Entries for August 2005
Village at 115 Feedback
I don't know who exactly I'm posting this for. To vent, perhaps?
GOOD JOB
- Beds, kitchens (especially the dishwashers), new faceplates, and the rest of the niceties.
COULD BE BETTER
- If there's one thing everyone I know at Case has a lot of, it's books. Yet any kind of shelves other than in the closet area, where there is a single shelf (presumably for wardrobe) are mysteriously missing. This is going to result in people attaching shelves to their wall, forbidden or not. Other people I know paid for some cheap shelves.
- I don't understand those little "shelves" in the shower. One of them can hold a single bar of soap while the other is completely useless as far as I can tell. Still, the South Side showers had nothing.
- One thing South Side closets had over our new "closet areas" was hooks. Hooks are useful and versatile and easy to install. Like, where do I put my towel when I get out of the shower? If I try to put it on my doorknob it opens the door or falls off.
- Aren't these new laundry machines supposedly money-saving and eco-friendly? So why are they more expensive for us? This is stupid.
MASSIVE FAILURE
- If the only problem with the phones were sharing a single line with more people, this would be under Could Be Better. But there is also what I can only guess is a "privacy feature," where two people can't have the phone picked up at the same time. This means that if someone calls for you and someone else picks up the phone, you either have to go to their phone or tell the person to call back so that you can pick up. Or call their number. You can't say "I got it!" and wait for the other person to hang up, you'll just get a busy signal. This sucks.
- Almost everyone I know (including myself) has locked themselves out already. Also, since the card readers are battery-operated, we need to carry an extra card around that opens our apartment doors. (If they were wired into the rest of the system, we could be identified like normal.)
- So far only one apartment I've heard of has actually received the trash cans listed on the apartment inventory. If this were the only trash problem, it would be under Could Be Better. But where the hell are we supposed to put the bigger stuff, such as all the cardboard boxes and bags we used to move in? We've had a huge pile of crap in our apartment for the past week because we have to walk through two other buildings just to get to a trash chute.
Knoware Client Update
It's getting pretty late into the summer now, and I predict that the client portion of Knoware will be done by the end of the week. So, outlook good.
Despite my prior C++ coding projects, my course experience here at Case, and even having taught it for a class, I was dreading getting back into it after having been dazzled by Python for the past year. God damn it, I thought, I'm gonna have to find all these libraries for crap like XML parsing, gonna have to re-learn sockets for like the third time, etc. Of course, no one said I had to use C++ — Python even has bindings for both the Qt and KDE libraries. But, I thought, I owe it to the users to slave over a damn solid C++ program.
The only thing I was certain of was using Qt for the GUI, obviously, just like the rest of KDE. And that's when I started getting more surprised every day, even now. What? Qt does XML parsing? It does sockets? It does threads? It can communicate with external processes? I don't even have to use the classic C++ strings, because it does that, too, and like I'd expect? Qt has definitely made getting back into C++ a pleasure. Thanks, Trolltech.
Remember those old Knoware screenshots? I prettied up a few areas with the help of KHTML, finally bringing them to life. Take a look:
If I don't write a post here about statistical results by this time next week, I'm in trouble.
money dot com
Today I deposited my first check from Google for $500. Now I can finally buy that food I've been saving up for!
Making the Best of It
This is for Patty, who is on vacation.
Knoware, Statistics & Orange
The lack of recent Knoware updates on this blog is a good indication of what the statistical aspects of this project mean for a programmer like myself — lots of time reading and researching up front. Aside from things like database design, I've put very little actual code into Knoware for the past week due the sheer amount of knowledge required to understand (let alone successfully apply) Random Forests and Classification & Regression Trees. This particular approach also includes learning a bit of R.
However, I just came across Orange for the second time and actually read the feature list this time. Wow! Could I have asked for a better module? Their Orange For Beginners guide includes examples of classification, bagging, regression, and other processes that make up the bulk of Random Forests. I think this could definitely speed up the process of getting a working system up before September.
Since I'm talking about the pieces I'm using to construct Knoware, I guess I'll mention that I'm working with SQLite right now for the database backend. I've used it for a few projects so far and I've become quite a fan. MySQL and friends are just too much sometimes — users, permissions, configuration, bah!