Brian Stinar's Blog

SOAPWare VPN Resources

2011-11-05T18:10:00.008-06:00

I've been helping my parents out with IT tasks down in Silver City for the past three years. A few months ago, we set a system live to comply with the Medicaid and Medicare Electronic Health System "meaningful use" incentive program. For those close to me, you may have noticed right before we set this system live I was going down to Silver City every weekend to work on this. Luckily now things have calmed down and I come about once a month to perform scheduled IT projects.

We switched to the SOAPWare Hosting Service because I believe that the talented people at SOAPWare can maintain a secure, reliable, and functional system cheaper and better than I can (being a dude that lives in Albuquerque and comes to Silver City on the weekends.) The other alternative would have been for me to continue to maintain a server, but to comply with the e-prescription incentive program (part of "meaningful use") we would have had to connect this server to the Internet - making security much more of a concern for a remote administrator such as myself needing to deal with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) . So, the hosting solution sounded good to me!

Things have been working pretty well. One concern I have tried to address this weekend was a slowness associated with the connection when all eight workstations were connected via remote desktop protocol (RDP) to SOAPWare. My mom and the most technically skilled employee at my dad's office both contacted me about it, and I believe the below steps of degrading the quality of the RDP connection should help with this concern, as a degraded connection requires less bandwidth.

I created this post to help employees at my dad's office feel comfortable further adjusting these settings (to degrade visual quality while increasing responsiveness), to provide a nice example of messing with SOAPWare RDP settings to everyone online, and to show how technical documents can be written in the first person with the use of humor and embedded advertisements in a classy way.

In order to make sure a RDP connection doesn't take up as much bandwidth, you can try the below steps. These steps can help you if you are using any kind of RDP connection - not just SOAPWare.

First click on the SOAPWARE VPN Icon as pictured below.

Figure 1 - Beautiful SOAPWare Icon

Next, click on "Options >> " as pictured in Figure 2. Some fields have been redacted due to their importance to National Security.

Figure 2 - Remote Desktop Connection Window - You should click on the red button.

After you have clicked "Options >>" then a more detailed window appears. We are interested in two tabs of this more detailed widow. The first tab we're interested in is the "Display" tab, as pictured below in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - The "Display" Tab

While in the "Display" tab, downgrade your colors to a level that is acceptable to you. I choose 16 bit color since the difference did not seem that bad to me. Also restricting the size of your remote desktop can make things go faster, but I did not do this as I thought my other changes would make things fast enough.

After you are finished playing around with settings in the "Display" tab, there is one more tab we are interested in - the "Experience" tab, as show below in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - "Experience" Tab

For this tab, my recommendation is to select the slowest connection speed available and use the defaults that come with this. Some of the nice visual components of your remote desktop might not be there, but hey, you want it responsive, right?

If this does not improve the responsiveness of the connection, I recommend further downgrading things in the "Display" tab.

First Google Adsense Check!

2011-10-20T16:04:00.005-06:00

As you, dear reader, may have noticed, my blog has a decent number of advertisements on it. This is mainly due to my unquestionable faith in the free market and the belief that 'free' content on the Internet is never really free - someone is paying for the time to generate the content, the serving bandwidth and the consumer is paying for their connection. As a result of these ideas, I thought I would try embedding advertising in my blog to at least benefit from a portion of this. Plus it's fun.

The Google services (Blogger, Adsense and Google Analytics) all play together very nicely. For this reason, and my love of all things Google, I have integrated the three into my blog. Finally Adsense has come to fruition!

Figure 1 - My First Advertising Check!

As is obvious from the check, I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon to focus on my writing career. It's still fun to think about. Even more amazing is that Google is able to host my blog, my pictures (through Picasa) and provide all of the tools for their share of the advertising revenue. Even more amazing, is that most of these tools would still be free even if I did not advertise with Google - because they would like to analyze the data I am generating. As a software engineer and IT professional, without a doubt, these would be much more expensive, and not as good, if I were to maintain a server and use existing (or custom) software to provide these services.

Thanks Google! You've made my life more fun, and a little bit better.

Figure 2 - Me Holding My Check with Crazy Eyes

Breaking Bad Wendy + Santa Fe Tournament

2011-08-15T00:05:00.008-06:00

This weekend my mother, father, friend Jeremy, and I played in a handball tournament in Santa Fe. Despite my recent success in B-level tournaments, I was knocked out in the first round. Jeremy and my family had a nice time at the tournament and doing things together around Pahokee and in Santa Fe.

While walking around the Buffalo Thunder casino, I recognized one of the dealers. She was an attractive woman that seemed familiar from the one and only television show I watch, Breaking Bad. She looked very much like the cracked out character named Wendy.

Rather than going up to this nicely put together woman and asking her if she (realistically) portrayed a prostitute that plied her trade in exchange for highly concentrated crystals of illegal substances, I tactfully asked her "Have you ever been in a television show?" to which she replied "Yes, I was the crack whore in Breaking Bad. Do you have a root beer?" Her character was always drinking root beer before, during, and after her activity in the show. Hopefully this post does not result in my blog being flagged for "adult content" but below is a short video one of the episodes contained showcasing Wendy (aired on the cable channel called AMC.) If one is from Albuquerque, some of these scenes may be recognizable.

I told her it was the only show I watched, and that I thought she did an amazing job. Her table was slow, so I felt comfortable asking her for a picture.

Brian Stinar + Julie Minescs

She seemed really nice, and I'm glad I said hello. It made the tournament weekend a little bit more memorable. I think she looks pretty and not cracked out at all when in real life.

First Squish Testing Problem Overcome

2011-07-19T16:53:00.005-06:00

I have been working on getting Squish testing going for the application my company produces, FLOW-3D. So far, we have been very happy with the level of support FrogLogic is giving us, and Squish seems like a great product. My involvement with this technology is just beginning, and I like it. Others' at my organization have more experience using Squish than I do.

One difficulty I was able to overcome that I wanted to post about was the "Either the application could not be started, or it was started but Squish failed to connect to it" error message I was receiving. After Google'ing this error message, a number of posts said that this was due to an incompatible version of Qt.

Error Message I was Receiving

However, I have Qt correctly configured on my machine, and selected the correct Qt directory while installing Squish.

The problem was because I was trying to test a debug version of our software. After selecting the non-debug version, everything worked fine. The installation documentation mentions this:

Using Squish with Qt debug libraries
The prebuilt binary packages are built against release versions of the Qt libraries—not against the debug versions. If you want to use Squish with Qt debug libraries you will need to build Squish from source. (See Installation for Testing Pure Qt 4 Applications (Section 3.1.2.2).)

Using Squish with Qt debug libraries

The prebuilt binary packages are built against release versions of the Qt libraries—not against the debug versions. If you want to use Squish with Qt debug libraries you will need to build Squish from source. (See Installation for Testing Pure Qt 4 Applications (Section 3.1.2.2).)

I wanted to create a quick post to help others (both inside my organization and outside) if they encountered this error message and didn't know why. For me, it was because I was trying to test a debug version of my software, which the Squish installer does not support.

First Attempt at Beer Brewing

2011-05-12T23:37:00.006-06:00

Ever since I met a cool older Russian dude that taught me how to make wine, I have been thinking about brewing beer. Those thoughts have finally manifest into something concrete. After my first attempt at brewing beer, I do enjoy the process. There are still a few weeks left until the result can be evaluated, but the creative process was fun.

Me With My First Wort - A Wheat Beer Made From a Very Simple Malt Extract

While at his party a few months ago in Santa Fe, I met Stephen Merkel. Stephen is a an archaeologist outside of Santa Fe and is into all sorts of cool creative things. We talked for a while about the beer he was serving at his party. This was all beer he brewed himself. There were a variety of interesting flavors, and Stephen was able to describe the different processes he went through to achieve the unique attributes within the beer. I told Stephen about my beer bottling experience, and mentioned that if he needed any help on bottling I would be happy to help him. A few weeks later, I helped him bottle five gallons. After the bottling event, Stephen loaned me the below book.

Read This Book If You Want To Brew

After reading the first 150 pages (of about 300 - I'm still reading it) of this book, I decided I was ready to give brewing a go. The author of this book constantly repeats the mantra of "Relax. Don't Worry. Have a Homebrew." This was an attitude I tried to adapt, despite being excited to try creating something of this fashion. I was in a bit of a rush to get things going, but chilled out once the ball started rolling. Stephen provided valuable assistance throughout this whole process.

First, I made a trip with some of my coworkers to the Santa Fe Home Brewing Supply during a long lunch break. While there, I dropped $113.74 on home brewing supplies. Of these, about $25 were consumed during the brew (unit costs). The remaining expenses were capital expenditures which will be amortized over the life of the equipment. Below are the consumables.

The Wheat Malt Extract I Used - Pre-hopped for Greater Ease

Dextrose - Corn Sugar To Up The Alcohol Content

Eventually, I will brew a malt-only beer, but for my first time I was not too concerned about the effects of adding sugar. The recipes later in the book usually do not call for much sugar to be added, but rather rely on the malt for providing fermentable sugars. Malt is about 10x as expensive as corn sugar, but is supposed to ferment to fuller, less metallic, flavors.

As an aside, a malted grain has been soaked in water to allow it to germinate and then is dried before the seed could grow much. This allows the developing plant to metabolize a little bit and create different sugars. Those sugars have been extracted, and sold to me, as 'malt extract.'

Other than the malt, and 1 pound of corn sugar, there were a number of pieces of equipment I needed to make this happen.

A good cleaning compound is the first thing needed for brewing. Luckily, the previous tenant at my Santa Fe place left a number of half-filled bleach contains around various locations. Stephen has noticed some odd interactions that take place if any bleach is left on glassware, and sunlight hits it. He uses iodine, which is something I will consider if I have any problems with the found bleach.

Most of the utensils were given a once-over with a diluted bleach solution.

A big pot is the second thing you need for brewing beer. This is what we used to cook our wort (malt + sugar + hops) in. As my malt extract came pre-hopped, all we had to add was the extract and the sugar to the boiling water.

Stephen stirring the wort.

My Six Gallon Carboy

Fermentation Lock - A Simple Water Valve (but really small and compact)

This is a five gallon bucket with a spout at the bottom which is useful for transferring beer to directly before bottling. We did not actually use this piece of equipment for this phase, but will when the beer is ready to bottle.

After we boiled all of the malt and dextrose together, we let the wort sit for and while. Then, we ran the wort through some ice in my funnel to quickly cool it down. Stephen recommended buying three gallons of distilled water, and cooling them greatly to add to the cooling wort. Unfortunately, my distilled water was not quite cool enough so we used ice. With ice, it was difficult to tell how much ice contributed to the water content of the wort, but Stephen's familiarity with the process dictated about a gallon of ice water, 1.5 gallons of wort, and 2.5 gallons of distilled put us at the five gallon mark. This was a good place to apply the concept of "Relax. Don't Worry. Have a Homebrew."

After we finished mixing the malt, sugar and boiling water, we let the mixture cool to and then measured the specific gravity. This is to measure the density of the mixture, which is proportional to the sugar content (which directly impacts fermentation.)

The hydrometer is an instrument used to measure the specific gravity of a liquid.

After measuring the specific gravity, Steven said it seemed really, really low to him (34). We read the instructions on the malt, and the instructions actually called for 2.5 pounds of sugar, and we only added one. Luckily, I had some sugar laying around my house which helped us bring the specific gravity to 48. The difference between this measurement, and the measurement I take when fermentation stops will provide me with the alcohol content of my mixture.

Once we upped the sugar content, and let the wort cool, I added the yeast. There was a small yeast package included in my malt extract, which made choosing the yeast extremely easy. Different types of yeast are available, which have their own impact on the flavor of the resulting beer.

Finished Wort

In My Closet, With a Towel Around To Keep Light Away

After A Day of Fermenting

Overall, brewing my first batch of beer was very fun. I am grateful for Steven's advice, encouragement and help. I look forward to experimenting with different processes and seeing how they impact the resulting beer. Send me an email if you'd like a homebrew!

Baby Rabbit

2011-05-10T22:21:00.004-06:00

Today I found a baby rabbit hopping along the street. It was too small to make it over the curb, so it was just kind of bouncing back and forth, waiting to get run over by a truck. No mama rabbit was anywhere around. I was walking home from a Blues dance at Cowgirls in Santa Fe and saw the little guy.

I carried it in my hands back to my apartment. The rabbit relaxed a lot when I would pet it on the head, and carrying it in my hands was a very pleasant experience. It is very warm and nice. When I got back to my apartment, I gently set it down in my shower after corking the drain so it wouldn't fall down. Then, I set a plate of water out to drink. I also cooked some soy beans (edamame) which I ate most of, and tried to feed the rabbit some of. If it ate any, it was such a small amount I couldn't tell.

Even though I understand that rabbits are very plentiful, and that the genetics which would drive a baby rabbit to be hopping around in the street likely shouldn't be selected for in Santa Fe, I wanted to help it. Hopefully bringing it out of the street, trying to give it food and water, and putting it in a little garden area at my place in Santa Fe actually accomplished that.

I think I would like to get a pet rabbit someday when I'll be around my house enough to take good care of it.

Maybe I will see this rabbit around my place in Santa Fe from now on.

Videos Of The Tournament

2011-03-19T23:06:00.010-06:00

Below are the videos of individual matches that I would like to include on this blog post. I've seen a decent increase to my blog based on this content, and I've heard about these videos from about six people in person.

Everyone Versus Armillo

2011-03-19T22:17:00.009-06:00

As part of the tournament, Dan Armillo played everyone in the tournament against him (sequentially, not in parallel.) Armillo had to win eleven points against everyone that played against him. Between fifteen and twenty people played a single match to eleven. I believe four of the players each received one point.

Additionally, Armillo could only serve three consecutive times, and he could not kill the ball before three rallies. He actually never killed the ball, with anyone. Despite these setbacks, he was no where near close 'losing' the match.

Below are a few videos which were recorded at the tournament. I always, always label my graphics, but I believe the YouTube titles should be sufficient to identify these videos. These are all the videos which were provided to me which involved Danny Armillo. All videos were recorded on Saturday, March 12, 2011.

In addition to the Armillo destruction which ensued, there were a lot of pointers Armillo gave during each match. He helped all of the players improve, no matter what their level was. One of my favorite things about the tournament my father organizes is the effort that goes into making it a learning experience for everyone.

Stay posted for additional updates. I still have videos from all of the individual matches to upload.

Dan the Hand Armillo 2 Handball Tournament

2011-03-12T11:31:00.007-07:00

Today, Saturday March 12, 2011 is the first day of the second annual "Dan the Hand Armillo" handball tournament. The tournament is located at the Deming Country Club, in beautiful Deming, New Mexico. Below are some images of the competitors. Stay tuned for up-to-the-second updates as the tournament progresses!

The tournament format is that a match is two games to fifteen, with an optional tie breaker to eleven. If New Mexico's top handball player, Dan Armillo, shows up, there will also be an everyone versus Armillo side tournament with slightly modified rules.

Wayne Abraham (left) vs Don Stinar (right). Stinar came out on top, with a score of

Cary Hamilton (left) vs Don Stinar (right). This match is still in progress.

Bobby Hall (left) versus Jeremy Brewster (right). Brewster won.

Ron Todd (left) vs. Alan Gast (right). Results pending.

Handball Destroyer (requested no Internet presence) (left) vs. Ryan Ashley (right). The Destroyer won, in the tie breaker round.

Below are a few images from the Hall vs. Brewster match.

SOAPWare 4.8 Database Backup Instructions

2011-02-12T19:28:00.006-07:00

I have been helping my father out with his information technology systems at his office. He is a pulmonologist down in Silver City, New Mexico and all of his patient records are stored electronically. I'm the IT guy that comes in every few weekends to keep things running smoothly.

Part of what I consider an important portion of helping people out with their IT infrastructure is determining what level of redundancy is appropriate for them. My mother manages my dad's office, and agrees with me that the ancient Windows 2000 database server storing patient records needs to have a hot swappable spare. This weekend, I constructed such a hot swappable system. Below, you will learn how to do this same thing. This blog post exists for three purposes:

If I stop being the network administrator for my father, the next administrator will be able to pick up these notes (in addition to those taken in a leather bound notebook) and not have to rediscover everything from scratch.
Other people in the world may need to maintain such legacy systems, and find this post useful (or contract with me to perform such maintenance!)
I want to be able to remember exactly what I did, so when I need to do the same thing a year or two later, I can easily remember.

This document does not exist to allow nontechnical people at my dad's office to perform backups. Things can be extremely broken by tinkering around with the database through the below mechanisms.

SOAPWare 4.8 is a difficult piece of software to maintain. It is well past it's end of life date, and it uses other, older, pieces of software to help it function. Our installation uses MS SQL7 as it's database back-end. As the first portion in this series on administering older SOAPWare systems, this blog post will cover backing up an existing MS SQL7 database. In a later post, I will carefully describe how I took those backups and created another MS SQL7 dabase, on a virtual server, which I then connected a SOAPWare 4.85.06 client to. All systems mentioned below are on a totally isolated network.

A book that helped me a great deal was SQL SERVER 7 : A Beginner's Guide, by Petkovic. This book cost me a $0.01 from Amazon, and then a few bucks to ship it. I ordered three other MS SQL7 books, one of which was worthless, the other which was helpful, this one which contained exactly what I needed, and a forth which I did not open because I already found the information I needed. These books cost less than fifteen bucks in total, shipped.

If you're going to buy it, use the above link and maybe I'll get a fraction of a penny from the sale. However, if you follow the instructions on this post, you won't need to buy the above book.

The first thing to do is to start up "Enterprise Manager", which is the utility that MS SQL7 uses for managing everything. Do not try and accomplish any of this on the command line, as you would do in Linux, or with any other database you are familiar with. For me, this is located under "Programs" -> "Microsoft SQL Server 7.0" -> "Enterprise Manager".

Figure 1 - Opening the "Enterprise Manager"

After "Enterprise Manager" opens, you will notice the sw_ databases present. These are what SOAPWare uses to store your patient information. There are six of these. They are:

sw_chart
sw_codes
sw_exch
sw_image
sw_trans
sw_users

Figure 2 - Hopefully You See Some of these Databases

The below steps are what you will do for all of the sw_ databases. We will begin at the top, and work our way down, backing up databases as we go. Right click on a database, go to "All Tasks" -> "Backup Database."

Figure 3 - Bringing up the Backup Dialog

Once you have the backup dialog up, make sure to type in something useful for the name, and remember where you are putting these backups. Then click "OK" to start the backup.

Figure 4 - Backup Dialog

Figure 5 - Hopefully You See "Backup in Progress" and not Something Terrible

Figure 6 - Backup Successful

Repeat the above steps for every database that SOAPWare uses (likely those beginning with sw_) . After you are finished with this, you should verify that your backups have been created with a somewhat reasonable time stamp.

Now, you have backups of your MS SQL7 SOAPWare database! In a later post, I will show you how to take these backups and create a fully redundant SOAPWare database server.

Broken Pipes + Playboy of the Western World

2011-02-04T20:36:00.007-07:00

This Friday provided quite a challenge to my organizational abilities and peace of mind. The only thing I planned on doing on Friday was attending a play, titled "Playboy of the Western World" put on by the Adobe Theater here in Albuquerque. One of my buddies caught a ride to Santa Fe with me in order to snow board. He was 25 minutes late to my house, making it so I did not get to work as early as I would like. While at work, one of my tenants called to inform me that my pipes had broken, and my garage was filling up with water (see the below picture.) As that instant, I remembered speaking with my mother, and agreeing that I should put a space heater in my garage to prevent this from happening, and then immediately forgetting. So, I called my buddy and he replied that he was leaving the mountain now, and would be there shortly. 1.75 hours later, he arrived at my work.

The Beautiful Fountain

Luckily, my friends David and Efrain were able to pick up supplies for me to make this project progress as quickly as possible and work in parallel while I was driving back from Santa Fe. We shut off water from the main, stopping the leak and leaving everyone in my three apartments (Greg, Ben + Franciska, Me + 3 house guests) without water for a short time. Luckily, my tenants are some of the most flexible people, and were much all right being without water for a few hours.

After shutting of the main, Dave and I went to see the amazing play! My friend Kristina Caffrey invited us to to attend the play she is in titled "Playboy for the Western World." The play was funny, well staged and generally a positive experience. For only $15, the play was an extremely good value compared to seeing one of the pieces of crap Hollywood puts out and Albuquerque consumes for $12 at Century {12/21}. After the play, Dave, Kristina and I went for appetizers and drinks at Zinc, an extremely pleasant place to drink a beer and listen to music.

Unfortunately, these shut offs were not effective for the leaks

There were three things that helped me maintain my piece of mind during this process. The first was that I could depend on my good friends Dave and Efrain to help me solve this problem. Efrain has skills at plumbing, and was able to reason through intelligent solutions and alternatives with me. Additionally, his plumbing skills allowed him to pickup all of the necessary supplies for actually fixing this project. Dave helped with the soldering, and other logistics associated with this project.

The second element was how flexible my tenants are. They were without water for a total of six hours. After Albuquerque had temperatures of -7F, which are twenty year records, they understood we might have some slight infrastructure problems. My tenant Greg tried to shut off water at the main, and was very understanding about any issues that would occur. Ben and Franciska were understanding and cool as well.

The third thing that helped me was the ability to improvise and the familiarity with tools and construction techniques my father taught me. If you mess up a project, come up with a way to make your error into a beautiful embellishment. As a result of his training, I am extremely familiar with numerous tools and construction techniques. If it were not for this training, being a landlord would not be a viable economic enterprise for me.

Combining these three things I am grateful for, with the fact that these pipes burst in an ideal position (unused washer hook-ups which could simple be disengaged through sweating caps on with a torch) made it so I was able to fulfill my duty as a landlord, and still have a fun time at the play.

The Final Solution - Cap The Pipes

Cherry / Silver Albuquerque Handball Tournament

2011-01-22T20:44:00.001-07:00

This weekend my family (my mom and dad) and I played in the annual Cherry / Silver Handball tournament in Albuquerque. The Cherry / Silver Handball tournament is well organized by Mr. Carl Brand. It is a single match, doubles tournament. Everyone is placed either on the Cherry team, or the Silver team. The team which wins the most doubles matches, wins the tournament. Everyone plays a single match, so it is not the most intense tournament in the world, but it is a whole lot of fun. My mother recorded the below video of the final few minutes of my match.

The below videos are movies I recorded of my father's match. My dad is in the baggy black shorts.

This clip begins with my dad's team serving at nine.

This video clip begins at 13 (my dad) serving 10.

The final in the series begins when the score is 17-17.

The below image is of me and my doubles partner.

The Cherry / Silver tournament was a lot of fun. The hospitality event was held at the German American club, complete with drink coupons for tournament players.

In addition to the tournament, my parents helped me on a construction project around my house. I needed to stucco a wall, and my mom and dad helped.

The above image shows how we 'fixed' the motor on my cement mixer.

My mom always makes extremely good, healthy, food to eat.

The Cherry/Silver tournament, construction project, and going out for drinks at the Low Spirits Blues Club as a family made for a nice weekend.

New Year's Eve 2010

2011-01-02T23:20:00.001-07:00

This New Year's was pleasant. I spent some time listening to Efrain mix, worked on some software briefly, went to an intense church service and then to a house party with my friend Sharlene.

My buddy Efrain has become very involved in his church, and wanted to go to a dinner and a service being offered by a similar church here in Albuquerque. Efrain, our friend Samantha, and I, went to the dinner put on by the mega-church Calvary. All three of us went to college together in Socorro.

Samantha

Efrain

The dinner began with a Mariachi band playing (what Efrain explained to me were) traditional Mexican songs. Efrain was able to translate whenever a double entendre was present in the song, and explain the different meanings for the gringos.

Any idea which photo was taken with Efrain's phone?

The food was Mexican - tamales, tortillas and posole. For vegetarians, it was a salad from McDonald's across the street.

Samantha - Vegetarian

Efrain - Carnivore

After the meal, a Christian version of Santana played in the main auditorium. Two Or More was the group which "blends blues, soul, pop and Latin rock for a very unique sound..."

The sermon was well done. I have noticed that the mega-churches tend to have much more captivating speakers than the traditional denominations. They also incorporate technology to a much greater degree all throughout their endeavors.

After the church service, I went to a house party with my friend Sharlene. Sharlene does a little bit of modeling. Below are a very pictures I like of her.

This is one of the nicest pictures I have seen of this part of town.

She's really not Muslim.

It was fun meeting a few of Sharlene's friends and talking with them at the party. Since I drove, and have been coughing for about a month, I decided drinking wouldn't be that good of an idea. Despite the last of revelry, this New Year's Eve was nice.

Software Development with DJ Efrain on the Turn Tables

2011-01-01T22:40:00.003-07:00

One of my favorite ways to study as an undergraduate student was on my friend Efrain's couch, with a fire blazing in his wood burning stove and listening to him spin records on his two turn tables. Today I was able to enjoy a similar situation while developing software on my laptop.

Efrain was working on his New Year's Eve mix while I was at his house. The couch and fire were missing, but it was still a nice way to work on software.

DJ Efrain

Here is an MP3 download of the mix (104 megabytes). I may spend some time trying to build a Flash component of the mix to embed directly in my blog, but I thought this would be good for now. Efrain also has this mix available online if you feel like streaming it here.

Merry Christmas Artmas!

2010-12-30T19:09:00.011-07:00

Merry ~~Christmas~~ Artmas! This year, my sister gave everyone in our family a number of paintings, and I gave my parents my tile table. As a result of this massive art exchange, we started to use the term which either my father or I invented to describe this holiest of days, Artmas. Unfortunately, Artmas is not adequately captured in its full glory by a cheap camera phone with a partially cracked lens.

Last Minute Grout Work - ~~Christmas~~ Artmas Eve 2010

This was taken with my mother's amazing camera.
I love working with tile, especially when I individually created every single tile.
Working on a fun project with a nice fire is about the most fun way I could imagine spending ~~Christmas~~ Artmas.

I had to cut four tiles to place a Zia in the center. My mother was not exactly thrilled that her front room became a construction zone, but she understood with it being ~~Christmas~~ Artmas and all.

I'm not sure why my eyes often times look three quarters closed when I smile for a picture...

My mother decided she was sick of waiting for grandchildren, so she purchased some from a gypsy woman. This is me, my father, and my two adopted siblings, Rufus (named after J. Rufus Fears, the best lecturer ever) and Juliet. My clothing is post-lumerjacking.

The Final Product - Only about two years in the making

My father will likely come up with an attractive oak edge for the table. The tile work is done, but the project still requires some sort of edging to complete the look.

This is one of the many paintings my sister gave me. This image was taken from www.autumnstinar.com without permission.

My good friend Oleg, and his mother and sister, gave me an expensive watch for ~~Christmas~~ Artmas. Oleg is (correctly) convinced that I need to upgrade my wardrobe, starting with a nice watch and some shoes. I agree with him.

My father playing Alan Gast at handball at the Deming Country Club.

I had a very nice time in Silver City with my family. In addition to the wonderful presents I received, playing handball with my family, building fires and doing a little lumberjacking all made it a very nice vacation.

Thanksgiving 2010

2010-12-04T18:06:00.011-07:00

I have many things to be thankful for. The first thing I am thankful for is my family. My parents have been extremely loving and supportive throughout my life. The gifts they have given me in terms of skills, attitudes and perspectives have been invaluable. I am also thankful for my sister. She always has a way of making everything beautiful. My friends also have been a very supportive force in my life that I am thankful for. Whenever I feel bad, I think about my wonderful family and the friends. Sometimes I feel sad about the friends that I don't see quite as much anymore, but I give thanks for everything they have taught me through direct interaction and reflection.

This Thanksgiving, I went to Silver City. My friend Oleg came down for the amazing Thanksgiving dinner my mom made (the baked broccoli with blue cheese, and the turkey legs, were my favorite) and to help on a construction project.

My father is converting an old shop into a guest house. Over the Thanksgiving break, we build the frame for the floor to sit on.

Oleg helping prepare the masonry wall for a supporting 2x10.

This kid is named James. He is probably the best worker I have ever seen help at my parent's place. He's an expert welder, and also quite skilled at general construction. He single handedly anchored all of the supports into the masonry with my dad's hammer drill as well as helped out with all of the other construction.

My Dad

Oleg Semenov - мой друг

However, Oleg Semenov does not like to be explicitly identified on my blog, and he decided to use violence to coerce this citizen journalist into silence. The below images provide photographic evidence.

Everything is all framed in. None of this will be visible whatsoever when the floor is put on, and the walls are up.

The framing project was a nice way to spend time with my friends and family over the holiday weekend. Of course, as a good American, it is important to celebrate Consumptionmas. This year for Consumptionmas, I purchased a laptop for $400 from Walmart. Such... Low... Prices... My father was especially interested in my Consumptionmas plans this year, and he was kind enough to go to Walmart for me after he finished his work in Silver City early in the morning while I was still asleep. The Consumptionmas revelers were out in such force, that by about 7:00 a.m. my father purchased the second-to-last laptop for me. My budget was around $400, and I am very satisfied I was able to spend barely over $400 and get this laptop.

Probably the most fun part of the trip was dancing with Jennifer at the amazing Flame Convention Center in Silver City. The Flame is a gigantic metal building with three or so partitions. I believe each partition contains a bar, and can basically be it's own venue relatively independently of the other partitions. During the weekend festivities, two of the partitions were combined. Jennifer knows my family, and our parents know each other, but this was the first time we met. She is extremely into Latin dancing. Thanks to David Romero down in Socorro from my days at New Mexico Tech, I am decent enough at salsa dancing to be able to improvise my swing dancing moves in without feeling completely retarded. Of course, drinking alcohol before hand always helps *with the way one perceives* dancing. *May not actually help with the reality of dancing.

No trip to Silver City is complete without visiting my uncle, Rob Stinar. It's always nice stopping by to see how he's doing.

Socorro Springs Bottled Beer Present

2010-11-27T20:35:00.011-07:00

In about two weeks, I'll be visiting my friend Norelle in Ridgecrest California. Norelle and I went to New Mexico Tech in Socorro together. While asking Norelle if I can bring her anything, the only thing she wanted was some pumpkin beer from the microbrewery. So, I embarked on a beer bottling adventure, as transporting their growlers through a month of time and 700 miles would not be feasible.

Socorro Springs only sells Growlers (1/2 gallon jugs) of their beer, or pints. I bottle two gallons in total (four growlers).

Growlers leak. The seal on a growler lid bleeds out carbonation, and eventually this leak becomes a gas exchange between the atmosphere and the bottle. Beer doesn't do so well sitting in air. About the longest I feel comfortable drinking a growler would be about two weeks after it has been filled. There are exceptions, and it's good to occasionally cultivate a spirit of adventure, but flat, spoiled beer is no fun. Luckily, my computer science graduate school friend Nate Gauntt is an expert at all things beer.

Nate - Adding CO2 to a keg of his in order to add as much carbonation to the pumpkin beer as possible before we bottle it.

Nate filling up the empty bottles he gave me for the project.

Nate explained we want to keep everything as cold as possible in an attempt to minimize out gasing of CO2.

As an added bonus, the girls were making cupcakes while the guys were bottling beer.

The final output - nicely bottled beer.

I actually did help with the different stages of this process, but being the photographer made it difficult to get any Brian Stinar action shots. Nate helped me understand a lot about making beer, and the entire evening was very fun. Thanks Nate!

After a beer and a cupcake, we enjoyed Harry Potter and some pizza.

My friend Norelle, who will hopefully be enjoying the beer from my bottling project soon.

Tile Table Update

2010-11-15T17:19:00.004-07:00

Lately I have been trying to make it to the UNM craft studio on Sunday nights to work on my tile table. I want to finish it up, and I'm only missing a single tile now.

After I finish the last remaining tile, I want to pick out some nice sandy colored grout to go with the tiles. I'm not sure how I will do the edging, the tiles are raised up a bit from the metal edges of the table and I would like them to be flush.

Washington D.C. Trip

2010-11-03T14:59:00.021-06:00

Over the weekend of August 28, I spent some time in Dulles, Virginia and Washington D.C. One of my friends, Yana Alaekseeko introduced me to her friend Elena Vinokurova (Да, я люблю русских). I decided it would be fun to check out Washington D.C. and visit Lena.

Lena, in her extremely cool apartment complex

While Lena was at work, I took the underground train to Washington D.C. The trip was eerily familiar - I spent a lot of time playing the video game Fallout 3, and all of the underground stops were exactly as in the same but not post-apocalyptic. The DC street scape was all the same as well. The Fallout 3 artists and models did an amazing job.

I like think picture a lot. Notice the guy that looks just like me, in similar clothing, in the exact same pose.

This is the theater where Lincoln was shot.

The gun Lincoln was shot with is TINY.

These buildings look familiar...

I have no idea who Glen Beck is, but he had a rally the day I checked out the mall.

Public transit seemed to be popular.

The other picture of me in DC - taken by Аня Горобец

During my trip, I walked along the entire mall and saw the White House. It was a fun trip, seeing all the historical things that I have read about and studied, but never seen. My favorite tourist type thing was the Lincoln Memorial. Navigating through the crowd of Glen Beck supporters became difficult towards the Lincoln Memorial, as that seemed to be where everyone wanted to go to see the speakers.

Silver City IT Work

2010-08-22T14:22:00.008-06:00

I help out with information technology (IT) support in addition to developing software. IT isn't exactly my favorite thing in the world, but it is nice to help out my family and be a part of helping people receive high quality medical care. My dad is a pulmonologist down in Silver City, and his network administrator quit almost two years ago. Since then, I've been picking up the work. He keeps all of his patient records electronically, and I'm the one that makes sure the systems keep running. Plus, more people need help keeping their infrastructure going than they need new, custom, (hopefully scientific) software written for them.

I build a separate, Internet connected, network for his office to use when connecting to the hospital's network (VPN) and looking up information online. This is completely separate from his electronic medical record network, since I was not ready to overhaul that network and securely connect it to the Internet. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides all sorts of guidelines for well connected networks that are basic IT infrastructure security guidelines, which are basically simple best practices for securing a network. It is much easier to secure a stand alone network than one connected to the Internet, so I simply build a stand alone network. (Red / Black seperation, for all you spooks out there.)

This system requires regular updates. The major two components that require updating are the virus signatures for the virus scanner, and the operating system.

These instructions have been created in order to help share some of the updating work load, so I can focus on other IT related tasks when I am in town.

Updating AVG
The first thing to do when updating the anti-virus scanner is to open the interface to it. This can be accomplished by double clicking on the AVG system tray icon as shown below.

Figure 1. AVG System Tray Icon

The next step is to actually tell AVG to update. This can be easily accomplished by clicking on the "Update now" button as shown in Figure 2. below.

Figure 2. Telling AVG to Update

After this completes, you can close AVG.

Windows Update
Telling Windows XP to update is even easier than updating your antivirus signatures. Simply click on the "Windows Update" option from within the first level of your start bar menu, as is shown in Figure 3. below.

Figure 3. Windows Update

Then, the easiest thing to do is to select "Express" to download the updates Microsoft considers critical. This is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. "Express" Updating Mechanism

The next thing you may or may not see, is a "No Updates Available" screen. If this is the case, you are finished. Otherwise, follow the on screen instructions for installing the important updates.

Windows update is scheduled to happen every day, but as the Internet machines are not always turned on, the automatic update may or may not happen.

Hopefully these instructions are helpful in describing the steps necessary to update antivirus signature files and the Windows XP operating system.

AI For Video Games - Final Project

2010-06-19T23:08:00.006-06:00

It has been almost two years since I took my "Artificial Intelligence for Video Games" course, but the topic still comes up quite frequently. I find myself using my blog as a resource for when I am talking with people about different concepts and programs. As a result of this, I decided to include a post where I actually show what the final game came out to be like.

I realize this kind of messes up my blog's layout. Since I am mostly interested in showing people the game, as opposed to my layout, I'm OK with this.

Click here for a full screen version.

It's been a while since I worked on my sheep herding game, and Jon Bradley is responsible for the code as much as I am (entirely for the sheep behavior). Please leave me a comment if you would like to talk about this.

Autumn Stinar's First Gallery Opening

2010-05-22T16:21:00.002-06:00

My only sister Autumn Stinar had an art opening in Silver City a few weeks ago (May 7, 2010), and I wanted to come into town to support her. Her work was featured at the ¡anima! gallery. The gallery owners were very pleasant and nice; the entire event was basically like a really controlled party. Below are some pictures from the event. The high quality photographs are taken (without permission) from her facebook gallery, the low quality camera phone pictures at the end are Brian Stinar originals.

Autumn began promoting her event by having a number of quarter page fliers made.

My sister strategically placed these at her place of employment.

The ¡anima! gallery owner husband, of the husband / wife owner pair.

My mom and a Silver City denizen enjoying the opening.

The guy in the blue is me.

Placing a blue dot sticker on the label - communicating that the painting is SOLD!

My father decided that anything other than a 2-liter container is uneconomical for his Diet Mountain Dew habit.

My mom, with the food table in the back ground.

My entire family is happy that my sister was able to have her first art gallery opening and that we were able to be there to see it. The event was very pleasant and fun.

Santa Fe Century Bike Race

2010-05-20T23:03:00.002-06:00

This past weekend I went on a fifty mile ride through Santa Fe as a participant in the Santa Fe Century. My buddy Aaron Torres wanted to ride the 50 mile loop section. He's been training a lot up in Los Alamos with his friend Cody.

My buddy Aaron and I have been friends basically since our freshman year together at New Mexico Tech in Socorro. Down in Socorro, we would occasionally work out at the gym together. However, we always worked on computer science problems together. Aaron encouraged me to ride the 50 miles with him, and I did.

I left Albuquerque around 6:30 a.m. to make it to Santa Fe before 7:30. The entire race had the feeling of a carnival. I believe there were around 3,000 rides. My estimate is based on the highest rider number I saw, which was 2,900. There could have been more and I just missed them.

Getting all set to ride was very easy. The organizers were friendly and helpful.

There were bikes and bicyclists everywhere.

Cody

Aaron Torres

The University of New Mexico Computer Science Department gave me this shirt. I felt out of place not wearing spandex.

This was a welcomed sight.

This was at the first major rest area. It was in a nice little town called Galisteo.

The Ulrichs were quite the hospitable hosts in Galisteo. They were making food as quickly as possible keeping all the hungry bikers fed.

Quite the spread!

This was the only unpleasant portion of the ride. We were on the shoulder of Interstate 25.

Aaron's Parents at a Restaurant after the Race

My Buddy Aaron Torres

Aaron's Coworker Friend Cody and Mrs. Kaylee Torres - Aaron's Wife

I had a lot of fun and am very glad I did this ride with my friend. We paced with each other for all except maybe the last eight miles, in which Aaron pulled ahead of me to finish about 20 minutes sooner. All of his training in the mountains of Los Alamos paid off! I'm too used to my flat bike commute. My total time was about five minutes over four hours. Cody pulled ahead of us early, and finished almost an hour sooner than I did.

I still haven't decided if I will do the 65 mile Albuquerque ride with him or not, but I am leaning more towards doing it.

Christmas 2009 in Silver City

2010-01-09T11:27:00.013-07:00

A White Christmas in Silver City, New Mexico

This year my family and friend Efrain spent Christmas in Silver City, New Mexico. My family is from there, and my parent's house is a little more comfortable for a large number of people than my one bedroom apartment.

When driving from Albuquerque to Silver City, one has two main options. One option is to cross the mountains through NM 152 and drive through Hillsboro on the east, the black range of mountains, and then come out in Mimbres on the west and continue on to Silver City. The other approach is to continue south on I25 until Hatch, take the NM25 through Hatch and to Deming, then take NM 180 up to Silver City. Both routes take approximately the same amount of time if the speed limits are heeded, Hatch-Deming can be much quicker if you choose to speed.

Going through the mountains is a much more scenic and pleasant route, but passing through the flatlands of Deming and Hatch has a significant advantage - Deming has a country club which my family can play handball at! One of our favorite things to do as a family is to play handball. I got into town a little bit late to play on the way in, but we were able to play on Christmas Eve.

Here is one short video of my mom verses Alan. Additional, longer videos are coming soon.

In total, Alan Gast, Colleen Stinar (my mom), Donald Stinar (my dad) and I played in Deming this time. Efrain wanted to stay in Silver City and work on a welding project, so he wasn't able to make it. Autumn Stinar (my sister) was working at her new job at the Javalina Coffee Shop, located in downtown Silver City.

Autumn M. Stinar working away

Numerous Patrons of the Coffee Shop

My family also likes to eat sandwiches from Diane's Bakery Sandwich Shop, also located in downtown Silver City. Outside the sandwich shop, the entire block was transformed from a somewhat run down industrial district into a beautiful commercial area with about four different eating establishments.

Frozen Fountain in Downtown Silver City

Efrain R. Grijalva at My Family's House

One of the nights in Silver City, my family went to eat dinner at Isaac's, also located downtown. We saw our friends the Kellerman's. Travis Kellerman was visiting from Albuquerque and his mom Karen and father Harry retired to Silver City.

Travis Kellerman - Albuquerque Politico at Isaaic's in Downtown Silver City

Efrain R. Grijalva - Low Light Conditions at Isaac's

I also spent a lot of time working on backups at my parents medical office. My father has all of his patient records stored electronically, and I am his system administrator. Performing a test restore on a new server is important, but not something that many would consider interesting.

Jalapeno Popcorn

2009-11-24T07:11:00.004-07:00

This weekend I accompanied my girlfriend and a few of her friends to see the Twilight Movie, New Moon. Despite living in New Mexico for over ten years, I still find certain things interesting. One example of such a thing is the delicacy know as "jalapeno popcorn."

Luckily, I was not accosted for recording elements of the new movie, nor for taking unauthorized photos of people. The couple in front of us was enjoying this jalapeno popcorn.

Car Auction

2009-10-25T20:47:00.003-06:00

My friend Oleg and I attended a car auction here in Albuquerque. We went to observe and measure how the car prices compare to similar cars on Craigslist. Our comparison is still in the works, but I would say on average the cars are slightly higher priced, but the outliers are significant.

Bentley's Auctions had a DWI seizure auction and I thought it would be fun to attend. New Mexico has a significant problem with drunk driving, and the state decided it would be a good idea to take someone's car after a conviction, so I thought I would see if I could buy someone's car (cheap), but they weren't quite cheap enough to motivate me into buying anything immediately.

Below are some pictures of the auction, and below that I have some video.

The auction had a bit of a carnival feel.

New Mexico used to have a single zip code, "505", which was the subject of many tatoos. Unfortunately, we now are 505/575, which doesn't look quite as good. 5{0,7}5 is also an option if you know regular expressions.

My friend Oleg

Hot Tub Moving Project

2009-10-10T22:34:00.005-06:00

My house in Albuquerque is rapidly getting fixed up and becoming more comfortable, but there is one critical element missing, my hot tub. The past two weekends I have come to Silver City to help my parents with their computer network, to visit, and to work on getting my hot tub up to Albuquerque. Last weekend, we were very short on workers and I didn't make any progress on preparations for this project (but the network admin stuff came along well.) This weekend, it will be close in terms of labor. The work crew is going to make an attempt tomorrow.

Today I spent about three hours demolishing my father's float setup on his flat bed trailer. Silver City has a Christmas parade and a 4th of July parade, and my dad always enjoys creating comic floats that somehow incorporate the parade theme, promotion for his business and humor. The trailer had a wood frame to facilitate the attachment of lights and decorations, but it was fairly rotten. The flat bed trailer is barely too small for my hot tub (the width of the trailer is 76 inches and the hot tub is 79 inches wide.) My general plan is to put the tub on the side, with one edge propped up against the trailer railing. Hopefully the fiber glass liner and pseudo-wood exterior are able to withstand the force of the tub! I'll help my dad rebuilt the float setup before the next parade, I am grateful I do not have to rent a trailer for this project.

While living in Socorro, my car suffered thousands of dollars worth of damage in the massive hail storm. Rather than using the insurance money to fix my car, I realized the damages were entirely cosmetic and I did not want to concern myself with appearing to drive a stylish vehicle. Instead, I realized that I could use the money to accomplish one of my dreams, to have a hot tub at my house as an undergraduate student.

I am not Asian, but this is the specific model. If you want to come and use it, send me a message!

This is the actual color of mine.

I got a "Tiger River Bengal" one of the more inexpensive models made by Hot Springs. My family has always been very satisfied with Hot Springs hot tubs and I look forward to improving my back yard with this addition.

Leader Tech

2009-08-28T14:51:00.013-06:00

I have been greatly enjoying my new job at a small software company in Albuquerque called Leader Technologies. The job is right next to the north diversion channel trail, so I can ride 9.3 miles each way to work safely, I work on very applicable projects which customers are interested in, and I work closely with very intelligent and nice people. Overall, I am very glad I choose to experience private industry.

Lately, I have been working on a number of data visualization routines. When I first started here, I was working on a general framework to replace our existing chart generation software. I have some before and after pictures. Before and after pictures are usually interesting, either with houses, people's physique, or computer programs. These before and after pictures aren't the most stunning things in the world, but I thought my blog would be a good venue to share what I've been up to.

These are generated with Java code, using the JFreeChart graphing library. Currently, I am working on a project to apply some of these chart types to visualize our mail server's log, so our customers will be able to understand what is going on with our system in a visual way.

VBAR - Before

VBAR - After

VSTACK - Before

VSTACK - After

PIE - Before

PIE - After (3D)

PIE - After (2D)

HSTACK - Before

HSTACK - After

LINE - Before

LINE - After

AREA - Before

AREA - After

2009-07-23T20:33:00.000-06:00

My friend Kate has been a very positive influence on my life and helped me shape my thinking. She is always interested in improving herself, and helping others improve. Based on her suggestions, I came up with a list of goals I would like to achieve and set my mind to them. I have been in the process of coming up with new goals, and I wanted to analyze my older goals. I thought I would post the analysis on my blog for my friends and family to read and comment on.

1.) Pay off car in 8 months (in account or paid)
* My cousin and I were involved in a car wreck and we owed the rental car company most of the money for the car. I was able to talk them out of about 25% of what they wanted us to pay. My cousin was an unauthorized driver, and I made a mistake authorizing him to drive. We went half on the expenses, even though I was 100% financially liable. The situation was pretty bad, but I am grateful that my cousin and I were able to talk and be involved in each other's life during this period. I was able to accomplish this within a month of setting my mind to it, mostly because of my cousin’s agreeability, good fortune and hard work.

2.) Finish Computer Science Masters Degree
This goal took a little bit longer than I was planning on, but thinking clearly about this definitely helped me choose which path to take. I was able to get my masters degree in May, 2009. Based on this goal, I choose to present my research to a board of professors instead of writing a thesis. I believe a thesis would have taken an additional 6-12 months to complete, and my goal was to get a masters degree, not necessarily a masters with a thesis. If I had cemented this goal into place earlier, and taken action based on that realization, I would have been done even earlier. Without it, I would have finished much later.

3.) Have Kate Johnson as a Girlfriend
This is the only goal I feel like I completely failed at. I focused too much on a lot of the negative aspects of our relationship, and failed to focus on the larger commonalities we share. Sometimes with concrete goals they are not achieved and this is one of those instances. I know I made a lot of serious mistakes with Kate and I can learn from those mistakes. I feel lucky that we are still friends. This is a goal where breaking it down into manageable chunks would have been good.

4.) Make Progress Towards Starting a Business
* MBA?
* Capital?
* Rental Property
Develop more specific goals towards this.
I was able to purchase some rental property and develop myself in that way. Without the support of my family, my old land lord Bob, my friend Oleg, and Kate pushing me to develop specific goals, this would have never happened.

5.) Write one letter or card per week to someone I care about
For this one, I started off really strong. However, things slowed down towards the end and eventually I forgot about it. I think I made a mistake by not keeping up with any kind of milestones, reminders or quantitative analysis of this. When I make a goal like this in the future, I plan on including a very detailed break down of it.

6.) Develop writing + web authoring skills further
My blog is a testimony to my web authoring skills, as is my learning of ActionScript. I finished a SANDReport for Sandia that will someday make it through review and approval, and I have another SAND report in the works. I feel pretty positive about this one.

7.) Learn how to make ceramic tile
If Kate didn't push me towards concretely writing down my goals, I never would have stepping into the UNM craft studio and learned how to do this. I feel like I accomplished this one. However, I still need to complete my table!

8.) Show more compassion
- listen more
- no interrupting people's sentences
For this one, I think I did better in general, but I still need to work on this. If I had done really well, I don’t think #3 would be a failure. Again, I feel like for these non-specific goals I need some sort of way to quantize them to make them more approachable on a day-to-day level.

9.) Stay Positive
This one has gone well. I find that if I stay very active, the positive outlook comes along.

10.) Practice Handball More
I think this one also went well. I went from a low B / high C player to a very solid B player. This one could have used more specifics and quantization, but still I feel good about it.

Google Voice = Awesome

2009-07-08T17:38:00.005-06:00

I was selected to participate in the new "Google Voice" closed beta test. So far, I love it! It's really cool being able to route calls to whatever phone you are currently at. Since I work inside a secured area, and cannot bring any personally owed electronics in (no cell phones) it makes giving people my work number a pain. However, Google Voice changes all that. Try clicking on the below link to give me a call using it!

In order to change the phones Google Voice will ring to, you need to authenticate that phone with the system (entering in a 2-digit code.) I think this is to make the service useful, as opposed to annoying by allowing arbitrary dialing and receiving of telephone calls (phone phreaking).

Here is a screen shot of how I can change the phones Google voice will ring on:

When I am at work, I just forward all my calls to my work number. Once I get off work, I have them forwarded to my cell phone. It's really easy and convenient.

I hope to post some additional screen shots to my blog showing how cool this service is. If anyone has any specifics they want to know, just send me a comment. Hopefully this isn't violating the terms of the beta, but if it is, google should "do no evil" by gently reminding me before pulling the plug!

I just wanted to throw this post up really fast so people could try calling me with the embedded button.

Email Scraper - In Python with urllib and regular expressions

2009-06-22T16:54:00.008-06:00

The past few weeks I have been messing around on the site rentacoder.com. Most of my work at Sandia lately has been writing (documents in English), with some IT work / configuration thrown in. This site seems to be a cool way to make some extra cash ($20 so far, only one success) and have fun writing programs.

One potential customer wanted someone to manually go to a bunch of web pages and harvest contact information. I started an email conversation with the guy, mentioning that I think there was a better way to automate this. Currently, I have a quick prototype I put together using urllib and regular expressions in python. If he picks up the project, I think I can find/create a better regular expression for email and clean up the data. Right now, I wanted to mess with writing some sort of email harvester; I just thought it would be fun (I have no aspirations towards becoming a spammer).

The code takes a list of fully qualified URLS, one per line. Here is the list the potential customer gave me.

http://weprintbarcodes.com
http://accstation.com
http://escan3d.com
http://edealsdepot.com
http://sandboxthreads.com
http://wildlifewonders.com
http://foreverbamboo.com
http://topsecretautomaticmoney.com
http://armormount.com
http://myjones.com

Here are the results after running my program:

brian@ubuntu-bind:~/tmp/other_programs/rent_a_coder/web_grabber$ time ./grabber.py
customerservice@weprintbarcodes.com
href="mailto:feedback@edealsdepot.com">Contact
freebies@sandboxthreads.com
src="https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@sandboxthreads.com/ssl/ecomby_128bit2.gif"
src="https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@sandboxthreads.com/ssl/paypal.gif"
Sculpture","http://ep.yimg.com/ip/I/wildlifegifts_2055_31879747","795","-@NULL@-");var
href="mailto:info@wildlifewonders.com">info@wildlifewonders.com

real 0m9.527s
user 0m0.312s
sys 0m0.208s
brian@ubuntu-bind:~/tmp/other_programs/rent_a_coder/web_grabber$

Not too great, but pretty good for about an hour and a couple of questions to my friend Aaron, who is awesome at Python. If I ever seriously want to write an email scraper (either for myself or a customer), I'll get a better regular expression, clean the output up, make it multithreaded and dump the email addresses to a database.

I may or may not ever actually post the code to this one, depending on how the rentacoder.com sales go. If you would like to see the code, leave me a comment with how to get in touch with you.

417A Princeton - One of My Rental Units

2009-06-13T20:01:00.007-06:00

Last November, I purchased a piece of property at 417 Princeton in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fixing the place up, keeping tenants happy and growing a garden have been a lot of fun. I currently have 417A rented out until just before classes start at UNM, but I want to get things lined up after that. In order to get the place rented out for the summer, I prepared a lot of multimedia to send to two students that live in New York. Luckily, they decided to rent it for the summer! Hopefully these pictures and movies will help me keep the place rented out, as paying the entire mortgage without tenants is not something I want to do.

Please give me a call at (575) 313-3173 if you are interested in renting from me!

417 Princeton - Front View

The above picture is an image of my house from the road. My parents and my friends helped me paint the place white and do all the trim work. It was a huge project, but the place looks a lot better now!

Small Lantern

My dad likes to do metal work, and constructed the base for this lantern by welding some decorative angle iron to a piece of steel and capping it. My cousin Brett and Dad helped out a ton with digging this hole and installing this lantern.

Porch View

My uncle Rob constructed the new pieces of railing for this porch, and my father, friend Ryan and I installed it. The porches were previously falling apart and rotting, so this was a gigantic improvement.

417A Princeton - Front Door

This image is of the front door to 417A. The stained glass was there when I purchased the place. I think it adds a nice touch to the door.

417A Princeton - Side Door

The side door for this unit is located off a very nice utility room with tons of storage space. It makes a nice coat closet and tool area.

This is of the walk way running along the house. It could use some landscaping.

The below pictures were taken before my garden was going strong. My friend Efrain helped out a ton by arranging all the logistics of picking up rail road ties in Socorro for REALLY cheap ($5 per tie, instead of the $16 at Home Depot or Lowes). Efrain also loaned me his saw to cut them. My buddy Kevin did a lot of the heavy work associated with lifting and moving them, as well as some cutting. My friend Oleg helped out with planting, and always takes care of my garden when I go out of town.

This image is of my super big tomato and corn bed.

This is a picture of my strawberry bed and part of my smaller tomato bed.

Here is a close up of my small tomato bed. The plants look a lot bigger now!

This is an overview shot of the back yard.

Overall, I am really happy with how the outside of my place is coming along. I still need to work on the trim in a few places, but the paint job is of a very high quality. I am very lucky to have so many friends and family that are skilled and interested in helping me.

The below videos are of the inside of my 417A unit. This unit is in the best shape out of all my units. I really like all the hard wood floors all over the entire place. The kitchen linoleum is in much better shape than any of the other kitchens.

This is the front room for my place.

It technically is a one bedroom apartment, but so far always two people have lived there. Currently, I have a guy and a girl that are not romantically involved sharing the place, so it's almost like a two bedroom.

This is the bathroom for 417A. My father, Ryan Coleman and I completely replaced the bathroom floor in two days. The bathroom got a bit crowded with three people in there.

Veritas Backup - Manually Starting and Stopping Jobs

2009-06-06T09:23:00.006-06:00

Veritas Backup 8.6 and Background Material
Lately I have been helping my family out with some of their information technology work down in Silver City. Since I live in Albuquerque, and Silver City is four hours away, I cannot help them all the time whenever something goes wrong. Something goes wrong quite often with the latest and greatest in 2001 backup technology with Vertitas Backup, version 8.6, revision 3878. Luckily, the machine running this backup system is on a totally isolated network, so we do not have to worry about the numerous security problems associated with running such an old version. My friend Ryan ALWAYS tells me to upgrade to a different backup system, but that isn't too high up on the IT priority list right now.

In Veritas lingo, a job represents the configurations associated with actually backing something up. Jobs are things that need to run in order to back up.

I find that I need to manually restart jobs, and cancel stuck jobs, as a means of achieving reliable backups. Hopefully this blog post will help that happen when I am not around and serve to show other people that may not be quite so familiar with Veritas 8.6 how to do that as well. I think providing documentation of IT work is very, very important and can save tons of time and money in the long run! Please leave me a comment if you find this post useful.

Canceling A Stuck Job
With this software, it is not easy or possible to run two different jobs at the same time, on the same tape. Sometimes a job becomes 'stuck' and runs forever. It is important to cancel these stuck jobs so you can start a new one. One way I found to cancel a stuck job involves being in the "Activity Monitor" window, as shown in the below image.

Figure 1. Activity Monitor
Left click on the labels describing the view pane you want to be in.
This is with my camera phone.

Once you are in the "activity monitor" you should be able to see a list of jobs that have run, are running, or failed. If you right click on a job, and select "Cancel" that will cancel the job for you. I have noticed that it sometimes takes a minute or two to actually cancel.

Figure 2. Canceling a Job
Don't forget to wait a minute or two after you cancel the job

Manually Starting a Job
Once you have made sure there are no stuck jobs, you can manually start a job if you would like. The system I work with has scheduled jobs, so manually starting jobs shouldn't (hopefully) be necessary. I like to manually run a job to make sure everything is working OK after canceling a stuck job, rebooting, adding a new tape to the rotation or anything else that would make me doubt things are working perfectly.

One way I found to start a job is to navigate to the "Job Definitions" view pane. This is at the bottom on the screen, next to the "Activity Monitor" described above. Left click on this label to switch to that view.

Figure 3. Job Definitions
This view lets you see all the jobs that have been created.

Once you are in this view, you can see all the different jobs that have been created for your system. For our system, we are interested in the job titled "Backup 0002." This job backs up our entire system. In order to run this job, right click on it and select "Run now..."

Figure 4. Actually Running A Job

After you have run your job, it is important to see how things are going. Switch back to the "Activity Monitor" and look at your running job, as can barely be clearly seen in the high-quality image below.

Figure 5. Backup Job Successful!

Conclusion
Hopefully this document clearly explains how to manually cancel and restart jobs using Veritas 8.6. The employee known simply as "The Handball Destroyer" at the office has picked up a lot of the the day to day responsibilities regarding the computer systems here and I hope this document helps them, and any of the Internet masses.

Also, I refrained from taking screen shots of the server since I would like it to stay in complete isolation. I do not want any sort of writable media entering that environment, and it is completely isolated with regards to networking. Sorry about the resulting lack of picture quality!

Garden Update

2009-03-13T13:32:00.005-06:00

Last year, I had an extremely successful garden. Kate gave me a ton of supplies for my birthday and was supportive of the entire endeavor. This year I started my garden inside again, so my seedlings have enough time to grow before it is safe to put them outside. I have a ton of pictures from last years harvest that I wanted to put online before this year gets going with too much intensity.

This picture shows a cat that Kate would always take care of. It also shows the ground after I tilled it, but before much has grown.

My garden was mostly vegetables, but I had a number of very pretty flowers in pots around my small apartment. Kate picked out the flowers with some suggestions from me. We also purchased some tomato cages, chemical fertilizer and other supplies.

In addition to the flowers we purchased, my land lord has a rose bush I took care of. Here are some of the roses the bush produced.

I really thought these peppers were pretty interesting looking. I enjoy spicy foods, but lack any discriminating taste towards peppers. I shared many of these with my coworker, Erik Lee, who is insanely interested in hot foods.

Here are some tomatoes pretty early in the season.

Take note of how small this morning glory looks climbing up the fence post.

My luck with the sunflowers was not that good, I think I received about 2 or 3 heads of seeds.

Some baby birds nested around my apartment as well.

At the start of the summer, I was very successful with squash.

Here my cousin and I prepare some of my squash for the "Stinar Burrito Factory"

My hand is a bit messed up from a bike wreck south of Albuquerque, but the garden is still going strong.

I really liked these "Anasazi Beans". They have a very pretty white flower and climb over everything.

I really like using morning glories to cover up walls. I'm going to go for this effect at my new place. I would like more beans that produce something other than pretty flowers in the mix though.

Everything became kind of crazy past this point. The morning glories made operating the gate difficult and started climbing up trees and my house. It was really pretty.

I planted way too many tomatoes in here.

This is the view from my neighbors yard.

I like this one with the sky.

This bug was huge!

These are the Anasazi Beans in their pods.

This was the annexed garden behind my house. Everything back here seemed more scotched than the side of the house, but I was still able to get some tomatoes and squash from the earth here.

My plants didn't do so well with the frost.

I made a TON of fried green tomatoes.

I'm pretty happy with how my garden turned out this last year. For the upcoming season, I totally want to have about 3 times as many plants.

I was hit by a truck while biking.

2009-02-24T20:46:00.005-07:00

Today I was biking from my work to the University of New Mexico and I was hit by a truck. I had the right of way, since I was going straight and the lady in the truck pulled out in front of me, but I consider force = mass * acceleration a stronger law than that of right of way. Either way, I'm not too messed up. Here are a couple of pictures of everything that's going on.

My spokes may require some truing.

Nothing is broken luckily!

My friend Oleg was nice enough to bring my laptop, my cell phone, a bunch of chargers and hang out at the hospital for a bit. Thanks Oleg! Now I can work on some cool stuff instead of joking around with other messed up people at the E.R.

Last Full Day in Hawaii

2009-01-06T00:11:00.001-07:00

Today was Oleg and my last full day in Hawaii. Due to Oleg's awesome booking skills, we spent as much time as possible in Hawaii with staying the fewest nights. We flew in really early the day we arrived, and we're flying out really late the day we leave (tomorrow).

Most of the day today I felt like doing something productive, so I looked up a bunch of I.T. companies in Hawaii and sent off emails asking them if they are interested in contracting with the company my friend Aaron and I formed. It's really low probability that I'll hear back from any of them, but that's better than the zero probably of accomplishing anything hanging out on the beach. This vacation has been really, really nice but 9 days is a long time to chill out. After this short post, I think I'll hit the hotel gym for an hour or so.

Other than sending off emails, today Oleg and I went on the Oahu Ghost Tour titled "Orbs of Oahu." The tour was pretty interesting and fun. The guide (Uncle Joe) did a very good job of telling creepy stories about (probably) historical events related to Oahu that resulted in things being 'haunted.' Unfortunately, Oleg and I did not see any ghosts, which is the outcome I was expecting due to my extremely skeptical viewpoint towards ghosts. The tour guide did a good job on explaining, in a very supernatural way, orbs present in pictures people were taking. All in all, I think this tour was very fun, kind of creepy, and a nice way to see some of Oahu at night.

Probably the best thing related to the tour happened yesterday. Oleg and I were scheduled to go on the exact same tour one day earlier, but I gave him my ticket so he could go with a girl from rural Idaho. I thought it would be really cool if the girl became scared and Oleg had to protect her. Since neither one of us actually believe there would be anything to protect her from, issuing protection should be relatively straight forward and possibly involve a lot of physical contact. Unfortunately, things did not quite turn out that way. The girl was actually extremely, extremely religious (Roman Catholic) and deathly afraid of ghosts, demons, evil spirits, leprechauns and especially demonic possession. During the initial stages of the tour, the guide requires everyone to sign a liability waiver in case of any injuries on the tour. I considered this reasonable, since there was a bit of hiking through wet terrain during night and slips and falls could easily occur. The girl Oleg was going with did not want to sign the waiver, since she wanted full legal recourse available if she was possessed by a legion of demons (or perhaps only a single demon) and an exorcism was required and a herd of swine was run over a cliff by demons.

I am not joking about her fears; this girl was seriously afraid of the Hawaiian guide chanting to protect her from the spirits. She considered it against her religion and 'voodoo.' I didn't want to correct her, telling her voodoo primarily a Caribbean religion with African roots, and we are in the Pacific. Such subtleties would have been lost. As a result, she got off the bus before the tour began and started walking back to her hotel. Oleg, being a nice guy, got off the bus as well to make sure she made it back safely. You might be asking yourself "Brian, you weren't there. How do you know what happened?" To answer such a question, I talked with the girl on the phone directly after she left the tour since I was hanging out with her brother while he was driving. She sounded very scared and shaken up on the phone, and wanted to talk with her brother. After her brother safely parked the car (I'm a big fan of non-distracted driving) she spoke with him and I could hear his side of the conversation. Oleg, her brother, myself and her all went to dinner together after the event and they filled us in on bits and pieces. Oleg also filled me in on the details of the story once we were alone later.

Initially, I was kind of pissed at the entire ridiculous situation. I dropped about $45 per ticket and some back country yokel girl let her superstitions get the better of her. After watching a movie, calming down and thinking about it I realized that there was nothing to feel bad about. Ninety bucks isn't a big deal - my friend and I were hanging out in wonderful Hawaii where everything is beautiful and perfect. I started to feel gratitude in my heart that I am no so superstitious, my friends are not and neither is my family. In addition, I now have a funny story to tell. To further remove any motivation for negative thoughts, Oleg spoke with the tour organizers today and we were able to reschedule at no additional cost.

All in all, everything turned out great. I am having some technical issues related to the videos I took for the guide chanting - I really wanted to incorporate the audio into some sort of multimedia presentation, game or something. That might work out, but if not, there are some really awesome videos about the ghost tour on youtube. We didn't have a digital camera with us, so no pictures.

Hawaii

2008-12-30T22:39:00.001-07:00

My friend Oleg and I decided to go to Hawaii over part of the Christmas break. Since Oleg came to the United States a year an a half ago, he mentions Hawaii and New York City as the two places he really, really wants to visit inside the U.S.

Under normal circumstances (mortgage, bills, school, work) I would not consider going to Hawaii, but my situation was far from normal. First off, Oleg offered to cover the hotel as an extremely generous Christmas present. In addition, I have enough rewards points from my Wells Fargo Rewards visa credit card to purchase a free flight. These two items resulted in a free hotel, 'free' flight and a buddy to split the other expenses with. This series of fortunate events culminated in our trip to Ohau, or Oʻahu (depending on the character set you have available and if you care about the reverse apostrophe used in Hawaiian to signify emphasis on vowels.) Oleg really wanted to spend a lot of time in Honolulu, so our entire trip is based on the island of O'ahu.

Our day began a bit before we flew out at 6:00 a.m. Our flight instructions said to arrive at the airport 90 minutes early, so we did. Usually, I am not a big fan of super duper early rising, but Oleg managed to book the trip so we would spend the maximum amount of time in Hawaii with paying the least amount for hotels, which is very cool. We had a since transfer in San Fransisco, then about a five hour flight to Honolulu. During this flight, I attempted to sleep about three times but I was woken up repeatedly by a crying baby. Crying babies are the bane of all of my air travel experiences, but it is difficult to feel very negative when heading to Hawaii, so I just relaxed and tried not to worry about it.

Once we arrived in Hawaii, everything became more relaxed. The absolutely perfect weather, combined with the beautiful green landscape helped me chill out a bit. Below are a few pictures from our first day in Hawaii.

The above three images are from the Honolulu International Airport

Oleg's Favorite - Starbucks

Oleg really likes the super tall buildings

This is Oleg's bed (I have my own.)

This is the view from the walk way outside our hotel room.

This is the same walk way, facing the other direction.

This is our hotel lobby, at the "Park Shore Waikiki."

This image, and below are from Kalakua Ave. which is the main street in Waikiki.

This is me, after snorkeling outside our hotel. I have the traditional computer science student tan of "clear".

I think this tree looks especially cool, I had Oleg take a picture of it because I like it so much

This place has some all right deals. I bought some presents and decorations here.

Oleg likes the gold fish in the pond here. They are pretty big.

I thought it was interesting that many of the signs were in English and in Japanese.

This piece of artwork is entirely constructed from ceramic tile.

I don't think I was with Oleg for these pictures - I went to sleep and he kep

Oleg's night pictures came out really, really well in my opinion.

This was day one in Hawaii! Hopefully I will be able to make additional posts about the rest of our vacation, but I have been very busy enjoying the beach, snorkeling and generally relaxing. Thank you very much for reading about my vacation and looking at the pictures I have taken.

AI for Video Games Project Update

2008-11-15T16:30:00.003-07:00

Today I spent about 5 hours at Starbucks working on getting the dog I jacked from this dude to follow a path in ActionScript. Right now, I solved the problem related to applying the points on the incorrect place and getting the dog to follow the points on the path. I still want to clear the path after the dog has finished following it, make the sheep run away from the dog and work on the dog's animation a bit. I think once I get the sheep running from the dog and the path cleared though, I am going to setup SVN and work on the splash screen and some other non-AI components of the game. My partner Jon has done an awesome job creating the AI framework, and we agreed to have him do a bit more AI and I would focus on the other structural points of the game. Our professors wanted to make sure all group members did AI related stuff, so path following seemed like a good place for me to work.

Click here for a full screen version.

Code is available here in case you want to see how I did path following in ActionScript. If you have any questions / suggestions, let me know. I see that a lot of people have been searching for algorithms and data structures related to ActionScript, but I never receive any feedback from you guys. Leave me a comment if this is useful.

AI for Video Games Final Project

2008-11-10T23:18:00.002-07:00

For my final project, Jon Bradley and I decided to work together on a video game he has an idea for. The game is all about herding sheep. So far, Jon has done a huge amount of work. Today I made some progress on implementing path following in the ActionScript framework Jon developed. I still need to make something actually follow the path, as well as figure out why my path adding is getting messed up with regards to clicking on a sheep or the shepherd whenever you are trying to add a path.

Anyways, here is a sample of what we have coming. I'm going to hold off on posting any code until the assignment has been turned in. My path algorithm is the same one that Bill Klein implemented in Processing, which is probably the same one from "Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games" by Ian Millington.

Click here for a full screen version.

Number one is getting the points to be correctly placed when you click on the shepherd or sheep. After that, comes getting something that looks like a dog to following the path, then setting up SVN so we don't have to email our code back and forth. After that, I am going to work on an intro screen, a level loader, a sound track (hopefully just finding one) and the other animation sequences, probably in that order. Jon has already finished the brunt of the AI, I he's going to add some obstacles, make a pen for the sheep to go into, add a little bit of state information and make it so flocks can be broken up. As long as I can get my pieces done, there isn't a ton more to do, since Jon has been working so hard!!

Finished A* Finally

2008-11-09T01:46:00.003-07:00

Hello,

I finally implemented an OK heuristic (Manhattan distance / Taxicab geometry from the current node to the end node). Everything looks the same, but the code is a bit different.

My full implementation of A* in ActionScript is available here.

A* for ActionScript, with an incomplete heuristic function

2008-11-05T03:21:00.002-07:00

I have finished my (first completely working) implementation of A* for ActionScript. However, the heuristic function is a constant function and thus not implemented, so 'A*' is just breadth first search. Technically, I believe it is correct to still call it A*, but I'm not certain since I'm not keeping track of my path cost, and my heuristic is more of an artful description of something that always returns the same value but has not been implemented... I suppose I am feeling a bit discouraged since the assignment is due tomorrow at 5 p.m. and it is 3:21 a.m. and I still have a bit to do in order to make it perfect. However, I think choosing which path to recurse down first based on a heuristic shouldn't be too big of an addition now that everything else is working well.

I feel very happy that I choose to implement this in ActionScript. I like being able to share my programs with people online and notice the Google search terms that bring others to my site. I gain satisfaction when I see that someone from China, Spain, or some other distant place, spent 20 minutes reading about some technical issue on my site.

Press space bar to switch between blocking off nodes, selecting a start position and selecting an ending position.

Click HERE to view this in it's own web page.

My sister would be proud of my photoshopping skills on the waving hand. I also have to give a shout-out to Michael Baczynski for the cool data structures library (I didn't have to write my own FIFO thanks to him.)

As always, my complete source code is available. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I plan on making it more of an actual A* implementation, and if time permitting, possible using Michael Baczynski's graph data structure and implementing A* in his (very well designed) framework. I did not plan on doing that from the beginning, even though I'm sure it would have saved me time, since I did not see him code until after I already made my own graph, and adjacency list, management routines.

Thanks for Laurie Phillips for finding a bug in my code.

A* for ActionScript

2008-11-03T23:20:00.007-07:00

For my class titled "Artificial Intelligence for Video Games" I have been working on an implementation of the algorithm A* in ActionScript. I've been pretty happy that the professors allow us to use ActionScript, instead of Processing, because it makes sharing my work on the Internet much easier. In addition, I think having substantial ActionScript skills is a marketable quality, as opposed to skills in the programming language "Processing." Hopefully I also will develop skills in artificial intelligence, to transcend any of the language-specific focuses I may have in mind.

As of this post, I have no actually implemented A* in ActionScript. What I have done is to implement a mechanism to draw and manipulate a relatively straighforward graph. This graph has the edges layed out in a regular, rectangular, pattern.

Here is a SWF of what I have so far:

Click to block/unblock a node, and press space bar to alternate between different modes of selecting a node. Eventually, the blue square will be for the starting position, and the green square will be for the ending position. Once I finish implementing A*, the path between start and end will be drawn in red squares.

Most likely if you are reading about my implementation of A* in ActionScript, you are interested in seeing my code. At this point, the most interesting thing will be how I keep track of adjacency lists for each node.

I will make another post when I finish everything, but I like making things available as I work so I can view my own progress. Here is a .zip of all the files for my project so far. I ask that if you use them, please somewhere link to my blog and email me so I can get some satisfaction.

Ceramic Tile Update

2008-10-03T01:07:00.008-06:00

For the past few months, I have been slowly working on ceramic tile at the UNM craft studio. I try and make it in for a few hours (2-5) a week but lately I have been so busy with everything it's been tough. One of the goals I made for myself at my birthday was to learn how to make ceramic tile.

First I grabbed a lump of clay from the "pug" clay. This is a giant, clean, garbage can filled up with mixed together and processed clay left over from other projects. The clay is still totally malleable, since it hasn't been bisque (first) fired. I use pug clay because I don't know enough about ceramics to be able to tell what kind of properties in the different clays (red, brown, white, porcelain..?) I am looking for yet. The pug machine is pretty cool, imagine a carrot juicer that takes a clay mixture, takes out just enough water, mixes it, and squirts out recycled clay ready for use. I think it's great that we can just throw our unfired pieces into water and they will be turned back into usable clay so easily. The process makes you totally fine if you mess up and have to start again, since nothing was wasted.

After kneading the clay a bit, the next step is to roll it out with giant rollers that have height adjusters on each side. For me, 3/8 of an inch thick works well. After they are bisque fired, they shrink down a bit to maybe 1/4 of an inch thick. I then sliced the tile to the dimensions I wanted (mainly 4 inches x 4 inches, with a couple 6x6 and bigger) and let it dry until leather hard. Not bone hard, as I learned and the director Zane mentioned. After it hardened, I trimmed it up with a straight edge tool to make the tiles more uniform. Then bisque firing, glazing and glaze firing. For the firing, we put our work on shelves for Zane (the director) or Randy (the ceramics technician) to load and unload the kilns. It's really easy to tell which shelves to use, and everyone is nice about telling you if you have something on the incorrect shelf.

These tiles will go on top of a decorative stainless steel table my parents gave to me. The glass on top of the table cracked with a much too heavy (and under supported) fish tank many years ago, and I finally threw away the cracked glass. My plan is to cut a piece of tile board to fit into where the glass used to go, and then either mortar or mastic the tile to the tile board after I read up on tiling and determine the proper adhesive. Choosing a great grout to complement the colors will be important as well.

I am very proud of how this last batch came out.

I realize that now I love New Mexico.

The Zia symbols will go on the corners of the table, with the same size tiles proving a border between Zias. Inside that outline, I plan on arranging other sized square tiles in some sort of interesting geometric pattern. I may create some triangle tiles to make it look cool. I need to either buy and cut the tile board, or draw out the outline on my plastic table or a big piece of paper. If these tiles don't get laid out exactly how they need to go, there will be a surplus of some sizes and a shortage of the other sizes needed to fill in gaps. I have a lot of fun going into the craft studio, working on this project and talking with friendly people from much different backgrounds.

When I dipped the tiles in "blue purple" glaze, let them dry for 15 minutes, dipped them again in blue purple, let them dry at least a day, then dipped them in "clear bright" they came out great. Whenever I brushed on any of the glaze, they didn't look quite so hot. Between my father and myself, we will be able to find an interesting place for the tile seconds.

There are enough tiles in terms of square feet, but I really need to make sure the dimensions are correct. More posts will be coming soon as the project progresses!

Artificial Intelligence for Video Games - Assignment 1

2008-09-17T03:44:00.000-06:00

This semester I am taking a course titled "Artificial Intelligence for Video Games" for my masters degree here at UNM. Our first assignment is to implement seek, flee and arrive in a programming language called "Processing" (basically Java). For this assignment, I started off with simple geometric shapes, but after finishing a few days early I decided to try and make something a little more funny.

What would be an interesting scene involving one object chasing another? One of the first things that came to my mind would be Michael Jackson chasing a child. Hopefully everyone finds this humorous and not in (too) bad taste.

Click this image to view the video in Flash

Click here for the movie in .AVI.
For you Mac fans, I've got it here in .MOV.

If anyone has experience with Processing/Java, I was having some trouble getting the sounds to work. I thought it would be funny to have a sound when Michael "catches" the boy, and possibly when the program starts. I also have a few ideas for future expansion of this concept, but I want to keep things a surprise until I see future assignments. One thing I REALLY want to do is to implement this stuff in ActionScript instead of Processing. I'm not sure if my professors will be OK with that and for this assignment I didn't have the time to write two versions.

This is a video of my "arrive" code - thanks youtube for the hosting

Shout outs go to my sister Autumn for doing the photoshop on Michael and the boy, Jeremy Pepper for general support and Oleg Semenov for help talking about the geometry I was messing up.

I'll post the code after I turn in the assignment tomorrow. If you want it, and I forget to upload it, please leave me a comment.

Oleg in Church

2008-09-07T11:00:00.005-06:00

After seeing the true life documentary "Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" and the truly inspirational scene in which Borat learns about Protestant Christianity, I decided to bring my favorite Kazakh friend to church with me.

I'm really happy with the way the stained glass illuminated Oleg, especially from my cell phone camera.

Programming Languages - Lecture Three

2008-09-02T18:10:00.000-06:00

During this lecture, we continued our discussion of the Haskell language. Some of the things we covered were types, curried functions and overloaded functions.

Click the above image for an embedded Flash version of the movie.

Or, if you prefer, download the movies in Quicktime or .AVI.

Programming Languages - Lecture Two

2008-08-28T14:00:00.001-06:00

This lecture really covered some fundamental material about Haskell, and functional languages in general. Dr. Stefanovic covered a number of currently available functions in Haskell and ways to build our own functions. We also were introduced to the Hugs 98 environment for writing our programs.

The videos are available for download in quicktime, and .avi.

Click the image for a Flash Version

Programming Languages - Lecture One

2008-08-26T21:33:00.003-06:00

My adviser, Dr. Darko Stefanovic, is teaching a course I am enrolled in. The course is titled "Introduction to Advanced Topics in Programming Languages" and will cover the language Haskell. Dr. Stefanovic asked me to film the course, since I have experience with recording lectures, and make it available online.

Click the image to view the video in Flash. I also have the videos available for download in quicktime, and .avi.

Downhill biking with Jeremy

2008-08-02T18:50:00.000-06:00

Today Jeremy and I took the ski lift up Sandia mountain to ride our bicycles down. Jeremy has a monster downhill bike, while I have a Trek mountain bike. My bike held up well, but I need to greatly improve on my balance, judgment and confidence on a mountain bike. My legs and cardiovascular system are in good shape from road biking, but I don't have the mountain bike skills yet.

Initially, Jeremy and I loaded up our bikes in his truck. His Toyota Silver Tacoma has an aftermarket bike rack in the back, that he installed, which allows for a bike to be supported through the front fork. Simply quick release the front tire and put the fork in the supportive bar and you're good to go.

After we drove up the mountain, I purchases two one-lift tickets for us (yesterday was Jeremy's birthday.) The process of getting up the mountain is identical to that of getting on a ski lift, except that the lift operators take the bikes and place them on empty lift chairs with big hooks on the back. The entire trip up the mountain takes about half an hour, and involves riding through a beautiful forest during the summer.

Once we made it to the top of the mountain, Jeremy and I began riding a trail that appeared to be the easiest trail present. After about thirty minutes, and a number of extremely difficult to navigate ('technical') rock formations in the trail, I recognized a scenic vista from two and a half years ago death-hike up the mountain, and thought that we must be wrapping around the mountain instead of going down it. I mentioned this to Jeremy, and he replied "You know, I thought this was awfully difficult for the easiest trail..." We began to push our bikes back up the trail we were riding when we encountered a hiker that corroborated our belief in taking the incorrect trail. Later, we saw a sign marking the trail as a wilderness area, closed to bikers. Whoops. After about an hour of pushing our bikes, we made it back to the ski lift drop.

I'll upload some pictures of injuries I sustained during our foray into the wilderness.

The correct trail basically connected up with the wilderness trail, but in the other direction. This trail had almost no rocks compared to the wilderness and was much, much easier to ride. Most of the trail was about twice as wide as a mountain bike and fairly packed dirt.

One of the coolest things about biking down the mountain was the alternation between grasslands and forests. Most likely, this was due to the fact that the grasslands were cleared for downhill skiing, as opposed to some naturally forming phenomenon, but the entire layout was very pleasant. The trees were tall for New Mexico, with pines standing 50+ feet tall. Whenever I would take a shortcut avoiding a winding path down the mountain and simply head straight down (to catch up the Jeremy) the grass was up to my chest. This made consciously avoiding obstacles in the grass impossible, but the ground tended to be very smooth. We spent close to an hour and a half riding down the mountain, with the trail only being 9 miles long. Jeremy waited numerous times for me to catch up, but overall I feel good about the ride and my speed, especially for a first trip riding down a mountain.

Isotopes Game with Kate

2008-07-28T17:59:00.003-06:00

Kate, Oleg, Brett and one of Brett's friends went to the Isotopes baseball game today. Kate's work, Walgreens, rented a VIP box for all the pharmacy interns. Oleg took this picture with Kate's camera phone, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Kate Titled this picture "Power Couple."

Somewhat Complicated Bike Repair - derailleur roller cleaning

2008-06-24T11:12:00.002-06:00

Today I became fed-up with the popping my road bike has been doing lately. The slack on the chain would suddenly increases, then decreases, creating a jerking motion. After observing this a few times, I realized that my rear derailleur (or dérailleur) was the cause of this. On a previous ride to Belen, a large amount of bubble gum lodged itself in my rear derailleur, which seems to cause the slack issue.

In case anyone else is having problems similar to these, and doesn't like to pay a bike shop $60 to fix a $100 part, I decided to write a simple post of how to clean the rollers on your rear derailleur. When I started working on bicycles, I wasn't able to find any good resources online teaching people how to fix things. Hopefully this post can help if you want to learn about fixing bikes but aren't quite sure where to begin.

Please continue reading below if you would like to learn how to clean your derailleur rollers in an easy and fun way. Before I performed this repair, I checked to see if my chain had any stuck links. From the limited amount of bike repair I've done, stuck links seem to be a much more common problem that a junked up derailleur. If you want to try and clean your derailleur rollers, it might be a good idea to read this post the entire way through before you begin on anything. If you have any questions, send me a comment and I'll try and clarify.

You will need the following tools to perform this repair:

Allen Wrench that fits your derailleur
Boiling Water
WD-40
Tri-Flow or some other grease
Clean Rag

Here is a basic diagram of the different parts on a rear derailleur:

Originally From here

Since the bubble gum was kicked up on my derailleur, I decided to clean the two rollers and the casing. My bike has basically the same design as above, with a slightly different casing mechanism. I have a Shimano 105 rear derailleur. The first thing I did was to throw my bike on my Nashbar (r) bike repair stand.

As you can clearly see, the Nashbar brand products are highly reliable (please note the vice grip acting as a handle.) At first, I used to wonder why Nashbar brand tools were so cheap. Now I realize that the low, low cost is due to the fact that everything I bought under that brand broke. I now try and purchase Park brand tools even though they are 2x-3x as expensive. If you do not have a bike repair stand, you can have a friend hold the bike for you while you work, or you can try and balance your bike like this in a chair (not recommended, but this is what I did before I bought a repair stand):

Note how the front fork is wedged into the chair arm, while the other chair arm is wedged under a counter. This is done in order to life the rear wheel off the ground, stabilize the bike and give you access to the rear derailleur with both hands free. You want to be able to spin the pedals to make the rear wheel move without it hitting the ground.

If you don't have a repair stand, and don't feel comfortable putting your bike in the ghetto repair stand, you can perform this repair without one. Simply be careful during the "testing" phase later on.

After my bike was on the repair stand, I thought for a bit about how the different parts were held together. On my bike, a single Allen bolt holds on both rollers. Once I realized that the top and bottom rollers screwed in from opposite directions, I took note of which way each one way attached. Here are some images of how my rollers are held in:

Here is a picture with some clarification in case you're not sure how to spot an Allen bolt.
This view is from looking inside my bike, I needed to work on my top roller reaching through the spokes.

Here is the outside view of the bottom roller.

Another picture of the bottom roller

After securing my bike in my repair stand (or depending on your resources, chair-counter combination) I removed the bottom Allen bolt and carefully placed it someplace I wouldn't loose it. Once the Allen was out, I carefully remove the bottom roller and broke it into it's components. Make sure you are very careful with this step, I was lucky enough not to lose any of the parts despite my somewhat haphazard removal of assembly.

Here are two casing components, an inside sleeve and the roller itself. I did not include the allen bolt in the picture.

The casing components should pop out of the roller pretty easily. For my bike, I had to use a flathead screw driver to carefully pry open the top roller since the parts were safely housed away in a protective bubble gum cocoon. After everything was separated, I sprayed WD40 on everything and scrubbed it down with a rag. This removed a lot of the caked on grime, but didn't cut the bubble gum at all. For that, I placed the parts in boiling water and scrubbed the pieces down when hot. After repeating the boil-scrub cycle for about 7 times, all the gum was cleaned off. I did a final WD40 treatment on the dry pieces, wiped them down, and then put a TINY amount of tri-flow (synthetic grease) on the insides of the part. After reassembling the pieces for an individual roller, I placed the roller back in my derailleur.

Once both rollers were clean, I carefully took off a casing piece that was held on my the rollers and cleaned that as well. The casing wasn't totally necessary for clean chain movement, but I didn't want any little pieces of bubble gum going back into my rollers. Everything that was assessable was rubbed down with a rag.

Probably the most difficult part here, that I somewhat glossed over above, was getting the roller back into the derailleur such that the chain is correctly guided by the roller. In order to accomplish this, I used one hand to hold the roller in place and remove the chain tension from slamming the roller out of place. My other hand was used Turn the Allen bolt. This isn't quite as awkward as it sounds though, once the Allen is into the housing even a little bit, you don't have to stabilize it much leaving your hand free to remove slack from the chain.

After everything is back together, turn your pedals a few times to drive your wheel and send the chain over the newly adjusted derailleur. Using my repair stand makes this test simple and easy. If you did not take my approach of wedging your bike into a chair, I recommend lifting up the rear wheel and using your other hand to spin the pedals. Do not actually ride your bike to test this - if the chain is not correctly running along the rollers you probably will cause some damage riding it.

Look closely at how the chain is moving over the rollers. If it is a smooth motion with the chain being guided by the rollers, that is looking good. Shift through all your rear gears to make sure that's still working. When I performed this repair, I did not have the chain guided by the roller correctly. If everything looks good, take it for a test ride.

Thanks for reading! Depending on how things go, I might make some youtube videos of bike repair. Send me a comment if you think that would be cool. A special thanks to Oleg Semanov for loaning me his nice digital camera to take pictures with for this post.

My Girlfriend Kate is going to be a pharmacist

2008-06-01T22:29:00.006-06:00

My girlfriend Kate was just accepted into pharmacy school! She has been working very hard towards this goal since I met her two years ago, and she achieved it on her first try. Everyone is very proud of her, but not terribly surprised she made it.

I have been thinking about her tons today, and wanted to post some images of her.

Taken January 27, 2007 8:58 p.m.

Black and White by my Friend Chad Peyton

Another Peyton Classic

This was one we submitted to the movie we were in. After seeing this, the movie people wanted us to be in a make out scene together.

I love my girlfriend a lot!

Bike Ride to Los Lunas from Albuquerque

2008-05-31T21:36:00.001-06:00

My friends David, Oleg and I biked to Los Lunas from Albuquerque today. Unfortunately, my bike received a massive flat tire. We were luck that the flat occurred very close to Albuquerque (I had patches but the hole was super big - I'll post a picture of the nail soon.) We took the bus back from the river trial to UNM.

I'm pretty happy with this image - especially considering it came from a camera phone

Oleg, David and a small portion of my finger

After my patch job didn't hold, Oleg and I tried to ride two to a bicycle. Unfortunately, people in Kazakhstan have become affluent enough for everyone to own their own bicycles. As a result of the increasing affluence, the population is unable to balance as a passenger. The above destroyed shoe is a direct example of this phenomenon. Luckily, Oleg was completely fine after his foot was violently sucked into the tire.

Here is a link to our current status. It will be updated as we continue to go further south. In total, the ride was 49.9 miles (80.3 km) total according to my bike computer.

Pymol - Molecular Visualization

2008-05-18T17:35:00.006-06:00

Today I have been messing with the program PyMol to generate images for molecular visualization. After following a simple tutorial, I generated a few images of water with different settings.

Water - Stick View

Water - Ball View

Now I am working on getting some images of the molecules my research group is more interested in. But first, I wanted to try the ray-tracing option. Not too shabby.

Ray Traced Water - 2048 x 2048 - About 19 seconds (slightly quicker than my ray tracer)

This is a Streptavidin - Biotin Complex generated from data found at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB) here. Luckily, this protein data bank exists, otherwise I seriously doubt it realistic image generation would be feasible.

Streptavidin/Biotin - Ray Traced - Not Quite as cool with the mesh option

Streptavidin/Biotin - Not Ray Traced - I think this looks better

Actual Final Image

2008-05-16T16:03:00.003-06:00

2048 x 2048 - 256 samples / pixel
Flipped Image (I trace my image reverse from how I index into my textures)
real 309m15.909s

Next Go

2008-05-14T14:17:00.003-06:00

Here is my final image showcasing Perlin noise.

1024 x 1024 - 256 samples / pixel

A little different view point

Even Further to the Side - You can see where my star texture repeats

Next Image

2008-05-14T08:56:00.003-06:00

My "movie aspect" images looks a bit distorted, so I rendered this image in 1024 x 1024. There are 128 samples / pixel.

Rendering Time = real 76m41.151s

Quite Possibly my ray tracing final project

2008-05-12T21:39:00.007-06:00

The "moon" is actually a Perlin noise texture with the color simply as the [0,1] noise value multiplied by white to get a gray color. I am using cubic interpolation and eight octaves of turbulence. The earth is from a previous assignment, and the stars are actually texture mapped onto a plane behind my sphere.

1440 x 1080 32 samples / pixel
(real 21m42.207s - Somewhat low-res star texture)

1440 x 1080 32 samples / pixel
(real 43m23.741s - Extremely High Resolution Star Texture)

The above picture has a star texture of about 20% the resolution of the bottom. At first, I couldn't see any difference between the two pictures, but now I think the bottom image has a sharper background.

Bagpipes @ Church

2008-05-11T14:48:00.004-06:00

Due to the semester finishing up, I thought it would be a good idea to get some "final project insurance" by heading to church. There were some awesome bagpipe players during the service. I managed to get a couple of videos on my phone when they headed outside to play after the service.

I feel ready to do battle on a Scottish Moor

Kate's final project for non verbal communication

2008-05-10T13:25:00.004-06:00

My girlfriend has been taking an 8-week, Saturday, course on non-verbal communication. For her final project, she presented material on non verbal communication going on at the UNM duck pond. She was responsible for the presentation, while other members of her group focused on a written report. She created two cool looking poster boards and some snazzy name tags for her presentation.

Kate's Boards

Name Tags

It sounds like her presentation went really well!

Better Scene Layout

2008-04-27T11:14:00.002-06:00

I like this layout more.

(2048 x 2048 -- 256 samples / pixel -- rendering time = real 426m19.944s, 7 hours 30 minutes on a 1800 mhz P4 )

Transparancy + Reflection

2008-04-26T21:10:00.005-06:00

Today I finished the last regular assignment for my ray tracing course - transparancy & reflection! Here are some of the images I generated.

Extremely High Resolution Image (2048 x 2048 -- 128 samples / pixel -- rendering time : real 279m22.153s, a bit over 4 hours)

This is the first image that I generated with spheres of different index of refraction, and ratio of reflectance to transmission. Overall, I think it looks pretty cool. There are a few minor changes I would like to make, but they shouldn't take too long. The sky needs to be changed from my polluted sky brown to a beautiful blue, the small middle sphere looks like it is getting clipped by the camera and the two upper spheres need more reflectance. This was still a ton of work getting here.

I like the color of the balls visible in this one

A box and a sphere

Messing with a transparent sphere and box

Some reflection

One of the passes at multiple spheres - after getting this far scene layout is taking a while

Index of refraction = 1.0, with some phong shading going on

Totally reflective - but still phong shaded

I also found an interesting blog by Pete Shirley, a professor at the University of Utah, about graphics. My professor, Joe Kniss, went to Utah and studied graphics. Check it out here. I also added him to the "friends links" that I support, even though we have never talked (so aren't friends).

Oleg + Brian Strength Training

2008-04-24T21:22:00.000-06:00

For about two months, my friend Oleg Semanov and I have been lifting weights at the gym. We bring his PDA to record the weights that we lift, in order to keep track of our improvement and our goals. We both have been improving, but Oleg has improved on sit-ups extremely fast. He went from completing 3 sets of 25 sit-ups on the ground to 3 sets of 25 on a major incline. Next time we do sit-ups, we are going to move him up another bar. This will bring him to about a 40 degree incline.

Currently, Oleg and I are tied on leg press and calf extensions. This is another area that Oleg improved on very quickly. When we started, I was at 4 weights @ 45 lbs (20.411 kg) each + the bar at 45 lbs. I think the bar weighs 45, so this totals to 5 x 45 = 225 lbs (102 kg) and Oleg was at 3 x 45 = 135 lbs (61 kg). Now, we both are at 6 x 45 + bar = 7 * 45 = 315 lbs (142 kg). That's a 232 % gain for Oleg and a 139% gain for me.

Oleg doing Sit-Ups so fast he is blurry

On the way down...

and the way up

ActionScript Update

2008-04-24T19:43:00.013-06:00

Today I have been working on my ActionScript front end for Mark Olah's molecular spiders a ton. In addition to moving the scene around, I completed a bit of some scene resizing code. Check it out below.

For this version, you should be able to move the entire scene around by clicking, holding, and moving your mouse around. This version ALSO supports resizing by using the scroll wheel, but my Blogger stuff seems to be getting in the way of it. You can also check it out directly by clicking here. If you are so inclined to take a look at my code to see how I accomplished this, I packaged it up for everyone here.

If you are interested in how I added mouse listeners to my flash file, check out the com\identityMine\documentClass\DocumentClass.as file. Since I started doing Flash as a programmer, everything is implemented in classes.

2008-04-24T12:39:00.007-06:00

Lately, I've been consciously trying to stay positive in a lot of different ways. If I feel discouraged with my ray tracer, or something else, I try and play handball with a friend, go to the gym, or a yoga class, or read something inspirational and then work hard at whatever has been bothering me. Maintaining a positive outlook is something I need to focus on, and improve on, but things like this always help me smile. The University of New Mexico ALWAYS has interesting characters sitting on the border between UNM-land and Central Avenue.

Fashion Conscious Protester

I believe he is equating President Bush with the Anti-Christ. Unfortunately, I did not have time to ask him the specifics of his political platform.

Complex Adaptive Systems - Assignment 3 Finished

2008-04-22T20:43:00.006-06:00

Today Ratheesh and I finished the remaining section of our complex adaptive systems homework. We knocked out the programming without too much of a hassle. However, some of the programs took hours to run.

Here are a few of the images we were able to generate based on our simple fractal, with different branching rules and different levels of iteration.

Binary Tree - 4 Levels of Iteration

Binary Tree - 8 Levels of Iteration

6-ary Tree - 4 Levels of Iteration

6-ary Tree - 6 Levels of Iteration

The complete code is available here. Please leave me a comment if you use it to generate any fractals for yourself (or for an assignment).

Also, here is a PDF of our write up. The analysis could probably be a bit stronger, and our simulation is still gathering data, but overall I think it's all right.

Easier L-System to Analyze

2008-04-20T21:20:00.007-06:00

After working for a long, long time with Ratheesh on the L-System:


rule(1).before = 'F';
rule(1).after = 'FF';

rule(2).before = 'G';
rule(2).after = 'F[+G][-G]F[+G][-G]FG';

Which generates this tree.

However, I decided to use this simpler L-system:


rule(1).before = 'F';
rule(1).after = 'F[-F][+F]';

I thought it would be much, MUCH easier to analyze. It would be cool to come up with an expansion that makes the trunk grow more, but keeps the binary relation, but I'm probably not going to be up for that... Here are the different trees that it generates depending on the number of repetitions.

0 reps

1 reps

2 reps

3 reps

4 reps

10 reps

L-System Fractal Growth Assignment

2008-04-19T15:49:00.004-06:00

Today I really started on the L-System assignment Melanie Moses handed out. I am still at a very early stage of development, but I have some interesting images already.

And the following Matlab code:
%
%L-system
%2D

clear all
clf

%Rules-- Cell array {1,x} is the xth string to be replaced
% -- {2,x}

rule(1).before = 'F';
rule(1).after = 'FF';
%rule(1).after = 'F[-F]F[+F]F';

rule(2).before = 'G';
rule(2).after = 'F[+G][-G]F[+G][-G]FG';
%rule(2).after = 'F[+G]F[-G]G';

nRules = length(rule);

%angle: +operator means turn left; -operator means turn right
%delta = 27.5; %degrees
delta = 25.0; % This is 'theta' in the project specifications

%length of the line segments corresponding to the symbols F and G
lenF = 1;
lenG = 1;

%starting seed
axiom = 'G';
%axiom = 'F';

%number of repititions -- This is 'N' in the project specification
nReps = 4;

for i=1:nReps

%one character/cell, with indexes the same as orilsys.mginal axiom string
axiomINcells = cellstr(axiom');
%axiom

for j=1:nRules
%the indexes of each 'before' string
hit = strfind(axiom, rule(j).before);
if (length(hit)>=1)
for k=hit
axiomINcells{k} = rule(j).after;
end
end
end
%now convert individual cells back to a string
axiom=[];0
for j=1:length(axiomINcells)
axiom = [axiom, axiomINcells{j}];
end
end

leaf_count = (axiom == 'G');
leaf_count = leaf_count(axiom == 'G');
sprintf('leaf_count = %d',length(leaf_count))

branch_count = (axiom == 'F');
branch_count = branch_count(axiom == 'F');
sprintf('branch_count = %d', length(branch_count))

sprintf('length(axiom) = %d', length(axiom))

axiom

% Now draw the string as turtle graphics
%Upper case (e.g. F or G) causes a line to be drawn in the current direction of the turtle
%Lower case causes a move with no draw
%angle +operator means turn left; -operator means turn right

%Init the turtle
xT = 0;
yT = 0;
aT = 0;
da = deg2rad(delta) ; %convert to radians

%init the turtle stack
stkPtr = 1;

%set(gca,'xlim', [-5 5], 'ylim', [-5 5]);
hold on

% Leaf counter
leafs = 0;

for i=1:length(axiom)
cmdT = axiom(i);
switch cmdT
case 'F' % Branches
newxT = xT + lenF*cos(aT);
newyT = yT + lenF*sin(aT);
%line([xT newxT], [yT newyT]);
line([yT newyT], [xT newxT],'color',[.3 .3 0], 'linewidth',2);
xT = newxT;
yT = newyT;
case 'G' % Leaves
leafs = leafs + 1;
newxT = xT + lenG*cos(aT);
newyT = yT + lenG*sin(aT);
%line([xT newxT], [yT newyT]);
line([yT newyT], [xT newxT],'color','g', 'linewidth',2);
xT = newxT;
yT = newyT;
case '+'
aT = aT + da;
case '-'
aT = aT - da;
case '[' %push the stack
stack(stkPtr).xT = xT ;
stack(stkPtr).yT = yT ;
stack(stkPtr).aT = aT ;
stkPtr = stkPtr +1 ;
case ']' %pop the stack
stkPtr = stkPtr -1 ;
xT = stack(stkPtr).xT ;
yT = stack(stkPtr).yT ;
aT = stack(stkPtr).aT ;
otherwise
disp('error')
return
end
%drawnow
end

sprintf('leafs = %d', leafs);

daspect([1,1,1])

ActionScript Parsing

2008-04-13T22:54:00.004-06:00

I've been helping Mark Olah out on some molecular computer visualizations in ActionScript and we are moving towards getting an actual front end for his simulator. In order to do that, we need to have some mechanism of communicating between his software and the ActionScript I have been working on to draw the pictures.

Mark suggested we have a fairly simple format that looks something like this:

//Hello World! This is Brian J. Stinar reading in a file with Adobe AIR.

Begin Surface
-1, -1, 2, 2
1.0, 1.0, 0, A
1.0, 2.0, 1, A
1.0, 3.0, 2, A
1.0, 4.0, 3, A
2.0, 1.0, 4, B
3.0, 1.0, 5, B
4.0, 1.0, 6, B
5.0, 1.0, 7, B
End Surface

Begin Spider
brian_spider_1, 4, 1
brian_spider_2, 4, 3
brian_spider_3, 4, 1,
End Spider
// Here is another comment

Begin Trace
Body Move brian_spider_1
LegAttach brian_spider_1, 1, 0
Spider Detach brian_spider_1

End Trace

If you would like to test out my parser with this file, the file I am parsing is available here.

Then, I will read in this file and generate graphics accordingly. After working today for a few hours, I think I have parsing down in ActionScript (Adobe AIR, actually?). The regular expression syntax is just like Perl, and well documented by Adobe.

Here is the code I came up with :


package com.identityMine.filereader
{

import flash.filesystem.*;
import flash.display.MovieClip;

// The extention here is to make it so that I can independently test these routines
public class FILEREADER extends MovieClip {


// Constructor - loads in the input file we are reading
   public function FILEREADER(){
   // Create a file object and let our app know where the file
    // exists
 
       // have we seen the "Begin Surface" command yet?
       var inSurface : Boolean = false;
       var inTrace : Boolean = false;
       var inSpider : Boolean = false;
       var inMove : Boolean = false;
 
       // This is the file we are reading
       var myFile:File = File.applicationDirectory;
        myFile = myFile.resolvePath("mySampleFile.txt");
 
       var fileStream : FileStream = new FileStream();
       fileStream.open(myFile, FileMode.READ);

       // Everything inside our file
       var fileContents : String = fileStream.readUTFBytes(fileStream.bytesAvailable);
     
       // Split our entire file based on newlines
       var splitString = fileContents.split("\n");
     
       // this prints out everything in my fileContents string
       // trace (splitString);
     
       // iterate through each element in the array
       // each represents a piece of information necessary to construct our
       // visualization
     
       // looping variable
       var i : int;
       // splitting variable
       var split_val : int;
     
       // Regular Expression for matching a string of 1 or more digits
       var re1 = new RegExp("[0-9]+");
     
       // Regular Expression for matching a sequence of alph characters
       var re2 = new RegExp("[a-z]*[A-Z]*");
       var re3 = new RegExp("[//s]*LegAttach");
     
       var SubVals;
     
       for (i = 0; i < split_val = "Begin Surface" insurface =" true;" i =" i" insurface ="="" subvals =" splitString[i].split(',');" split_val = "End Surface" insurface =" false;" split_val = "Begin Trace" intrace =" true;" split_val = "Begin Spider" inspider =" true;" split_val = "End Spider" inspider ="="" inspider =" false;" inspider ="="" subvals =" splitString[i].split(',');" split_val = "Body Move" inmove =" true;" split_val = "Spider Detach" inmove ="="" intrace ="="" inmove =" false;" split_val = "End Trace" intrace ="="" intrace =" false;" split_val = "LegAttach" intrace ="="" inmove ="="" subvals =" splitString[i].split(',');">

Code Available Here

This is a TERRIBLE solution to my problem of not being able to display code well on my blog. As an actual solution, I should make my blog wider (and yes, adjust the images that came with the template.)

As of yet, I still need to check to see how error resilient my code is. I think my regular expressions might accept too much stuff. For the next small increment, I am going to actually print out the corresponding function call I plan on making. For testing purposes, I added a bit of junk into my trace file and my program spit it out.

Axis Aligned Boxes - Stage 1 Complete!

2008-04-13T16:41:00.005-06:00

Jon Bradley mentioned that Axis Aligned Boxes would be good to test the dielectric shading with. Since Jon has the best ray tracer I've seen in the class, I thought it would be a good idea to listen to him.

Pass 1 - Axis Aligned Box

Pass 2 - Axis Aligned Box with Correct (matte) Shading

Pass 3 - Axis Aligned Box floating above the plane (rather than bisected)

Jon Bradley, possibly the best living programmer

Kate Walking Her Dog at the UNM Duck Pond

2008-04-13T14:12:00.006-06:00

Today my girlfriend Kate decided to take her families dog for a walk at the UNM duck pond. She sent me two photos of the duck pond from here camera phone. I was surprised by how nice the photos turned out.

Other than a massive amount of ray tracing and going to church, my cousin and I created a temporary burrito factory in my apartment to make 20 burritos for the upcoming week. I don't think I'll start selling burritos on the corner of Central & Stanford, but if the whole computer science thing doesn't work out it's always an option. I'll probably hit the UNM gym for about an hour, do some molecular visualization / ActionScript research and then go to sleep. That doesn't sound too bad for a Sunday.