I was in a bit of a hurry, but I wanted to go somewhere different, so I drove an hour and a half away to Harriman Reservoir in Vermont.

I paddled past the  glory hole and dam, keeping a safe distance, of course. (picture taken by a different Cory, not me)

I also spotted a rope suitable for swinging into the water at a great height, made somewhat more dangerous by rocks below. No one went anywhere near it when I was there.

Overall, this was surprisingly like Somerset Reservoir. That was a pleasant surprise. For some reason, I thought it was much more developed. Better than the one I saw at Somerset, I saw TWO bald eagles this time, soaring overhead for almost a minute. But no otters.

GPS data later. It was mighty windy, and the wind somehow always seemed like it was against me. I didn't travel the full length of the reservoir, but about half and back was still tiring. There appear to be nice parking areas on either end. This would be a great place to park cars at either end, paddle one way, and get a ride back.

I left  My Tracks recording GPS data for the drive home, so the map this time is slightly less awesome. I hand-edited the data and gave it back to Google Maps, but it insists on breaking it up into multiple pages of directions, and the last bit of the trip is missing from the embedded map.

• GPX
• KML
• CSV

This was where we launched (photo taken after we were done). I met Anton in a small parking lot nearby, and the first thing I heard was, "that water is VERY green!" The water was very green.

This little man-made area was very neat. Everything except the water seemed to be basically in good condition with a video game style "nature overtaking man-made structure" aesthetic to it. I'm sure it was intentional. I later learned that it was  Clute's Drydock, formerly used to repair and construct barges.

So we took to the water thick with duckweed, and I arbitrarily chose a direction. This is what happened:

We ended up turning around, and the water cleared up a bit. Enough to paddle. We made it to the Mohawk River but not before "paddling" through another area of seaweed.

The Mohawk River was busy with people pulling people on tubes with boats, fishing, swimming, and doing whatever else it is that people do on boats that aren't paddled by hand.

Here's roughly how the bit of our trip on the Mohawk River went.

• "Which way should we go?" "Against the wind."
• Anton inspects an old twisted up aluminum rowboat.
• "Oh, that's an island? We have to go around it!"
• We go under the I-87 bridge.
• "I think the wind changed direction. And the current is strong in the wrong direction."
• We explore a marina.
• We turn around and head upstream.
• We pass a nice area to stop and take a break but opt to move on since there are a bunch of people around.
• We pass some ducks sleeping on a rock.
• Anton disturbs all of the ducks.
• We paddle for a while until we find another place to take a break.
• A boat with a Canadian flag zooms by, making waves that get me wet and throw my kayak into some rocks as I'm trying to dry it out.
• We head back to "Duck Rock."
• Ukulele.
• We head back and head home.

"Duck Rock":

Saratoga Lake is technically the first place I ever kayaked though only briefly in a recreational kayak. At over twelve miles around the perimeter, I knew it would be some great exercise and leave me exhausted.

I started from Saratoga Lake Marine Park, which is a state park, which means it cost me $8 to park there. It was mostly empty on a Friday.

• GPX
• KML
• CSV

The most peculiar part of my trip was a giant orange boat with a conveyor belt which constantly carried seaweed up into a big storage container.

I didn't get a good picture of it from the front for predictable reasons, but I did find  an article that explains what was going on. It turns out they have to mow the seaweed.

It was a beautiful day. There was only a gentle breeze, and save for ripples from boats zooming up and down the lake at high speeds, the water was quite calm. There were bunches of people fishing and houseboats packed with people and some swimmers. This is what goes on most of the time when I am at work?

Lake Lonely was rendered poorly named by  the Canadian tools programmer / ukuleleist following me around in a canoe.

We launched from a boat launch at the intersection of Crescent Avenue and Poe Road, each paying $5 for access and being warned that they close at 5:30pm. Anton considered enough to ask what happens if we don't make it back in time, and the attendant / owner was basically speechless, much to my amusement, before he finally came up with something about towing vehicles.

We took a spin around the lake, admiring some of the gigantic houses as well as the deteriorating shacks along the eastern side. Exploring some of the streams on the northern side, we found ourselves in the middle of the nearby golf course, each bringing back some souvenir balls retrieved from the shallow water. Having exhausted that direction, we turned around and head down the stream toward Lake Saratoga, reaching the fork before we had to turn around.

• GPX
• KML
• CSV

This was by far my most epic kayak adventure. First off, I couldn't decide where to go. I've found plenty of sites of people listing places around here, and I've had some success looking at maps for nice-sized lakes and then reading up on how to get to the water, but I couldn't get everything to align for this trip. And the weather reports were generally nice but predicted some rain and wind.

• GPX
• KML
• CSV

This was a two hour drive to an undeveloped lake in Vermont. The driving was about an hour not on highways but on 40-55mph roads, half an hour through villages, and then half an hour on a dirt road that I wanted to be rallying on the entire time.

The "caravan menace" was in full swing:

All I can say is that this place was beautiful.

I mean, really beautiful. The only signs of civilization I saw the entire time were the cleared ski slopes of Mt. Snow off in the distance, which guided me back to my starting point, a dam by the boat launch, and just a few other people in small fishing boats, canoes, and kayaks.

I saw wildlife!

	The first thing that really floored me was a bald eagle which flew almost directly overhead. I wasn't expecting that. So much so that I didn't get my camera out in time. But I got a nice view of it from underneath.
	My second real surprise was a group of otters, popping their heads out of the water in full Whack-a-mole fashion. They were probably about ten feet away when I first noticed them. Did I accidentally invade where they were swimming? They certainly weren't scared off by me. They continued alternately poking their heads out of the water and swimming under for quite some time as I tried to maneuver to give them some room and get my camera ready, but I failed to get any shots of them. Those guys were my favorites.
	After I thought everything was all done and I was headed home, a relatively small black bear crossed the dirt road in front of me.

In the end, the weather worked out perfectly. It was about overcast about 50% of the time and sunny the rest. The wind was gently against me half the time and then helped carry me back to where I started. I had some trouble getting water out of my kayak as I turned around at the far end, but I managed. I need to read up on how to do this right in the future.

As excellent as this trip was, I'll probably tone things down in the future. I wasn't ready for the workout I got, not that it was bad to get it. The rest of the kayakers all stayed in the southern half of the lake from what I saw. I saw some rowboats paddling around near the far end, but I suspect they got out there with motors. Though maybe I'll see a loon next time?

My  roof rack arrived today. Anton  bought a canoe yesterday, but he hadn't had a change to try it yet. After work, I assembled my roof rack on my car, and we set off to do some paddling in the hour or so before it got dark.

This time it was Round Lake. It is pretty aptly named. It was about a twenty minute drive away. And then we had to park alongside the 55mph route 9 to access the water. I didn't realize until we were leaving that I parked under a "no parking" sign. I'm not sure if it was for the road I was on or the area down below. The sheriff behind us as we arrived didn't seem to mind. Neither did the other people parked near us.

•  Google Map
• GPX
• KML
• CSV

For the first time for me, the weather was beautiful. There was an occasional cool breeze, but nothing strong. The lake was flat except for some ripples as boats zipped around. There were a handful of people fishing and some other people out in kayaks and canoes, but it is a bigger lake than I expected, and I hardly ever actually saw any of them. There is a neat little airstrip adjacent to the lake, and a few small planes took off and landed while we were there, for our amusement.

Arriving:

Anton picking his nose as we set off. He's really getting in there:

I don't think that's how you're supposed to use a canoe:

This is a pretty OK place to spend an evening!:

Then it got dark and we went home. Then I copied the pictures and GPS data off of my phone and wrote this.

This Friday came around, and I was thoroughly excited about going out kayaking again. I am determined to go out at least once a week, and I figured that since I am taking Fridays off, this should be no problem. Checking the weather, thunderstorms were predicted basically all weekend, with only showers on Friday morning.

Figuring that was my only chance, I strapped the kayak on my roof in my garage while it rained outside and then took off.

This weekend's venue was picked by a Mr. Plummer at work, as I randomly asked him where I should go, and his familiarity with nearby parks for the sake of hiking allowed to pick a place arbitrarily that suited my needs. Also  http://www.albany.com/parks/ helped. In the future I think I will cross off parks listed there with a "boat launch" one by one.

I am worrying more and more about the effects of a boat on my car roof. I think I will invest in a roof rack soon.

There were some fun winding roads on the way to Thompson's Lake. It was just beyond Thacher Park, which is another great place to spend some time. It rained most of the way there but started to clear as I approached the lake.

Then it started raining again.

I paid a $7 vehicle use fee, as this was a state park. The place looked fairly nice. It was primarily a campground. I carried my kayak past a playground, small beach, and a swimming area to get to the lake, and each were populated with children and families at various times.

•  Google Map
• KML
• GPX
• CSV

I went around the outside of the lake, which took a little less than half an hour. I was wet at this time, but it was probably more from me splashing myself than the rain, which persisted. I made a few zig-zags of the lake to fill out almost an hour of time. Then it started to get a little windy, which was only a problem as it made me start to get cold.

I strapped the kayak back on to my car and headed home in a full downpour.

There were problems with this:

• Strapping a boat to my roof in the rain when I am starting to get cold is not fun. I am definitely willing to overlook a little bit of work for the parts of this that are fun, but I think that is too much.
• The kayak acts like a rain barrel. I was pleased it hardly filled with any water when I was on the lake, but when I took it off after I got home, it was substantially heavier.
• The straps around the kayak wicked water into my car. I was rained on the whole trip, and I worry for my car's interior.
• Some people were waving at me from inside a lodge nearby. I had half a mind to go in to dry off, but I wanted to get home badly at this point.

This week, for the third time in only a few months, I found myself without Internet access at home.

The first time, it went like this:

• The cable modem indicates no connection.
• I call Time Warner Cable.
• They tell me they shut me off, because of "leakage."
• They scheduled someone to come check things out (but they couldn't come for quite a few days...frustrating).
• They plug some measuring device into my cable, which indicates a small but apparently acceptable amount of noise.
• They remove the ground from my cable connection.
• They repeat, and the amount of noise remains the same.
• They reconnect everything, turn me back on, and figure that I was disconnected by mistake.

The second time was my fault:

• HTTP requests were being redirected to a "your computer has been causing trouble, we're disabling you" page.
• A local user account with an apparently easily guessable password on one of my computers had been compromised and was running a number of sketchy-looking scripts.
• I wiped and did a fresh install of the affected machine.
• I should add that I had to call Time Warner Cable to sort things out, and they turned me back on before even asking whether I had the machine under control, though they did threaten disabling me for longer if it happens again.

The third time went like this:

• Cable modem reports no connection.
• I call Time Warner Cable.
• They ask me to try power cycle the cable modem, fiddle with the cable.
• No, that doesn't improve anything.
• They schedule an appointment.
• The guy comes out, plugs in his meter, looks at it for a few minutes.
• "Your signal's perfect."
• He replaces my cable modem, and everything is fine.

It's slightly less annoying now that I have a  Droid Incredible with an unlimited data plan.

For some reason, until recently, I had never gone kayaking. My family owned a canoe. I've rowed row boats. I've paddled paddle boats. I had never kayaked.

Some weeks back, I was with a group of friends at  Saratoga Lake, and four of us hopped in kayaks and paddled around for a bit. It was fun, and it made me say I would get a kayak.

After looking around a bit, I had a lengthy and informative conversation with someone at  Eastern Mountain Sports, who basically steered me to the  Pungo 120 but emphasized that they were having an event on Saturday where people could try all of their models for free. Despite wanting to buy one then and there, I held off, went down on Saturday (today), and tried a few boats. It was fun. The staff were great (though one dropped and lost his radio in the water, hehe).

Then came the first problem. I went straight back to EMS, but most of their kayak enthusiasts were busy at the water. I knew exactly what I wanted, but of the few staff members there, one was clearly brand new, and the others were clearly overwhelmed by everyone else. It took some time finding the right things. I got the boat, a paddle, and a life jacket that were on sale as a bundle. There was confusion about this, which items were actually part of the special, where they were, .... But eventually I got everything I needed, one of the staff members helped me strap the thing I bought to my roof, and I was off.

Where to? I searched around (the Internet) a bit for a lake nearby with public access to the water. I picked The Great Sacandaga Lake, arbitrarily. It was about an hour away. I wasn't really sure where I was going to launch, but I drove around a bit and finally found a public boat launch. There was apparently a beach area where I would be charged $15 for parking, as a non-resident, but I couldn't launch there. I ended up carrying the boat to a boat launch where there was a formidable line of people putting motor boats on the water. I snuck in between two of them, and I was off!

That's what my route looked like. There was a strong wind. I was tired before I started. I had also paddled for a while in the morning, testing boats, and I'm not in any kind of shape. I headed into the wind and stopped now and then to adjust the numerous adjustable bits of my seat and paddle. I was hoping to find a quiet moment to bust out a ukulele and sit back and snack and whatnot, but the water was really choppy, both from the wind and from boats zipping back and forth near me, and waves overtook me every few minutes, despite my best efforts to avoid them.

Here's some data from my phone, which was sitting in one of the kayak's compartments, gathering GPS data. It and my other cargo stayed dry, but I was soaked by the time I was done.

•  Google Map
• KML
• GPX
• CSV

I paddled into the wind until I was tired. At about that point the clouds started to look intimidating, so I turned around. The wind basically carried me straight back, and I mostly just steered.

That's what the kayak looks like on my car, all ready to go home. I found a metal loop under the rear bumper, which is just perfect for hooking a strap into, and a big threaded hole in front which worked fine, too. For some reason it was much more stable on the way home than the way there, which was a relief. Shortly after I had pulled away from the store, one of the straps started buzzing. I found that giving each bit a half-twist, though less aerodynamic, helped silence that.

Conclusion: All in all, I had a lot of fun. The weather, despite the wind, was beautiful at the lake, while it was incredibly hot and humid back home. The water was a really nice warm temperature. Such a big lake was probably the last place I should have gone, but there is no shortage of other places for me to explore around here.

This is the report that  YouTube generates for  my channel, with several important comments from myself. I suppose my goal is for me to one day be more interesting than a four hour drive on the New York state thruway.

They are parked  like that every morning as I drive into work. And then I park.

Need to avast with this zombie drawing.

A  philosophical zombie.

I still can't draw zombies:

I did not know things were actually shipped this way.

From left to right, in order of acquisition:

1. My first ukulele, a Makala I picked up at the  North Carolina Ukulele Academy in Wilmington, North Carolina when visiting family. If I think someone is going to accidentally sit on or back a car over one of my ukuleles, I will try to make sure it is this one.

2. My concert size "Surf"  Fluke ukulele with rosewood fretboard. When I got my Makala, I kind of laughed when the store owner recommended a Fluke or Flea because they can be stood on end on a table. But he was right, and my Fluke is sitting next to me on my desk right now.

3. A solid mahogany Pono I picked up at  Aloha Warehouse in San Francisco. When I want to pretend I'm a real musician, I'll have this around. It also came with a nice hard case.

4. A Kala koa Tenor cedar-top with a pickup that I just got from  The Ukulele Shop while driving through Virginia. I intend to use this when I want to play loudly.

A message accidentally sent to the drawing topic email list became a new topic.

I just wanted to get my point across and get out, on this one. Boticelli, the teenage mutant ninja turtle who wielded guns.

Grargh...artists making me draw people... Well, I'm happier with it than I expected, and she provided good background music while I worked, so it's OK.

Not to change course, I attempted to emulate  my favorite web comic ever. Except I lacked funny. And now I can't remember if there was a comic where Beartato and Reginald were actually dressed as vikings.

I was way behind on my "daily" drawings, so I sat down and did five in a row. This is the first. I just wanted to draw  White Ninja for no particular reason.

There was an open mic at  VV's 15th anniversary party. I sang and played ukulele. My coworkers were very kind. I was very nervous.

That pirate likes his Celine Dion.

Just some quick bunnies.

I really thought there was a site that worded the appropriate question correctly, but I failed to find one in my twenty minutes.

Is there any other way to draw a turkey?

It doesn't exactly seem so bad.

JPEG artifacts give me the jibblies.

o/~ Na na na na na na na na! o/~

These topics are getting scarier and scarier.

I heard that a ghost

All he wants to do is eat your brains.

I'm not sure I did this one right.

conFUSION, as in  Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2(: Fusion).

Snikt!

That's what I draw in twenty minutes if I try to fill my time drawing numerous random things:

Bleh. I remember now. Twenty minutes is no where near enough for me to do anything with color.

AKA "Thursdays."

Took me a very long time to decide how to draw joy. This can be a pretty good part of my day sometimes.

Milenko plus.

Among the most sickly unicorns I've seen. That must be the Hudson.

They're actually both right-handed, but one's throwing lefty to throw the other off-guard.

I totally failed at the first thing I tried to draw. This was a quick consolation. Now I need to go play Scribblenauts.

Was thinking of the devil as illustrated by  Tastuya Ishida. Totally missed the mark, but reminded me of where I stand on drawing people. In retrospect, I should have drawn 'Nique.

Try moving closer to the rail.

Forgot to draw my mind. Also, those are peaches.

Second drawing. I wanted to not draw people for no particular reason. I ran out of time way before I got most of my glorious plans done. Partly wasted time just relearning how to do things in gimp.

I forget if wagons or boxes are the best means of space travel, so let's assume time travel was involved.

Some artists at work have apparently started a thing where they all draw something for the same theme for twenty minutes or less each day. I can probably find twenty minutes most days!

I can tell already this is going to be really hard for me, but being severely limited in time makes it seem reasonable and kind of OK that his hat is falling apart and his limbs aren't attached right.

So I'm watching a  friend's bird for a little while. I think he said it was an owl or a chicken or something.

Most of the time it is really well-behaved. I didn't know birds could be so calm. He'll happily sit on my finger, presuming I scratch his head every thirty seconds, or even chill out on my shoulder for a bit.

But he's also kind of a jerk sometimes. He has pooped on me more than once, and every now and then he becomes all angry and attacks me.

Here is some footage I caught of him aggressing me:

All in all he's pretty awesome, but I'm determined to figure out what I'm inadvertently doing or not doing to make him angry.

I have no excuses for the poor image quality, except that previous claims of having this webcam working were less than fully truthful, and the bird had me under duress.

I feel dumb.

I picked up a Logitech Orbit AF webcam, having seen it  listed as working well in Linux. The pan/tilt controls also looked amusing.

I do this periodically. I decide I want to make some sort of video for youtube, pick up a webcam, it fails to work in spectacular ways, and then I give up. As it stands, all I have shared are time-lapse videos. n webcams * m computers * o pieces of software * p drivers ensures that I'm entertained for a while.

Anyway, I tried this new one, half of the apps I used to test it weren't working well. It's always a crapshoot if cheese initializes properly, and I think the rest had some v4l/v4l2 problem. When I finally got it to the point that it seemed like it should work, I couldn't record at more than 5 fps.

 It turns out the autoexposure settings can limit the framerate. Oops.

I still can't get pan/tilt working:

ioctl querycontrol error: Invalid argument
Set Pan down error
ioctl querycontrol error: Invalid argument
Set Tilt down error

I wanted to play with electronics and home automation. This is what I came up with.

The following sequence of events is not just a dramatization. It happened yesterday.

• The UPS delivery guy delivers a package and pushes my doorbell button.
• The button rings my doorbell and switches a relay.
• The relay drives a pin high on the  GBA port on the Nintendo DS.
• A  homebrew app runs on the DS which reads from EEPROM every frame, effectively polling the relay state.
• The DS connects to my wireless access point, sends an HTTP request to my server, and then goes offline again.
• The HTTP request executes a CGI script which connects to a chat server I've been working on, sends a message, and then disconnects.
• The chat server stores the message and sends it to any connected clients.
• One of the clients, which was the result of an AJAX request, returns the new message to a web browser.
• Cory, in his web browser, is notified that a package has arrived.

Notes:

• My front and rear doors are monitored separately, hence the two relays.
• There are two pulldown resistors on the GBA port pins. I think they're unnecessary if I cause the DS to drive them low before I start reading.
• The DS app is a trivial modification of the httpget demo.
• This isn't in fact useful, but it was fun, easy, and made almost entirely with stuff I already had.
• The DS is a neat alternative to a  microcontroller, if you happen to have a spare or two lying around. It doesn't draw much power, as an ARM chip or two running with the screens off, and it has its own battery back-up.

I have been looking for a computer to run on my TV for a while, lately. I thought my constraints were fairly reasonable. I wanted something fairly quiet and small. It didn't have to be super small, but I didn't want, "oh, you jacked a computer into your TV in your living room" to be a common first reaction. It didn't have to be super quiet, but moving parts tend to fail on me, and quiet things have fewer fans. Playing 1080p video is nice but not absolutely essential.

I almost bought a  Mac Mini. I almost stuck a full tower in the basement and ran cables upstairs. I didn't really want either of those.

After months and months of Engadget  taunting me with previews of hardware that is either not yet available or never going to be available in the US, I bought the first thing that met my requirements.

The  ASRock ION 330 was the first thing I found that appeared to be quiet and small while still being an adequate machine. (Asus, why will you not sell me an  Eee Box B208?)

It arrived without an OS (as desired). I threw  Jaunty Jackalope x86_64 on it, and I have been pleased.

For video, I'm begrudgingly using the latest closed source drivers from nVidia (185.18.31). I hate nVidia less than ATI/AMD, currently.

Audio was an adventure. Analog output as well as optical and digital over HDMI all worked out of the box, but pulseaudio  fought me at every turn. I ended up grabbing  the latest PPA of pulseaudio, which fixed most of my problems but seems to have deprived me of surround output. This is what I'm still using currently.

I also found it necessary to use VDPAU, which seems to be nVidia's proprietary video decoding on the GPU API. After grabbing a custom build of mplayer and rifling through documentation, mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau had me watching 1080p content without issue. Decoders for mpeg1 and 2 and some WMV-related codecs also seem available.

In summary, I like it, and I spent a third of what I would have spent on a Mac Mini, but I had to wait about six months.

Penalty for demonstrating an affinity for cardboard and then being absent for a week on a honeymoon.

Four months and no posts? Clearly I need another blog.

That's right! I'm going to start raving about  The Singularity  here.

I picked up a ukulele a few weeks back when I was in North Carolina. I had been learning to play the guitar, but I wanted to branch out to something different. Little did I know how much of a following they actually had.

There are plenty of chord generators around for all sorts of stringed instruments around, but I knew next to nothing about actual music theory, so I made one for the ukulele. It probably lies sometimes and fails in all sorts of ugly ways. It's based on my understanding of  this document.

There are some very entertaining people sharing ukulele videos on youtube:

•  http://www.youtube.com/user/jaaaaaaa
•  http://www.youtube.com/user/sweetafton23
•  http://www.youtube.com/user/ukebucket
•  http://www.youtube.com/user/seeso

And I was surprised at how many good sites there were for tabs, chords, and lessons:

•  http://www.giantflightlessbirds.com/ukulele/
•  http://ukulelehunt.com/ - hehe
•  http://ukuleleunderground.com/ - lessons
•  http://nwfolk.com/uketabs.html
•  http://yirmumah.net/ukulele/
•  http://www.chordie.com/ - can show ukulele chord images

I noticed this week's  Bigger Than Cheeses was about ukuleles. A recent  xkcd strip wasn't about ukuleles, but I'm glad I wasn't the  only one who put the two together.

Trying a new trac blog plugin. Apparently I need an "about" post. I imported all of my old posts, and they're still around on the wiki. I might have lost some versions. *Shrugs*.

For no reason that I can remember, I was recently reminded of a solution to a homework problem way back from my first semester in college that I thought was creative. Having not had anything to say here for four months, I thought it would be fun to dig up the code and take a look.

The challenge was to rotate a vector in place using constant extra memory and less than O(n²) moves. There was very little additional information. I remember scratching my head for a while and then coming up with this crazy scheme involving the greatest common divisor which I drew out in great detail with boxes and arrows explaining how everything would move. I was disgusted that I couldn't arrive at a way to remove the gcd function entirely.

Now that I look, I see it is an early problem in book Programming Pearls. Their solutions can be found  here. Algorithm 3 is the closest to mine, and they indeed don't need to calculate the gcd ahead of time.

Oh, and I was sloppy with whitespace and some other details back then.

/* Euclid's algorithm for calculating the greatest common divisor of two numbers.
        Taken from page 58 of "Data Structures & Algorithm Analysis in C++ Second Edition" by Mark Allen Weiss. */
int gcd(int a, int b)
{
        while (b)
        {
                int r = a % b;
                a = b;
                b = r;
        }

        return a;
}

/* Rotates a vector i steps, using minimal moves.
        This requires an "extra" calculation of the greatest common divisor of i and v.size(), but this algorithm
        still wins out over rotating v one element at a time i times, because this is O(n) while the latter method is O(n^2) */
template<class T> void rotate(vector<T> &v, int i)
{
        int size = v.size();
        int factor = gcd(size, i);
        i %= size;

        int p;

        for (p = 0; p < factor; p++)
        {
                int n;
                T temp = v[p];  // Pull out one element so we can shift everything forward.
                for (n = (p + i) % size; n != p; n = (n + i) % size)    // Until we get back to where we start, shift each element forward.
                        v[(n - i + size) % size] = v[n];
                        
                v[(p - i + size) % size] = temp;        // Put back original element.
        }
}

Bargle!

I have been recommending reading material weekday morning for a handful of people for just over five weeks, now.

I make no claims to any of it being interesting, relevant, or entertaining, and I am not even sure how it will proceed from here. For the most part it has been programming-related articles with a mix of random things that amused me from the Internet.

 http://groups.google.com/group/cory-can-read

It has long annoyed me that Thunderbird sometimes treats the '>' characters in excerpts from diffs as reply markers and draws a blue line instead of the actual characters from the E-mail.

I finally found some talk about how to disable that feature  here.

Put this in ~/.thunderbird/*.default/chrome/userContent.css:

  blockquote[type=cite] {
    padding-bottom: 0 ! important;
    padding-top: 0 ! important;
    padding-left: 0 ! important;
    border-left: none ! important;
    border-right: none ! important;
  }

Set the following options:

  user_pref("mail.quoted_graphical", false);
  user_pref("mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support", true);

And the bars go away. Along the way, I noticed that if format=flow is included in the Content-Type header, Thunderbird does the right thing. So, the source of these E-mails is partly to blame, but I am happy that there is something I can do about it for now.

Hat Quest

I don't know what got into me, but I got a hat and made a little adventure game about it.

I have not allowed comments in a long time. Let's see how well this works out...

http://www.unprompted.com/share/tge.jpg

Thanks to movie nights on Thursdays, MST3K Mondays, and going out to see movies on Fridays, I have been watching a lot more movies than I previously did. Here is a list of movies that I can remember:

• The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension
• Amores Perros
• Big Trouble in Little China
• Clerks II
• Conan the Barbarian
• Crank
• District B13
• Drunken Master II
• Hudsucker Proxy
• Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
• MST3K (Rifftrax) - Star Trek V
• MST3K - Hobgoblins
• MST3K - The Day the Earth Froze
• Mission Impossible III
• Scotland, PA
• Snakes on a Plane
• UHF
• V for Vendetta
• Wordplay
• X-Men III

http://www.unprompted.com/projects/attachment/wiki/Updates/PotatoVillain/psnowman.jpg?format=raw =? http://www.unprompted.com/projects/attachment/wiki/Updates/PotatoVillain/pvillain.jpg?format=raw

At least I no longer suffer from allergies. I only suffer when I am not taking a copious amount of antihistamines. And then only when my ensuing itchiness, despondence, lack of sleep, and inability to focus on anything get in the way of what I am trying to do.

Dear The Food Industry of America,

Feel free to take the following ideas to do with as you please.

Sincerely,
Cory

http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/transformers.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/singstar.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/guitarhero.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/cowbell.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/uhf.jpg

Why?

That is what I get for eating lunch with a bunch of programmers.

In about a week,  VV is moving  its office  across the river. In a musical experience never to be duplicated, we got the  band back together for one final  performance at the old place.

Ten days of classes left, and I get spam like this:

Good jobs require a universityy education. Now you can get one in just a few days, and you'll also get that paper on your wall''

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Read what the reviewers are saying...

•  http://ds.ign.com/articles/667/667731p1.html
•  http://www.gamespot.com/ds/sports/tonyhawksamericansk8land/review.html?sid=6139957
•  http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/launchreview.asp?reviewid=642968

Then see what players are  making.

 http://rinse.unprompted.com/share/pumpkin.jpg

x = 2c / (-b +/- sqrt(b² - 4ac))

•  http://ds.ign.com/articles/661/661073p1.html -- Tony Hawk's American Sk8land brings the series back to its roots on the Nintendo DS system. This portable version is pure Tony Hawk: fast action, tons of skate moves, clever parks with tons of grind rails and vert ramps, and dozens of unique challenges to accomplish along the way.
•  http://media.ds.ign.com/media/740/740721/vids_1.html (videos)
•  http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3144993&did=1 -- ...we're seeing one of the best examples yet of 3D graphics on the portable console. But that's just a small part of why we're excited for Sk8land, which is looking to be one of the most feature-packed DS games we've seen since the system launched.

Notebook Ninja was on  Attack of the Show on  G4TV last Friday. The hosts gave it really positive comments and talked about it quite a lot, and people raved about it in the forums. Far more people have downloaded it now than I ever really expected. Cool!

I have been up to a whole lot of no good lately.

I did not <a href=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/projects/Chalk/">chalk</a> nearly as much as I would have liked to, but a friend and I did manage to decorate the sidewalk outside the DCC with Mario, Luigi, and Link.

To recap, this semester was very full of game-making. I had a blast working on all of these projects, learned a lot from them all, and probably wasted too much time playing around with every one.

<ul> <li><a href="http://www.unprompted.com/updates/Projects/flagfu1.html">Flag Fu</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.unprompted.com/updates/Games/princess.html">Princess</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.unprompted.com/updates/RPI/ink.html">Notebook Ninja</a></li> </ul>

I have a new game in the making, now. I will be sure to provide details as things develop.

I have only gotten good surprises, grade-wise, which is to say that my mobile robotics grade was higher than I expected based on some of my early grades in the class, and the rest were good.

I am spending the first half of the summer in a really nice apartment furnished just about right for me from a friend who had to leave town before the lease expired. After that I will be back in my RPI closet.

Today was my first day back at work. It started something like this.

<ul> <li><i>6:00 AM</i> - wake up</li> <li><i>6:01 AM</i> - fall back asleep</li> <li><i>8:00 AM</i> - alarm goes off</li> <li><i>9:00 AM</i> - wake up</li> <li><i>9:01 AM</i> - oh crap, I'm going to be late</li> <li><i>9:30 AM</i> - oh crap, I'm early</li> </ul>

After that, it was good to see lots of familiar faces and to start figuring out what is going on with my project.

This update was brought to you by "death" macaroni (macaroni and lots of cheddar cheese) and those cookie dough rolls which yield cookies when dropped in an oven for a dozen minutes.

<img src=" http://nninja.unprompted.com/manual/game2.jpg" alt="Notebook Ninja Screenshot" width="320" height="240">

<a href=" http://nninja.unprompted.com/">Notebook Ninja</a> is now pretty much done. All that remains is to present it on Monday.

It was briefly mentioned in the <a href=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/documents/nn_times.html">New York Times</a> after we showed it off at the RPI Game Symposium. We have had a lot of people play it, now, and the general response has been great.

<img src=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/images/princess.png" alt="Princess" style="float: right">

This weekend I competed in an <a href=" http://retroredux.parsons.edu/">24 hour Game Jam</a> targetting a new Atari Flashback console with three other people I know from <a href=" http://www.vvisions.com/">Vicarious Visions</a> and classes.

Our game can be found <a href=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/flashsmack/">here</a>. I didn't see any other teams working on anything quite like ours. The whole thing was a lot of fun.

Update: We won "Most Innovative Game!"

<ul> <li><a href=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/documents/retroredux-nytimes.html">New York Times Article</a> (<a href=" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/arts/design/06game.html?ex=1113451200&en=0231f95dd4f16662&ei=5070">original</a>)</li> <li><a href=" http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=5239">Gamasutra article</a></li> <li><a href=" http://news.com.com/Images+An+angry+Atari+princess%2C+bull+and+ninjas/2009-1043_3-5656760.html?tag=cd.top">CNET coverage</a></li> <li><a href=" http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200504/N05.0404.1800.08849.htm">Game Informer</a></li> <li><a href=" http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/07/2116212&tid=202&tid=156">games.slashdot.org Article</a></li> </ul>

As a CS major at RPI, I am required to take the Software Design and Documentation course, which involves working on a group project, producing excessive documentation along the way. Given the choice of anything to work on, my group is working on a stick figure "street brawler"-style video game. It's coming together really well so far. <a href=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/images/nn.png"><img src=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/images/nn_thumbnail.png" alt="Notebook Ninja" align="right" /></a>

Meanwhile, my network programming class has had some really dull lectures. Some friends and I have taken to various games involving drawing and writing on a piece of paper and passing it around to pass the time. Various disturbing creations can be seen  here. The latest [ http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/images/netprog/comic0004.jpg comic] is particularly noteworthy.

Today we Haiku.<br/>Do not speak without counting.<br/>It's five-seven-five.

getaddrinfo<br/>deprecates gethostbyname.<br/>You can use either.

So bored in netprog<br/>that we would not talk in prose.<br/>We just wrote haikus.

[ http://www.wxplotter.com/ft_loser.php?im <img src=" http://www.wxplotter.com/images/ft/lsr.php?val=9676">] [ http://www.wxplotter.com/ft_nq.php?im <img src=" http://www.wxplotter.com/images/ft/nq.php?val=8783">] [ http://www.wxplotter.com/ft_weird.php?im <img src=" http://www.wxplotter.com/thetester/images/php/wq.php?val=8279">]

I am just killing a few minutes before my next class, and putting off some homework.

<img src=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/images/flag1_thumbnail.png" alt="Flag Fu Screenshot" style="float: right" />

I have not had this much free time since about a year ago, so I have enjoyed being able to take the time to work on one of my projects. FlagFu?, for lack of a better name, is my recent attempt at creating a multiplayer sidescroller.

During school and in the past in general, I rarely have gotten so far on random projects like this, but this thing went together pretty quickly, and as it is, this meets my original goals for a solid prototype.

Plenty of work still needs to go into it for it to become something that someone might call "good" or "fun," but I am hoping for some art and some very specific programming help from other people to get to that stage.

Graphs...

<a href="http://www.unprompted.com/rrd/"><img src="http://www.unprompted.com/rrd/graphs/zim.unprompted.com-percentload-1d.png" alt="A graph of system load" /></a>

Yes, a big chunk of that load is from generating the graphs.

My projects for 3D Computer Graphics are all available [ http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/projects/Programming/College%20Course%20Work/3dcompgraph/ here]. I wish I had more time to work on the flight simulator, but I am happy that it went together so smoothly.

I made a <a href=" http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/archive/images/ray3.png">ray-tracer</a> for 3D computer graphics. Fun stuff.

Oh, and don't play "Go Fish" with marked cards.

I am halfway through midterms at this point. I have been up to a bunch of different fun things.

Most notable of my classes are 3D Computer Graphics and Computational Vision.

I posted some of my graphics projects [ http://acm.cs.rpi.edu/~cory/projects/Programming/College%20Course%20Work/3dcompgraph/ here]. I may share some of my vision projects, but they are not as fun to use.

I went to Crossgates mall on Friday to watch  a movie, but it was interrupted around half an hour from the end by a fire alarm. Doh!

I did manage to escape the mall with a really neat game I have been awaiting for several months, now. [ http://www.namco.com/games/katamari_damacy/ Katamari Damacy] is an incredible Play Station 2 game. I wasn't prepared for the story, music, and feel of the game to be so entertaining. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

After eight months at Vicarious Vision on a co-op, I am once again unemployed.

Classes start next monday. My  schedule is odd and still unsettled. Basic Drawing is for freshmen only, so I will have to drop that, but I have not decided on a replacement yet. I may leave it at the rest of the courses for a solid 16 credits of computer science courses.