Essay and More

The first draft of this is dated October 18th, so many things in it are now dated, but here goes.

I’ve been thoroughly shaken by an essay question on a college application. Not that it’s a difficult question or anything.

Tell us about a time you used your creativity.

It should be easy enough. The problem is I’m having trouble thinking of recent uses of my creativity. I haven’t made any new Flash movies since 8th grade, although perhaps that’s for the better. They’re becoming increasingly embarrassing now. I made some comics Freshman and Junior year, but thaose were both for literature projects. I started making a 3D maze the last time I went to Camp CAEN, but that was the summer before last, and I stopped after I ran into an issue with sound under Linux in Zenilib. Writing about it makes me want to try picking it up again, but finding the time to do so will be difficult. It seems I have somewhat inadvertently found ways of being unproductive that are not obviously so, such as browsing Reddit instead of playing TF2. That’s not to say I’m not working hard, which I am.

My Dad’s Rosewill fan failed suddenly by making horrible grinding noises. Although PCI slot fans seem like a good idea, they might be too much trouble to be worth it. I’ll probably stay away from PCI slot fans for the time being.

Because I’ve had so much homework, namely in Precalculus, schoolwork has displaced my life somewhat. Synthetic division is nice because of the very predictable amount of space it takes up, and it’s oddly fun to multiply together factors to get a polynomial with the desired zeros. It’s making the math work to make something, rather than the other way around. It’s also strangely entertaining to factor in my head.

Thanks to this page I was able to figure out an otherwise extremely cryptic error in my crontab. It was in the line for server backups to the alarm upstairs. It’s not offsite, but at least it’s not in the same room. I also got GZIP compression working, with the assistance of these pages. To boil it down, the magic line is ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

I recently downloaded Cavez of Phear and it was fun. However, the lack of save functionality made it frustrating, as I had to continually replay levels after dying. As it is open source, and I had compiled it, (requires libncurses-dev) I decided to crack open the code and give it a go. With the very low number of comments it is somewhat difficult to read. It seems that once it loads in a level file made of of low-level, unprintable ASCII, it replaces special objects with the stone character, and makes entries in another array. I have yet to figure out why it needs another array for this. I’m also currently mystified as to why the save function (I didn’t write it, it works in the editor,) produces complete gibberish even right after I load the map and haven’t moved. It still does this when I undo the replacement of special items. I’ll probably have to rip chunks out of the program until it’s more evident. I really should try gdb. Maybe I should start a Git repo to make all this easier to manage, as although my memory is fuzzy on the matter I think I had parts of this working better before.

Despite my problems figuring this out, it is meaningful for me because although I’ve long known philosophically and logically that open source is far better for innovation and rapid development, I’ve never been able to directly participate in helping that process. (I’ve donated to and reported bugs for Wine, but that’s about it.) Even though it is a very simple contribution, it’s something that with a closed-source product would take emailing the developer or doing some strange dark arts with DLLs. With open source, I am able to open up the code and start to add a new feature. This is amazing.

I got my plate of food together and left it in the kitchen. Asking my sister to guard it against cats, I took my salad and milk out to the table. I returned for my plate, and noticed the empty one intended for Sarah sitting on the counter as Sarah held a full plate. I asked her if the plate was mine. No, she mumbled around the ham.

Matt called me over and asked if I wanted his old machine. He said it had stability problems. I’m now agreeing with that, as when I tried to connect to it just now to check the specs, it was unreachable. What I can remember is Athlon 39(?)00+ 3700+ at 2.4 GHz with 512MB RAM. It seemed stable at first… Maybe I should check the BIOS settings again, as I seem to recall it complaining about failed overclock upon POST.