2006-04-16

Summer of Code

From code.google.com:
"A number of you have emailed us with one question on your minds: Will there be a Summer of Code this year? The answer, as you might have guessed, is yes! The SoC is our program to introduce students to the world of Open Source software development. Last year of the 8744 applicants, 419 students were accepted into the program and more than 80% of them succeeded, which means they received the full stipend of $4500."

I heard about this last year, but it was after the deadline, plus I was taking classes last summer so I didn't have the time. But this summer I'm not taking any classes so I think I'll try to be apart of this. I need a summer job and this would be great. Not sure what project I'd like to work on. Maybe Subversion because I like it so much and I'm familiar with it, at least as a user. I think I downloaded the source from the svn repository at some point. Guess I should start looking at it.

Summer of Code

2006-04-08

I've been away too long, sorry.

I know, I haven't posted in a while. So what have I been up to?

I haven't worked on my game project in a while so in that regard I haven't had much to say, so that kept me from posting. But I've also been busy with a myriad of other things, in addition to school, that have kept me busy.

First off, I got accepted to the University of Michigan, so I've been looking for an apartment in Ann Arbor, at least a little bit, browsing online and driving around campus a bit. And I've been filing out additional forms for Financial Aid and stuff. But now that I am officially a part of the university, I have what is known as the Basic Computing Package, which among other things, gives me some web space, and the ability to remotely login to their Linux machines. So I spent a whole weekend just playing around with that from home. The default shell was csh which I was not familiar with (I'm used to bash on Cygwin) so I spent some time learning where everything was and customizing my shell. Then I found out about chsh which allows you to change your shell. So I switched to bash and then spent a while setting that up. Now my remote shell looks just like my local Cygwin/bash shell with my familiar prompt, ls with color, and syntax highlighting in vim. And I learned lots about Linux and bash along the way. It was quite enjoyable. And recently, meaning this weekend, I got everything working so that I can run X windows applications ('clients') on the remote machine and have them display on my X server locally, through ssh. It was a joyous occasion when I saw my first remotely running xterm pop-up on my machine (which took forever because I'm on dial-up, so I figured it wasn't working. Dial-up also makes it almost impractical to actually use, but when I get broadband it will rock). I also played around with Mathematica remotely. I've wanted to use this program for a while, and now I can. And once I got X tunneling through ssh, seeing my first Mathematica generated graph pop-up on my local machine got me excited. Now I just have to learn how to really use Mathematica so I can do something useful with it.

I also learned more about Cygwin and got my iPod version of it working much better. No more windows links, which have hard coded drive letters, and are problematic on a portable drive that could potentially have any drive letter. I became aware of the nowinsymlinks environment variable which causes Cygwin to use special files with POSIX style paths in them for symbolic links, instead of the windows style links. This allowed me to finally install X Windows on my iPod. Now I have a portable X Windows system that I can take to the library and ssh into the U of M machines with X11 forwarding and use Mathematica remotely and have the graphs display locally. I can't wait to do this on Monday!

And I recently started a new project for my Physics class. I'm trying to write a small program to get some extra credit. Right now it's just a projectile motion simulation, nothing to amazing, but if I have time I'd like to do more. I've only got a few weeks left. The semester ends May 1st.

And I've been reading about electronics some more, though I haven't played around with it much it the last week.

So as you can see I've been busy.

It's just a placeholder page right now, but here's a link to my web space at U of M. When I get a chance I'll put some stuff up there.

Guess that's it for now.