So how on earth do you import movies into PowerPoint? Our group is doing “The Spin in Sports” dynamics project analyzing baseball, tennis, and curling (guess which one I got ;-). Anyhow, we have a bunch of cool video clips to import, but we couldn’t seem to get it to work. Of course, QuickTime doesn’t work (for obvious reasons). But mpeg should work, right? Nope, won’t work… Neither will AVI. We tried on multiple computers with multiple versions of PowerPoint. Some sluething on the Internet told us to embed the videos in a webpage and then embed the webpage in PowerPoint. Sound needlessly complicated? Sure sounds like it too me. So I had to create a web page, use the embed tag to embed the video, and then add a Microsoft Web Browser control to the PowerPoint slide, and then add code to the DocumentComplete event, test the current location for nothing loaded (“”), and then load the webpage with the embeded video. Ehew, what a pain. And I had this one WMV file that I needed to clip, but I couldn’t import it into VirtualDub because Microsoft asked them to take the feature out. So I tried an external utility to convert it to an AVI, but of course, the utility crashed. I tested the utility on some other WMVs and it seemed to work. So I got the bright idea of simply converting the WMV to another WMV and then converting to an AVI. So yeah, that worked (figures, right?).
UCF Software team (which includes me) took 3rd place!
This past weekend I spent at IEEE SoutheastCon 2005, an engineering conference for undergrads. I was recruited about a month ago to go as part of the programming team. I said yes and forgot about it. Until last week when they told me to be ready to go Friday at 3 PM. So I’m like OK, well that’s good. So I meet this guy named Jaime there who it turns out is also on the programming team (this was the first time I had met him). We waited for another guy named Malic and then went from UCF to Ft. Lauderdale. We got there around 7:30ish and checked in to a Marriot (a nice one near the beach) and then went to try to register and find the other 9 people from our school (none of which I knew). Unfortunately they had already shut down registration, so we wandered around talking to people. Turns out since we didn’t come by and register earlier, another team took our seat in the programming competition. So we went to find the rest of our UCF group to figure out what to do. We found out the hardware team hadn’t qualified and nobody knew where they were. Our faculty sponsor was nowhere to be found. We did get a hold of the other guy on the programming team to meet him. He was a CS major (we were CpE) named Jobby. He seemed to be a smart guy who had been a lot of programming competitions. Unfortunately we were not able to reach our chapter president back at UCF so we didn’t know what to do. So we went back up to our room and got pizza and watched TV. We got a call later that night from Justin our chapter president and he assured us we should be in the compeition and he would sort everything out.
Saturday we got up early at 6:30 AM and went downstairs to register. That took a while. We also submitted our t-shirt design for the t-shirt competition. Ours had a picture of the robots in the hardware competition running around picking up little metal balls. Underneath it read: “Do you have the balls to compete?” And yes, we did have to wear these shirts, although I felt a little bit uncomfortable with that on my t-shirt. We ate at the hotel (no contenental breakfast) for an outrageous rate of $4 a pancake. We then went and met with Jobby and the three of us went over some Linux stuff to refresh ourselves. We also went out and stocked up on subs, water, and snacks.
The software competition started at 1 PM. Basically it worked like this: a team of 3 from each university has a workstation with one computer running Linux with basic editors. You are given 8 problems to solve. Your team tries to solve as many as possible in a 5 hour period (no breaks, no nothing) using C, C++, or Java. And you could do them in any order. We got there and each took a a few problems to read. After reading through our individual problems, we came back and explained the problem to the rest of the group. We then choose the easy ones first. I decided I could do one right off, but got stuck after 20 minutes or so. During that 20 minutes, Jaime caught onto a patern in one of the problems and we wrote like 1 line of code to solve it. It turned out to be correct and that put is in first place being the first team to get a problem right. The second one we spent a bit of time, but got winthin another hour or so. That put us just barely in first place. After that, we spent the remaining 3.5 hours trying to solve the rest of the problems. We were able to solve 2 more, but only using a brute-force method. Unfortunately, the program had to run under 2 minutes, even with 50,000 inputs, so we were not able to get those. So we gradually lost position as other universities overtook us. When they froze the scores an hour before the competitionw as over (so we couldn’t see who won), we were in 3rd place. Immediately afterwards, we went up to our room and relaxed for a bit. Then we went to the awards ceremony banquet to find out who won. The banquet was really cheesy, just some wings and pizz for the students. The grownups got salads and meat and desert, which we viewed as totally unfair. The next hour and a half was boring as all as all the bigwigs talked and got awards. Then we got to the student awards. Our hardware team never even qualified (we don’t know if they even showed up!), but it was fun watching the other teams get their awards. The top two teams acutally competed right then and there to determine first place, which was really cool to watch. I was pretty surpised with the results of the software competition as we held 3rd place. I thought that was really good considering none of us 3 on the team knew each other before we got to the competition and we didn’t have a faculty coach and 2 of us had never done a programming competition before! We also won the t-shirt competition (they wouldn’t say our slogan outloud, but we have an official certificate bearing the words: “Do you have the balls to compete”, which is pretty funny).
That night back at our rooms, two guys were trying to get on the Internet. Unfortunately, you have to pay $10 per day for internet, so they plugged in their wireless cards to see if they could hop onto an unsecured wireless network. It turns out that the University of Alabama Huntsville were directly below us and had unsecured networks. So they hopped on, and then one of them couldn’t resist the temptation any longer and started to hack them. He booted into Linux and started doing packat sniffing. Before long, he had AOL screennames, instant messanger conversations, websites they were visiting, and even passwords. It was scary what they were doing. The other guy then decided to start chatting with them. He signed on and started to chat with them which totally freaked them out (as he knew their names and stuff). He told them he was on a hotel computer and the hotel kept records of all the trafic (which was a lie). Anyhow, as he was chatting with them, he would insert things that they had already said in chatting with other people, which freaked them out even more. They never told them who they were, only that we were a Florida team. After a couple hours of sniffing their traffic and chatting with them, one of them mentioned that he was going majoring in internet security. All of us in the room absolutely died laughing about that, because our guys were hacking them at that very moment. I don’t think they even caught on that we were using their internet connection to surf the web and chat with them! Anyhow, scary stuff.
Today we checked out, ate, drove by the beach, and came home. It was actually not nearly as bad as I had expected and our team did win, so I’m pretty satisfied. Now back to all the stuff I have to do this week.
Wow, what a week. Monday and Tuesday I spent 15 hours in a 24 hour time span working on a poster to present my research on. Yesterday I got the poster back from the print place only to find out they smeared the ink – in the worst possible spot: the title. So I had to so some reconstructive surgery (read “I mutiliated it more”). Today I presented it with 150 other undergraduate students. Part of the time I got to walk around and look at other people’s posters – there’s some neat stuff going on around campus. I also met with my professor to show him the completed research project and he seemed pleased, so I’m happy.
3B (Busy Beyond Belief), that’s my new motto. I have a semiconductors exam today, a IEEE Southeastern Conference 2005 this weekend, have an exam Monday, a poster to design by Tuesday to present on Friday and a bent to polish for initiation on Saturday. Oh and I have to write an abstract for a paper, do two assembly programs, do a chapter’s worth of Dynamics homework, start and finish a Dynamics project, and present my research to a professor all by the end of next week. Oh yeah, and get a completely working vision system ready by next weekend. 3B it is!
Wow, you’d think I just went on permanent spring break, huh? Well, I sure thought about it. The first Sunday I was home, I pulled out my hammock, got me some snacks, drinks, a good book, and man I was in heaven. It was a breezy sunny cool Florida day and I just relaxed and had a ball. The week was good, I honestly tried to be productive, but wasn’t terribly successful. I did some Dynamics and Semiconductor work (not much), helped my grandparents clean their house, did some work on the barn (again not much), and did some programming & commenting. But mostly I relaxed and read and stuff. Very nice, I tell you. Alas, all things had to end, and here I am back and school with an exam staring me in the face on Monday and I am nowhere near prepared. Oh well, such is life…
Halelujah! Spring Break has arrived! Need I say more?
Tonight’s cooking results was mixed. I had planned to make 3 meals: cheap frozen pizza, queche, and salmon fillets with vegetables and rice. The cheap pizza went as well as frozen pizza can go. When I went shopping for the queche, one of the ingredients was heavy whipping cream. I couldn’t seem to find it, so I though, well wouldn’t coolwhip count? Baaaadddd mistake. 2 cups of coolwhip mixed with eggs and cheese = absolutely disgusting. It smelled bad, tasted bad, it was truly nasty. That was a total flop. The salmon fillets however, whent like a charm. Some stir-fried vegetables and Uncle Ben’s rice heaped around the salmon was delicious. Unfortunately, I ruined the pan I cooked it in because when I tried to scrap off the baked fish skins, I scratched it and it rust. Oh well…
I ordered some more RAM (512 MB stick @ $80) for my laptop this weekend and am amazed that I can track it’s progress across the US via FedEx’s website. I’ve recently started to swap over from Visual C++ 6 to Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta and let me tell you, it sure is sweet. Although it takes up 15 times the RAM, it sure has a lot of nice features. Back/Forward buttons, awesome intellisense, debug break when value is modified, more optimization settings, line numbers (!!!), function folding, and list goes on. Of course, it’s not completely perfect. It whines about depreciated functions all the time and generates massive amounts of warnings (some of which are helpful, but most not). And did I mention it takes up like 60 MB of memory too? Good thing my RAM is on the way 😉 Visual Studio 2005 Express Beta is free from Microsoft (for now anyhow) so you can try it out if you want.
So my parents are going to buy the second most ugly car on the road, a Hyunde Element. Not only that, but they plan to fly from Florida to New York (yeah, that bitterly cold place up new Canada) and drive it back next weekened. And it just so happens that they’ll be trying to get through Jacksonville next Sunday – right past all the hordes of people swarming around the Super Bowl game. Good luck! Oh, yeah, and here are some pics: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Oh yeah, I also noticed my Contact page was broken, so I fixed that. I wonder why nobody told me it was broken…hmm, let me thing about that 😀
My family came by today and my Dad fixed my car in about 2 minutes. Apparently, all that had happened was the tube that connected to my spark plug had fallen off, so I was running on 3 cylinders. I felt a bit stupid, but I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious. I then saw my sister graduate from her semester long modeling training (yeah, never thought I’d have a model for a sister). Hopefully she can get some good jobs out of it. I spent the rest of the day and evening at robotics. I’m really liking my GUI for image processing and computer vision, but I was getting a bit limited with FLTK GUI and need to do some re-organizing in order to add some new features, so I decided to swap to the nicer, more professional looking wxWidgets. While I was at it, I decided to try out Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta (what a mouthful!). It was actually really good. It has some quirks and it is a memory hog, but it is miles ahead of Visual C++ 6 in terms of features. Still, it took me a while (all night basically) to get the basics ported over and wxWidgets setup. Now I have to port the GUI, something for next week, I guess.
This past weekend, my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Of all the things they wanted to do and all the places they wanted to go, they choose Epcot! Although a bit surprising, it certainly was a nice surprise. So after being in Orlando for a year, I finally went to a theme park. The whole clan gathered Friday afternoon (although I had to turn around a lot because I kept getting lost) and we went to Downtown Disney, which was a real treat. We ate at Captain Jack’s and then went to Geradeli for dessert. Man, they sure pack it in – it was some of the best dessert I’ve ever had. The next day we went to Epcot early. Just as we were leaving on the bus, we realized that not everybody was on….oops, not even at Epcot and we were already separated. Good thing for cell phones! We met up at the gate and went in. Our first stop was Mission Space which was a really cool simulation ride. None of us really had any breakfast, so at least there wasn’t anything to get all over the shiny controls 😉 However, we did feel a bit on the wobbly side when we came out. We at breakfast, did the big Epcot golf ball ride, the aquarium, energy, and some other stuff while we were there. Then we went to the countries. The countries were really cool. We ate at Mexico and had some really good Mexican food. We visited Norway, China, Japan, Morraco, USA, Paris, which was most of the countries. We ate at Morracco and watched the belly dancer do her stuff. Afterwards we watched the fireworks, which were pretty spectacular. By the time we left, we realized what Epcot stood for: Every Person Comes Out Tired, which was certainly the case. The next day some of us went back to Downtown Disney to walk around a bit and eat more Geradeli desserts. Then we all split up and went home. On my way home, I had some car trouble – I was almost home and it started shaking quite badly. Not good at all…at least I could take the shuttle to school and back.
My first business trip went well. I flew up to Washington DC to attend an NSF I/UCRC annual meeting. The NSF building is a whole lot bigger than I had imagined. The Marriott hotel we stayed was also huge (13 stories) and the top story overlooked the Potomac river, Georgetown, and Washington DC. You could see the Washington Monument from the hotel as well. It was a grueling first couple of days trying to get presentations and demos done. Our presentation was squished quite a bit and we had to scrap the demos because the computer we were presenting on was…well…let’s just say very incapable. No internet? How am I supposed to demo my online website?!? Some of it was interesting and some of it was boring, but I took some notes and had fun. I got to ride the metro for the first time too – that contraption must have been built a long time ago, because it was rather rickety. Overall, it was a great learning experience. But now it’s time to crack down on schoolwork <sigh>…
I hope everybody is having a nice holiday shopping and doing all sorts of other fun stuff – isn’t shopping such a blessing? OK, so maybe shopping isn’t the biggest blessing in your life, but I do hope that everybody is enjoying themselves this holiday. I just got home yesterday and it’s nice to be able to sleep in and not have to do much of anything. Hopefully that means I can organize my computer and do a lot of (badly needed) updates to this site. I’ve got a lot of cool stuff that I can put up, so perhaps if I get a chance I’ll do that.
The week after finals! So nice not to have to cram for one weekend in my life! But I am staying at UCF another week to work and get some Robotics done. I’m making some real progress…well, at least with generating some cool feedback loops with the new Sony Handycam DV camcorder. Take a look at our new “Discover” application in a feedback loop.
Whahooo!!! Finals are over!!! I’m so excited…conk…zzzz……We are sorry to interrupt this message, but it appears Brian is unconcious and drooling on his keyboard…Until next time…
Finals are upon us. Run for your lives! Umm, err, well, maybe we ought to run for the library instead!
Wow, what a day. First a meeting that never happened, then a 16 page Differential Equations take home exam due, then classes, homework, and more classes. I had a class at 6:00 PM, so I couldn’t leave for home until after class around 7:00 PM. When I tried to merge onto I-95, I set a new record: I merged onto the interstate at about 20 mph becuase it was nearly total gridlock. Nice…That’s what you get for traveling home the night before Thanksgiving. Oh, well, I’m thankful that I got home!
Well, I tried to make no-bake cookies today. They are oatmeal chocolate cookies that you boil and then put on waxed paper to set. After they have set, you can eat them like a normal cookie. Unfortunately, being the engineer that I hope to be, I decided to “improve” upon the recipe. Why not add some marshmallows to the mix? And if you don’t have waxed paper to put them on, why not use aluminium foil? It turns out that if you put marshmallows in the recipe, the cookies never set and you get a gooey glob of a chocolate cookie. And it turns out if you try to put them on aluminium foil, the cookies stick to it and never come off. OK, so I guess I should stop trying to be creative.
What an insane week! Looking back, I’ve realized that I’ve spent no less than 12 hours at the UCF campus every day of the week! Monday I had a rescheduled class from 8:30 to 10:15 PM. Tuesday I had a very important work deadline to meet. Wednesday I had a massive assignment due. Thursday I had an exam I was not prepared for. Friday I had another extremely important deadline to meet. And Friday night I crashed and got me 10 hours of sleep…mmmmm….nice….
I also helped a friend hack my first attempt at an existing open source project. We added a password change option to SquirelMail using the Mercury Mail Server on Windows Server 2003. Awesome!
Oh, and yeah, my webhosting company upgraded some stuff to add some security measures and broke most of my php scripts. I had to coax my webmail and Typo3 back to life, but I think I’ve gotten it now. Whew!
Tonight was time to hit the Volusia County Fair! Every year my family gets together and we go to the Volusia County Fair for the night. We had lot of fun, watching some tigers misbehave during a show, eating all sorts of grease and sugar, and looking over the plants, animals, and farm equipment. Of course, my sister and my aunt were blowing through the rides like no tomorrow. I did notice they didn’t go on the ride that dropped you from about 50 feet in the air. Anyhow, it was lots and lots of fun!
Wow, I actually got to go to a social event tonight. Amazing! Must be a record for most engineering students. OK, so there was a reason: today is Veteran’s day and I didn’t have to go to school! Whoopie! Instead I spent 7 hours in front of my computer. Then I decided to go hit some balls around at the tennis courts. I came back for a quick change and then went to my church’s spagetti dinner and entertainment, which was a mockup of the show The Price is Right. I hadn’t heard of the show before, but if it’s anything like what I saw, it is pretty pathetic. However, it was an uproar with all the twists, enthusiastic college kids, and goofups. Anyhow, gotta be up early tomorrow (6 AM, no Mom, 5 more minutes, please?), so gotta get to bed. Oh, yeah, and in the last 23 hours, I’ve gotten 42 spams. Cool, almost 2 per hour. Awesome.
Well, I’ve spent the last few days studying (ur, um, cramming) for my second Electrical Networks exam. Yeah, and it didn’t go well…at all. I only finished 3 of the 4 problems (like I didn’t even draw the circuit on the 4th problem), so I hope he drops one. The problems weren’t too difficult, but they were really really long! So I was rushing around doing stuff as quick as I could. The other three problems I didn’t get to double check and I’m pretty sure I didn’t quite get the last couple parts. And I probably made some dumb mistakes too. All I can say is I hope he curves a lot!
Today I voted – and boy was I prepared. I had heard horror stories all around campus and from friends that they had waited 2 or 3 hours to vote. So I brought 3 books on my PDA to read while I was in line. I figured it would be a nice relaxing afternoon reading my books in the cool Florida fall weather. And boy was I wrong. I parked my car at 2:57 and walked in and got in line – a very short line since there were only 4 people in front of me. I didn’t even have time to pull out my PDA book! I waited for several minutes, then got my ballot and went to the booth. I took a while to look over the ballot and understand all the legalese before voting. The machine didn’t want to accept my vote, but after spitting it up a couple times I force it down. By the time I was pulling out of the place, it was 3:16 – I had spent grand total of 19 minutes voting. Not fair!
Because I was sick and coughing a lot, I didn’t go physically to church today, but I watched the live stream on the Internet. Last time I checked you couldn’t srpead germs via the Internet (that would be scary!). I also fooled around with some more robotics stuff, and came up with these images. Pretty nifity, even it the method I was using only works with about 1 in 100 or so.
I had a hot date tonight – litterally! I took my sister to the Melting Pot for dinner. It was our first time, and I sure was impressed. For those who don’t know, it is a fondue restaurant (for those who don’t know what fondue is, go look it up in a recipie book and make it!). We ordered mexian cheese fondue, which was slightly spicy. It came with corn chips, a mix of breads, celery, carrots, cauliflower, and granny smith apples to dip. I found the apples eaten raw helped cut the cheesyness. It was like nachoes like you’ve never had nachoes before! Then we ordered the cookies and cream chocolate pot. Man, I think I went to heaven or something when it came out. Choocolate and marshmallows mixed together with strawberries, bananas, pineapple, cheescake, marshmallows, crumb cake, and brownies to dip in. When we were done, we both just about rolled out of the place we were so full. Excellent place!