Steve Dougherty's Blog

Nine school days until seniors leave! Both my APs are now what amounts to study hours now that testing is over. It’s nice. Comp Physics created some quality quotes yesterday:

“Light pours forth from your rear and keeps you from falling through your chair.” (In reference to photons, the electromagnetic force boson behind most Newtonian forces.)

“We call it the ‘Ultrapurple.’” (Ultraviolet)

I’m working more on Cavez of Phear. The save file format is now one file, the code has been further cleaned up, (Mostly eliminating copy-paste) and I’m working on adding features to the editor. I had some problems with not closing file pointers initially, which caused very strange behavior until I realized what I had forgotten. If anyone wants look at the github repo, it’s here.

My nose is congested and I was sneezing yesterday. I got up around 2am because I was having trouble sleeping. I think taking Psych is messing with me, as I to some degree harbor irrational fears that I exhibit symptoms of whatever mental disorder we covered last. It’s a really interesting class. If I had more time I’d gladly upgrade to AP. The current Psych assignment is annoying to me, as the podcasts we have to describe a study from seem to discuss a phenomenon in broad terms rather than talking about a specific study. I found an interesting article on conditional love.

I read about Steve Roberts, who seems interesting.

School has been overwhelming. I’m taking two APs: AP Computer Science, which teaches Java, and AP English Literature. AP Computer Science is at least currently pretty easy, as it apparently assumes no coding experience, which I find strange for an AP course. I wonder if it might be improved through an entrance exam and skipping the easier stuff, with the intro being instead in the existing Intro to AP Computer Science? As I haven’t coded Java before, although it is very similar in syntax to C++, it might be good that the class starts out lower-level.

One of the things I find about coding is that I seem to be unable, on my own, to think of reasons to program. My current line of thought is that simple games might be boring: they’re simple and will probably be clones of Pong or Tetris or something. When we actually wrote simple games in Advanced C++ Game Development at CAEN in 2008, (I didn’t go back last summer; they took away the dorm option so we didn’t get to spend evenings on our own machines.) it ended up being fun anyway. It could be fun to rewrite my maze game… The next problem I have in this is that I don’t have much free time with my current class load, so I’d have to sacrifice browsing reddit or something. At least it would be more productive, and perhaps more educational. Qualifying many of my statements seems to make my writing more verbose… (See! I did it again!)

AP English is satisfyingly rigorous, and I have by no means been able to complain that we aren’t doing enough. I’m going to a University of Michigan campus visitation over today and Monday, and I’m going to bring Hamlet and attempt to annotate during downtime; Act I Scenes 1-3 are due Tuesday.

I am told Computational Physics is equivalent to an AP, although it doesn’t seem bad at all in contrast to APE or Precalc. Relativity is really interesting, and the equations aren’t bad; it’s the logic I usually get tripped up on. That’s not to say my algebra never utterly fails. I really like Olstad. His website is very impressive. He is very careful about definitions, and on the first day (or so?) we discussed the differences between schooling, training, and education. After listening to our definitions, Olstad defined schooling as what goes on at school, training as specialized refinement of skills, and education as longer-term outlook for learning. He frequently calls schooling “the game,” (which makes Irfan lose often) and not the point of being there; I find this appealing. He also likes semicolons, calling them yield signs. This has influenced my semicolon use in this post. I’m not sure whether I’m overusing them.

Precalc and AP English give the majority of my homework. Precalc assigns homework consistently, even when the Seniors are gone, as I have learned the hard way. Now that I’m aware of that, hopefully I will manage things better. Pline has an evil genius chair, and I have yet to determine why.

I am amazed by how much it helps to have a pad of paper next to me while reading Great Expectations for Brit Lit.

The timing for the snow day was awesome. I was glad for the break. Four-day weekend! ^^

I played Left 4 Dead Versus and got ground into a fine powder. However, I knew it was a game, didn’t ragequit, and asked for advice when we finished and went back to the lobby:

• Smoker or Hunter: try to attack the last one to go over a one-way ledge, the others probably won’t be able to stage a rescue.
• You are not so much a team of four as two teams of two. Never let someone go off alone. Stick together.
• The two in front crouch, the two in back shoot over their heads.
• Talk. Coordinate. As Infected, wait for someone to stray, or plan an overwhelming Boomer, then Hunters and Smoker ambush.
• As Tank, it is very bad for you in the open. A survivor running backwards can outrun a Tank, provided the Survivor doesn’t run into anything.
• As Tank, bash physics objects around. Movable objects have a red outline when you look at them. Hitting a Survivor with one is devastating.
• “Four in a bad situation is better than two in a good one.”

I’m halfheartedly working on Chemistry studying. I hope Monday will prove to be productive.

I had an eventful day in Chem today. I accidentally dropped the top to the crucible a few times, then when we heated it part of it cracked and flew off. I hope that wasn’t due to my dropping it. After it was heated, I carefully and firmly picked up the top with the tongs, and one arm of the tongs slipped over the other, flipping the top and knocking over the crucible, spilling the barium chloride all over the table. Oops. Justin and I had to get our data elsewhere.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. The admin interface is now really slick. It’s gotten an overhaul and is now a pleasure to use, although it seems like it’s slower.  The main page just took an ENTIRE MINUTE to render! This is unacceptable, and hopefully I can get it sorted out. [EDIT: I enabled WP Super Cache, and it seems better. That's odd because it didn't seem to enable last time.] Unfortunately, I forgot, although I understood I was supposed to, disable my plugins before the upgrade. Result: white screen of non-loading death and me panicing. Luckily, Google revealed a very helpful page on how to disable plugins by editing the MySQL database, so now the site is back up.

I was hoping to get into RSI, which is an MIT research program. The first sign was that it wanted people who already knew what they wanted to do for their PHDs. (I seriously almost wrote “PDFs” there.) I checked my PSAT and ACT scores and they didn’t meet the minimum. Even though they said that lower scores could be balanced with strong recommendations and whatnot, I decided not to continue the application process. That saves my teachers writing recommandation letters then. It made me feel strange to request an essay from a teacher.

I’m holding a LAN with 8 people on January 2nd. I say 8 because we would need that many for a full game of Versus Left 4 Dead. Pat might not be able to come due to a New Years thing, but I hope it works out.

EDIT: Hmm… The delay in response time looks like it’s limited to default_socket_timout in php.ini…

My DSL modem (even though I guess it’s actually a bridge, but modem is what is says on the box) crashed. I knew something was wrong when a request to Google timed out. I couldn’t ping the modem, even from the router. I have homework to do and I haven’t started any of it yet. Tomorrow will be busy.

I hope I’ll be able to learn my lesson this time: if it’s assigned more than one in advance, it’ll take more than an hour to do it. I stayed up until 1:30AM to finish an econ essay, and I will have Spanish vocab studying, a Brit Lit essay, and whatever else I get today for after school. Bleh.

The Left 4 Dead demo is set to release sometime today, and the Valve server admin mailing list is spazzing out because Valve announced there will no longer be a server browser in Left 4 Dead – servers will be added to a pool of available ones, and people will be matchmake’d into them. The only control over settings server admins will have is the MOTD and a banner image. They’ve said they’re taking the piles of feedback into concideration, though, so hopefully a traditional server browser will be included. The reason they get loads of servers for only the cost of software distribution is because people get to put up a server for themselves, and they control it, call it home, and are able to possibly get a better experience if they upgrade their servers. In a pure matchmaking setting? Doesn’t seem like it. I want to be able to pick the server I play on.

Oblivion still exists. Sadly Bethesda doesn’t seem to have improved the engine much for Fallout 3 – the characters still move jerkily, and the voiceacting still leaves much to be desired.

I finished the Theives’ Guild quest. It was pretty epic and the ending gives you very, very nice things. I’m also in the Dark Brotherhood now, and the quests are kinda depressing. OOO upped the amount of gold that was required to be fenced to a whopping 15,000! I had to go down lines of shops and houses stealing anything worth money that I could get to. I got it, though. There are lots of vistas – I mean that in the sense of breathtaking view, not in an operating system full of fail – to catch one’s eye.

In other news, I’m waiting for the impending school to happen, I’m working on a HL2DM map of my house, and I have confirmed that Oblivion uses nav nodes. Which is bad. Also, I called Cavalier (for C2) and a high-level tech was able to confirm that they don’t do any filtering or blocking. W00T!

EDIT: Thanks to Ryan, I am now able to begin moving my machines downstairs into the nice, cool basement! ^^ I am happy! He helped by putting an end on the ubercable that comes down from upstairs where the Intertubes come in.

Only three days in and it feels as if break never happened… It was nice while it lasted, and it didn’t help that I was sick over half of it. Oh well.

I have all my Linux boxes getting the correct time from t3h Internets on a daily basis. It’s way easer than I would have thought – in /etc/cron.daily/ put a script named ntpdate (for human readability, I would think) with the line ntpdate <server name>.

The <server name> is the domain name of a time server. AT&T runs two at ntp1.sbcglobal.net and ntp2.sbcglobal.net, and Ubuntu has one at the logical ntp.ubuntu.com. I’ve noticed severe drift in the time on all my Linux boxes, so hopefully this’ll sort things out. Instead of a daily update, there’s also an option to run ntpd, which will use up some resources, but correct the time constantly.