Author Archives: Alan V

Ah, break

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This past week has been the busiest ever in my 3-years thus far at CMU. The bulk of it has been my networks project 2. Including the night I spent coding until 10 AM (from around 4 PM the previous day, with a couple hours of photography and other stuff around 10 PM), my partner and I have probably put in well over 30 hours of coding for this assignment. The best part? It’s still not done. I’m going to wake up early tomorrow and to my best to get it working completely (which may or may not happen) and use a late day.
Wheee.
So yeah, I’ve basically been doing nothing but coding today since 9 AM, which seems to have been the story of my life for the past 3 days (wake up, go to class, code until dinner, go to eat, code until bedtime, repeat).
For networks, I more or less rewrote the entire routing daemon from scratch, because it was the preferable alternative to trying to restructure our existing code to be more correct.
For web apps, did a little bit more with CMU Adventures… mostly backend work.

Apparently, my webhost upgraded PHP or changed around some settings today, because I came home to find my site completely broken. Keep in mind that most of my site was written by me back when I was teaching myself PHP (with some tips from B’man), and so was written before I knew about the $_POST, $_GET, and $_REQUEST variables. My host had previously had these arrays set to be automatically exposed, and all of my code was written for that. They switched it on me today, and so I had to go in and fix almost every script on my site (many probably still don’t work). Whee.

Besides that, there was a “ZMONGZ SPRING BREAK!” party with Tim/Tim/Apphia/Ian/Mars/Dan/Keith tonight. There was ice cream and games and it was awesome and happy.

Been spending a lot of time in the darkroom lately, developing film and printing. I’ve mostly been doing photography for myself lately, more than for class (because god knows I’m sure as hell not enjoying the class). I eventually want to assemble a book of cluster photographs, starting with my final project for color photo last year (which you can see in art), and adding in more of my work from this year (mostly black and white film, but a couple digitals).

This is the first picture I have of everyone in “The group”… and I had to be blah and stand in front of Mars and Dan.
Meh.
Whatever.

Um yeah.
Oh god busy week :(
At least it’s almost over. One more day of coding and then I’m free…
…
Free to start… coding… other… things…
…
But meh, I want to code my webapps project, so that’s a good thing.

Edit: In case you’re the geeky type and interested in this kind of stuff, like me…. here is more info about the global registration of variables that got disabled.

Busy, busy, busy

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Let’s start off on a good note…
I played lots of ITG today.

This makes me very happy (my first ever double star).

Academic things are slightly less good…

Worked a ton on our Networks project today. It is now 3:30 AM and I’m still coding. I probably won’t get to sleep tonight. Meh. I keep feeling bad, like Mike is doing all the work and I’m just writing bad stuff that he has to go back and fix later. I dunno.
I did write various tree-construction functions though (with Dijkstra’s, which is a pain to implement in C, especially when your graph is implemented as a linked list of nodes with ints of destination ids), and I suppose they work, but coding past midnight is probably never good for writing sane code.
Note to self: start the next project sooner, dammit.
I also need to finish up graph theory homework (a rather difficult set) and develop the two rolls of film I shot today. All of this must be done tomorrow (networks is due Thursday, graph theory and film are due Monday).

On top of that, Casino Royale at McConomy was cancelled today. ‘Tis a shame… I was looking forward to it too. At least there was still a bunch of yummy free food at the UC.

Backtracking a bit, I shot flashlight portraits of Alisa and Valerie today in the studio. The digitals came out decently (could’ve been better), but I don’t know how the film came out yet (I have to develop it; see above). Alisa and Val are awesome subjects, and have good suggestions too.


Lots of other stuff has happened since the last post that I’ve wanted to post about, but I can’t seem to remember any of it right now except that my new (awesome) flip phone is here and it makes me happy. It replaces my old phone (alluded to in the previous entry), which was awesome but too small, which was inconvenient for loud rooms (since my mouth was 4 inches away from the bottom of the phone). Whee.
You should poke me for the number, if interested.

There was a Pittsburgh job fair logical yesterday. I went. Not many people seemed interested in me, as usual. Meh. I feel like I have so much potential as a potential intern…. I wish companies would give me a chance. This doesn’t bode well for my getting a job after graduation in under a year.

Back to coding…

Power Plant

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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!

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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

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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!