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I guess I'm going to write a little bit every few days about the process of this whole recreate-the-last-3:30 of The Usual Suspects thing.
Connor is going to be Kujan (the investigator/police person). We'll have to find/fake suspenders, somehow. For him, and for Rabin (the other cop). Need to find someone good for Verbal (this is vital), and someone reasonable for Rabin. Kobayashi, too, and Keaton, and another extra cop. That's all, really, most of the other people are from behind or such so they can be anybody.
I sat down and stepped through the video and wrote down every shot. Fun! I started, but haven't quite finished (it's done now), stepping through and writing down all of the audio (well, primarily the dialogue, I'll worry about music later).
I also found a copy of the script online. Unfortunately it's a little different from what actually ended up happening... and misses the audio montage during the last 3:00 or so.
GNOME 2.28 is out! Now with 100% more Seed!
Also, last Wednesday, my first Intermediate Video project was due. I've shoved it to Vimeo for your viewing pleasure. Or not. Amy's awesome in it, but the lighting needs serious help (and I only managed to acquire one of the crappy cameras that has really poor low-light response). There are also some stories surrounding the making of this video and having to call PubSafe because I locked my keys in a room that nobody else I know has access too. Whoops!
Anyway, the next video will be mostly filmed outside; what's not being filmed outside will be filmed with lights (I'm planning on getting 6 large video lights, this time). So it should look a lot better... Unfortunately, it's also going to consume a lot of time — I'm replicating, to the best of my ability — the final 3:30 or so of The Usual Suspects. Ha! Disaster waiting to happen...
Last Friday, I left Colchester for Troy once again; this time, instead of heading for an RPI-run dorm, I'm living in my first apartment, along with Matt, Mike, Nate, and Robb (surprise!). There are some random pictures of us around the apartment at Flickr, of course.
Classes started this Monday; my schedule doesn't look too bad (no class before 10, and even that's only two days a week):
I've been to one session of each class by this point, and they all seem pretty reasonable. Our Machine Learning professor seems to be one of the most coherent computer science professors I've ever met, but we'll see what I'm saying in a few more weeks! Intermediate Video is taught by a relatively recent (2004) graduate of RPI, which should be interesting (besides the always-interesting CS-major-in-an-EMAC-class dynamic).
The walk to campus isn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. Ten minutes or so, which isn't that much worse than the 7-10 it took the last two years. Also, Carol's (and Kim/Zarin/Christine/Jillian and Gino/Marcus/Nick/Andrew's) place (I feel like that's one-too-many-girls or one-too-few-boys, but I can't imagine who I'm including that doesn't belong/forgetting that does belong... it's confusing because there's always so many extra people there!) is on the way to campus from here (which also provides a great place to hang out in the gaps between classes).
Anyway, there's lots of other little things to talk about, but I'll write about them later. I'm just glad that we're all back to Troy, Kaitlyn's happily back in school, and Amy is (somewhat less happily) back at school too! (Amy's coming to Troy this weekend with her new Mini 9 to OS-X-ify!!)
2009.05.03 in school
I'm leaving RPI today, so I'm pulling an all-nighter to get my side of the room back into proper working order and move all of my stuff into the lounge. Sehrish is coming at 10, so I have six more hours to clean. I seem to have made a mistake, because I don't have a vacuum, Robb's asleep, and I still have more cleaning to do (the bed isn't even back together, mostly because of the lack of a vacuum, actually).
I moved this site to Dreamhost last night, so it'll probably act a little differently. Also, stuff like the Aperture archive, Git, SSH, Planet, etc. won't be back up for a few days, and I'll post about what's up when that comes to pass.
For now, I'll just say that I've had a great semester and I hope that the summer is even better.
P.S. As noted here, when everything comes back, Git, SSH, and things like that will be on jayne.hortont.com, instead of hortont.com directly, since they require more Jayne-eyness than Wordpress and stuff...
2009.04.18 in school
This is my second-to-last weekend at RPI for this semester; things are wrapping up quite nicely. Nearly half of my grade has yet to be determined in two classes (LITEC and SD&D), but overall this is shaping up to be my best semester so far, by a long shot... I'm much, much happier now, in Computer Science (and Engineering) classes, rather than Physics with a side of CS...
RCOS
Robb, Nate, Matt, and I presented on Ease and Seed today at the Rensselaer Center for Open Software, finishing our final requirement for this semester. Many thanks to Moorthy and Sean O'Sullivan for the opportunity!
Nate and Robb are planning on working with RCOS this summer, I believe; Nate is going to write a pretty, not-chintzy, G*-based typing tutor/testing application. I'm not sure what Robb's planning to work on — probably Ease or Seed.
SD&D
A significant portion of Software Design & Documentation involved the design, documentation, and construction of an application of our choice. We created groups on the second day of class — I latched on to Andrew (who I didn't know at the time), who proposed that those of us comfortable with Objective-C and interested in developing for either the Mac or the iPhone should stick together... I really didn't want to be stuck working on some buzzword-infused web application, hosted on Windows, stuck in a SourceSafe repo, written in a combination of Java and ASP and Ruby... I really don't take kindly to such projects :-)
We eventually decided that we'd put together some sort of iPhone application — Andrew had an application that made it onto the App Store within a week or two of class starting (Notecards), so he had plenty of experience; I'd spent a good bit of time with Objective-C in the past; Sarah had spent a lot of time with straight C, as she's been a LITEC TA for at least the last two semesters; and Cheng had a good bit of experience with C++ and the other languages espoused by RPI. Both Sarah and Cheng were quite open to learning whatever they needed to, so we had our group of four!
I believe it was Andrew who originally brought up the idea we eventually took to designing and implementing: a location-based task application. Basically, your generic to-do list, with the ability to tag a task with locations; when the phone detects that it's near that location, it gently reminds you that you have something to do. We named it Tasc, after noticing the obvious pun based off of our first initials.
Unfortunately, we didn't have quite enough time to finish the location part of the application — another week probably would have done it, but between me having no experience with UIKit and half of the team having never used Objective-C, there simply wasn't enough time... so, you can tag locations, but auto-detection is not implemented. It's really not that interesting without the ability to background applications, anyway.
We all had fun — I certainly consider the three of them new friends, now — and managed to succeed to a great extent. There's still a significant amount of documentation to complete in the next week, but the Construction phase is over... luckily, since the class is mostly about design and documentation, the fact that we didn't quite finish won't affect us too much...
This experience also led me to buying into the iPhone Developer Program. I'm going to write another app or two and see if I can't make my 100$ back (or more, who knows?!) over the summer... but that's a story for another day!
P.S. We released Seed 0.5 on Wednesday. There's a Bugzilla product for us in GNOME Bugzilla now, and Robb pushed our documentation to his GNOME webspace.
P.P.S. I moved Carol and Matt's blogs to a Dreamhost server last week; if anyone has any trouble, let me know. Planning on moving Robb there or to b.g.o at some point in the future. There's no reason other people's stuff should depend on Jayne's uptime.
2009.03.29 in school
I got all signed up for classes on Thursday. Besides the below, I'm also signed up for Robotics I, but I'm probably going to drop it because it's at 8:30AM three days a week (and is by no means required), and I have plenty of other class. I'm also TAing Inventor's Studio next semester, so that'll take up a good chunk of Wednesday mornings.
2009.03.26 in school
Here's a quick Keynote to set down "what we need to learn" for some people who want to write some iPhone apps. I'm TAing "Inventors Studio" for a few weeks (and next semester), just in order to be a resource who happens to know Objective-C and Cocoa and stuff...
PDF
Keynote
2009.02.07 in school
Note: Someone else has come up with revised instructions which work on more recent versions of Linux.
For LITEC, each group has a C8051F02x development board attached to a car (and later, to the RPI blimps). The course only includes instructions and support for people using the SiLabs IDE within Windows (it doesn't exist for Linux or OS X), which greatly disappointed Andrew and I when we started the class a few weeks ago.
Andrew spent a good bit of time fiddling with things in Linux before — a few days ago — he finally got it working! It turns out there are Linux drivers and support software for the SiLabs EC2 debug adapter which we use to download code to the chip (and run it, debug it, etc.)... and the Small Device C Compiler is even in APT! (sdcc-nf is the package including the non-free components which I believe we determined we need).
So... there's a brief set of instructions to get compilation and downloading working, after the jump!
- Install SDCC from APT (sdcc-nf, etc.)
- Install kernel headers
- Checkout the EC2 driver for Linux:
svn co https://ec2drv.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ec2drv/ec2drv/trunk ec2drv
- There's a mistake in the EC2 driver build scripts (at least with Jaunty and whatever Andrew uses...); in the file libtool find ECHO="echo", and add a line echo="echo" below it.
- Build and install the EC2 driver.
- Compile your program with SDCC (thanks, again, Andrew!):
sdcc -mmcs51 --model-small --debug --code-loc 0x0000 --iram-size 0xFF --noinduction --nooverlay --nogcse PROJECT.C
- Now you have a ton of messy files sitting around. Launch 'newcdb' (which got installed with the EC2 driver). I have to run it as root because I haven't figured out which device needs more liberal permissions, but you should probably figure that out...
- To connect to the EC2 debug adapter:
set target SL51
set target port USB
set target connect
- Then load your file: "file PROJECT" (notice the lack of extension). This will take a while while it downloads to the board.
- The commands "run", then "continue" will run your program on the 8051! Yay!
I've crafted a small Makefile for our use which might be useful for others: TARGETS = library_test
all: $(TARGETS)
clean:
rm -f *~ *.adb *.asm *.cdb *.ihx *.lnk *.lst *.map *.mem *.rel *.rst *.sym
rm -f $(TARGETS)
download: $(PROJ)
sudo newcdb --command=download.cmd -ex="file $(PROJ)" -ex="quit"
run:
sudo newcdb --command=run.cmd
.c:
sdcc -mmcs51 --model-small --debug --code-loc 0x0000 --iram-size 0xFF --noinduction --nooverlay --nogcse $@.c
Where download.cmd is:
set target SL51
set target port USB
set target connect
And run.cmd is:
set target SL51
set target port USB
set target connect
run
continue
quit
You can download a particular project with:
PROJ="library_test" make download
and run it with:
make run
Pretty cool! We're also developing a very awesome library for use with the 8051 to make it much, much nicer, but I can't publish that because of it being for class and stuff. Maybe after the semester's over! Have fun, and if anyone tries this and can't make it work, email me.
2009.02.02 in school
Some of you might have already heard the story of the day when Richard Stallman came to stay. If not, here're some anecdotes:
- Matt emailed RMS to ask if he needed a place to stay. He did! (and he accepted the thought of sleeping on Matt's floor)
- Weeks later, the school offered him a place to stay — a hotel, that they'd pay for. He picked a dorm room with a bunch of geeky kids instead.
- About a week beforehand, Matt got an email listing his food / social requirements, and other picky bits. It was rather hilarious; I'd like to repost it but it's not clear he wouldn't get angry.
- Matt ended up getting lots of emails from Luis (who works at Kitware), who was organizing the visit, picking up Stallman at the bus station, etc.
- RPI TV asked if they could rebroadcast his talk — Stallman wanted to ensure it would only be available in Theora. Hopefully they don't play it over HDTV (does RPI TV do HD? probably not...)... MPEG!! (they've already put it on a DVD.... more MPEG). Poor Stallman.
- On January 22, we all gathered in DCC 308, and Luis and RMS showed up.
- Matt went and talked to him and shook his hand, and then he started selling stuffed GNUs, his book, and stuff like that. Matt and Robb and Mike all got GNUs. They're cute.
- The last GNU got auctioned off. Moorthy won it, after a fierce bidding war with someone else who I didn't recognize. Something like this.
- He refused to sign someone's EeePC because it was running Windows, but he happily signed Matt's (GNU/)Linux box with proprietary wireless microcode running (Matt swapped out the proprietary nVidia drivers on his ThinkPad with the much-crappier Nouveau driver (which RMS had never heard of, even though it's the only FOSS driver that gets some video acceleration on half of the video cards currently in existence) for the duration of the visit... silly boy).
- There was a good bit of yelling during the Q/A part of the talk ("How is my uncle going to feed his 8-year-old daughter?", from one particularly dense individual), but everyone mostly left in good spirits...
- There was only one glaring mistake in his talk: he considers hardware something that needn't be free; his main reasons are that people aren't capable of modifying or duplicating hardware without spending millions on fabrication plants and design, etc., and that hardware cannot be "reprogrammed" in shipping devices. However, since some/many chip designs can be loaded into FPGAs with none or minor modifications (and this is how many chips are tested before going into production), this should actually qualify as "software", which should be free, in Stallman's eyes. Some people even put OpenSPARC on FPGAs... so half of his argument for not caring about free-as-in-speech hardware is entirely fallacious.
- Between the talk and the Q/A session, he put on his St. iGNUcious costume for us and acted in that role for a few minutes, ancient hard disk platter and all...
- He recorded some clips with DJ for WRPI to use during breaks: "I'm Richard Stallman, and I hope you're only using software which respects your freedom.", "I'm Richard Stallman, and I hope you're sharing the music you like with your friends.", "I'm Richard Stallman and you're listening to WRPI."
- Matt, Robb, Luis, and RMS went to dinner at a sushi place (the place Luis had planned on taking them was closed, because the talk ran for three hours — this also led to Stallman being frustrated at losing an hour of time to work; it turns out "work" means to respond to gazillions of emails from within Emacs).
- Dinner, apparently, mostly consisted of Matt and Robb talking to Luis with occasional interjections from Stallman ("F**k nVidia", "More people should learn Scheme", etc.)
- Eventually they came back to Davison; it turns out that our careful planning of mattress situations didn't work out (the bed: "That's much too hard.", and the floor mattress: "Oh, that's not good, either.") — he'd brought his own air mattress, without a pump, that he wanted inflated. In our dorm, of course, it was hard to find a vacuum... after like 20 minutes of running around as if their heads had been chopped off, Robb and Matt found a vacuum (apparently the RA who gave it to them thought RMS was Matt's dad).
- He spent most of the evening in Matt's chair, responding to emails ("about 400", in a day) in Emacs on his MIPS laptop (seriously, where do you find a MIPS netbook? China, apparently...)
- There was a lot of playing with his hair, the temperature ("I really am a Princess"), the window, etc.
- The next morning, Luis took him to a used book store, and then off to the bus station so he could continue on to his next talk (he was in Canada with a friend of Robb's within a few days).
- At some point, he asked to get the "Rensselaer Center for Open Source" renamed to the "Rensselaer Center for Free Software". SURPRISE!
Here's the video, in Ogg formats, of course: (it'll play with VLC)
High Quality (600MB)
Low Quality (260MB)
Audio Only (100MB)
It's been a long time (20 days) since my last post — in that time:
- I've moved back to RPI and gotten settled in.
- We have a new President! And he's already doing a much better job. *high hopes*
- Robb and Matt (and Nate!!) and I have started our next project after Seed. I can't tell you about it yet, because we want to wow everyone once it's done.
- I sat through a 3 hour lecture by RMS, who then stayed in Matt's dorm room, down the hall, and went to dinner with Robb and Matt! (more about this experience later)
- I finished and ordered the second revision Intervalometer PCB, this time, for a "dual-core" intervalometer!
- We've had two weeks of class. LITEC is ... incredibly disorganized but awesome; Graph Theory is boring and, so far, a repeat of DSA; ModComp... we'll see; SD&D is strange because it involves designing and writing software with a group of people that I don't know (they all seem cool, though!).
- Seed got a writeup in Ars Technica, which was reposted to Slashdot and OSNews, and prompted #seed on Gnome IRC to become slightly busier than usual!
- I got Seed working reasonably reliably on Mac OS X, and am working on MacPorts packages (waiting on a new gir-repository release), and wrote a Seed/Clutter Pong, though it's really rough and useless at the moment!
- WebKit passed revision number 40,000. This would not be notable except for the fact that Matt has spent most of his waking hours attempting to create Arch binary packages for every single revision of WebKit.
- New pictures! Not much, just of all of us (and of Matt's RMS-signed laptop), but still cute!
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