Benford Does Stuff

I gave the final presentation for honeyB last Wednesday (4/23) and it went very well. Non computer science types were easily able to pick up the basics of my project, and I even got an article in the campus newspaper!

A mac mini trying to run 100+ bees is quite the humorous task. For a total of 5 CS presentations we ended up bringing four computers to the presentation room. One windows PC was brought over for powerpoint, as well as the xanTunes network media player demo and the Underworld AI poker projects by Xander and Randall respectively. Kyle also used that PC to demonstrate his Nintendo DS western (1866 era) city simulator.  Two mac minis were there as well, one for my project, and one for Sarah’s Quilting Revolution. Since both Xander and Randall had network oriented projects, they needed a second windows PC t run as a client. We were quite thankful for KVM switches by the end of the day

I was the 3rd of 5 presenters, so my mini was crunching away at running a beehive for the first hour of presentations. By the time I was ready to demo, my hive had grown to over 100 bees, which slowed everything down significantly.

I was especially appreciative of the support of all of my friends and family who came to see the presentation.

There was a CS afterparty in which we spent time not worrying about the projects that we finally got done, so all was well.

The past few sessions at my internship have involved me gaining a crash course introduction to AJAX, otherwise known as Asynchronous Java and Xml. The Asynchronous part is what distinguishes AJAX from normal javascript that we’ve had for years. Instead of having the entire page update and refresh each time an action is taken, such as pressing a button, you can set only a portion of the page to refresh, such as a few objects that are relevant to the button’s action.

This technology can be paired with several scripting languages, including asp.net and php. It is one of the driving forces behind every “Web 2.0″ application such as Google Docs.

So far I’ve got a pinging animation going so that you can ping a specified hostname from your web browser. Though this is relatively “Hello World” level I’m going to be working on some more sophisticated applications next.

I was in the lab today and got a great weather reading from one of the machines:
   

It’s going to be very cold in the near future, where  the estimated low is not even on the numeric scale. 

I’ve got some pics of my cat uploaded along with captions, transforming him from a ordinary, mild-mannered housecat into a grammatically challenged, internet-powered Lolcat.

Enjoy

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/View.aspx?ciid=955104

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/View.aspx?ciid=955124

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/View.aspx?ciid=955181

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/View.aspx?ciid=955229

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/View.aspx?ciid=955292

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/View.aspx?ciid=955316

Hey all. I have a second movie of my senior project ready. It seems that youtube was either having trouble or didn’t like Safari or Opera, so it took me a while to upload the video.  This represents the program in its final form. All classes of bees have been implemented and most of the undesired bugs have been eliminated. It just makes me wish that the presentations for this thing were not so soon (4/23). 

Since finishing my previous data reporting project I’ve been setting up my workstation with the newest versions of various Microsoft tools that we have aquired in the new quarter. Though the install time was lengthy on my somewhat aging workstation (p4, 1 gb ram) at least everything was able to work without too much trouble. Running all of the installers over the network was priceless. Microsoft SQL client was not so easy to get working however. The main hurdle was that to install only the client, it was necessary to start the installer on the second disk, then choose a very specific set of components from there. I was able to get everything up and running on the second attempt.

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