Lolrus.org

I Need a Jorb

Well, I didn't get a job at Harris RF after I had a good phone interview and such because currently my GPA is .075 below their minimum requirement.  I find this very upsetting.  I think my friend, Drew, worded it quite well, "It's one thing to have a [GPA] policy of limiting interviews so that they aren't inundated, but not accepting someone because of a GPA after you've decided you like them is really stupid."

Well, I also didn't request to work remotely part-time in the fall for Mastercam in the fall because I was pretty optimistic about getting this job.  I am SOL.  I also refuse to sell my soul to retail because I am worth more than selling iPods at BestBuy and I have too much integrity to sell people garbage at CompUSA that's marked up at least 200%.

If you are reading this and know of a place near or in Rochester where I can apply to work part-time this fall, or a place I can work remotely I would greatly appreciate it.  Also, I will be happy to do freelance work as well.

I won't make it through the fall--especially because I need about 40 portfolio prints by the end of fall quarter.

Anyways, I have good news too.  I am really excited about my color science class.  The professor seems great and like he knows his stuff.  It's going to be a challenging class, but it's definitely applicable to stuff I want to do after I graduate.  I also think I will enjoy the Imaging Science department a lot.  I am very pleased that I found out about the Imaging Science minor. Who knows, I might even be sucked into going for an imaging science masters after I get my CS degree.

Internet--or Lack Thereof

Well, I haven't gotten cable internet in my apartment, but I think I am deciding not to get it.  Why?  Because I think I will be much more productive and get better grades and get out of the apartment more.

I can always go to CSH or some hotspot to use get my email (p.s. I love CSH internet)

Unfortunately, this also means I will not be putting much work into my personal projects for a while.

More GLens

Wow, check this out:

If I do say so myself, it looks quite sweet. So I have all the tracing code worked out. Now I just need to (a) add interactive features and (b) optimize the hell out of it (c) give it a little chromatic aberration. It's terribly inefficient right now, but I just set it up so it works.

GLens Continued

I coded all night and I actually got some tracing working. Oh boy! Only for the entrance of a lens, not the exit. I've had enough dot products for one night.

Here's a screen shot: See, spheres are not ideal for lenses.

GLens

I coded my project a bit more. I decided to name it GLens for now. It's a lens cad program licensed under the GPL, so why not? I wrote a class for sperical lenses today that just draws them. You input R1, R2, d, and the clipping height, and the centerpoint for each one. I am trying to decide between using real math, or just approximated linearized stuff to find the refraction angles and intersections. Since these are sperical lenses, real calculations wouldn't be too hard. Kinda wish I payed a bit more attention in calc.

Here's a screenshot:

Pseudo Ray Tracer

Well, I have for a while been curious about modeling how light is effected by lenses with a somewhat realistic computer simulation. My curiosity about chromatic aberrations is what started this nonsense, but I don't think I will implement code for different wavelengths for a while. It won't actually create images, but it will trace rays.

It will be in just two dimensions (for now) because lenses can be modeled in 2D. Calculations in 2D are also much cheaper.

I plan on making this a dynamic program where you can move the focal plane, objects, and the lenses around. Eventually, I will set it up so lenses can be moved in an animation or something to demonstrate and experiment with zoom lenses.

Sperical lenses will be the first things that I implement, but I definitely plan on being able to have aspherical lenses as well, represented with NURBS eventually. I really should brush up on my calculus so I can find how rays intersect with these (Newton's method)... either that, or I could just turn them into line segments and solve a bunch of equations. Either way, I need to learn more math.

I am thinking OpenGL and GLUT for now.... C++, not C because I am an OO whore. I really want to have menus and drag & dropping too, ideally blenderlike, but probably much simpler.

Edit: Wrote a little code and my repository is at: http://ohpie.com/svn/lens/trunk/

Rails Woes

Getting Rails to work was such a bitch. Maybe I am just stupid or my server is a bit nutty, but it took me like two evenings just to get damn scaffolding to work.

I also realized I had used MEDIUMINT for my user ID's in my database for the AOL searches, and the user id went beyond the MEDIUMINT limit.... so I am rebuilding the database as I sleep tonight.

On the good note, I found a nice little article on making screen have a tablike status bar on the bottom. It works pretty nicely. Check it out here I enjoy it thoroughly. Couldn't live without my screen and my zshell *sigh*.

I've also been using sed a lot more. I had a lot of arduous tasks to do at work today and sed helped out. Maybe didn't hurry things up very much, but it made it more fun for sure. Regexes are your friend. And so is REXML when you have to change a lot of Visual Studio vcproj files. I mean, sure, using ruby to alter a bunch of Visual Studio projects sounds like a terrible idea, but it works great. Project files are XML, so you can just read em right in to a document. The only issue I had is that we use post-build steps with newlines characters... VS.NET turns it into a type thing in one of the attributes. REXML reads it in as &#x0d...which is annoying. Yay for the function String.gsub!() I just put them back in their place like a good little attribute. Writing these scripts is turning projects that would take days of cut & paste work and carpol-tunnel syndrome into projects that take hours.

Writing a script to do something is always more fun than doing the actual something.....

AOL Search Logs

I was curious how many numbers were in there that were in the form of a phone number (###-###-####)

mysql> select COUNT(*) from srec where Query
> regexp "[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}";
+----------+
| COUNT(*) |
+----------+
|    4626  |
+----------+

Facebook API

Well, the Facebook API was released a few days ago.  It uses REST to retrieve data.  There was a Java and a PHP library on the Dev site for it already... but I felt like making one for Ruby that could be used for Ruby scripts and Ruby on Rails apps because I wanted to make a web app that would turn your friends into vCards.  I wrote mine called FBLIB... it only has classes for users and friends so far since that's all I was going to use.  It's pretty elaborate though, except there is no error catching or documentation because I was writing this for myself in a hurry and I am lazy.

Anyways, I have it in my SVN repository at http://ohpie.com/svn/fblib

After I finished writing it I realized that the Facebook API didn't give you contact information, so it would be impossible to make useful vCards of all your friends.  So I give up.  Have fun with the source.  It's licensed under GPL, and I think it's a lot cleaner than the other Ruby facebook libraries I have seen in the Facebook Developer group.  It uses the REXML libraries that come with Ruby (REXML is pretty damn sweet!).

If you would like to contribute, drop me a line and I will give you write access to the repo.

Rolleiwhat?

Yay!  I was fiddling around with my rolleiflex today and I finally got the exposure counter mostly working, which is just fantastic.  Still, I wasted a ton of film trying to get it to work.  Ugh.  At least most of it was expired.

I shot two rolls that came out and they are drying right now.  It was getting dark and I didn't have much to shoot, so I just took pictures of my cats, Apache and Lord Fuzzles, and some other randomness.  I'm also getting the hang of metal developing reels so I am happy.

Tomorrow is the company picnic which is bound to be fun.  I had to miss it the last year because it was after school started.  If the weather is anything like it was today it will be fantastic, just fantastic. :)

I was given a project at work to do which involves splitting MFC projects into two projects, one for the code and another for a resource only DLL.  There's like 60 projects for me to do and I think my boss was planning on it taking several days/weeks, but I wrote a ruby script which automates 90% of the process.  I still have to modify 1 file in each project by hand, add each project to the solution, and deal with Visual Source Safe (EWWW, VSS is so bad).  I also have to test each project.  Oh by the way, I love REXML, the  built in XML ruby support.  It's making my life so much easier because .vcproj files are XML and I can read it in and spit it out.  The only issue is that Visual Studio wants to "convert" the project once I open it up again probably because it isn't the exact same formatting as the ones it outputs.  That's the only actual difference I see.  Order of attributes and whitespace shouldn't matter with XML.

I'll post some pictures from my Rolleiflex when I get around to scanning them.