I’ve always felt slightly offended by the people who write off multiple inheritance in one fell swoop as being something akin to the fight against guns - it’s always misused, and there is no real useful purpose, so we might as well get rid of it in its entirety. There is a slight truth to the statement, as it applies to both guns and MI (the misuse, for example), but the conclusion is oh. so. wrong.
Today’s little blog post comes in response to a guest article posted on The Daily WTF (which used to be What The Fuck, until the author became even more retarded than he usually is, and now it is The Daily Worse-Than-Failure). Feel free to read the original article before you continue on here, although there really isn’t anything specific you are going to learn from it: Guest Article: Our Dirty Little Secret - Worse Than Failure.
For my last quarter at RIT, I decided to take as few courses as possible to stay a full-time student (and thus keep my scholarships) and still graduate. Since I’m required to do a 2 credit honors project, I figured that if I also did a 2 credit independent study and took 2 other courses, I would have a total of 12 credits, which is full-time. To that end, I’ve decided to do an independent study around observable collections in Java. Time to put my money where my mouth is, I suppose.
So I was reading through the blogosphere this morning, and I came upon this article: Creating User Friendly 404 Pages. Since I find myself also somewhat annoyed at bad 404 pages (hence the reason why I use the ErrorZilla firefox add-on), I decided to become a part of the solution, and not just bitch at the problem.
Alright, here’s the low-down. There’s this here website thingy, http://wowio.com, that is running one of these “get a free ipod shuffle” type deals. Thing is, this one doesn’t appear to do any type of spamming crap. WOWIO is a site for distributing ebooks, and you get something on the order of 5 free ebook downloads per day. The only people who can sign up without hassle are those with .edu/.gov addresses (so yous all college-type peoples apply).  Once you sign up, if you can get 10 other people to sign up and list you as the referring email address, you get an ipod shuffle. I’ve never actually tried one of these things before, although I’ve sure helped other people with their attempts. This place appears to not do any spamming nastiness, as attested by the few people I know who have gotten ipod shuffles already from this bad boy.
So, if you want to help out a poor brotha’, go to the website, sign up, and list my email address as the referrer: nbr5959 -AT- rit -DOT- edu
I’ll keep everyone updated as to whether or not this thing actually works, and whether or not I get a free ipod shuffly. Shuffle on down that road, ladies and gents. I do appreciate your time and clickity clicks.
Konfabulator/Yahoo Widget Engine is the programming equivalent of a crayon drawing made by a Kindergartner. Except these crayons are only ugly colors, you know, the ones that were all icky green or yet another brown. The ones you threw at people or ate (don’t judge). If it were possible, I would molest Yahoo Widget Engine’s children just to destroy it’s life. I hate it that much.
Seems I forgot to post one of the finals. For Abstract Algebra I, we had to write a report on something related to the course, so I spent a few hours (2am-4am) Wednesday morning writing about check-digit schemes. Nothing too exciting, but perhaps you can take this as a selling point for Microsoft Office 20007. This took 2 hours, and it doesn’t look to shabby at all. Here’s the report: Check Digit Schemes Based upon Weighted Multiplication and Dihedral Groups. And if you haven’t already, go download a 60-day trial for Office 2007. All of my most wanted features have been implemented: better support for styles, awesome TeX-like equation editor, and automatic works cited/bibliography management(!), and the ribbon (yes, I like the ribbon). And no, I’m not a Microsoft fanboy, as I think Office 2007 is the first half-decent Microsoft product since XP (which was partially decent).
Well, I’ve officially just submitted the last piece of work for this quarter, which means I only have one quarter left at this institute. This submission was a final research paper for Intro to CS Research with Bayliss. The project in question is called MediaPipes, and its something I’m working on with Matt Campbell, my roommate. There will be more information about it next quarter, as we will be using it for our honors capstone project (working with Prof. “Big Show” Heliotis, no less). If you want to read the paper, you can get a copy here (apologies for any errors, as a bit less effort went into this paper than the other ones for my finals week): Simple Music Streaming with MediaPipes.
I just finished my final paper for my Zen: Thought and Practice course taught by Brian Schroeder. I decided that Zen teachings, at least as translated and written for Western cultures, have as their primary weakness some basic misconceptions about Western theories of language, and that writings within Zen on the language of Zen are rather bad at capturing the problems and proposed solutions. Have a read, if you have a bit. I certainly enjoyed writing it, and I’m sure many people would certainly enjoy making fun of it :) Here she is: Wittgenstein and the Language of Zen.
