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Several videos of the Meddies performing have made their way online:
- King Creole (orig. Elvis)
- Lydia (orig. Groucho Marx)
- Safety Dance part 1 and part 2 (orig. Men Without Hats)
Karen said:
After reviewing my diploma, I am intensely curious to know just how they wrote "Computer Science" in Latin on your diploma.
It's written "Scientia Combinatoria", which doesn't seem right - the French and Italian translations look like the English word "informatics", and the Spanish one actually has "computation" in it. I got curious and turned to the oracle of all knowledge, Wikipedia, which happens to have a Latin edition. The entry on Computer Science is titled Informatica, and "combinatoria" seems to be used to refer to combinations from probability, so I guess that settles that.
The real news in all of this is that there is a Wikipedia written entirely in Latin. I browsed over to the front page and the featured article of the month is Pong cervisiale. Wow.
Posted Friday afternoon, June 1st, 2007I graduated from Bowdoin on Saturday.
Posted at lunch time on Sunday, May 27th, 2007Scene: the Bowdoin Computer Science lab during finals week.
First Student: "CS dinner? Yeah! Who's up for it?"
Second Student: "What is CS dinner? We all get bag dinners so we can come back to the lab and work?"
Hmm...
Posted at teatime on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007One of the courses I'm taking this semester in the Computer Science department is "Artificial Intelligence and Computer Games," which deals with, naturally, applications of AI in computer games. We're using Unreal Tournament 2004 because it provides a rich, 3D environment with many possibilities and there exists a good set of supporting materials.
Gamebots is a modification that provides a generic socket-based, client-side API for controlling Unreal Tournament characters. JavaBot goes one step further and provides a Java framework for the Gamebots API and a nice front-end for managing multiple bots simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the JavaBot is very minimal; it takes care of parsing the messages from the server, but you're on your own to do things like keep track of health, nearby items, and other players. I wrote a superclass for the course that makes it easy to pick and choose which parts of the Gamebots API to implement and hides the grunt work of generic state updating. It's available for download and in darcs should you be interested. I'll be updating it throughout the semester.
Posted late Friday afternoon, February 2nd, 2007The Bowdoin Orient has an article in this week's paper about student reactions to the new Microsoft Exchange webmail: "E-mail system gets poor reviews".
In summary, students don't use many of the features available and often can't use the features they want because those features only work in Internet Explorer on Windows. The switch to Exchange has traded the ability to search through email and manipulate multiple messages at the same time for shared calendars and task lists.
What really surprised me about the article was that 435 students forward their mail to an external account and don't use Bowdoin's system. That's one-fourth of the student population! IT says they're listening to students - the article reports that the CIO meets regularly with a student IT advisory council and a previous Orient article notes that students tested Exchange before the big roll-out - but you wouldn't know it looking at the end result.
Posted at lunch time on Friday, February 2nd, 2007Tonight the major event on campus is a talk entitled "I Love the Female Orgasm," which according to the program description "combines sex education and women's empowerment with a hearty dose of laughter."
Probably unaware of the aforementioned program, the Bowdoin Computer Science department faculty and students (of which I am one) chose the same date and time to screen "Return of the Jedi."
I think the situation is hilarious.
Posted Monday evening, September 18th, 2006Ferd just sent me a prepress copy of the new Meddiebempsters CD, "Princes of Maine." It sounds fantastic. We're going to send it off to the CD pressers soon and should have it in time for the start of school.
Tracks (alphabetically, we haven't decided an ordering yet):
- Agnes
- All for You
- Billie Jean
- Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me
- Drive My Car
- Georgia on my Mind
- Here I Go Again
- Hey Ya
- I Believe in a Crazy Little Thing
- Just What I Needed
- Laid
- Livin on a Prayer
- Now You're a Man
- Right Now
- Southern Cross
I got back up to Bowdoin a while ago and have been busy.
In terms of my summer fellowship, I've been working with our RoboCup soccer team. Bowdoin has a team that competes in the four-legged league and did very well at the world championships a few weeks back. So far I've been working on improving the walk and updating the development toolchain.
Walking is an important fundamental skill, and while we currently have a decent walk, it could be a lot better. Speed and accuracy are obvious concerns, but also important is stability. The less the view moves while the dog is walking the better it is able to detect objects and keep a good idea of where it is on the field.
I'm implementing a reinforcement learning system based on policy gradient reinforcement. The robot will walk back and forth between two objects, each time changing slightly something about its walk, and will determine if that change improved its gait. Over many iterations, it should discover an improved if not optimal way to walk.
In terms of the toolchain, I am updating the version of the Python programming language we use on the robots and the compiler and libraries we use to cross-compile source code for the robots.
In terms of Python, we have been using the version ported by the rUNSWift team; it isn't the latest version and doesn't contain all the modules we want, however. I've been porting rUNSWift's patches to python-2.4 and have almost got it compiling; we'll see if it actually runs later!
In terms of the compilers and libraries, we're still using gcc-3.3.2 to cross-compile for the Aibos. Cross-compiling is building the code on a different type of CPU than the code is meant to run on. Unfortunately, the gcc-3 series doesn't compile with the gcc-4 one that is now standard among GNU/Linux distributions like Debian and will likely be standard with newer versions of OS X. This means that as we upgrade computers and move to new ones it will be more difficult to keep our toolchain working. gcc-4 also provides more optimized code than gcc-3, and we can always use more speed!
The difficulty with moving to gcc-4 is that it is not ABI-compatible with gcc-3; that is, software that's been compiled with gcc-3 can't directly interface with software compiled with gcc-4. This would be an easy problem to resolve if Sony had released the Aibo code as free software, but instead that have kept it proprietary, and now that they don't want to sell Aibos there's little hope they will release a gcc-4 compatible version. Luckily, someone has pointed me to a gcc-4 option that seems to produce gcc-3 compatible code; I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
Outside of the lab I've also been investigating how best to upgrade Network Operation's wiki. A wiki is a collaborative documentation system that makes it easy for people to record, share, and update knowledge. Since most of our employees are students, we only have them for a few years and are constantly training new people. The wiki has been a great help since I set it up a few years ago, but it is showing its age.
I have been taken with ikiwiki. The traditional wiki is implemented as a web application that stores changes in a database and dynamically creates the page for each viewer; ikiwiki stands that idea on its head. It keeps all files in Markdown-formatted plain text, uses Subversion to keep revision history, and rebuilds the wiki into static HTML on each check-in. There's an optional CGI attachment to allow web-based editing. This non-web-orient, Subversion-backed approach fits in with our general workflow at Network Operations. Unfortunately, I'll need to write a program to convert our old wiki to the new format and one to use Bowdoin's account information, but that's just a Small Matter of Programming.
Posted Saturday evening, July 1st, 2006Bowdoin has a spotlight profile on recently-graduated Meddie Josh Chung.
I have to agree with his answer to this question:
Posted late Monday evening, June 12th, 2006What is your best Bowdoin memory?
My best Bowdoin memory would have to be the trip back home with the Meddies. I had seen other prestigious universities and colleges from the United States come perform their a cappella music in Korea. Since then I had always hoped that a group from Bowdoin could come and perform in Korea and familiarize the nation with Bowdoin a bit. Our two-week trip was a phenomenal experience and I cannot explain how grateful and proud I was as a Bowdoin student. We performed at the major churches and hospitals in Seoul and even at SBS, Korea's nationwide TV station. Through this tour we were able to start our first gathering of the Bowdoin community in Korea and establish the "Bowdoin Club of Korea." We were also hosted by the mayor of Ulsan City, the home to Korea's heavy auto industry and to Hyundai Corporation. The mayor was generous enough to organize a tour for us of the whole city, the Hyundai Corporation, several historical/ancient sites, and Buddhist temples. In one of the temples we sang our classic repertoire to female monks. The performance at the U.S. army base, going to see the Backstreet Boys' first concert in Seoul, singing at karaoke bars, and singing at the local restaurants and subway stations were also unforgettable events. Whenever and wherever we felt like singing, we would gather and give small performances and the crowds around us enjoyed them very much. The entire two week experience made us much closer as friends and gave us unforgettable memories which we will cherish always.