I was talking with Bigtime a few minutes ago about this. The invasion of Grenada is not as well documented as the Star Wars Clone Wars. Whoa day.

I went to grab a cup of coffee with a certain someone this afternoon and had a great time (it looks like she did too). Since I don’t like talking about this stuff on the Internet, I’ll leave it at that.

Another cool thing I found recently, a decent comic book reader for Linux. I’ve been searching for a viable replacement for CDisplay since I switched over to running Debian. I’d been using GQview but was unhappy with parts of the interface. GQview is meant for viewing/manipulating/displaying collections of images like a gallery, not necessarily for reading/viewing images that are often visually sequential and can be two page spreads. Its lack of support for .cbr and .cbz files was also pretty disappointing.

Enter Comix, the answer to my woes. Unfortunately no Debian package is available in the official sources. However, snagging it from the home page, or finding an alternative package source, like the Debian Mentors site is almost as easy. Check it out if you’ve been looking for something similar.

Edit: As it turns out, Comix is now avaiable as an official Debian package! Version 1.5 was moved into the unstable distribution just last month (just goes to show, I should run apt-get update before talking about this stuff).

It seems like a lot of folks are joining in on the Firefly bandwagon. I’m glad the show is getting more attention, although I was disappointed in the numbers that the sequel movie Serenity got at the box office. It’s one of my favorite films of the year. If you haven’t gotten a chance to see it, you might still be able to catch it in some theaters. If not, the movie should be out on DVD on December 20th.

I highly recommend watching the TV series before watching the movie though. I picked up the complete “set” (all 14 episodes, only 11 of which were actually aired on TV) from Best Buy and watched the whole thing in 4 days. I got hooked into the show all over again, just as I had when I managed to catch it on TV a few years ago. If you’ve been curious about it, but hesitant because of the sci-fi and/or “created by the guy that made Buffy” shtick, give it a chance, you’ll be impressed.

Is anyone listening to L’Arc~En~Ciel’s latest US release, “AWAKE”? The sound is more eclectic than their previous release “SMILE”. I’ve spent the last month or so listening to it pretty much straight through, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed.

For those of you into Japanese music (I’m looking your way Sam Felton) or curious, I highly recommend it.

I was browsing through the bonus disc on my shiny new Batman Begins Deluxe Edition and found a neat piece on the martial arts used in the movie. The film makers and fight choreographers wanted a different feel for how Bruce Wayne should fight in the movie. They didn’t want the ballet-like Wushu people are used to seeing these days, but also didn’t want some sort of choppy Tae Kwon Do or Karate feel.

What they went with was a relatively new martial art (about 20 years old) called Keysi, or the Keysi Fighting Method (KFM). Apparently it’s a spin off of Jeet Kune Do (the style Bruce Lee came up with, for those of you who don’t know about this stuff) with a lot of other styles mixed in (that’s considering Jeet Kune Do was already a mix).

It’s pretty vicious and basically what they wanted, a close-in fighting system with a good flow that was also a little more down to earth than some of the more stylized Wushu movements. It sort of reminds me of a slightly more frantic Krav Maga (an Israeli martial art system). Unfortunately, the official Keysi website won’t launch for a few more days, so there’s not a whole lot of information about it out there. Pretty cool though overall.

I’ve come to the sad conclusion that keeping my friends section up to date was too much of a hassle since it would take me on average two months to pick a decent anime visage for each of my friends. Since no one really visited that part of my site anyway, I figured it would be better just to migrate all of the links over to the blog.

I should be adding two more blog-like sections in the near future. One based around running Linux on my new laptop (yes Jim, I promise I’ll really get it up and running this time) and one revolving solely around the latest anime I’m watching. Look forward to those.

I took some sequential photos this summer while I was in Japan intending to stitch them together into some cool panoramic shots. I finally got around to finishing that little project. You can find them here.

Keep in mind that I had my computer do the hard work in each step, so the alignment of certain elements in the photos might be a little off. However, I must say I’m pretty pleased with the results.

About 20 minutes ago, on my way to Kendall Square for some lunch I turned a corner in the basement of the Infinite Corridor only to encounter an old lady with a rolling suitcase. She glared at me for a solid 2 seconds before asking me where “Building 25” is.

After confirming that she meant Building E25, I offered to escort her since I was heading that way anyway. After walking for a little while, she starts telling me about her allergy of the sun and how she headed to the basement to avoid being exposed for too long and got lost.

After that rousing conversation I proceeded to make small talk by mentioning how confusing the basement could be when she blurts out this gem:

“It’s very dark down here. Someone could get murdered and you’d never find them!”

After that, we promptly found Building E25, where she simply said “I found my folder!” while I kept walking on towards my original destination. Strangers say the darndest things.

A friend of mine from Kung Fu class is a ridiculously awesome guitar player. He’s trying to get gigs with his band while finishing up at Berklee College of Music and just got a web site up. Check it out here.

Registration day dawns on MIT campus once again. Although, this time everything went entirely smoothly for me (unlike the last two years in a row). No trips to the Student Services Center, no fussing with requirements, or anything. Even the freshmen on campus weren’t as annoying as they usually are…

I picked up a new laptop this weekend. It’s the AV3715-EH1 on this page. Due to my overwhelming need for a portable computer ever since my old laptop’s screen went on the fritz (it’s been stuck on my desk ever since) I found myself needing a light unit I could actually move around with.

I’ll basically be using my old laptop as a desktop from now on, and “avalanche” as I’ve dubbed my new one will serve me when I’m on the go. There’s pretty much no documentation for it on the Internet, so I’m starting a blog about it where I’ll list all of its actual technical specs and instructional entries for setting up Linux on it.

I’ll post the link for that soon once I’ve properly set it up and sorted out what I’ve already managed to get working.

There’s a pretty good DVD sale going on at several retailers right now. I noticed at both Best Buy and Virgin Megastore that several movies are now just $10 a piece on DVD. It’s got to be due to some sort of inventory flush on poor-selling discs, however if you haven’t picked some of these up now might be the time. As for myself, I picked up both Pi and The Big Lebowski.

Also, not on sale but definitely worth every penny, grab Kung Fu Hustle on DVD. Looks like Amazon has the best price thus far. It goes without saying that I picked that up this weekend as well.

I finally got to wrap up my rewrite of the Pollxn plugin for Blosxom. I was originally using the Date::Calc Perl module, thinking it would handle all of the dirty details about dates particularly when dealing with how many days are in a month and the problems that creates when generating time differences between dates.

It turns out that package doesn’t handle those sorts of date calculations at all; the formats were all confusing. It all became a big mess when I looked into just writing some sort of conversion routine to fix the incongruencies. Instead I went with the Date::Manip package and everything came together nicely.

Here’s a tarball with my fixed plugin and Jim’s previously mentioned fix.

After removing my dinner plates from Random Hall, I’m finally moved out. I’m now a resident of Sidney-Pacific and I feel more and more like a graduate student every day. I no longer have to wrestle with huge flies in the bathrooms, custodians who perform 30-hit combos on the walls outside my room as they vacuum, or poor air conditioning in the common areas.

It feels pretty good all around. Now I just have to see what my roommate will be like, whenever he shows up.

All right, looks like everything is working on the comments front. This should make it easier for people to notice when new comments are posted. For those of you who want to try it out, I’ve wrapped up my addition to the Pollxn Blosxom plugin and Jim’s fix of the actual Pollxn engine into a tar file.

Edit: It turns out the Perl module I used doesn’t do things exactly the way I wanted them to. I’m going to take down the link, fix some stuff up, and then post again when everything is as it’s supposed to be. If you already downloaded the tarball, I apologize. A new one will be up shortly

Hey folks, pardon the ugly looking text next to any posts with a non-zero number of comments. I’m working on something that will let everyone see when the last comment was posted. It’s a little rough now, but hopefully people will use it in the future. Once I’m done screwing around, I’ll probably post what I added for those Pollxn users out there.

On that note, Jim fixed Pollxn’s ridiculously bad parsing of HTML when it sanitizes comments, so look for that when next I post Pollxn stuff as well.

This summer is a bit tame for me anime-wise given the ten shows I was watching simultaneously last summer. However, I have found some real gems this year.

Here’s what I’m watching these days:

• Naruto
• Bleach
• Gundam SEED Destiny
• Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid
• Honey and Clover

I have to say that of all these shows, Honey and Clover (“ハチ クロ” or “hachikuro” as it’s commonly referred to by fans) is by far the most surprising. It really is an amazing show, and I’d wager that it might blow His and Her Circumstances out of the water. I can’t really say for sure until the whole story is finished, but it’s definitely one to see if you’re interested in romantic comedies.

Apart from the shows currently airing in Japan this summer, the Fort-Awesome folks and I have been watching some older stuff like Trigun (although we started off with the comparatively new Bleach). I’m also thinking of fully dedicating myself to watching Monster as well. I took a look at the first three episodes and it seems interesting, so it’ll probably get added to the queue sooner or later.

Since before I can remember, I’ve always wondered what the “ITT” in ITT Technical Institute stood for. If you’ve every watched any sort of technical program on television, daytime shows, or even shows on late at night you’ve probably seen at least a commercial or two for the school.

Now, being at MIT, there’s always some sort of joke or reference to ITT, but I have yet to meet someone who actually knows what the acronym stands for. After talking it over with Julian, I decided to take action and actually call their hot-line to ask them that simple question. The answer I got, however, didn’t make a whole lot of sense at first. The lady who answered my call, after chuckling for a while and saying “I knew I would get asked this some day” comes back after putting me on hold for a while (even some of the employees don’t know what it stands for) and states that ITT stands for International Telephone and Telegraph.

At the time, I couldn’t really connect how a company called International Telephone and Telegraph decides to take that name and found a college. After some poking around though, I found a much more interesting, and very rich history of one of America’s largest conglomerates of the 1960s.

International Telephone and Telegraph was a huge conglomerate that had its hands in everything from hotels, radio, television, and even defense contracts. Anti-monopoly laws eventually ended up splitting the company into several small ones (just like the Baby Bells) most of which kept the ITT moniker somewhere in their name.

One of these spin-off corporations was ITT Educational Services Incorporated which runs ITT Technical Institute. Pretty interesting stuff. If you want to know more, Wikipedia has a good article on ITT here. That’s one childhood mystery solved!

I finally finished posting all of my trip photos with neat nuggets of information I’m sure you all are dying to read. In all seriousness though, I hope you enjoy them. Also, please pardon the dust as I continue to make major improvements to the gallery page as the markup is horrendous for the thing.

Pictures are here.

I’ve been back for a few days now, but I’ve been kind of busy unpacking, getting things in order, and playing video games. I’m working on getting Gallery set up on my server to post up all my pictures, but it’s going to take a a little longer because I can’t stand any of the “skins” they have available so I’m gonna write my own.

Look for the pics by the end of the weekend, provided things go well.

The trip so far has been spectacular! There is so much to do in Tokyo it’s a shame I only got to stay for 3 days. Now, I’m in the old capitol, Kyoto which is vastly different in culture and attitude compared to Tokyo. Only one day left of actual vacationing before I head out for a full day’s worth of flying. Until then…

I’m off on a post-graduation trip to Japan tomorrow. Six days in both Tokyo and Kyoto with my brother lay ahead after 16 hours worth of flying. I have to say I’m pretty excited about going, although I hadn’t really planned on actually going to Japan for another 10 years (I was planning on mastering the language first).

My parents surprised me with the trip while they were up here for graduation. Despite my previous resolution, I am pretty stoked. I would have written my title in Japanese but I just can’t get bloody Apache to report UTF-8 encoding right in my HTTP headers. Oh well, I’ll worry about it when I get back. Until then, please wait with bated breath for the mountain of pictures from the trip.

I’m going to be juggling cities for the next couple of weeks. My brother gradutates from high school on Wednesday, and I graduate on Friday. So, (for those who haven’t already heard the story) I’m going home to Miami today, and coming back to Boston on Thursday. That’s perhaps the shortest “long distance” trip I’ve ever taken.

To complicate matters, the family wants me home again almost immediately after, so I’ll be going back home the following Tuesday for a two week stint. Traveling around so suddenly will be interesting, but I can’t complain seeing as how I’m gonna be in beautiful Miami for the majority of the time and my frequent flier miles are going to get a nice kick.

Slashdot had a news article about this new show being released on the internet only called Systm. Kevin Rose is one of the hosts of the show, whom I recognized from watching G4 TV all spring break.

It turns out Kevin left G4 (where he was on “The Screen Savers”; the new one not the old one with Leo Laporte) to make Systm his focus. After downloading and watching the first episode, I have to say the show has potential. The episode focuses on making your own personal war-spying kit to snag unencrypted video feeds from those oh-so-popular X10 wireless cameras.

While the show itself spares the viewer some of the more interesting technical details, the coolest thing about Systm is the fact that their newsletter has all of the circuit schematics and info you need to build one for yourself. That is, so they say, they’ve been inundated with so many visitors they haven’t posted their first newsletter yet.

I’d definitely recommend taking a peak, this has “potential to be cool” written all over it.

So S,G,C,A,J, and I were sitting in the kitchen earlier this evening making fun of people’s Xanga pages…

Sorry for the lack of updates lately folks. I’m alive and kicking but busy as hell until finals week (starts May 16th). This week in particular has just about everything due at once (AUP, two tests, etc.). Despite the copious amounts of work, I have actually found time to give other folks fodder for their blogs. Check out Hippo’s blog, where my web camera is prominently featured.

So a student came up to me a short while ago during my office hours and, out of the blue, asked me if I was from Wisconsin. That’s just plain weird.

So I promised some of the guys that I would post about an interesting exercise that is given to students every year as part of the third 6.115 laboratory assignment. For those not in the know, the point of the exercise is to generate a table of sine wave values. Basically, you need 255 values of sine of x over a full period. These values need to be converted into hexadecimal format and placed in their assembly code as a lookup table. There are no restrictions on how they generate the table, only that it be correct.

This is where things get interesting, and where you really get to see the ingenuity and occasional confusion MIT students experience. Since students are really bright, they not only generate their sine values using some sort of code, but also use their code to generate the assembly they need to wrap the sine table with as well.

Some of these folks have interesting and appropriate solutions, others have really complicated schemes that work but are at times funny given their thought process for choosing the way they did it. For example, one guy used C code to generate MATLAB code which itself created an Microsoft Excel table that generated yet another set of values (most likely hexadecimal in format) which he then pasted into a text editor to add the necessary bits of assembly. Why he couldn’t have just used C to do all of the work, none of the staff can figure out.

Here’s a list of other languages students used this year: C, C++, Perl, MATLAB, Java, Python, Microsoft Excel, Mathematica, Visual Basic, and PHP.

The person who used PHP was, in my opinion, the most impressive. He even had the website listed in his lab report where we could go see his resulting table. I’m still waiting for the student who decides to do it in SSI, that person is going to get a personal handshake from me. Interestingly enough, Jim says he still hasn’t seen anyone try do generate the table in assembly. Go figure.

I was looking up some information about the new Justice League Unlimited cartoon airing on the Cartoon Network yesterday, when I came across an interesting issue. First let me preface my story with the how impressed I am that the creators of all of the Justice League related shows actually listen to the fans and actually attempt to add the things they request. Justice League Unlimited is brought to television by the same creative team behind Batman: The Animated Series, Superman (the one that ran in the late 1990’s), and Batman Beyond among others.

Bruce Timm in particular is the artist that gave Batman: The Animated Series its distinctive look. He and Dwayne McDuffie (co-creator of Justice League) often comment on fan sites and chat with fans about several aspects of the show. One curious detail was brought up by a fan about The Flash running around outside a space station without a space suit. McDuffie, who has a master’s degree in Physics, was quick to point out that a human body could last up to 90 seconds in a vacuum without suffering permanent damage.

Now, that piqued my interest. The most common thought about an unprotected human body in outer space is that the lack of pressure would cause eyeballs to explode and blood to boil. Mr. McDuffie didn’t just leave the fans hanging on his statements without proof. He pointed out two web sites on the subject, one of them being slightly more credible than the other here.

While the 90 second number is stretching “survivability” a bit, a human has successfully survived in a near-vacuum environment for 15 seconds. According to the NASA representative’s statement on the site, you start dying around the 90 second mark, and you’ve basically passed out from lack of oxygen after 15 to 20 seconds. However, that still leaves plenty of time to jump between hatches on a space station or something. That’s all pretty cool in my book. Plus, if you’re the Flash, imagine what you could do in those 15 seconds!

Have you ever thought of your life as a TV show? More specifically, I often wonder what the opening to a show about my life would be like. What would the theme music be? A lot of TV shows (particularly anime TV series) change the opening and ending theme/animation every season or so. Sometimes it cycles more often depending on how fast the cast of characters changes. The cast of main characters in my life has changed about every 5 years or so, so I guess I’m in my fifth season or so now. I wonder how they would all be introduced as the music plays in the background…

My little brother is in town this weekend for a Model United Nations competition (BOSMUN) being held all the way over near the Sloan Building. He and about 10 of his friends are hanging out and enjoying being away from school for a few days.

I had the opportunity to meet these folks first hand last night when I headed over to the Marriott to say hello. Boy was I impressed. These kids are some of the smartest 17 and 18 year-olds I have ever met! They all sounded quite mature for their age despite their rowdiness and obvious excitement over being in a big city. The whole atmosphere was something I hadn’t really expected. When I was in high school, I never really felt like I was surrounded by truly smart, vibrant, well-adjusted people. I always thought the majority of folks were pretty freaky.

I’m really happy that my brother has found such a great group of friends. Not to mention how proud I am that he’s gotten into some great colleges already and won himself a handsome set of awards at several school competitions related to various subjects.

One last little nugget from my “group hang” with my brother and company: I couldn’t believe how old I felt. My senior year history teacher was their chaperon. Together with him, I seriously felt like an adult giving advice and talking amongst a younger generation. When the hell did that happen?

This morning I awoke not only feeling sick, but also bumbling around like an idiot in my scramble to get dressed before volleyball class. As a result, I knocked some things over and managed to get a 3.5 inch floppy disk trapped inside my air conditioner!

The AC was sitting on the floor. I hadn’t yet gotten to packing it up and storing it in the basement. I was struck with quite the conundrum. There’s no way my AC could function/not break the next time I used it with that thing inside it. I had to get it out somehow.

During my volleyball foray, I tried to think about some solutions for getting the stupid thing out of the AC. Unfortunately they involved reaching arms and magnets, two things which I had not access too before heading to work (I was determined to solve this stupid thing this very morning).

In the end, I hacked together the following solution: the ruler-lasso. I managed to bump the floppy all the way to the inner edge of the AC. A vent on that side would let me grab it. Unfortunately it was lying at an angle, I couldn’t reach it from the vent! Thus comes in the lasso part of my solution. I made a lasso out of black 22 AWG wire and snagged the corner of the disk, dragging it flush to the vent. After a couple of tries (including recouping from a near disastrous try where the floppy lay flat at the bottom of the unit) I finally got it just right to pluck it out with my pair of pliers.

That was one hell of a morning, definitely a test of ingenuity given the lack of resources. After I solved my problem, the whole thing felt kid of fun. I even chuckled a bit while lying next to my AC. Fancy that.

A dramatic reenactment	The culprit
The lasso