Kitty!

Whitney and I just adopted a new kitten. He is a 3 month old buff tabby named Ralphie. We were originally going to change his name (almost named him Gizmo) but we decided to leave his name the same. He is a little bit sick right now so he doesn't look as lively as he did the day we went in to adopt him but he is still adorable. You can find pictures of him at the usual place.

Gizmo Pumpkin!

Here is the Gizmo Jack-O-Lantern that I made for James when he came down for the LAN party. Very time consuming to make but looks great!

From Halloween Pumpkins

They finally did something that wasn't idiotic...

Microsoft just revised their licensing terms for Vista to allow unlimited reinstalls of the OS. You can read the posting here. It's good to know that if enough people raise their voice even the arrogant Microsoft is capable of fixing the errors of its ways.

Shame on you, Microsoft!

As most people probably know by now, a new Microsoft Windows release (Vista) is just around the corner. It has been delayed countless times, stripped of all the features that would have made it worth owning, and then split up into so many versions that purchaser confusion will probably be endless. I have used the beta version of it and there is really nothing about it that makes me want to come running to it. To make matters worse, I read this article today. The EULA (end user license agreement) for this operating system is utterly vomit-inducing and blood-curdling. How arrogant can this company get? Buying Vista would be something akin to buying a personal Hitler to strip away your computer usage freedoms. How STUPID do they think we are? It is insulting to me that they would even try to pull this kind of crap. They think they can tell us that once we shell out $300 for their software license that it can only be transferred ONE time before we have to buy another one? What about the people like my father and I that do significant upgrades to their machines several times during the lifespan of their operating system? Do they think that they can tell developers that the only way they are allowed to perform testing for Windows platform is to actually buy a PC or buy the most expensive version of their new OS ? How can they tell someone that they aren't allowed to run their software in an emulated environment? Seriously, who the hell do they think they are?

It's ok though, because the time is riper now than ever for Microsoft's competitors to actually start taking pieces out of the big M$ pie. Mac is gaining converts faster than ever, and desktop linux distributions are FINALLY usable by someone who isn't a computer genius. I have Ubuntu running on my laptop right now and it is pretty dang slick, not to mention FREE. It was incredibly hassle free to get running and I would say most people could convert to it with just a little help. Microsoft is about to learn that eventually you can piss people off enough to part with familiarity in exchange for respect and freedom. People don't want to be treated like criminals or little babies and they are only going to take so much of it before they wave goodbye. More people would have switched to something like Mac or Linux already, but they didn't want to invest time in learning something new or buy new software or find free alternatives to the software they already know and love. It is purely a matter of convenience. Windows has already become so deeply penetrated in personal computing that it persists as the most dominant creature despite being the crappiest of the three major players right now. But what will happen if enough people finally say, "you know what? I am tired of this garbage! I am tired of being infected with viruses and spyware. I am tired of being so vulnerable. I am tired of things constantly breaking. Most of all, I am tired of being told so many things that I am not allowed to do just because some company wants even more money from me"? What will happen then? People will switch to another operating system (probably Mac OSX because it is still easier to use than Linux by far and Apple is becoming very popular).

You know what I see every day at my university? I see Macs and Linux boxes everywhere. Do I see Windows as well? Most definitely, but I also see a lot of other systems. I remember years ago when only the geekiest of geeks were running Linux and only the most uninformed were running macs. Windows was everywhere, and despite its problems it was everywhere for a reason. Linux was just too hard to use, and macs just plain sucked. Now, almost all of my professors are running macs, and about half of my fellow peers are running Linux (keep in mind I am a computer science student so this high number is not representative of the entire student body). Does this mean Microsoft is about to crumble to its doom after the release of Vista? Unfortunately not, but I think there is one thing Apple could do to help wake Microsoft up and take a huge chunk of their market share along with it.

Right now hardware is the only thing that stands between me throwing Windows XP out the door and using Mac OSX. If I didn't have to actually buy Apple's stupid hardware to run their OS, I would be using their operating system as my primary this very instant. Most people I talk to right now have the same sentiment. Hatred for windows is growing but a lot of PC savvy people don't like the idea of forfeiting their hardware flexibility. I like to be able to build a machine from scratch and have control over every single component that is inside it. I do not want to buy a stock system from the store. New macs run on intel processors so architecture is no longer an issue. I have tested a hacked version of OSX on my laptop so I know that it is capable of running on regular PCs. So why has Apple not opened up their operating system to run on any PC? If they were to do that right now, they would have flocks of people buying their operating system. Sure they would probably lose a huge portion of their hardware business (which is the only reason I can think of that would explain why they haven't done this already), but if they want to become a dominant player in this market I think it is something they might have to do (and I hope they do it because windows needs to go to hell already). I guess we will just have to see what happens. All I know is that Microsoft is really getting on my shit list with the way Vista is turning out to be and I have this feeling that I don't want to be tied to it anymore. I have found myself recommending alternatives to Microsoft software a lot lately and I am certainly not going to recommend Vista to anyone. A lot of people ask my boss about Vista and whether or not they should upgrade to it when it comes out, and right now our answer has been to wait a while before diving in. Maybe we will end up changing our answer to "get Linux" or "get a Mac". If enough computer servicing and consulting companies end up making such recommendations to their clients it will start to have an impact as well because people value our opinions. The only downside to people switching from Windows is that it might put me out of work because I won't have anything to fix.

LAN Party!

It is now 7:00 am on Saturday morning.......we have been playing games since 7:00 pm last night. Rest of the day to go yet......yikes. I am really tired lol...I should probably squeeze a nap in here. This is really fun though I miss doing things like this with the guys. I don't usually have this kind of time to spare, its nice to take a break!

Pumpkins!

Whitney and I made some pumpkin carvings today! I made the Edward Scissorhands on the left and Whitney made the Pirates of the Caribbean one on the right. Hopefully we will be doing two more this week if we have time. If you want to see more close up pics of each one individually click the link below the image.

From My Halloween Pumpkins Album

Whitney's Website

Whitney and I have been working on her website for a few days now. It is starting to take form...check it out at www.munroeglass.com. It is done in pure css and xhtml coding in notepad++ (and of course photoediting with photoshop). I am just beginning to learn css and I am finding that there is a frustrating level of inconsistency with different browsers and the way they handle css...most notably I've been having a hell of a time getting Internet Explorer 6 to work properly with things since it has terribly buggy css support. IE7 will resolve nearly all of these issues but it will take a while before IE6 is totally phased out so I am doing my best to make sure it works reasonably well in IE6 as well as firefox and opera but it definitely works best in firefox and opera at the moment. So if you visit the site with IE6 and something is totally out of whack....view it in firefox or opera. Be sure to check back often...we've been working on it almost every day so it will be updated often. I will let everyone know when it is completed.

In other news...the client really liked the bella day spa site so we will be moving forward on that here shortly. Apparently her sister owns a salon and now she wants us to do a site for her too. Looks like I'll be doing lots of web work :)

Been a while...

Wow it has been a while since my last post. I am slackin! I have been very busy lately (and my computer was toasted...) but I have a few moments now and my new computer is working like a charm! I am now officially addicted to dual monitors :) Not a whole lot has been new...just been busy with school and work and clubs and life in general. I just started a new project for work, you can see it here. Right now it is just templated, there is no content. I am also going to try and redo everything using css and strict xhtml so that it will be easier to work on. Right now it is based off of a dreamweaver template that uses table layouts (gag). The lady wanted it to have a theme of gold and green colors...so don't blame me for the ugly appearances of yellow colors. It looked much better when it was only shades of green if you ask me but the customer gets what they want!

Oh I wish....

I can't stop thinking about this creativity machine stuff. I spent 3 more hours so far today scouring the internet for anything I can find on it. I have been reading some of Dr. Thaler's papers, news reports, other people's blogs. Apparently many of these neural networks of his are implemented in excel spreadsheets! I want so badly to be able to play around with this technology and see what I could do with it. I am hoping that I can extract enough information from his papers to perhaps try and emulate some of the things he has accomplished. Am I even allowed to do that since all his work is patented? I don't even know.....patent laws can be so confusing sometimes. I think I am ok to do stuff with it so long as I don't commercialize anything based on his concepts. I wonder if he would be willing to be a guest speaker at one of the meetings for the student chapter of ACM over here. It sucks so bad sometimes when you want to peek under the hood of something but you aren't allowed to or the chance to do so isn't available to you. There are so many open-source computer programs out there that I could look at and learn stuff from, but they are nowhere near as interesting to me as something like this. I don't want to look at the source code for firefox or linux, I want to look at the source files for one of these neural network implementations. Gah...

SIFE Project

I was studying at a table in the place where Whitney works today and I overheard parts of a SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) meeting. Turns out that they had found someone from DeVry last year to program this game on the web for them to teach middle schools students about tariffs and imports and stuff. Unfortunately, it turned out like garbage as you can see by visiting its current state of existence. It doesn't really work properly, the interface sucks, and it doesn't scale to the size of the browser window (and apparently it was designed for a higher res than 1024x768). They were discussing how to go about finding someone here on campus to rebuild it from scratch for them. I decided to help em out, so it looks like I will be making a web application.....YAY! This should be a fun project and it will be a great learning experience for me given my limited experience with web apps. When I finish it I will post a link to the results.

Regarding creative machines....

I've been scouring the internet for more information about Dr. Thaler and his so called "Creativity Machine". It turns out that he has a company called imagination engines, inc. that sells applications for his technology. I highly suggest checking out their homepage. There is some amazing information on it. This news article is also fascinating.

Apparently this guy has been doing things with this technology for quite some time now. You will be flabbergasted by what it has accomplished. Ever heard of the OralB Crossaction toothbrush? That toothbrush was invented by this machine after it learned from existing examples of toothbrush designs and their effectiveness. This technology has created music. In fact, as stated in the news article I linked to above, Dr Thaler has technically created more music than any composer in the world (of course it was his machine that did it, not him). The list of its creations, in fact just, goes on and on. There are endless applications for something like this. What seems most ironic is the fact that this technology invented itself in a way. You see, there are multiple neural networks involved in this technology. Some of the networks are like the trainees, and some are the trainers. One network is creating ideas while the other network evaluates these new ideas and rewards the good ones. Basically, this thing is self training! But get this...the segment of the network that evaluates the other network's ideas was created by one Thaler's neural networks. Thaler's second patent was created by his first...as in his first machine created the component of the second. It was like a team effort...the most revolutionary computing paradigm created to date (in my opinion) was developed by a team made up of a human and his created machine. Amazing.

If you want to see some of this technology for yourself I suggest downloading the screensaver that you can find under the product menu on the imagination engines web site. I have it running on my laptop as we speak and it is truly fascinating to watch. The web site stresses that this screensaver is NOT pre-scripted video....it is a real time rendering and the simulated robot IS actually learning during the screensaver's execution. It starts off with a simulated hexapod robot located in a maze-like room with a bunch of walls. When the program first starts running the robot is unable to walk effectively. It just flails its legs wildly about in an attempt to move. As time passes, it learns what movement patterns work effectively and which ones don't. This eventually leads to a coordinated tripod walking gait! Obviously this walking gait is familiar to anyone who has worked with this kind of bot before, but this bot actually learned how to do it on its own. Over time this simulated hexapod figures out how to turn when it runs into walls and even avoid walls to some extent with its sonar sensing. I can't imagine how well a full blown version of this AI would work with a robot or swarm of robots considering how impressive this toned down screensaver is!

I think Google should buy this company...with their computing resource and access to such large amounts of data they could probably make this technology do things that are absolutely insane. I bet there are endless applications for this technology in regards to search. Can you imagine how much better their video or image search engine would be if it didn't rely on filenames or user labelling (which people sometimes change to purposefully mislead) but instead used a creativity machine to tag each image automatically with relevant information? This would also be great for content filtering used by schools or parents.

Anyways, I wonder if any of the computer science department researchers here have experimented at all with technology like this? I would love to do research with someone here if they were doing that. I hope that I get to work with technology like this someday. For now I just want to keep reading more about it :)

Robot Sprinklers??!?!

Check out this site: http://www.accurain.com/

And watch this video: http://www.accurain.com/AccuRainII/AccuRainVideo.wmv

How cool is that? I wish I had thought of it. Such a simple, yet novel idea.

Bowlin

OMG I'm going bowling tonight! :-)

First post!

So, I decided to give this blogging thing a try. It is the new web craze after all isn't it? Who knows how long it will hold my attention though.

My day has been pretty relaxing so far. I dropped Whitney(gf) off at school, hung out with her dad for a little bit, and now I am here on my computer. I came across an extremely interesting article while getting my daily dose of tech news today. Check it out

I wasn't aware that anyone had come so far with neural networks in robotics applications yet. How did I miss hearing about this before?!? Seriously, how amazing is it that someone is creating machines that can actually come up with creative solutions to problems? They can actually develop their own walking gaits without any programming and adapt them to different situations. These things are actually thinking in groups and for themselves. Is this scary? Maybe a little bit but it is still fascinating. I need to learn more about neural networks, I've always been fascinated by them but I didn't know they offered quite this much potential. I gotta keep a close eye on this Dr. Stephen Thaler guy's research (granted there probably won't be much information on it anywhere since he is developing all this for the military). This just adds one more thing to my ever increasing list of things I'm hungry to learn more about. I wish there were 50 hours in the day or something so I actually had time to read more about what's going on in the tech world!

In other news....Whitney's dad made the most awesome dinner suggestion to me last night and it turned out amazing. I'm really starting to like this cooking thing...it's fun and delicious! I couldn't believe how something so easy to make could taste sooooooo good. I just Sautéed some boneless skinless chicken breast in a pan with a little olive oil and seasonings (seasoned salt, pepper, fresh garlic, and some basil) and when it was done cooking I coated it with a thin layer of barbeque sauce and sprinkled grated cheese on top and let the cheese melt in the oven. SO GOOD!

That's all for now. I have to finish up my programming project for class.