The Inquisitive Penguin

Subject: Matlab & Vector Computing

http://people.rit.edu/cml1661/matlab.pdf (PDF)

MATLAB Examples I used while talking

edit: Made file formats better/ more Windows friendly, as per multiple requests.

Click the link to “RIT CE Resources” at top right, or click here.

Bothered Andrew all night, got him to introduce me to more of the CSH members. After meeting a few of the on-floor members, I still definitely want to apply, which is good. The floor is a little clique-y though, but I guess that would happen to any large enough group that lived together.

Switched to decaf for lent.

So far I’m not any more tired, but a lot more crazy.

That is all.

I’ve just received a “What kind of guy will you fall for? ” invitation and a “What kind of bride will you be?” invitation, from my friend Dani. I’m not quite sure what’s she’s trying to say…

I wanna know What Kind of Bride Will You Be? — Just answer a few questions and find out instantly! It’s SCARILY accurate.

Not that accurate, methinks. Not quite that accurate…

I’m apparently an Internet celebrity of sorts; I was browsing /b/ on 7chan, and in the middle of a browsing a thread full of Team Fortress 2 pictures, I was very surprised to find a picture of myself. An exceptionally awesome picture of myself, as a heavy, kicking ass with my huge minigun, while on fire and screaming. It was described by the poster as “Fresh from the 7chan TF2 servar. This pic amuses me to no end.” In retrospect, it’s fairly likely that someone on the 7chan server might screenshot me and upload to 7chan’s forum, and I play on 7chan’s TF2 quite a lot, as I’m an admin on it… but it still weirded me out to find a picture of myself on the Internet. Weird indeed.

Also, got a new GPG key… naturally, don’t trust anything on the Internet, so I will give it to you in person should you need it anyway.

I had the sketchiest mail today. Opened it up, and found two small paper-bag packages stuffed into my tiny school mailbox, complete with obscenely cheap and bad wrapping, beaten up exterior, questionably legal lime-green customs declaration tags, falling-off airmail stickers, with return addresses to personal apartments in Hong Kong. Needless to say, I was ecstatic; my insanely cheap e-bay electronics purchases had finally found their way to Rochester.

My laptop now interfaces with an external 8 inch 10 dbi 2.4 GHz wifi antenna, and it’s awesome. Reception using the three, two internal and one external, omnidirectional antennas (I have a three-stream wireless card from intel) is insanely good. Later, I might get a better antenna, one compatible with 5 GHz signals that wireless N is capable of, but until then, this is awesome.

Oh, and google finally cached my website. Not sure how it crawled here, as nothing links here, but it did. Somehow. Hax?

Roy is better than Google when it comes to redirecting people to my blog. *sigh*

Actually, I really appreciate being in a learning community at RIT. It makes life here… nice. Nicer than my home town, I’d say. I have great friends I can walk over to see, without getting in a car, and spend fun time with on campus, or in Henrietta. I still wish I had a car here though…

In other news, Evolution is pretty awesome. It works perfectly for syncing email, calendar events, task events, searching for names to find any campus member’s email address through the global catalog (makes life so much easier than remembering or writing down everyone’s esoteric “letter-letter-letter-number-number-number-number combination!), and everything with RIT’s Exchange server. Which is nice, because there’s no way to get Exchange working in linux, especially newer versions. WINE doesn’t work with Microsoft Outlook well at all. As far as I know, the two newest versions don’t work even the slightest bit. That, and Outlook costs money. Lots. Of. Money. So, I’ll be using it to organize my life, as its perfect for doing just that, especially as I can access RIT’s Outlook Web Access from anywhere with a browser and an internet connection, instantly grabbing and adding new events, contacts, and emails. The Evolution installation was a breeze, and it was extraordinarily easy to configure. Easier, I’d say, then setting up Outlook Express or Thunderbird for IMAP or POP3 access, which lack the plethora of calendar and task features I’m now using.

If anyone is here looking for the Intro to Computer Engineering research pages, they’re located at http://clockfort.com/ce/. They’re in wiki form, but they’re password edit-protected, as to prevent vandalism.

D&D 4th edition was recently announced at GenCon; among other things, WotC promises online/computer aided character management and such.

I’ve already been using online character management for years thanks to great projects like RPG Web Profiler and 3E Profiler, and it’s mighty convenient.
However, at each level up, or to make extensive edits, etc, each player would have to have a laptop, a situation that distracts from the game, and distances the players.
What I really, really want to happen is to have something like Microsoft Surface that would allow for each player to have their sheets out in front of them in digital form, and be able to edit them, without laptops in the way.
Such a situation like Microsoft’s surface would also let the DM show an entirely digital map, something that I’ve been kicking around ideas for since I saw this at the D20srd page a while back. But instead of projecting down onto a table, I’d much rather have a thin display on the countertop itself.

Possibilities for such a technology exist as either e-ink technology (incredibly prohibitively expensive) or maybe an array of smaller monochrome STN LCDs (rigid, difficult to move, annoying to wire/code for so many small LCDs hooked up together, as no one makes large displays like this).
It’s possible that a normal large LCD monitor (or two or three small ones with little bezel area) could be used, but the players proximity around the table would mean horrible viewing angles for a normal LCD monitor.
Plus, after laying down a protective hard but clear layer of plastic, one would then have to lay down resistive touch sensitive film, which is costly, and writing programs to take advantage of so many different different touch screen inputs is time consuming.

But just imagine, if this got off the ground, then players could walk in to a session and not bring anything, and could never lose their character sheets and notes. Technically, one would not even need dice, instead using the computer in front of them, but the experience of rolling dice is key to the game, so I imagine most people would still use their old trusty physically-present D20s anyway…