Anyway, I just wanted to make a list of things to install. It’s smaller and less heavier than mine and has ~120GB of free space.

Things to install:

-Windows 7 Home Basic
-Microsoft Office
-Visual Studio 2010 Professional Student Ed.
-Ubuntu
-Maybe Debian

And thus I have a laptop I can take to uni without much hassle

I really don’t need anything newer than my Nokia E71.

And besides fiddling a bit with emulators, I haven’t really played many videogames since starting the new semester.

Talking of emulators, I got dolphin working on my PC. It’s a Core duo 2 so it isn’t really much, but it worked and I played Pokemon XD for 15 minutes before deciding it was crap.

Still, if you’re looking for a GC and Wii emulator, try it out. It isn’t very demanding since my crap PC was able to run.

I mentioned before maybe here or twitter(both maybe) that I will start C# + XNA. I decided not to do that. I figure I still need to sharpen some of my programming knowledge. I only read halfway through Ivan Horton’s Beginning Visual C++ 2010 before I decided that I know enough to get through my first programming course(and before college decided to consume all my time).

Then I’m going back to the basics a bit. However this time with another book: Bjarne Stroustrup’s Programming Principles and Practices.
So far I’ve read a bit more than a 100 pages. They were enjoyable and reminded me of a few things I forgot(yeah, I haven’t been programming a lot lately – only dreaming about it).

It’s quite a thick book but I’m gonna go through it for now. After that I’m going through Ivan Horton’s Beginning Visual C++ 2010 just so I have a book that helps me get acclimatized to the .NET Framework. Then I’ll start going through Microsoft’s own documentation. After that maybe C# and XNA. Hopefully this semester isn’t as time consuming as the last.

Other stuff:

-Reading Dune: Only 13 pages in. So I can’t judge it really.

-Playing Dragon Age:Origins: My “serious” game to beat this time. Enjoying it so far. Story is generic fantasy-fare. Fun and simple. I’m a mage playing on easy. Hard and challenges do not interest me anymore. I don’t know honestly what I find fun about this game. The battle system is not that great, nor the story, the “choices” are laughable(it’s Bioware, so that’s a given). BUT I just enjoy running the game and playing to chillax. I guess that’s it. After this, I’m starting Red Dead Redemption. Man, I’m so late to this generation of gaming.

Also, screw NFS:Hot Pursuit. I”m playing Forza 3. So so so so much better. But I never liked arcade racers anyway. meh.

-And applying to become a Microsoft Student Partner. There are some criteria that I don’t fit. I hope they at least accept enthusiastic ones. Gonna try either way. What’s going to hurt me if I do? I don’t have my hopes up, so lets go!

I think I will put a review up for Bjarne’s Stroustrup’s book later on if people are interested. But so far it’s a 5/5.

Now what?

Finals.

I have one coming this Saturday(Discrete Mathematics). Then another on Monday(Electric Circuits). After that a week to study for both my Linear Algebra I(Monday 31st) final and Calculus II(Feb 3).

For some reason, everything seems easy from here on. Hope I’m not wrong. I know most of the subjects, at least I think I do. Nothing seems new when I study it. Good sign I guess.

After that, and that’s what I wanted to announce mostly, I’m going serious with C# and XNA programming. Going to do it with C# 3.0 and XNA 3.1. 4.0 only really added Windows Phone 7 functionality.

Woow.

So our software is all done. Only extra things left to do(turn off all lights or let the user input his light sequence). I will look into that I guess. They do bag us extra points and a higher grade is never bad.

As for the proper office model, it’s done. All that’s left is to for them to allow to use the board I’ve never seen of the SPEEDY. Overall, this project was sorta fun.

What I didn’t like is that they didn’t teach us everything with Lab-VIEW, nor were they specific of what they want. I don’t mind the former, however the latter bothers me. It shows a lack of organization from their part. I’ll rant later.

Anyway, happy new year everyone!

What I know though is that we’re supposed to get some wood to build the office. I know the way it’s designed is o have a door and underneath a drawer to put in the Speedy-33 and be able to hide it(as demanded in the project). Everything should go well. I know we’re supposed to also hide the wiring through a double layer for the walls.

I’m not supposed to do much there, since I’m only responsible for the software part(which through some modification by a friend became almost unreadable). I’ll upload it as soon as I’m done with the project. Due I think on the 1/26/2011. eh.

For now, Merry Christmas everyone!.

But now I get the news that I should split it into two VIs, one for the remote site and one for the SPEEDY-33. hmmm…

Ah well, at least I won’t have to spend all Saturday any more.

The problem we’ve come to is it’s really hard to simulate things without access to some variables and Lab_VIEW isn’t very clear about those. For one we’re having a bit of trouble telling our water heater to stay on or off depending on its previous state. The other big problem is making our LEDs go into a disco sequence. It’s fairly easy to do when you’ve got the hardware around(mainly using a sequence structure(really easy). But with the software, I can’t replicate the same object I want to use in different sequences. At least, I can’t figure out how yet to do it with this goddamn language even though it’s really easy with any other language I’ve come to.

That’s where most of our problems lie, Lab-VIEW is supposed to be a really high level. So high, it’s literally graphical. But accessing it seems some facilities which are very trivially accessible and usable in other languages, are hidden here. It’s bothering!

I guess I better start reading a book on how to program with this thing. I only have till Monday. GAH!

The project consists of building a green office – an office that is energy efficient basically. It consists of using Lab-VIEW for the programming(ugh) and the SPEEDY-33(yeah, we kind of have to there) to integrate the software into the hardware.

We already made our proposal. It was mostly a guessing game for what we should be doing. They still haven’t taught us what should be done. Apparently that should be rectified by Tuesday. However I do have a problem with all of this. We are supposed to present a soft demo by next Monday(the 10th). It doesn’t seem like it would take time though. It seems fairly simple. I just hope that our group will be able to finish it since all four of us have also a final two days before it :/

We’ll see. I will probably have to spend a Saturday a college. Kind of excited honestly; this is the first time I really felt like an engineer instead of a science and math student.

And if you want to read our(really) hastily written report here’s a link: http://www.mediafire.com/?n0djxcma1x0ddhd

Hopefully, turnitin.com won’t see this as plagiarism.

We honestly read some papers that were a lot worse and most papers weren’t as good as ours. Hoping for the best.

But why is wordpress such a cluster fuck? I still don’t know where my facebook and twitter links are. I posted my public email and live messenger and they don’t show up anywhere either. And I can’t find a way to change my banner(Passbyer’s blog. Another blog on the whatever). Whatever. If you can help, then that would be appreciated.

EDITs: Just hover over my “gravatar” to see links to facebook and twitter. As for the backloggery link, I dunno.