so I did, and the friendship established itself shortly thereafter. This was apparently all the prompting Chris needed to drive the five hours down from MSU to come visit Rose, putting into motion a massive chain of events that ended in nothing less than pure awesome. Continue reading "Like exchange students, but awesomer"

Funniest 8am EVER.

I show up, and the first thing I see is the giant vat of coffee sitting on the end of one of the tables. This is not new; our prof is nice enough to buy us all coffee on various days, especially on Fridays. I'm actually like ten minutes early at this point, so I grab some coffee and sit down.

That's when I notice the other thing: nobody from my group is in class with me. I was only expecting one out of three in the first place: one of my group members had an appendectomy the other day, and another is at his sister's wedding, but there was supposed to be at least one other person there.

So I'm sitting there sipping my coffee when the prof finally decides to start class (five minutes late - we had about 50% attendance when the bell rang, so he held off a bit until a few more latecomers straggled in). He begins with announcements, and the following conversation took place:

Prof: "OK, so one of the feedbacks I got from you guys was to keep announcing when the homework was due. The next homework is due Sunday-"
Student (in the back): "Wait. Why is it due Sunday?"
Prof: "Do you ever pay attention?" Continue reading "This just happened"

I celebrated a triumphant return to college a couple weeks ago, moving in the 30th and finding it very easy to get back into the swing of things. First thing I did? Help run a laptop orientation session for the freshman.

The way it works is as follows: every freshman is required to buy the same laptop. This makes support a lot easier for our tech department, and also means that the school can standardize on a set of software that everyone gets access to (and gets pretty deep discounts on at the same time, because of the volume of purchases made). However, the network services here are pretty intense - we run everything from an online learning management system (ANGEL, for those wondering, but it may shift to Blackboard in the not-so-distant future) to a couple different network file systems (AFS and DFS) to integrated Kerberos/LDAP authentication.

Technobabble over.

Anyway, the complete orientation takes about four hours, and includes just about everything a new student could possibly want to do with their laptop. I do mean everything - the session starts with a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation before it even gets to "plug in your laptop," and progresses through another ten slides before it gets to "press the power button to turn on your laptop." I did get to deal with some pretty interesting questions - one kid didn't receive exactly half his power cord, and another got two mice in his package. And I got paid for four hours' work. Not a bad deal. Continue reading "Back to school"