Checksum Arcanius

Well, last night was all-nighter #2. I struggled at time during the day, but now I seem to be rather awake, and I just finished my computational biology project with an hour and a half to spare!

Hopefully I’ll be able to get a little ahead of the wave and surf rather than my current state constantly almost drowning. Probably this means WoW and life will be put on hold for a few weeks.

This should be the last hardcore quarter, though — both of my Bioengineering petitions were approved, which means, as soon I as get credit for my Neural Engineering class and finish up my capstone, I will have no more Bioengineering classes left that I have to take. I repeat, after this quarter, I have no more Bioengineering classes left to take.

All that being said, I may still end up taking (or at least attending) Synthetic Biology, because it sounds like it might be a cool class.

That, and the CSE capstone. Maybe EE 233. And another CSE elective too, perhaps? Hm, maybe Spring will be intense too?

Every once in a while I read a paper that makes me think the social sciences are not entirely lost. The most recent, by an FSU professor is titled “Is There Anything Good About Men?” Definitely a thought-provoking read.

While my pre-game prediction of Giants 0, Patriots -21 (thats negative 21) didn’t pan out, the result was good enough to make me smile — I was pretty tired of hearing about the perfect Patriots. And this way, I don’t have to boycott the NFL for a year (as I said I would had the Patriots won).

To top it off, the game itself was thrilling, with a spetacular fourth quarter, and I was able to watch it with good friends, great food (including some killer Guacamole), and a fun atmosphere.

Progress on WoW has slowed significantly since the early days, but this morning saw a significant advancement. Logins are now supported on Facebook as well as Bebo. From the log:

FYI, LithiumPolymer is my main Warbook account.

This is especially nice because it will allow me to do things like this:

p = Player('LithiumPolymer')
p.land.allocate_to_state({'training grounds': 0, 'forts': 0, 'mines': 1, 'amplifiers': 0, 'barriers': 0, 'barracks': 0})

To reallocate all of my land to mines. Currently, this takes about 30 mouse clicks and about 4 minutes. It can now be done in about 10 seconds — and all of that time is server latency.

Sure, I expected all-nighters, just not this early in the quarter.

I must become more efficient during the week-ends, I guess.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted to the effect, but I was turned off to the iTunes music store as soon as they upgraded their DRM, breaking the tool I was using that allowed me to continue using my music player of preference, foobar2000.

In conversations since then, I have always maintained that I would become a music consumer once again as soon as I found a store that would sell me the music I wanted without the stupid (breakable) strings attached that came with other services. For example, it would have been easy enough to burn my iTunes music to a CD, and then rip it using EAC and encode it with LAME, but that required work that I didn’t have to do if I just typed a name into eMule and downloaded the song in a few minutes.

I am happy to announce that I have recently discovered the store that I was looking for, and to find it I didn’t have to go very far. Local retail powerhouse Amazon.com has introduced high-quality DRM-free MP3s at a reasonable price at the Amazon MP3 Store. I am once again a music consumer. See, music industry, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

The right tool makes any job easy. Thats why I like posting about when I find the perfect tool for a job. In this case, I was testing out a serial translator program I wrote yesterday for a former coworker. The program I wrote takes in one stream of bytes from one com port and outputs another, translated stream of bytes to another com port.

To avoid using three computers and two cables for testing, I needed to connect two virtual com ports to each other on one computer. Com0Com to the rescue!

It installed quickly and painlessly, was intuitive and easy to use, and did exactly what I needed. I input characters using a terminal emulator to one virtual com port, and they magically came out of the virtually connected com port, then went through my program, and out a real com port to my laptop, which saw the translated stream just as expected.