Mindstab.net

• Landed in Huston! The audiance should grab a nap, this next parts boring :) #
• Cleared customs sans full body scan or ultra grope! We are happy. Now we wait for 3 hours, #
• Boarding flight CO 1767Y to Seattle. #
• Touchdown in seatle. A bit of a wait and then home to vancouver! #
• Finally boarding ac8096 to vancouver! Almost done #
• Landed in vancouver! #
• Cleared customs, we are home! #

• Leaving for the airport shortly #
• Boarding flight CO 588Y to Huston. Here we go #

• I think I'm becoming a cranky old sysadmin. My love of bleeding edge has been massively blunted by hatred of wasting time on instability #
• In other news, Gallery3 Is Not Ready. http://www.mindstab.net/wordpress/archives/866 . And I'm still running Ubuntu 10.04 (unheard of prior) #

So I’m setting up a new website for a client (an artist) so the easiest what I’ve always done is use Gallery. I’ve used 2.* for years and now 3.0 is out, and has been for a few months. So I figured why not give it a try.

I’ve never knows a website to have intermittent bugs, but Gallery3 has a good couple of them. Sometimes the spacing around photo/album items is just way too big, and after a mouse over, they jump position. A good half the time trying to delete an item takes you to a blank white page with a single option, “delete” and then that takes you to a dead end page with clearly an AJAX reply. But only sometimes. How do you track down bugs that only happen half the time? The default theme, wind, seems to lean heavily on jquery and I think, but am not sure, this is where the instability is coming from, but having not boned up to the level of jquery master, I certainly can’t dive in. Also apparently some of these issues aren’t even unknown, but still haven’t been fixed so we could assume better minds than mine have looked.

So that’s a bit disappointing and a waste of a days work that I get to eat. Gallery3 is not stable and usable. Back to Gallery2.

(Also, I’m not even really a fan of hiding things like item names by default and only showing on mouse over, it’s bad for the kind of galleries I’m putting up, but there isn’t even an option about that, and again, not recoding a ton of jquery code.)

Frustrated.

• Mindstab.net: "2010 in passing": http://www.mindstab.net/wordpress/archives/859 #

• Ha, Android 2.2 has out of the box USB internet tethering, I can now install tomdroid(!) and Skype! #
• Good news: I can now play Quake3 on my cell phone (insane right?) Bad news: Wow is it hard to play Quake3 on a cell phone :P (need mouse!) #

So 2010′s been a year.

Nearer it’s start some friends and I competed for the second time in MIT’s BattleCode, this time getting second non-MIT spot, or 18th overall. These competitions have been good for us: they are fun, it’s a good group project, and we work on our group project skills like planning, coordinating, and so forth. We spend so much time on our own, or in school even, working solo it’s good to work these skills as they will be needed later. Also it’s fun to learn about and catch up on low level AI stuff, like swarming and flocking movement/coordination techniques etc.

I also entered a school project into BCNet’s Broadband Innovation Challenge and got awarded second place. My project was “Cortex” a P2P processing app that runs with no software install entirely in your web browser. It was comprised of a small Java Applet webserver used as a backbone for communication and then a JavaScript front end, with all the control logic of the P2P network also written in JavaScript. I pretty much wrote a P2P app in JavaScript just using Java only to get around the AJAX/Server of Origin security policy issue. It was an interesting and challenging project and I’m pleased with how it did in the competition.

Over the summer I was in China which was amazing.

Then in the fall while finishing off my degree in CS once and for all I also competed in the Google sponsored University of Waterloo AI Contest. This, while being a simpler solo competition, was notable for me as it was my third major project undertaken in Lisp. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge and again learned lots more about Lisp and again improved my Lisp style. Lisp and the emacs environment just take longer to learn and wrap my head around. And since I don’t get to work in them constantly, between work and school, it takes time. I’m by no means a master, but after convincing a friend to take a stab at the same competition in Lisp for his first try with Lisp, I at least see how far I’ve come. I’m getting more used to thinking functionally, especially with respect to using Lisp mapping functions instead of loops to modify, filter, or build on data. I placed disappointingly poorly due to lack of time, but I’m satisfied with what I learned (and also proud by association that the winner was a Lisp entry!). It was a good experience. I look forward to being able to undertake some more Lisp projects in the new year.

I also boned up on my Python this fall for a small work project, a multi threaded web crawler for a client. Played successfully with Python’s threading, so that was fun.

And that brings us to now. I’m in Colombia for the holidays, and in my vacation spare time I’ve finally gotten around to looking at the codebase to my school project “Cortex”. As school projects are, it worked, and well, but the codebase was a bit of a mess due to strong time constraints. Now that I have some time I’m doing some massive cleanups and adding a few features I’d wanted to but didn’t have time to. Hopefully early in the new year it’ll be in shape that I can release it. That would be nice.

So 2010 was a great year. I got to write a lot of cool code in several different language. I got to travel more than I ever have before, and I read a lot more than 2009 (traveling facilitates a lot of reading :)). It’s been a good year.

For 2011 though, now that I’m done with school, I’d like to start by releasing more code, starting with Cortex; getting more paying work; and looking at maybe starting a startup. I’d like to spend more time working on both AI (if you hadn’t noticed, obviously a hobby of mine) and in Lisp, starting with getting back into my signed copy of Peter Norvig’s “Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp” (yes getting it signed was awesome and a ridiculously geeky moment) and moving on from there. I’d like to at least keep up with the reading. I have high hopes for it to be an interesting year.

So here’s to 2010, you’ve been great, lets see if I can’t build on that for a more amazing 2011.

• Well it turns out a PHP upgrade on my server shattered all my gallery installs so I spent the morning fixing those #
• We just bought "Manzanas con manzanas", spanish "Apples to apples"! #

• Just upgraded my cell phone (LG Eve) to Android 2.2 myself! It's awesome. Fail for Rogers. http://www.mindstab.net/wordpress/archives/845 #

So early this year I bought my first Android phone, an LG Eve, from Rogers Mobile. It turns out it came with Android 1.5 which was a year old at the time, the current version was 2.1 and 2.2 was released that spring. Rogers has been promising an update to 1.6 for the phone pretty much since I bought it and still no release. It was pushed back twice and has since gone silent. This could be the end and a sad story at that, with just over 2 more years left on my contract.

However, this is Android! And so heroically the CyanogenMod people have been following the Android code base and releaseing an free up to date version that works on some more common phones. The good folks of Open Etna have taken that work and customized it and made sure it works on the LG Eve specifically. So following the instructions on their and other sites, I have been able to upgrade my phone to Android 2.2, and it’s awesome. There is a lot more software available, voice commands, live wallpapers, and a JIT compiler so software should run faster, and more that I’m just discovering (ships with a good terminal app). And just generally newer default apps. So thank you very much to those communities of volunteers for doing vastly more than what my Phone company was incapable of.

And now briefly what I did:

I followed the Open Etna Installation Guide. It’s pretty straight forward and simple. However there were a few other resources. I can’t stress enough how important good backups are, so make sure your contacts are synced to your google account and make a list of your favorite apps because you are about to wipe everything clean. Better instructions on how to run the backup procedure are at www.zacpod.com/p/71. Bellow the videos on the Open Etna guide is a important reminded to install the Google apps. Considering how important this is I’m surprised they placed it a bit out of the way, and it’s important because it allows you to then resync all your contacts and access all the other Google goodies that help make these phones great (and who wants to reenter all their contacts when all you have to do is hit a button to restore them).

So that’s about it. Now my phone is to date and has a whole lot more life to it. Thanks Android community!