Fun times...

I would like to formally apologize to my vast audience (all two of you) for the recent lack of updates.

Anyway, I've been up to a lot in the last few weeks.

I am currently working on three internships at the University. Hopefully this means I will be paid well for the summer. The most interesting of these internships is the one that I am doing with Dr. Yu, our chairperson in the CS dept.; actually, I am technically working for Dr. Behera in the Civil Engineering dept., but it makes little difference. The project revolves around mapping the uncertainty in position of moving objects. If an object is moving, and providing updates for its position at discrete intervals, it can sometimes be useful to know where that object could be between those updates. I'll provide some more info later.

The real cool part of that work, for me, is the real-time message delivery aspect. I wrote a custom SMTP email server, using a Python networking framework called Twisted, and have it talking, in an asynchronous way, with a custom HTTP web server. The net result is that when a message is received from the object, the client web pages are updated automatically -- no user interaction is necessary. This is a really good thing, because it will allow someone to open a page, and have that page show real-time information. Nice. I'll post a link when the site becomes active...

In other news, I have finally started buying games for our wii. Mario Galaxy is quite fun, if a bit disorienting. Actually, I suspect the disorienting effect is more prominent for the people watching the game, not the one playing it. My only complaint is that the jumping seems somewhat unresponsive; I tried using a different wiimote, but I think the problem is in the game itself. It could simply be that I'm running the wii through a VCR, and from there through a TV Tuner card in my computer. One of these days, we'll buy a real TV -- but only for movies and games. Honest.

OK, time to crawl back into my hole.
Later,
T