Pug’s Place

Today I saw firsthand how important it is to be different when you’re handing over a resume and expecting to make an impression on a recruiter. I spoke to 30 people today about the careers they wanted and how the US Air Force could make that happen while stripping away their souls, and amazingly, they all blur together. It’s as if they all said the same things, had the same career goals, the same conservative dress and the same resume. Of course, these people all are the product of the same technical writing course, taught by the same teachers who explain patiently that drawing attention to yourself is a bad thing.

The only person who sticks in my mind was a young woman with a very peculiar set of studies: her B.S. was in Physics, her M.S. was in Astronomy and she was finishing her Ph.D. in Food Science. But she wanted to do more Physics work, and was interested in how she might do that with the AF. Otherwise, except for two of my friends who came by no one made a real impression on me (My friends subsequently amazed I was greeting them and passing them onto recruiters — I’ve told essentially no one that I have the job I do) . Also curious: almost all of the students had in their eyes the same sort of nervous terror. One person in particular seemed remarkably relieved when I introduced myself to him as a fellow student and talked to him about Eglin. It was as-if some horrible shadow before them suddenly resolved into being a smiling man with a tray of hot cookies.

I spent a fair amount of my first hour wandering the top floor of the O’Dome stopping to talk to students who were just looking around, apparently unsure of where to go. I suggested they go visit the groups downstairs (where the AF booth was) and, if their major was in an scientific field and they appeared to be U.S. citizens, advised them to stop by the USAF Civilian Careers booth. When I tired of walking in a circle introducing myself and providing unsolicited advice, I went back down and just talked with people waiting in line to talk to real recruiters. Once a recruiter opened up, I introduced them. A simple job, but I did seem to relax people quite a bit when I said, “I’m also a student here, but I’ve worked for years on Eglin…”

It’s going to take me some time to digest all I experienced today, but I think an obvious strategy is to be mildly cocky and assertive, since few people seem to be. Confidence is an important factor in being memorable.

I “finished” my second homework assignment for Computer Vision after spending the vast majority of my waking hours since Friday on it. The last problem in this assignment is eminently noteworthy, it goes like this:

Prove that the squared gradient is a rotationally symmetric operator.

We have one week to do this assignment. I, having been busy, waited until this weekend to work on it and it’s due tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM. Anyway, I made good headway through the 6 problems in maybe 20 hours of work. Then I came to that problem above. I began with writing down my general way of telling if a function is rotationally symmetric: if in it’s polar form it is not dependent on angle, then it’s rotationally symmetric. Then I got stuck.
Like any good stuck math student, I looked on the ‘net for inspiration. I came away with a paper which deals primarily with this proof, written by the gentleman who wrote our textbook for this class. Yes, the solution to this problem is about 17 pages long in its full form and was published by the MIT AIL as Rotationally Symmetric Operators for Surface Interpolation by Michael Brady and Berthold K.P. Horn in 1981. The PDF is linked above. Yes, the solution to this question is, in print form, 17 pages long, was first proven by the author of our textbook and I hardly understand any of it. We had a week to do this assignment, and in that time we were supposed to be able to come up with this? Does anyone else think this is a little unrealistic?
I came out with this knowledge to my roommates who basically said, “Print the PDF and cite it.” Since I couldn’t come up with a better possibility, that’s actually what I did. I wrote: “The proof of this proposition is both long and convoluted. Thus, a complete proof by B.K. Paul Horn and Michael Brady is attached.” followed by a complete MLA citation.

I would bet that I get 0 points for that answer… but at this point I hardly care. There is a limit to all things, even rotationally symmetric functions and their proofs.

An update on Gpremacy, the Game of the Superpowers:

I just finished implementing selling resources to the World Market and buying resources back from the World Market, in other words part of Gpremacy’s stage 6 and all of stage 2 (note that my stages break down differently than those of Supremacy). Additionally, an impressive amount of back-end code is completed now, and the development speed for the general rule definitions keeps increasing. Even the things which further on in this update say “Not Started” have had lots of back-end work already completed. For example, the API for the Artificial Intelligence is being written at the same time as everything below, since I’m using a liberal dollop of the Command design pattern to perform any game state updates.

Also of interest is that I just received my copy of Programming Game AI by Example by Mat Buckland, a book recommended to me by Dave, my project adviser. I’ve barely cracked the book open as of yet, but it both has a good looking first chapter and comes highly recommended, so I hope that it will be my salvation when late October comes along and I’m programming an AI opponent for Gpremacy.

That means the overall project status is:

• Goal: “Supremacy 3.0″ Rules - In Progress
  • Stage 1A: Pay Salaries and Loans to the Bank - Done
  • Stage 1B: Transfer Production Units to Supply Center -Done
  • Stage 2: Sell All, Some or None of the Supply Units - Done
  • Stage 3: Attack - Not Started
  • Stage 3A: Conventional - Not Started
  • Stage 3B: Strategic - Not Started
  • Stage 4: Move armies and/or navies - In Progress (calculate pathing)
  • Stage 5: Build Forces and Weapons - In Progress (needs to be generic)
  • Stage 6: Buy or Prospect for Resources - In Progress (needs prospecting)
• Goal: Network Play - Not Started
• Goal: Artificial Intelligence - Not Started

Presently, Gpremacy weighs in at 3,631 lines of code with little in-line documentation (because of MonoDoc, woo!). It’s also lacking a lot of graphics refinement, but that matters little to me at present — it’s going to be tough enough to simply get the game in a playable state on time.
It’s fully ready for anyone with a copy of Mono to check out from CVS, build and try. It should even work in Windows (with Mono), but I don’t plan on testing/worrying about that until much later in development.

It really is a labor of love, and it’s a good thing too: this would be a back-breaking workload if I weren’t enjoying this coding!

Solicitation for Assistance:
If any of you have suggestions on a different motto for Gpremacy that stays true to the “feel” of “The Game of the Superpowers”, please post it as a comment!

Avast! ‘Tis International Talk Like A Pirate Day, me hearties! Three years, aye, three bloody years be the time Cap’n Pug’s missed this day. When I was playin’ Ultima Online and Everquest, Sept 19 was a holiday. Sadly, after I keeled over and fled said games Talk Like A Pirate day was almost a forgotten treasure. Me fellow cap’n Carmen, black blade of the East, kept this day’s significance on deck and here be it, this year I remember! Arrr!

So lads an’ beauties, today Cap’n Pug answers his phone, “Ahoy, ye scurvy dog!”

ARR!

Update, 0820 ET
Arr! A foul lubber rang me phone mere grains o’ the hourglass ago! Me mate, James the Hailmaker, heard and will testify to this being the conversation be had!

Captain Pug: Ahoy, ye scurvy dog!
Phone Wench: Hello, I’m calling for James Jones.
Captain Pug: Arr! I be he!
Phone Wench: (pause) You’re James R. Jones?
Captain Pug: Arr?
Phone Wench: I’m trying to reach James C. Jones.
Captain Pug: Arr! That be me. Speak yer words!
Phone Wench: (longer pause) I have a wrong number.
Captain Pug: Arr.

Update: 0850 ET
Here’s a conversation I had with Pascal, me matey who hails from Australia:
Read more

After going through the whole Masters/Bachelors application process from December - July last year and being accepted, now I’m going through the whole Graduate School application process. It seems so silly, doing these things over again.

Anyway, I’ve given UF another $30 application fee and established Florida residency, since my 3 years of attendence of this university isn’t proof enough. I’m going to check tomorrow to see if I need to get an official UF transcript and turn it in… *chuckle*

I’ve named our programming teams thusly:

UF Emu
Tim, Thomas, Chris
UF Penguin
Justin, J.C., Ravi
UF Kiwi
Warren, Javeed, Nikhil
UF Ostrich
Sundara, Pranav, ?

Let’s hear it for the University of Florida Flightless Birds!

According to this PhysOrg writeup, a Prof. Wildberger has published a new book which redefines trigonometry into what he calls Rational Trigonometry, doing away with all trigonometric functions and angles. Instead he’s replaced the concept of distance with Quadrature (Q(x1,y1,x2,y2) = (x2-x1)^2+(y2-y1)^2, essentially the distance formula without the square root) and angle with Spread (the ratio of two lines’ separation as quadrature measured from a triangle formed between an arbitrary point on one line and its corresponding projection on the other line). Then he’s written a whole book providing a full course of trigonometry instruction without using sine, cosine, tangent or any of those difficult-to-exactly-solve concepts. Chapter one is on-line here.

You have to admire this man’s gall, attempting to rewrite trigonometry courses’ teaching strategies the world over.

There are some benefits to his method of expressing trigonometric formulas: since the trigonometric functions do not have many exact solutions, by doing 3D math in terms of Spread and other ratios we can (theoretically) improve mathematical accuracy, at least without the hassle of keeping a high-resolution cosine lookup table nearby when doing discrete mathematics…

There is a disturbingly amusing Bad Science column in The Guardian this week titled Don’t Dumb Me Down. I doubt this column will surprise any of my readers, but you may find it amusing at least. Especially the last half.

Here’s a shout-out to Hurricane Ophelia, who has graced my area with overcast skies, wind and sporadic rainfall for the past three days. The National Hurricane Center still has no idea what is going on, as Flynn put it. I wonder if it’s going to loiter there just off the coast, strengthen to a Cat 5 and hit some other port city, like poor Gulfport and Biloxi.

There’s really no point to this post, I’m just trying to look busy.

I just watched the first episode of Star Trek: New Voyages titled “Come What May.” If you’ve not heard of New Voyages, it’s a fan-produced continuation of The Original Series, taking place between the end of TOS and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. They’re releasing episodes at a rate of around 1 per year at present, which is rather fast considering the amount of work which must have gone into producing these. Now, about “Come What May”:

The plot was very acceptable, very reminiscent of several TOS episodes. The special effects were, as one would expect, much better than those of The Original Series… the sets were about what I expected, most of them looking like the same room in someone’s house with different spray-painted plastic water containers taped to the walls. That’s not to say they failed to suspend disbelief! No, they worked despite being rather simple. The bridge set, though, looks rather good. Not quite Paramount’s standards, but the important blinky-lights are blinking, the captain’s chair looks uncomfortable and the view-screen has blue matting showing around its edges. Everything working as Trek should.
The acting… well, I’m not so sure on the acting. Some of the characters seemed more occupied with copying their predecessors’ mannerisms than delivering a believable performance. Kirk and Uhura were fairly believable, but I’m less impressed with Spock, Bones and Scotty. Interestingly, the only people I thought were poor were the support folks: the colony leader, the Admiral…

It’s worth watching, if only for the same reason that Pizza Delivery Jedi is worth watching: morbid curiosity. I’ll see if the second episode, “In Harm’s Way,” improves upon the ‘pilot’ and let you know once I get a chance. Considering my present state of health, I will likely have more than sufficient time to vegetate and watch shows. Mmm, Babylon 5….