Andy Morrow's Blog

I am sitting in the library, nigh-upon slack-jawed. I have just witnessed a live performance of Pac-Man. Yes, I just said that. A live performance of Pac-Man. Two people, one wearing a Pac-Man costume (that makes sound!) and one wearing a Blinky costume chased each other around the library. Yes. Perfectly made costumes and black pants. It was incredible. I took a terrifyingly low-quality video on my cell phone that I will consider editing and posting, because it was absolutely amazing. Everyone clapped when they left.

In addition! The software available in the library is incredible. I have access to an incredible CAS, Maple 10. I have access to the entire suite of Adobe applications, including Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 and Acrobat 8 Professional. I have the complete suite of Macromedia applications, including Flash 8 Professional and Dreamweaver. In other labs, I have access (I think) to engineering and design tools from Autodesk. I have access (I’m certain) to every conceivable software development tool and suite anyone could need. Hardware is plentiful, and I’m even able to log in to presentation kiosks in classrooms. The library will also request books and articles from almost any other college library in the US for free (they charge staff). In short, the resources available to me are nothing short of incredible. There is nothing you cannot accomplish for lack of resources.

Nothing particularly interesting has happened since my last post, so here’s some old CS news that I hadn’t seen. Clearly I’m way out of touch.

The Optimus Maximus keyboard actually shipped! One more rare case of vaporware becoming a reality. Check it out. I’d love one. One day when I’m absurdly wealthy.

Now, the RedFly. It’s not for Palm OS, so don’t get too excited, but it’s like the Palm Foleo. It’s a big keyboard and screen for Windows Mobile phones, and it’s only $200. If only Palm hadn’t killed the Foleo. I would have wanted one. Sigh.

My CS598R project is actually making very good progress. We’re about to have a meeting. We’ll have something to show off very, very soon.

I think it doesn't work anymore.

Here’s a photo of an old winch formerly used to haul incline carts up horizontal shafts. Taken by my friend James in the Ophir Hill mine.

I just got back my CS 235 midterm. My score was 156 out of 160 – a 97.5%. Bwa ha ha!

Also, there is a shirt I desperately need. Its coolness, on a scale of 1 to 10, is roughly infinity. Yeah. Check it out.

Actually, two. My math test was a 94. The class average was 71. The real aced test, however, was in chemistry. I scored 100% on the multiple choice part again yesterday and felt very good about the written part. As soon as I left the center, I loudly repeated Katie’s favorite sentence, yelled “Bo boo beep! Perfect Score!!!” and walked home grinning.

Be sure to check out the link. It makes me nostalgic.

My back was feeling rather sore from crawling around in there.

Here’s a gratuitous photo of the three of us in the same fault featured yesterday. The lens was rather dirty – I’ll look and see if I have a better photo somewhere.

My CS235 professor, Jun Lee, has just told me that the Data Mining Lab here might be interested in hiring me as a research assistant. I’m going to email him a resume, in addition to the one I’m preparing for the Chem CSR lab. This is going to be a tough choice – work for Bob exclusively, or take a job on campus? I don’t know. This week will help me make up my mind. I’m going to try and do 20 hours of work. If I don’t have the self-control, I’ll think especially hard about a job on-campus.

The Mojave Underground has just been featured in an article in Forbes talking about how mine explorers consider them historical monuments and how bureaucrats consider them death traps. The mine the members talk about is the mine I visited with them. All the people featured in the article were on the trip with me. The first photo on the left side is the group standing on a ladder that I climbed with them on Saturday. Super, super cool!

The group hunting for galena.

Here’s a photo of my first trip with one of the most awesome groups on earth, the Mojave Underground. We went into an abandoned mine near Ophir, about 40 minutes from Provo. (Be sure to check out the first link in the last sentence, including all the descriptions. I made it.) The group for this particular trip was unusually large – around 20 people. The photo featured here is of a large part of the group working in a small fault filled with galena-rich rocks off a main passageway. Galena is a mixture of lead and silver and was one of the major products when the mine was originally active. The mine was active from before 1900 (probably around 1880) until 1930 or later. Maybe as late as 1950? I have no real idea. The wooden supports make me laugh – as if they’re going to do anything should that ceiling decide to fall. The group has no problems with bringing rocks out for collections etc. I have a few pyrite and galena rocks.

The equipment in the mine is absolutely incredible. A lot of it is completely rusted out and some of the wood is rotting, which certainly makes it cooler. The one scary part about the mine was a region where several wooden supports were rotting and collapsing, threatening to dump many tons of loose rock into the main passageway. As long as nobody does anything to the wood, it’s stable enough to be safe.

In other news, I also went to a Peruvian restaurant with James and Bradley. We had ceviche, Peruvian sushi. It was very, very good – and only $10 a person. It completed one of the best Saturdays ever.

I’m going to call home now. I’ll keep on catching up on my blogging later.

Today’s been an amazingly busy day, as the title suggests. This morning, I finished my math homework and started revising my paper for English. I met with my CS598R group from noon until 2PM. We accomplished more than we have in the last several weeks. I think we need to be physically together in order to really get stuff done.

After that, I ran home and ate lunch. I then ran to the bookstore to help in the filming of a commercial on campus. It’s for a dance held early next calendar year that the Mac User’s Group is sponsoring. I stood in front of a green screen and tried not to be awkward dancing to no music. I think it worked well enough.

Now I’m waiting for religion to start. I’ll then be going to math and leaving a few minutes early. From there, I’ll be going to see Don Giovanni with Scott. After that, I’ve got to finish revising my paper – it’s due tomorrow.

Finally, other news. My vote-by-mail ballot arrived today, so it’s time to make sure that my mind is made up. Last, and most excitingly, I think I have a very good shot at getting a job on campus in a fantastic office. One of my friends from CS598R, Christian, got kicked out of school for one year because of ridiculous details within the Bureaucracy. It’s a long story, but he failed one class and got an incomplete on another. Without his knowledge, it escalated behind the scenes to the point that he had to leave school temporarily in order to keep his scholarship. So he lost his job in the Chemistry CSR lab working as a web maintainer and general Mac support. The CSR in Chem CSR stands for Computer Support Representative. It might sound boring, but we’ve been meeting in that office for our CS598R group, and it looks absolutely fantastic. Alex (who also works there) is going to recommend me to the guy who runs the lab. I’m very hopeful. It would be a fun job.

I’ve received several inquiries now into my birthday present. Mom and Dad gave me a 1GB stick of RAM. It arrived in roughly a week and works absolutely perfectly. I am currently running nine applications now – one of which is Safari, which is consuming almost 200MB – with no slowdowns at all. It is so wonderful that it is beyond words.

Now, the neat tools for math. I’ve been doing a variety of things to check my answers to differentiations performed by hand. One of the most amazing is the Grapher application included with OS X. It’s in Applications/Utilities/Grapher. It can do 2d or 3d graphs on a wide variety of coordinate planes. It can animate and rotate graphs. It can show graphs of integrals and derivatives. It can find intersections, roots, and other properties of graphs that I don’t yet understand. It can also graph non-functions, like the cardioid, hyperbolas, and other such things. It can’t perform calculations on them; however, it can graph them very accurately.

Next up – Eigenmath. It’s an open-source suite of math tools written entirely in C. Hence, it is cross-platform compatible and very, very fast. It specializes in symbolic math. The tool I’ve been using it for is providing differentiations, although it can also solve algebraic equations and provide graphs.

Finally, the online derivative calculator. It too does symbolic math and does a very nice job of it. Furthermore, its answers are formatted using LaTeX. It also includes a very good limit calculator. Neat stuff.

This is the second time in the last two months that I’ve had to mount a Samba share on Ubuntu using the command line. Both times, I’ve struggled through huge heaps and piles of man pages with all the information I don’t need and none of the stuff I do. So, here it is!

The basic syntax is as follows:

sudo mount -t cifs -o user=[user name] //[host name or ip]/[share name] [mount point]

The difficulty I ran into lies in the fact that URLs along the lines of “smb://larry/andy” are not yet supported – but there’s no information on what is supported. All mount would tell me was that it needed to start with //. So, through a combination of regex’ing through the man pages and my bash history, I figured it out. Hope it helps. For more options, see mount.cifs.

What’s the practical application, you ask? Both times, I’ve been ssh’ing into the web server on our home network and from there mounting a samba share on the file server and copying things back out to my computer at BYU. If you can dream it, Linux can do it.