Dave Kellam

Visual Who: Animating the affinities and activities of an electronic community. The basic concept of my first UI assignment.

I have to admit, playing with a robot arm is pretty cool. It’s dumb as shit; it will do exactly what you tell it to, so you need to be kind of careful. Making a robot arm pickup different sized blocks and drop them into the right boxes was interesting. Everything is more fun at three in the morning. Now I need to finish up that assignment and hand it in before midnight. And then some relaxin’. I’ve compiled a lot of the stuff I’ve written for the paper this year and will probably be putting it up in the near future.

I’m just about to head out to a computer lab for a few hours; it should be fun. We get to play around with these robotic arms, writing logic circuits for it and so forth. This assignment’s due tomorrow night at midnight. There was operating systems due earlier today, the database assignment yesterday and the algorithms assignment on monday. Wazoo. And then the weekend comes. I get to interview the two teams vying for AMS exec for the paper on saturday, it should be a good time laughing at them.

Lately, I’ve been doing more crossword puzzles than I used to. If I’m on campus early in the day, I can grab a copy of the Toronto Star for free, it has a pretty good one (online version, not sure if it’s the same one or not though). There’s also this crossword that I do sometimes, although I find it a bit too easy sometimes because it tells you if you have the letter right. And even more crossword puzzles, including the first one.

I finally got sick of that semi-default layout that I was using. So there’s something new, it looks nicer. It appears to be about the same in Safari, Mozilla and IE 6 on Windows, although not exactly. It’s awesome that everyone has decided to implement style sheets differently, so nothing looks the same. I thought css was supposed to help fix that cross-browser problem. I’ll keep tweaking things at any rate.

I just found the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing today, it seems like a pretty handy thing to have around if you’re doing much with computers. My operating systems assignment had taken me on a short quest for a good definition of semaphores.

A review of the recent STB show. Dave, Matt, and Steve shall be given tacos. Provided tacos are redefined as something else. Maybe I’ll redefine the rest of the language while I’m at it. Or just go to bed; class at 8:30, I will return to the house about twelve hours after that.

Picture: Warren being attended to by his personal physician, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

This screenshot has many purposes. Or at least a few anyway. First one, take a look at the personal ad on both The Onion and Modern Humourist, I smell a conspiracy. The shot also shows off a few of tweaks I’ve made to OS X and also the incredibly cold weather (-16C in the afternoon) we’ve been having. And today is a nice day. Blah, snow is alright, the cold is shit.

Various things for changing the look of your mac:
ThemeChanger – allows theme switching
Max Themes – a number of cool looking themes
Swizcore Studios – more themes
ResExcellence – tons of mod info
Unsanity – great interface tweaks
AquaFix – restore original aqua theme

Here’s a thread describing some hacks for Safari.

They’re big on computational complexity in computer science, go figure. An nice way to describe computational complex it with asymptotic notation, basically a rough estimation of how long something takes to run. I was working on my algorithms assignment and came across some asymptotic notations that I hadn’t seen before. To tell you the truth I didn’t even know they were called asymptotic notations; they started us off with big o notation, and then handed us big omega and big theta notation. Now they give me this squirrely w notation (which I discovered is actually called little omega notation) and little o notation, which are very similar to their bigger brothers but different enough to warrant a name change. Anyway, I hadn’t bought the textbook yet but needed to learn what these new notations were but the internet saved me again.