Glimpses

Got stated on the our Software Engineering project last night. Lets just say that the source code, which is in quick basic, is atrocious. I'd be very sad going back and looking at my old code and finding it equal to this. Granted most of my old code was back before college, when I was still a kid. Anyways, the horror of the code is quite clear:

• No comments to speak of
• Most lines are actually a dozen statements strung together onto a single line

Another long day in the boring day in my life. Hours of classes, okay so it was just one, but homework afterwards has stretched on for hours, and I feel guilty taking the breaks I need from it (like writing this) so they aren't really very relaxing. Some dilemma huh? For the interest of all those who care, I despise writing. Okay, so its not that simple. I like to write, I truley enjoy it as I see it as a form of art and myself as an artist. I just happen to despise writing when I have no choice in the matter. Actually, just ask any who knows me well, I despise doing anything if I didn't have a choice in it. And thus, my rebellious streak, or perhaps I'm just lazy, or I just like having my say to much.

Another quicksilver post, it really is one of the coolest programs. A note on those quick reminders, if quicksilver crashes, it loses your reminders, which is a bit annoying, as I keep crashing quicksilver, or locking it up, something with the apple mail plugin, rather annoying. Some cool things you can do, control iTunes with quicksilver, so now you can pause your songs and stuff with just the keyboard without Alt-Tabbing over to iTunes.

This semester I am doing a ton of writing due to taking three Gen-Eds this semester, Christian Thought, Science Technology and Society, and Fine Arts. Christian Thought has numerous written homeworks that are reflections on our reading and STS has weekly letters/journals.

I think I have the photos section setup to my liking. It more or less mirrors what I had before, so thats good since I'm trying to move to Drupal with minimal effect to the visual side of things. However, it did require some fairly in-depth modifications of acidfree, the photo album module I'm using. I didn't like the way it displayed things such as a weird background around images, the spacing was to not my liking, and various things like that, and oddly enough it required digging into the guts to change it. I also had to extend phptemplate in order to allow seperate theming for acidfree content, so there were so major modifications to it.

Here you will find a collection of things I've worked on or found interesting and worthwhile to post. There is some poetry and other written works, as well as projects and programming thoughts/ideas/tips.

Okay, so the coolest new program for me on the Mac is Quicksilver. Basically it gives you keyboard control over every little thing you do. I don't know about you, but if I can do it without moving from the keyboard I will. Even though my MacBook has a gorgeous large touchpad easily within reach. So the trick here is about setting reminders with Quicksilver:

I'm trying to move my site over to using drupal. Things should look more or less the same, but hopefully by making it easier to update I actually will update it. I'm dreading the task of moving existing blogs over to drupal, I have two on blogspot.com, and I should probably move them, but that will take time.

I've been trying out RC3 of Blender 2.41 and so for its been pretty cool. I've run it under WindowsXP Pro/Home, Fedora Core 4, and Ubuntu Dapper Drake. For the most part things have been smooth sailing. At first I tossed out RC3 on Dapper as the version I downloaded wouldn' let me select any objects in the 3D views. Come to find it out it was dynamic link problem with open source Radeon drivers. I had had this problem before trying to run Breve. The solution was simple after some looking. Its clearly explained on the Ubnutu site. Installing the binary drivers worked like a charm. (Note: The staticly linked RC3 worked fine once I tried it.) I like the nodes and compositer but the best is the revamped sequence editor with ffmpeg support. Finally a clean way to export muxed videos (meaning audio in the same file as the video . . . like normal, lol). However there are some interesting problems with Blender not wanting to import Audio HD claiming something isn't found, and all it was was a simple .wav file. Oh well, I'll have to track that down later.

Welcome to my website. I'm a Masters Student at the University of Oklahoma studying Computer Science. My research has focued on neuroevolution, game play, evolutionary computation practice, and now I will be starting to work in severe weather prediction.

Beyond research I enjoy playing computer games and art work, such as drawing, watercolor, 3D graphics, and digital artwork.