encoded notions

Computer Science House sponsored another coding competition last Friday. As with the other two I’ve participated in, the competition lasts from 7pm until 7am the next day. Each team has a list of 10 objectives to choose from and must complete that objective to the best of their ability in that 12 hour period.

I was on a team of three from HOGS. The objective that we selected stated the following:

Create a simulated bug that learns how to walk by itself. Human interaction can only be implemented in terms of telling the bug “good” and “bad” (Human interaction is optional). The bug should learn to avoid collisions with other objects (for example a wall or another bug) and it should learn not to fall off any cliffs or holes it might encounter. Extended features could include having the bug learn to run a maze, or search out a target object (the object’s location is unknown to the bug). Keep in mind, the main word of this objective is “learn.”

It turns out that all of our abstractions pushed the difficult bits into the same module called LongTermMemory. I’m not sure how well this was implemented, but at the end, the bug was interpreting its surroundings and querying its LTM to decide what to do to some degree.

In the prior two competitions, the HOGS team has come in second place. At the first competition, first place was awarded to a team of computer science grad students who wrote a window manager. At the second competition, first place was awarded to a team of Computer Science House members who completed two of the objectives in the allotted time.

I hope we do at least as well in this one.

As I said, yesterday it was warm—70 degrees warm. I was wearing shorts. And now I wake up and it is 39 outside! But one thing remains steadfast: the pollen levels are still high. Oh goody.

What’s that in the sky? Could it be the daystar? Usually around Rochester that’s a rare sight, unless it heralds the onset of Spring. Nights are warm and days are warmer. Comfortable gusts of temperate wind have replaced the typical frigid winter blasts that annoy and chill the students of RIT for five months out of the school year. I feel as though it is safe to put away my heavy coat and perhaps even tentatively hang up my hoodie.

But for all that is good about this change, there is always something bad that accompanies it. When Spring arrives, the vegetation takes notice. It hears Mother Nature’s song of renewal; the trees, flowers, grass, and other foliage release the most toxic substance to those of us with hayfever: pollen

The only annoyance pollen causes the ordinary person comes in the form of a yellow scummy coating over their car’s windshield in the morning. This isn’t enough to keep them from enjoying its supposedly sweet, sweet smell; that’s the kind of aroma that inspires cliché lines like “stop and smell the roses.”

People with hayfever can’t enjoy this in the same way. We must take pills, injections, and sprays to prepare ourselves to be in the presence of flowers and apple blossoms. And though I hear a freshly-cut lawn is a delight for the senses, after I finish mowing the grass all I can think about is how soon I can get indoors to stand over the cool, clean, filtered air-conditioned air vent.

Apparently—if my poor biology background doesn’t fail me—pollen is like sperm for vegetation. That’s a relief: at least my body doesn’t like to inhale plant sperm like the rest of the world.

I’ve completed a journey that began in July 2003.

I’ve walked down the path of weblogging. I began with Blosxom, and tried to hack it to act a bit like slashcode with regards to categorization and user maintenance.

That program evolved past Blosxom and eventually there was nothing of the original source left, but in it’s stead stood Orchid; written in Perl, it had a templating system, multi-user access with permissions, and plugins for the different page types. It could do blogs, galleries, linkblogs, single pages, directories, address books, a library system, a quote database, a feed syndicator etc.

I also purchased my own domain name at nexusvector.net and started renting space from noir.cc. All was well with the world, and I used the software for my site as well as for the site for the special dorm floor on (The House of General Science).

As I learned to absorb information not only from slashdot, but also from a vast array of blogs and other sites that output an RSS feed. Special sites, such as Erik Benson’s weblog, seemed to stick out in my mind because they felt more like a wiki than a blog. As a hacker & a geek at heart (but a physicist by choice) I felt an itch to write my own wiki software—just to see if I could do it.

Sometime between February and April of 2004 I wrote this beast in Perl, using what I learned from Orchid. The one difference between my wiki software and other systems is that pages would be protected from non-owner edits by default unless the author opened it up to registered users. Non-registered users could not edit anything. I drew up a small logo for it and christened it Infusion. I added some users and let it go.

Then something bad happened. My hosting provider’s hosting provider suspended my account because Orchid had sprialed off into an infinite loop and consumed ~97% of the shared server’s CPU. I was depressed that an error like that could go undetected for so long, but unfortunately I could not locate the error since there was no error output for such an event as that (especially since I did not wish to recreate the glitch and lose my account again). I lost faith in my software and decided to port all of my blog entries over into my wiki.

After I did that, something didn’t feel right, from a deep inner-geek level. Thoughts of namespace conflicts for titles floated through my mind and I let it slide. At some point I decided to learn PHP and perhaps write a simple blogging-only tool to settle my namespace issues. About a week into translating large portions of Orchid into PHP, I stumbled across WordPress.

WordPress is a PHP-based blogging tool that does not do statically built pages like MovableType. It felt more right to me than MT. Inside of me, I finally let go and gave in…

I realized that I didn’t want to write a blogging application, but I only wanted to understand it. At this point in my journey I did understand it, and so my geek was satisfied with using WordPress.

Redirects, rewrites, templates, and a manual import later: I have completed the move.

This is the post that I christen the install with. Oddly enough, Shelley Powers has just switched from MT to WP.