An untraditional student masquerading as a professional student.
Olessia and I have both been busy with school. We don’t see much of each other until the weekend. I took some pictures at Back 2 the Wild. Saw a lot of birds of prey. John hosted the Halloween party. Olessia took some pictures. Continue reading School and such
I tried to transfer my calculus 2 class from Tri-C to the University of Akron. No luck. In fact, because I took it outside of U. Akron, I’m no longer a student. Nice. So now I have to transfer back in as a new student. Doing so will require an additional 3 or so more classes I will have to take, so I’m going to wait and take them at Tri-C, then transfer everything over. Continue reading No Longer an U. Akron Student
I’m going to tackle all of these, although not necessarily in order… Nothing too new with photography. I did attend the Cleveland Photographic Society club meeting and it was quite interesting. I plan to attend more meetings when I’m feeling better (I missed the last meeting due to sinuses). Olessia and I headed over to Lake View Cemetery to check out the James Garfield monument. The balcony has a nice view of Cleveland and we grabbed some shots. I wasn’t feeling too good so I didn’t shoot much. Calculus 2 is chugging along. So far, it appears I am minus … Continue reading Photography, Software, School
It is that time of the year. Fall semester has started. What am I taking? Wait for it… Calculus II! Ugh. This one is Tri-C flavored. I have spent this year at Tri-C. I took Trig in the spring (aced it). I took calculus I in the summer (did ok and landed a C, not bad for working full time and sitting in a calc class for 3+ hours twice a week). Now it is calculus II, at the Metro campus. The commute isn’t as bad as Parma, but not as nice as the five minutes it took to get … Continue reading School
We’re building cantennas in class so here’s a list of links I’ve found which have seem handy:
Here is my adventures wardriving. These will take a while to load:
Wardriving on 77 – Pictures from scanning the U. Akron Exchange parking deck
Wardriving on Rt 8
Wardriving on Rt 8 using a cantenna – Rather interesting to compare these results to teh Rt 8 results. Same path taken using 2 different antennas and some rather different results. The Rt 8 trip was from using an omni antenna and it did a great job picking up everything in the local area. The cantenna seems to be able to pick up APs at a greater range, although when you’re driving, its tough to get it pointed in all directions at the same time, so if its pointed left, it may miss what is out on the right.
Continue reading “Cantenna links”
I scored an A in the database management class. I must have done ok on the final and the 2nd project. Kinda curious what grades I got. Oh well.
The class was very handy. It already helped with some queries I had at work. Its nice to know the theories behind the madness.
I would be tempted to post the 2nd program, but it requires too much, I think, to make it run (MS SQL, plus the schema and data, plus the application, plus .NET v2 runtime). Maybe later I’ll post the code. If I don’t, its because it was my first C# app and its probably not the best way to implement what I implemented.
Continue reading “The conclusion of the Database Management class”
I’ve updated the info in the school page. All the DSA2 programs and their source have been linked. Plus, I’ve updated my course list (only about 13 more classes to go).
Continue reading “School page updated”
I think I survived it! I walked into class with a 93% and walked out with a 97%. This doesn’t take into account the final exam I just took. I think the exam went ok. There were a few questions I know I got wrong, a few I know I got right, and a few I’m not sure about.
I got the Adventure program back. Scored 105 points out of 100! Everything in the program had worked. And if you don’t mind, I wanna quote the comments:
Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm: “Very elegantly written – especially for someone who didn’t start as a Java programmer! You used Java methods extremely well and intuitively here.”
Documentation: “Incredible! I looked through it very carefully, trying not to bend any pages. I also did not write on any of your code. No reason, to in any event, as your program works perfectly. (+5)”
Other: “Just an overall very professional job and good code.”
Me: Whoa!
Continue reading “DSA2 is OVER!”
The last program for DSA2 is now done. The program works (hopefully to the way the prof wants it). The documentation ended up filling a 1″ standard binder (I tried and a 1/2″ binder wasn’t going to cut it!). I’ll post the code probably after tomorrow. I think I have to post code for program 3 too. I’ll get that done too.
Also U. Akron related: The Zips football team won a championship! I talked to several people and they had all given up on the game 2 minutes or so before the end and the Zips managed to turn things around in those last minutes making for an exciting game.
Continue reading “Whew! DSA2 Program 4 Done!”
Russian class is going pretty well. I’ve had a number of one on one classes now. Some of it is getting a bit foggy due to all the word ending changes.
My computer science class has had its ups and downs. I did a great job bombing the last test. My mind was elsewhere for the exam. I think its safe for me to post the code to program 3. I rounded up 6 bonus points on that program. If I heard correctly, my program was the only one to handle all 5 test cases properly. Program 4, the last one of the semester is about done. Its functional and could probably be turned in as is. But I’m going to poke at it and polish it up a bit. This time I documented the snot out of it while WRITING the code, versus last time when I wrote the code and then went back to document it (that sucked).
I’m working on testing out of Applied Internet programming. The paperwork has all the needed signatures, I just need to pay up and take the exams.
Continue reading “School – status update”
Whoo-hoo! I’m working on the last programming assignment for DSA2. It can be found here: Adventure.doc (its a Word file).
Its a pretty involved program. I’ve been working on it for some time now. I think I’m building the graph properly and the debug output makes sense. I think I’ve sorted out the GUI to the way I wanted it (nothing fancy – in fact, its a bit retro). The only thing that worries me is implementing Dijkstra’s Shortest Path algorithm. (Think I’m going to take another look at it to get clues if I built my graph right or not.)
Continue reading “Last programming assignment for DSA2”
For the UACSC web dev team, I’ve installed the forum here: http://www.rsbauer.com/phpBB2/ The discussion will be geared towards getting the club’s website up and running and hopefully learning some tricks along the way.
She put up with learning about binary search trees so she could go swimming at the U. Akron pool. The material gets pretty dry, but the class itself was entertaining.
Turns out one guy managed to persuade his phone to run my J2ME slicing floor plan project. Only problem was I had hardcoded the screen width and height because the display class didn’t have a way to identify the available screen pixels. Another check today and I see the form and canvas classes both have a way to get the width and height. I put together a quick fix and it tested ok on my Nokia emulator.
Swimming was a blast. We went up and down the lazy river (its a lot harder to go upstream!). We did a couple loops in the whirl pool and then shot soom hoops. Then we gave up on playing hoops and just played catch instead. Then Olessia went and did some laps in one of the swim lanes. It was very refreshing…
Continue reading “Olessia attends my DSA2 class”
The University of Akron’s computer science club has been invited to compete at Case’s Engineers Week in the Lego robot competition. They normally compete against high school kids, but in 2006, they have invited the local area colleges to come in and compete as well. Trick is Case has Lego kits. Each team gets the same exact kit and has to build a robot which searches for a light source. Once found, it must go to the light source to score a point. Two robots go at it at a time. Another trick is we don’t have ANY of the robot gear Case has. All our testing and development will be based on wild guessing. Later on, we’ll get a couple hours to play with the equipment and then we’ll build on the day of the event. Oh yeah, the gear they’re using had cost $800 back in the day. Today, you can’t get it and what you can get costs $400. Its cool stuff, but out of all of our budgets.
After talking with a friend of mine who graduated from Case, I’m thinking we don’t stand much of a chance. They’ve been doing the robot thing on some level for probably at least a decade. Akron? I think they JUST started offering a robot course not too long ago.
The cool part is I think I have some tools for figuring out the light sensing (anyone remember back when I had wired up my apartment?). We need to be able to measure light, identify the location of the light and instruct hardware to move towards it. Doesn’t sound too bad, but the arena will not be perfectly dark and we have to be able to lock onto an 80 watt and 20 watt bulb (if I’m remembering correctly).
Continue reading “U. Akron invited to compete at Case”
J2ME (Java 2 for mobile) has had me curious. I have a J2ME friendly phone. I’m doing Java in DSA2. It can’t be that hard to write something for the phone, can it?
Turns out it really isn’t too bad. The bugger of it is fiddling with the right mix of software development kits and Eclipse’s Java settings. The other fun part is figuring out which SDK matches with the Nokia 6600 phone (for those wondering, its Series 60, v2 FP1 (feature pack 1)). I lost a good amount of time just trying to figure that one out.
But the development process wasn’t too bad once Eclipse was setup to compile and package. I haven’t mastered the art of persuading the emulator to run from the “run program” button, but I found I can use Nokia’s Eclipse add-on buttons to run the emulator from there.
The last thing to try was to actually write something to run on the phone. What better test than the current programming assignment (due this coming Monday, but already turned in). I had to water down the code since the phone lacks a lot of the features the desktop edition of Java has. Once I put together the interface, the rest of the Java class files just dropped right in with a little bit of tweaking here and there. Here’s some screen shots of the Slicing Floor Plan from my 6600:
The config screen – specify the plan here:
The drawing of the binary tree:
The drawing of the floor plan:
Feel free to browse the code. I don’t know if it’ll work on other J2ME gadgets. If it does, great!
Just like the desktop edition.
Continue reading “Slicing Floor Plan assignment in J2ME”
The slicing floor plan has been posted on the site. I also posted the code to the Hexagon assignment. All of it can be found under the Data Structures 2 section.
Duh.
I remember using U. Akron’s dialup to ditch AOL dialup back in the day. I also remember using UA when I was in a jam at a network client site and needed a driver for something.
Now, I’m able to use the UA dialup numbers to allow me to go mobile and maintain a ‘net connection when wifi isn’t available (*cough* Tri-C). I just persuade my notebook to talk to my cell phone and have it dial out. This solves the problem of getting stuck with T-Mobile’s Internet plan for $20 a month (ouch).
One setback (not counting the fact its a low speed connection): the UA dialup account is only good for when you’re a current student. Good motivation to keep taking classes, right? This is one of those “you know you’re a geek when…”
Continue reading “I forgot. UA still has dialup access”
The University of Akron is considered the THIRD most wireless college in the US. It was beat out by Ball University and Western Michigan University. I’m surprised to see Case at number 8. Although, they do have super crazy high speed ‘net access over there which I doubt is wireless friendly.
Most Unwired College Campuses Survey
Continue reading “University of Akron is Pretty Wireless”
I’ve posted my Java assignments. You can find them on the school page (scroll down to Data Structures and Algorithms 2). I’ll post them as I complete them. For safety though, I won’t post the code to an assignment until after its been graded.
The hexagon fractal assignment was rather fun. Learning Java Swing wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Figuring out how to draw in a JPanel took a little bit of work (as I learned, simply drawing on the canvas is sort of a no-no since Swing components will overwrite the canvas every time). You’ll need Java 1.5.0 installed for the applet to work.
Continue reading “Java assignments posted”
Olessia and I were invited by my Russian prof to come in and speak to two classes. Olessia showed pictures when she was in Moscow this year as well as pictures her sister took in Siberia (there’s new pictures in this album as of last week).
The Moscow pics were great. People really enjoyed the TGI Fridays pics. The Siberia pics were great. There were a lot of “oohs and ahs” from the audience. We worked on reading some of the signs. We learned a little bit about the largest fresh water lake in the world. It was great stuff (and I learned a bit too!). Plus, it was great saying the pictures displayed nice and big taking up a good part of the classroom wall.
Its понедельник (Monday) and its going to probably be another busy week of work and school. I have some other news which I’ll post later which will explain the delay in getting the news up on the site…
Continue reading “Olessia gives Russia Presentation”