So, I utterly fail at keeping my blog up to date over the time period when I had a decent amount of time. My break mostly consisted of either hacking on the bottleneck assignment problem solver (I’ve transitioned to a C++ based one from Python), trying to get my newly minted academic application system framework to a version 0.1, sleeping, and slacking off. The time off was nice, but I need more of it without the drop in productivity that comes with going home.

In other news, I’ll be trying to clear out my old draft posts, update my zenphoto to include various reprap photos (soldered up 12 opto endstops yesterday: just need to pump out some 46 aluminum parts in a month), and finish this E/M take home test. I’ll be around.

So I didn’t get around to updating last night before going to bed at 3:30, but I’m getting around to it now. You should notice the site overhaul: I still have a garish gimp flame-plugin thing, but I needed some green, and making something by hand just wasn’t working out. The color scheme is based on brown, just because it is? I tried it out, and it worked, so I ran with it. Also, I brought back the side bar.

More important news: it is spring break for me! It’s partly why I spent an afternoon screwing around with my blog style, and I hope that I’ll get a load of things done this week ‘round. As I said before, I’ll hope to grab pretty much everything else that I’ll need to finish the reprap before the heat death of the universe, and if certain professors are around, I’ll stick around and cut some more parts. That in itself would be a pretty good use of my break, but I’ll also be looking at describing and improving my algorithm for the BAP problem I’ve been talking about: keeping people in the dark about what I’m talking about is no fun. I’ll also clear out my old list of draft posts, make up/set up an image manager that isn’t crappy, and work on EZLO. On top of this, I do need to finish the homework profs have assigned over the break, finish applying to REUs, and save the world. Oh, and anim3 needs some serious work.

Well, I think it’s about time to get started on these things. Stay tuned.

So, I figured that I would just update everyone on exactly how I’m throwing my life away. First and foremost, I finished another set of reprap parts, this time the z-axis support brackets. If I can move it along, and my partner in crime joins in, then we’ll have these parts made in no time. Now, I won’t have access to the machine shop for the next week, so implementation will halt for a while. That’s not such a bad thing, since I need to get everything else caught up with the machining. I have plastic, and a bunch of bare pcbs, but no bearings or even a guarantee that we have the rods we need, nor any of the SMD parts we need to solder to the pcbs; heck, I’m not even sure how we’re going to do the extruder, especially since swighton (originator of the extruder design) doesn’t have a good extruder either. If we’re going to finish this by the end of March (highly optimistic, and probably not possible if I want to keep all of my limbs) then I’ll need to really step up the rest of the parts of the projects, which dovetails with the presence of a spring break! Now, it’s almost time to go out with friends and hit the town, so I’ll leave more thoughts for later.

Well!

Today, I’ve touched on cython, python profiling, and numpy. Guess who’s wrangling with number intensive code? I’m still working on the bap problem, although I’ve gotten it speedier: not quite speedy enough, though. The guys from 40 years ago are probably still beating me. Hopefully, I have time to write this up so everyone is a bit less confused, although this is unlikely.

Things to do:

• Homework up the wazzoo!
• Reprap research: round out what we need in terms of electronics, and what we need, period.

So why haven’t I been updating? I like to think that the MCM has irrevocably killed my schedule, but it really ain’t that: life’s just catching up to me over and over again. It’s really annoying. I’ve had viral gastroenteritis (using the power of google, you too can self-diagnose when things go horribly wrong with yourself!), otherwise known as stomach flu, for the last few days, and that just killed my productivity on Wednesday. Shoopdoowap, so that just means I stay up for a night or two. I’m over it now, thought, so that’s one good thing.

Another good thing is the fact that we’ve finally cut our first aluminum reprap part. I finally found an extended period of time when one of the profs and I were both relatively free, and whacked out a z-axis bracket.  It is very rewarding, since I’ve been trying very hard to get to this moment for more than 2 weeks (maybe more like 4). First tutorial in the metal shop was enlightening. If I can help it, we’ll whack out parts at a faster rate. I might have to wake up earlier to do so consistently, which might be an very difficult thing to do. But nonetheless, an exciting moment in the history of UPS’s reprap project.

And one bad thing to wrap up the first half of my Friday: well, I’ve gotten my first D on a math test in a very long time, dare I say ever? Really, if I can’t do math, then I might as well get myself a lobotomy or something. The cloud cover is made of mile-thick lead while the sun is going supernova, I think is a very apt description of these things.

The MCM went alright. We better do well, or we’re gonna have a disowned team mate.

More later tonight.

Hi. The MCM starts in 2 days.

I have to finish a paper and a bunch of lab questions before then, and I want to do at least one run through with my talk on maglev trains (as well as hacking S5 to auto-advance ala ignite), run at least one reprap part into existence, find if we can do etching cheaply, start the E/M test, and talk to a prof about what sort of equation I should use in a feedback loop.

Whew.

So with all of this to do, I took 3.5 hours off and coded up a framework for a problem posed by my prof that could have been a potential summer research topic: looking at the bottleneck assignment problem, what’s the relationship of n and the probability distribution used to assign weights to the assignments? If you are terribly lost, and I manage to do some work on this after the MCM, then I’ll post an update. Point is, I’m code deprived or something, and I just finished something I thought would take me at least a week, which shows me just how good my estimation abilities are (off).

And updating wordpress isn’t such a lark: I gotta do backups? Hell, gotta wrap this stuff up into a script