Grad School

Today, I finished applying to Grad School! I applied to:

University of Washington
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Media Lab)
Carnegie Mellon
Brown
Tufts
Virginia Tech
Georgia Tech

It was not a fun process. It was a lot of repeated data entry, which is really an unnecessary waste of time. I'm glad it is now over.

Winter!

So, this blog sort of died. Whoops!

Anyway, today I found out that I received an Honorable Mention for the CRA Undergraduate Research Award, which is pretty cool.

I have finals, and grad school, and classes, and tons of work.

Summer!

Finally! It is really summer. I finally studied for and took the algorithms test I missed while in the hospital with pneumonia.  After five weeks of not doing algorithms, the test was tricky. It would have gone a lot better if I could have just taken it with everyone else. At least I no longer have school work looming over me.

I also found a marble.

That's all for today.

Program Embedding

My assignment for Programming Languages this week was to embed a programming language inside an existing programming to make it more extensible. We began with the Unix script program and embedded Lua inside of it so that we could use it to complete other actions. the Unix script program is something which records a log of the terminal session while running. In other words, at the end of the session you can read a file which shows all of the actions entered by the user and the output from the terminal.

In general, you can imagine the script file as follows (figures taken from CS131 assignment instructions):

The internal behavior of script can be visualized as:

Finally, we embed a language within script to add functionality:

To complete this process, we had to substantially modify the C source code for script and make it so that we could call functions written in Lua from C and vice versa. The final part of the homework assignment was to do something interesting with the new Lua embedding. One of the things that could be done was to change the way in which information is displayed on the screen. This is what my partner and I decided to do:

For every string that was supposed to be displayed to the user, we went through character by character and added the ansi commands required to change the color and then displayed the newly altered string to the user in the terminal. As you can see in this picture, we began by running the newly compile lscript. All of the text in white is the original color before the embedded code starts running. Then, once the code starts running, everything displayed and everything the user types becomes RAINBOW! As an example, I used cat on the rubric for this assignment so the terminal displayed the rubric in gorgeous colors.

A Shop Called Quest

A few weeks ago a comic book store opened in the village (Claremont). Since then, I have already been to the store at least five times. It is the greatest place ever! My common patronage means that I am getting to know the people that work there. They are all extremely friendly and love talking about comic books. I have been constantly referring other Mudders to the store, to make sure that they get enough business to stay open. It looks like it shouldn't be a problem. Mudd is an incredible place for a comic book store; everyone I mention it to is instantly dying to go there and have a look around.

When we asked for recommendations, they were more than happy to point out various interesting series. Both Carling and Jeb asked for recommendations, with extremely different tastes. Carling got a series called Chew while Jeb got a series called Preacher. Both of them are addicted. I introduced them both to the store on Thursday, and they have both already gone back for seconds.

I am currently working on The Walking Dead. It is an entertaining and extensive series.

One shelf of The Walking Dead

Unfortunately for me, they were entirely out of the second volume of The Walking Dead.  I was really upset because the first one had quite the ending and I needed to know what happens next. One of the people who works there mentioned that they were having a really hard time getting the second one in stock. When I said that I supposed I could buy the second one on Amazon and the rest in the store, the clerk Jason offered to lend me his personal copy of the hard cover vision and put the second one aside for me when it finally comes in stock. He brought the book in the next day for me to pick up (in the middle below). Their friendliness and dedication is wonderful and I love to give them my support!

Here is what I ended up picking up from the store today:

The third volume of The Walking Dead, the hardcover version of The Walking
Dead containing volume 2 (from Jason) , and Batman: Hush

Early Easter

Today I got an adorable Easter basket from the Easter Bunny! Here is a look at some of the goodies inside:

A cute Easter bunny in the basket.
You can seem some of the delicious candy beneath the green!

There was a lot of nice Confectionery candy inside as well as this mystery egg!

This is the inside of the mystery egg!

Weird Lizard

When I was walking back from the library today, I saw this really weird lizard on the path. He is pretty different from what I normally see around here. He was not at all afraid of me, I was able to get up really close to take the picture of him.

I sent an email to the professor with whom I had Lizard Lab last year, Professor Stephen Adolph. He replied with the following:

"It's an alligator lizard (Elgaria multicarinata). They are the second most common lizard on campus (after the fence lizard). I had a pet alligator lizard for about 5 years and it loved to eat spiders. They are good biters."

Knife Flipping and Light Painting

Pat and I did a few Knife Flipping Light Painting tests today with the test supplies I bought at the store today. We wanted to see the difference between clear and diffused LEDs for this type of project, and the differences were huge! We both really liked the results so we are excited for the other colors to arrive in the mail early next week!

A single, clear LED for 20 sec at ISO-500

A single, diffused LED for 20 sec at ISO-500

A single, diffused LED for 20 sec at ISO-3200

A single, clear LED for 20 sec at ISO-3200