So, I’ve had some ups and downs in the 2 weeks since school ended. I’ll be focusing on one particular thing, which is the distributed computing cluster me and a friend set up to crunch through solutions to the optimization problem I’ve been looking at.

Well, you may be thinking, you have a computing cluster? In that case, man, you’ve got it made! The sky’s the limit when you’ve got a computing cluster! Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but having a whole lot of computing power behind you makes solving certain problems easier or just plain out possible. In this case, having a bunch of cpu time crunching on this optimization problem makes it tangible study in depth.

So, a certain very good friend of mine heard that I was looking for computing time, and since he worked for a branch of his university’s IT department, he knew that a certain computer lab would go unused for most of the summer. So I whipped up some customized live cd’s that would be devoted to solving these problems, along with a distributed computing system to tie everything together (part of why I got this domain in short notice) and we filled up the lab with systems running off the live cds. For a few short glorious days, I had over 100 cores crunching numbers for me: it’s a great feeling to wake up and have a job that would’ve taken a month with one dual core computer finish overnight.

Then, some of the other IT guys stumbled into the lab looking to play some games, and failing to closely read the friendly note I had left on every computer in the lab, proceeded to freak out and raise a pretty good shit storm over it. Looking back, we could’ve prepared better for this, by at least telling the IT people with access to the closed down lab that we were up to something in there. In our defense, though, we didn’t think that people would be dumb enough to freak out about it (which was a mistake on our part: sometimes, you just have to assume that people are insane. To be honest, I’m glad I’m learning it now rather than later). At one point we were afraid that my friend would get fired, but all they did was close down the majority of the cluster, and now I’m back to having some 20 odd cores at my disposal. It’ll get done eventually, but it’ll take a bit longer.

So what’s the point of this little story, other than you should prepare for unforeseen consequences? There isn’t one, but it got me thinking about something that I’ve been wondering about. Your usual university might have a dedicated research cluster, but most of the smaller ones don’t have a one. However, all universities (the ones I’m familiar with, at any rate) have at least a few computer labs, all with non-ancient hardware. Most people use those computers at sane hours, or if at insane hours, then they’re usually there by the time insane hours start.

I’ve never gotten why no one has tried to tie together all the labs as a giant cluster, but one that only functions at night. If there aren’t any jobs, then the cluster shuts down like it’s supposed to: if there are jobs, then they crunch through them until it’s time for the lab to open, and then the cluster shuts down and becomes a normal terminal-ish thing. That way, smaller universities have an appreciable amount of computing power on hand, in house. That would be cool.

There’s plenty of  objections to this sort of scheme, with security, cost, and maintenance topping the list of concerns that I can make off the top of my head. However, so far, it’s just an idea I’m tossing out there, mind candy to kick around and think about when you can’t sleep. Like all the other ideas bouncing around in my head, we’ll see where it goes.

Two-fer-one night!

Status: I’m finally home.

—

Home.

You should be happy you’re home.

That’s what they said.

That’s what they all said.

They never had to come home to empty cities.

Empty streets.

Empty building.

Empty people.

He had to fight.

Fight a war.

All by himself.

Well, that wasn’t true.

The leeks were good fighters, but terrible leaders.

They needed a leader.

He led them into battle.

He won every battle except the one that mattered the most to him.

He lost Earth.

The leeks didn’t know what the enemy did to their conquered worlds.

They had never regained a world from the enemy before.

After victory was assured, he took back Earth.

And now he was home.

Except home wasn’t home.

People had become automatons.

They looked better, the cities cleaner as well as the people, their technology advanced, but they had lost their spark.

Why?

How?

The last enemy had been extinguished: they couldn’t be asked.

He tried asking his people what had happened during the invasion.

They told him about an industrial revolution.

Then the computing revolution.

Then the biotech revolution.

Then the bionic revolution following on it’s heels.

It was clear, then.

The enemy just had to teach.

The leeks invaded on his command, and he watched from the top floor of his abandonded farmhouse as fire poured from heaven.

After half an hour, he called the leeks off.

Except for one ship.

No more dusty farmhouse.

No more conquerer.

No more genocide.

No more.

No.

“You’re what?”

“Yeah, I’m a dream chaser. It’s my 9 to 5, you know.” Wiry smile.

“Never would’ve thought you the type to go chasing dreams. What gives?”

“You know me, I was always the deranged romantic,” he said with a bit of a smile. Of course, that wasn’t the real reason: he hadn’t cared much for romance or romantic ideals since the last war reduced all human or quasi-human populations below 1 percent their pre-war levels. Dream chasing was merely something that paid the bills, and was one of the jobs that the bots flat out couldn’t do. More humans would chase dreams, but most people couldn’t handle the crushing loneliness in between pulls. So they mostly di

A pebble glanced off his viewport, bringing him out of his temporary reverie. A pretty big scratch for a tiny pebble: must’ve been going almost half the speed of light. He must be close to his target asteroid.

“Hey, Jim, I’m coming up on a strike. You know how hard catching dreams…”

“Yup, haven’t forgotten. Hey, we have to catch up over drinks later. I’ll talk to you later.”

The com snapped off, and he pointed his craft directly towards the dark spot in the middle of his view port, an interstellar asteroid framed by the brilliance of a galaxy full of stars. Lonely asteroids like this one were one of the few objects in the galaxy that still had appreciable amounts of dreams tied up into them: no one realized that dreams even existed until someone noticed they couldn’t colonize the alien planets after the war. They could slap down terraformers and move in cities, but the people would loose their will to power and entire planets would become slums, with people fleeing as quickly as they could scrape together money for tickets until only an apathetic mass was left. There wasn’t anything physically different about these planets with regards to planets held only by humans, so the social scientists had a field day trying to explain the phenomenon until one of them pointed out similar conditions developing on the original planet, Earth. We knew where we came from, but it still shocked us that Earth, once the hub of technology and culture, had degraded to such a level for no apparent reason: we were fully aware of the folly of the Americans and the Romans, and Earth was designed to not fall to the same effect.

But fall it did: then someone discovered dreams, and all became clear: we had used up all our dreams on Earth during our long stay there, and the aliens had used all of theirs, which played a role in how we handily defeated them. For 100 years, we put our best scientists and artists on new worlds, where dreams were abundant, and prospered.

For 100 years.

Then the wars happened, wars over the shortage of dreams. We were running out of planets in the galaxy, and the next galaxy over was farther than any of us could travel, then. Once someone found out how to extract dreams, armies sprung back into vouge, with planets invading other planets to stage massive dream mining operations. Then, the sentient bots rose up and started the last war, which was fought 10,000 years ago, when I lost my…

A firm thunk resonanted through his craft: he had surprisingly subconciously guided it into the asteroid. Well, 6000 years of doing the same task over and over was bound to build in some muscle memory. He flipped the switch to start the dream extraction process, and sat back.

Bots cared nothing for dreams, or almost anything human for that matter. If you couldn’t pay the bills, then you died. In the end, defeating death didn’t matter if you were too poor to buy food, and the bots outperformed the humans in all jobs. What was left of humanity died in droves, unable to find jobs alongside the bots, until only those with fat savings accounts were left. Those, and the people with the gall to chase dreams to sell to the rich. Silicon didn’t have the knack for finding dreams, so humanity still had something to keep itself occupied.

A soft beep announced the completion of the dream extraction. Not too many dreams in this pull, but he’d seen worse. He pulled the craft away from the asteroid, and pointed his craft back the way he came. With any luck, Jim would get back from chasing dreams at the same time, and they could hopefully both find buyers. Most of the young ones had already died as paupers, buying up too many dreams at the start. The older ones drove a mean deal, and hoarded their dreams, but they were the only ones left buying.

Which reminds me, he thought…

“Hey, Jim.”

“Hey, two coms in 10 minutes! And before that, what, it was one com in the past 7000 years?”

“Yeah, right.” It was true. “Listen, are you headed back to Solaris? I’m thinking about heading back there with this…”

“About that…”

Wait, what?

“Sorry, kid, I’ve had enough of this. I’ve been on Solaris for the past month, looking for a buyer. Couldn’t find one human in this mess, and we know it’s the best place to find em. I’m done.”

“Wait wait wait”

“I’m waiting, kid. I’ll be gone before you get here, though. Figured it out: I’m gonna overdose on dreams and go out with a bang.”

You could do that?

“Heard about someone that did that once, way back when. Guess it couldn’t hurt.”

“What about trying to hop galaxies?” Some people had struck out for another galaxy back before the war, and some more tried after it. He had heard about a desperate dream chaser that had struck out 100 years ago…

“Nah, I’m done. Couldn’t scrape up a craft that could make the distance, with the money I have now. In fact, my rent’s gonna run out in 23 minutes. Listen, kid, don’t worry about me. I’m gonna try to find some food, and the bots will have everything cleaned up in no time.”

Moments hang.

“Goodbye.”

“Yup, goodbye. Best of luck ta ya, kid.”

The com snaps off.

He stared out the port, blinking into the face of a billion unblinking stars staring back. He turned up the throttle and

Well, I finally got moved into an actual server. Hopefully I get to stick around!

Edit: Oh, and the site is a LOT snappier, even when it’s in a completely different location.

Sorry about the broad title: I’m going to be talking about a whole lot of things.

First things first, I’m almost done with this iteration of the academic school year! Exciting.

The metal reprap is coming along: it’s coming along at a good clip, but man, if it makes it, it’s gonna be close. I have a week-ish left, while finals are going on. It is going to be interesting: unfortunately, I don’t have any money, and I can’t get belts or extruder parts. So, definitely can’t finish-finish, but I already knew that was going to happen… right?

I noticed, a few weeks ago, just how much the school’s library touch-screen kiosk sucked. So, I decided that I would whip up a new design for it, and it turns out that thinking about how to design for touch-screen interfaces is an interesting exercise. Plus, it’s fun to throw around huge buttons. We’ll see what happens with that: I doubt they can pay me to finish it up, especially since there’s people in place to maintain these sorts of things.

Working on that project, I’ve noticed that my design skills suck. I mean, look at the current design for EZLO: it really, really sucks. Which leads me to my next bit of news: some other guys have come up with a new way to do online-latex, latex-labs. Hell, there’s something called scribtex, too. The difference is, they (latex-labs) are basing their project off google docs, where a google docs style latex editor was one of my project objectives, and they have a much better interface. Hell, they don’t even consider monkeytex, much less EZLO, to be a true competitor. So, I might be done with EZLO: I just don’t have time for it (this last year, I’ve put oh-so-little time into it), and other people are starting to fill in the gaps. I’ve scratched my itch, and it got me through a couple years. So, what’ll I do? I’m not sure at this point in time: latex-labs might need another dev to help out, even if it’s sporadic and not always so-helpful help. Or, maybe I’ll rewrite EZLO, and try harder to offer a competitive alternative. Or, I’ll pull it from the server and let it die, and go work on other things. What to do, what to do…

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here: since then, I’ve switched to being a comp eng major, got my financial aid stuff, and am probably going to Columbia. Fun times.

However, it’s the first time that I’ve really felt the weight of the cost of my schooling. For some reason, I’ve never realized just how much $10,000 was worth (much less $20,000, or $30,000). It’s amazing that I consented to go to college with the costs as high as they are: I can understand why I did, but man, it’s just so much money. The cumulative spent could have been good seed money for a startup. I could buy 10 makerbots with $10,000. I could have an impact on billions of people with that much money. Of course, I don’t know how to do it: I just think it’s possible. The point is, I think I have a better handle on how enormous the amount of university tuition feels.

The upside is that I now really understand why scholarships are a good thing: having in mind just how much tuition I have to pay has changed my mindset from “scholarships are cool, but they’re not worth my time” to “why yes, my time is worth a few hundred dollars per hour (if I spend a day on an essay for a $1000 prize)”. It’s a wonder how I’ve gotten through most of college without realizing this.

For something completely different, I’ve cut less than 5 parts in two weeks for the reprap (or, it feels like it). I put together the electronics, only to find that I had some missing parts; after ordering those, I found that I was missing a few more, which I haven’t ordered yet. For some reason, the desoldering braid I have isn’t wicking very well, and I can’t get the wrong trimpots off my board. Then, just today, I burned my extruder board while trying to smd solder a voltage regulator onto the board. Apparently, either coins don’t work at conducting heat, or a thin air space doesn’t insulate very well. Or something else went wrong… at any rate, my life would be considerably simpler with a heatgun. I also need to figure out how to salvage a burnt pcb, but seeing as I also melted a button onto the board, it might be better to desoldering everything and then put it on a new board. No, I really don’t want to source all the components again, although I guess I could use the extra atmega168 I got, then.

Once you add in school, then it’s no wonder that I’m ready to be done… I’ve stopped worrying about whether the reprap will get finished before the end of school, because it won’t be. Now, it’s just a matter of making sure I get as much stuff done before I leave, so that whoever picks it up next year can do it without too much resilience; particularly, an extruder should get stuck together, or something resembling one. That, and obtaining a set of mini-mendel parts is my new reprap goal.

Presentation tomorrow, 2 tests due Monday, project due Tuesday: I guess I’ll go to sleep as soon as this banana bread finishes baking.

Good night, world. Sleep tight.

So, it turns out that I didn’t get into Columbia’s Comp Eng program, but the EE program. I must have chickened out at the very at minute when applying and changed my major. When I look at what EE’s do for a living, though, I’m more and more convinced that it’s not what I want to do, and that while I could just do EE and take the cards life hands me after graduation, I would rather do Comp Eng. I think some emails to the Comp Eng department at Columbia are in order, although it might take some more finger crossing and pig sacrifices to get myself into the program.

When I lay awake at night, I (sometimes) think about the reprap. Again, I don’t think I’m going to finish it, and I’m getting more certain every day. I have 2.5 weeks of school left, and almost exactly 4 weeks until break really starts. Will my professors be around after then? Who knows? Can I finish an extruder, or even two? Who knows? Can my partner finish this on his own? Can I even finish soldering all the electronics together? Can I recoup the costs of putting a double order of electronics in (the school needs some results by next week, or they can’t reimburse me for this year)? Where can I find a tooling ball, and find someone that knows how to use one? If I started cutting, really cutting, at the very beginning of the semester, would I be done by now? I’m worrying about these things, and I can’t seem to forget them. I really want this to get into a working state, as kind of a validation of the force of my own will. At least, I’m guessing that ‘s why I’m so concerned about this.

So, I better find out how to cut those corner brackets with or without tooling balls, and get myself a hotplate so I can start soldering smd components once the digikey parts come in.

And then, there’s everything else. I was reminded of all of it when my friend asked me, first, how to program: after trying to figure out why a microbiologist wanted to program, he told me he wanted to animate something. He has a ways to go, but so do I: god, everything that I want to do is on hold, and it’s bothering me. It’s making life harder than it needs to be…

Anyways, time to stop complaining and time to do homework.

First, I got into USC’s combined plan program.

Second, I got into Columbia’s combined plan program.

Third, PROFIT!!!!!!! (or extreme dancing)

I’m pretty stoked right about now. I don’t have to go to USC, and I got into Columbia’s combined plan program for computer engineering (rather than the saner choice of electrical engineering).

The only problem is that Columbia has the power to force me to take another programming course, since I haven’t taken a computer science course at UPS (really, optimization and discrete mathematics don’t count). This may or may not interfere with my research at calpoly: I hope it doesn’t, but I’ll need to send a bunch of emails and sort it out.

Well, here’s to things working out.

I got into Cal Poly’s Robotics REU program!

I’ll say it again!

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Damn, I’m happy. Happier than winning the MCM (which is saying something). The MCM took only 4 days out of my life: this is going to put me in California, working with robots, for an entire summer. I’ll say it again.

God DAMN I’m happy.

Now it’s time to finish this lab so I can work on my reprap the rest of the week!

So… life.

The reprap project is on the ropes: I spent a week cutting around getting 3.5 parts done. I have maybe 4-7 weeks left to finish it: the math just does not add up. My project partner is MIA, and Digikey is holding up my order for some reason, perhaps because I ordered a bunch of cable to be custom cut. At any rate, I still have some of the harder parts to cut ahead of me, and the homework is not going to let up from here to the end of school. I haven’t even started with the extruder, which is going to be a pain in the butt by all indications.

My god, this thing just isn’t going to live.

And while I’m trying to make this work, I’m ditching pretty much every other project that I’ve cared about; all the art, all the music, all the code. Maybe it’s just the late-night super-hot pho talking, but I’m despairing: not terribly hard, but it’s a notable local minimum.

Also, I’ve been rejected from almost every REU program I applied to. I’m not sure what I’m going to do this summer if this falls through: I was banking on getting a good REU (not just ‘any’ REU), so I haven’t looked into doing things elsewhere. What’s for certain is that I can’t let myself stay at home again (and my dad won’t let me just stay at home, either). Self-motivating is extremely difficult, even more so when I happen to be at home, which seems to introduce a whole new level of laziness. I just can’t let myself spend 2 months working on a single algorithm again…

Finally, all my applications for continuing my education are still up in the air.

I’m kind of stressed. My optimization mid-term also just got turned in today, and I need to get a perfect score on it if I want a reasonable chance at making a good score in the class.

Anyways, time to sleep it all off and start a new day.