The times they are a changing
Posted on Sunday 03/08/09
It's time for the 10 o'clock Kevin update!
IBM Co-op
Yup, I'm on co-op again. From 3/9/09 to 8/31/09, I'll be working at IBM's lab on RIT's campus working on the Lotus suite of software. This job has a few downsides:
- It's in Rochester
- It's another massive corporation (see previous posts while working at GE)
- It's yet more Java development
- Lotus is one of the more hated software suites I know of. Apparently it's this massive enterprise-y system with terrible usability. Just what I've heard, though, since I've never used it.
It also has some good points:
- It pays quite well
- Offers convenient part-time work afterwards
- Work is with small teams
- I can still do stuff with friends in Rochester
- It sounds like they're really into good SE practices. I liked GE on the whole, but the group I worked with was just barely above developing on an opportunistic model, so doing better than that is a welcome change.
Website upgrade
Nothere v5 is on the way. V4 (the rails site you may be reading now) was largely a rails learning experience. It was fun. It has some problems, though.
Firstly, it's still using the same design as v1 (the iframes-based monstrosity that I put down like a rabid dog and that I'm ashamed to have created in the first place). The art and code sections are still heavily image-based, and have some unresolved layout issues in certain browsers. I think it's time to go to a much simpler design, maybe along the minimalist style of the current main section. Whatever I do, it'll be unified between the sections.
Secondly, the stuff below the surface needs changing. I was learning rails as I went, so a lot of early decisions in the building of this site were made poorly out of a lack of underlying understanding of a number of concepts. I know a lot more about what I'm doing now, so I think I can make things work in a much more logical fashion.
Thirdly, I'd like to use a framework that allows me a little more flexibility than Rails does. As it stands, I have three very similar sections to the site (art, code and main (writing never got implemented)), but under the hood, they're almost completely standalone. This is a result of equal parts my inexperience, rails' limitations, and poor decision-making on my part. I think that redoing it in maybe cakePHP or Python's Django (with my significantly increased understanding of this kind of web-development) will alleviate a lot of those problems.
Yo Dawg, I herd you like silly scripts...
Posted on Friday 02/06/09
Background
So, Dr. Hoss N Lopp, aka Chris Hossenlopp put together a fun script in mostly Ruby to generate variations on the YoDawg meme:
YO DAWG, I HERD YOU LIKE Xs, SO WE PUT AN X IN YOUR X SO YOU CAN Y WHILE YOU Y.
It's a stupid meme that was funny for about 5 minutes, but the script is pretty cool, and it was fun to help out with. My contribution was to replace a few sections in 'Lopp's code that used shell scripts with pure ruby, and then crammed it into my rails site (nothere.rit.edu). Paul Fisher also contributed some optimization.
So, if you are bored, check out the YoDawg generator:
Code
You can find the Paul Fisher's latest version of the code on his mercurial repository, and 'Lopp's on his.
Forgive the state of the code - this was put together during a boring class, and my modifications were done in about an hour while I should have been working on other stuff, so it's not exactly the cleanest code. :)
Algorithm
The general algorithm is:
- Pick a verb at random
- Get the definition from the dict.org server
- Check each word in that definition, keeping all the nouns.
- From that list of nouns, pick one randomly.
So, we get nouns more or less related to the verb from which they spawned, sometimes. :)
Where have all the servers gone / long time passing...
Posted on Monday 01/26/09
You may or may not have noticed, but the Nothere server has been down for almost 3 months. We're back, though, so here's what's new.
Where'd You Go Now?
About 10 weeks ago, my co-locationg facility informed me of a hardware malfunction (Fish told me my fan was dying). I attempted to fix this with parts on hand, but it turned out the be the cpu fan, not the case fan, and I had no replacement on hand. It took me a few weeks, but I found a couple old Quicksilver G4's of the same model I had, but with dead motherboards. I bought them for $25 each, and now I have a couple nice boxes of parts, should anything else break (besides the motherboard). It took me several weeks to find time to drive the 1 mile over to the co-location facility (Fish's apartment) and replace the fan, but I finally did, and now, here we are.
Classes
I'm taking:
- Concurrent Software Systems, which is all about, you guessed it, concurrency in software.
- Verification and Validation, a course on software testing.
- Intro to AI, a very cool class on intelligent systems + algorithms. We're getting into neural nets now, which is just really freakin' neat. Final exam is to build Skynet.
- Physics II, only one more to go after this one.
Work
Working part-time at GE MDS, maybe 15 hours a week. Working on the SOFA Production Database (spdb), which can be found here, 5-20 hours a week. It's php + mysql; I'd love to re-implement that using some sort of web framework, rather than the raw php it has at the moment, but that may be a ways off.
On the co-op front, I'm still looking. Mainly for the summer, but possibly for the spring, should a really nice offer present itself.
