ThePanda

Blog time, perhaps. It is sort of late, and I’d rather go to sleep tonight, seeing as it is like one of the first days this semester when I really don’t have work to do. Strange, in retrospect I am not completely sure about whether or not I should regret not taking the cool graduate vision course I was in for a day. They were cool, they are helping solve a real crime in Virginia involving a run away car and such, and I really really wanted to do that, mostly because it was research, had lots of real stuff to do, and was very little fluff, however as an undergraduate I am in fluff filled classes and have little time to do much of anything else. I promise next year will be cooler, I’ll be done with most of the fluff, I will be in a year where I am pretty certain about completing concentration requirements, should I ever actually get the time to file one before this semester runs out, and everyone my year will be out exploring the world. Wonders of wonders, I am still associated with my research from last semester, if everything works out and things don’t go kaboom like they are now, I might even have a paper out, and that can be fun. Working with a professor across the country however is not always fun, it involves meeting other people, and that is not a fun thing to do if you are not a very people person.

Blogs were predated by .plan files, and being in a CS department where Zephyr is still popular makes you intimately aware of the importance of maintaining one. However I also have a blog, and hence it is fairly important to put stuff up here too. Well anyways, I am going to be in New York, New York for the summer, living with my roommate, his girlfriend and other people, and this can be fun. I will be working for a semi-to-majorly evil corporation which makes lots of money, and is not completely weird. I have so far interviewed with what was formerly Macromedia and is now Adobe’s Flex division, which seemed fairly exciting, because it involved mostly research, and Apple Corporation. Adobe was one of the places where I really wanted to work, sadly they came to Brown too late to actually create a major dent in Bloomberg’s chances of getting me. Apple on the other hand has convinced me of not really wanting to work there (no I don’t care about declaring this, I e-mailed them this already), because they really never got back to me, kept dropping out of sight, and pretended to be far more important and busy than they were. I have long been a fan of Folklore, and would at some point of time really like to work at something of the Apple they describe. That Apple however no longer exists. I am not sure I am applying for any internships after this, a lot depends on how I find this one, but I would really like to do more research the next year, probably a more tightly controlled piece of work.

The powers that be are going to discontinue making the Aibo at the end of this month. As many people as I have told about this, have told me I am crazy to want one or care about this, however I am known to be crazy, and an Aibo is one of those things which I would really like to own at some point of time when I am rich enough to not care about the über expensive price tag. That being said they are cool, used by colleges and things like the Robo-Soccer World Cup, and are some of the best pieces of robotics available in the consumer market. Sony wasn’t going to discontinue them until they got a new CEO/Chairman type thing who decided they weren’t making enough money. Post rootkit Sony seems to be doing increasingly evil things, is sad, they used to be a fairly good company according to me, and weren’t very high on my evilness scale, but are getting there now. I also just noticed, that outside of my cellphone, acquired from Cingular, and my digital camera, I really do not have any SOny products littering my room.

So KM has acquired one of those nifty Intel based iMacs, made because Apple shifted just as IBM was coming out with what it claims are better chips. He’s yet to post a review of this, however conversations, and hints provided so far, seem to indicate he’s doing pretty well with them. However what concerns me is the lack of native Photoshop support on any of those machines, even Apple admits Photoshop doesn’t really deal with Rosetta well. And as much as I’d like to think Photoshop CS 3 will solve these problems, it will be really really expensive, and again come with some form of a hardware key. I’d like to claim GIMP is the solution to all these problems, what with GIMP being open source and all, however I am yet to come across a really good native GIMP installation for Mac OS X, those that exist aren’t really there yet, and this is getting annoying. With my father recently acquiring one of ‘em PowerBook G4s, just about everyone I know who does any significant amount of computer usage has an Apple, this is amusing, for when I bought mine, KM was probably the only other person I knew who had a recent (as in post PowerPC) Macintosh. Hopefully at the end of the summer I’ll be buying an updated nifty MacBook thing, hopefully by then Microsoft will be announcing the launch of their now universalized Office or the forthcoming release of the same, one hopes anyways. My computer’s clogged and slow, well not really, my old computers got a lot slower, but umm, ya this might be a good time to buy a computer, before I (hopefully) end up in grad-school and end up becoming very poor.

Well I am in a software development class now, and I have to crib about Tigris. Tigris is cool in some ways, they host Subversion, which seems to be a pretty OK versioning system, and seems to fail less often than CVS, and is free, Tigris also happens to be one of the very few places offering project spaces (to university projects amongst other things) with support for Subversion. Now let us see, technically I should just make a repository in the CS department, this however isn’t very appealing to people (not completely sure why), and getting a Tigris project would be nice. We even have a name (Raphael, I originally wanted Rembrandt, but that was too hard to spell according to some), a team (SCE, LRG, IAN and me) and an idea, however my Tigris project has been waiting for approval for like the last 3 or 4 days, and they don’t really give any indication as to how long this should or should not take, I wish they did, but they don’t. Hmm, so much for that.

Ze Panda

PS: This is an extemely small subset of the going on’s in my life hence no mention of CS166, classes, or much of anything else. Someday I shall post about this, till then you perhaps want to find a way to access my .plan file

PPS: Attempting to write a worm in Java is an interesting exercise in seeing just how far you can stretch the capabilities of Java.

PPPS: Do not write a worm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Observances, article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.