Power Plant

Whee…. lots of stuff happened today.

First of all, I got my cell phone. I don’t know my number yet (I will get a number assigned when I activate it), so suggestions as to whether I should get a Pittsburgh or a Phoenix area code are happily considered (I’m leaning toward a 412 number right now).

Second, I got the login and registration portion of my final project for webapps (as written about in last night’s post) working and debugged. It uses email authentication to activate accounts as not to fill the database with spammed accounts, and it also has challenges to verify human registration. Whee. I can start writing the actual content for it now.

Third, and best of all, I just spent the past 5 hours touring a coal power plant courtesy of Ben’s associate Kevin. There will soon be pictures up in photos (yes, first update in a while, I know). It was by far one of the most awesome things ever (and I have a piece of coal schlag from it too).
Here’s a teaser image until I get the rest up (which I will do before I go to bed)… This is actually looking into the main reactor where coal is burned to produce the steam. We got to look in (safe due to the difference in pressure, causing air to rush in rather than out, even though it’s over 4000 degrees inside) and see the coal streams and everything.

Only downside is that my eyes now are watery and I’m coughing a bit from all the coal dust I absorbed throughout the tour. Whee. So worth it though.

Fourth was that today was the Dean’s List dinner. I got my Klaus pin and had lots of yummy food. Not much to report about that, of course… whee.

Accomplished!

I’ve spent the past 5 hours pounding my head against the desk trying to self-teach myself everything about PHP sessions, objects, and MySQL accesses all at the same time by building the login/registration portion of my webapps final project. But hey, it was all worth it, because I understand them now!

The more I do webapps stuff, the more I think this is what I want to do with my life. I can’t identify what it is about writing PHP (or, to a certain extent, JSP or Java Servlet) code that is so addicting… but once I start, I just can’t stop. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself sitting at my computer until $late_hour writing webapp code… and that rarely happens with any other kind of program.

So yeah, I spent a while trying to fix mistakes that came about from misunderstandings about PHP (trying to teach yourself 3 new things at once doesn’t make it easier to learn any one of them)…
-The header() function doesn’t automatically dispatch. You must call exit afterwards if you want to immediately dispatch the headers (ex: redirect to a new page).
-Starting a session (with session_start()) automatically calls in all saved session variables, overriding any existing variables. I couldn’t figure out why the hell $username was being overridden until I realized I hadn’t lost my previous session (which contained a duplicate $username variable), and it was loading the variables.
-You cannot use session_unset() if you set variables through $_SESSION
-If a function returns either an object or false, you cannot do testing with !$variable, you must do $variable!=false (but you can do that with functions that return either true or false).
-Defining things with define() in an if statement doesn’t carry over into the global scope (although this problem might have stemmed from one of the previous misunderstandings).
-The general hash() and hash_hmac() functions are only in PHP5, and my server only has PHP4.
But hey, I got everything working… now I can start on the fun part.

I really should be asleep given that I have class tomorrow at 7:30 followed by an exam. Blah at that.

It’s a Todd! For some reason I like this picture a lot.

Life go asplode

Wheee… my housing situation is exploding. There’s a dependency chain in it, and the graph representing the various decisions that we’d each make is cyclic, and ahhhh. I’ll try to get it all worked out, but bleh.
I should put this out here now, I guess:
If my housing situation explodes over the summer, and I come back next Fall and don’t have a place to stay, is there anyone who would rent out part of their living environment for one semester? Only thing is that it has to be within walking distance of CMU (I’ll be taking OS), and I’ll be graduating in December.

Spent some time in the darkroom today making prints. Also played around with solarization (you might know the term from a photoshop filter… doing it in the darkroom is more fun though). Huzzah for solarized print of matthewj?

Mike and I worked a bit on our networks project. We’re implementing the network layer of the network stack, and building a router and a daemon that configures it. Whee. It sounds awesome, but it’s confusing as hell. So this is what building a real app is like. Hmm…

Still bummed about the Google interview yesterday. I wish I hadn’t been so stupid on some most of the questions. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now.

So much more work to do this weekend, and an exam to study for for Monday. Ahhhh!

Interview’d

So today was my interview with Google. Overall, I feel like I wasn’t nearly up to par. I had a couple of “Oh god, DUH” moments when the interviewer said something about my algorithm(s). I should also learn to start trusting my instincts… my first instinct on one of the problems (floor of sqrt) was right-ish but I tried to over-complicate it, which was actually a worse solution (same runtime, but with much more memory usage).
I also screwed up one of the problems which *should* have been straightforward to do.
Oh well.
I really wish I interviewed better. I know the stuff, really… meh.

Pittsburgh has been kinda crazy lately. According to the papers, there’s a highway that motorists have been stuck on since Wednesday evening due to the snow and road closures and everything. The T light rail system also shut down due to freezing rain on the power cables that make it go.
On the plus side, all the freezing rain around makes for some pretty damn nice pictures.

Also on the plus side, I’ve been photographing again. I spent most of last night in the darkroom and studio making images. Whee.

Housing for next year has more or less been taken care of, so that’s one thing down at least. Now I just wish I could get a job for the summer. Meh.

OMG workdeath has started. I now have 3 major projects that I’m working on concurrently, plus a photo presentation for Monday, plus an exam in graph theory on Monday. Grrr.
*goes off to do work*

Life foo

Hey look, it’s an update.
I actually don’t have much to talk about. Meh.

There was an EOC. As usual, no one was interested in me. I really want a summer job… I wish someone found me talented enough to employ. Meh.

I’m generally feeling much better. I dunno.

It’s too early to think. Bleh. I have class in about an hour in Shadyside, so I should probably leave and start walking there in 20 minutes or so.

I had a strange dream last night where we (me and some people not from real life) were being hunted by some robots, and cast a spell to summon futuristic super-robots to our aid that annihilated the other robots (the entire battle was very RPG-like, with a huge long summoning animation and everything). Then I recieved a package in the mail a few days later saying that I had been selected for their internship (it was all apparently a test). However, it was a drama/acting internship, addressed to the wrong person (since I’d been staying at someone’s house this entire time). I walked upstairs to give it to the right person and I was suddenly in Fairfax running back and forth between peoples’ rooms with Ev. He was saying it was 5 AM and he had to go home, and I was saying it was 4 AM and I had to sleep, but we just continued running around the floor. I probably would have found out the reason for doing so if I hadn’t woken up.
Meh.

I wish my life involved more than job searching, housing foo, and homework right now, but alas…
Whee?