Author: Steve Dougherty

She chose a larger plastic square thing with a blanket this time.

Well, my cat decided to force herself into a shoebox and fall asleep with amusing results:

She was sleeping until I came over and started taking pictures, at which point she woke up and glared at me until I went away…

I’m back from CAEN! It’s good to be home, and the cats are happy that all the humans are back.

In the political landscape, Bush has once again bent the principles on which this nation was founded: people can now have any or all of their property or interests in property taken away if there is suspicion that they MAY COMMIT A CRIME, IN THE FUTURE!

Official White House Link

Explaination and Reaction (Edit: Links dead)

No longer does the slow legal system have to punish those who have done crime – you can have everything you own taken away if it’s thought that you MIGHT commit a crime! Bush seems to have read the constitution, and has begun killing off our constitutional rights through excecutive orders and unlawful laws.

Well, I’m spending the morning coding my capture the flag AI. It seemed deceptively simple when we started. Pathfinding couldn’t be that hard could it? At the start of the game I have it first figure out if it is horizontally or virtically farther from the opposing team’s flag, then move in the longer direction first, then the shorter. Considering there are 4 impenetrable barriers on any given board, (3 boulders and 1 of your flag) it’s inevitable that you’re going to run into one. Getting around it quickly is the hard part. Randomness can help somewhat, but that doesn’t dependably make the best move. If it runs into an obstacle, it looks for a beneficial move in the other plane of movement. For example, if it were heading west and ran into a rock, it would check to see if moving north or south would help more. If neither was benificial, it would pick one randomly. I haven’t a clue what it would do if it ran right into a rock again.

Ideally, I will next code it to check its distance from the enemy flag compared to that of the enemy to its flag, and protect if needed/possible. Maybe a few players to seek and destroy enemy dots, as well. I’m hungry. Lunch is soon…

CAEN is still chugging along nicely, and I really like what they’ve done with their Linux systems. They have the home directory on a network drive, so web history, saved passwords, desktop contents, ect, go from computer to computer. It’s sweetness, and it makes it so the user isn’t tethered to a single machine. It is sweetness. Also, I haven’t done a more formal test, but I’m getting at least 70 KBp/s UP! I love gigabit LAN, too.

The C++ class hasn’t been challenging in the least, it’s still nice to code once again, however. I helped Adam install Ubuntu on his laptop, which he now enjoys. We were getting along fine, then I started talking about politics, and Adam turned out to be a Fox News believer. He would claim many of the facts I mentioned were the “liberal media,” and he also actually believes that Fox News was really fair and balanced. I told him he’d think that the News Hour with Jim Lehrer was liberally biased. He also said that many Bushisms were taken out of context. I’d like to know how “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully,” can be taken out of context.

Game design has, so far, been playing and reviewing – but mostly playing – games. It’s fun. I’d like to see how it develops. Yay CAEN!

Well, I’m at Camp CAEN. It’s awesome… The only snag so far is that when they came by after curfew to give out IPs, I didn’t bother to get out of bed. Now I can access t3h internets during class, but not from my computer in the dorm, currently. I hope to get it this evening. My C++ class is using Linux as their OS! I’m suprised how much Red Hat seems like it’s just Debian and GNOME that makes people pay… Oh well. Further bulletins as events warrent! Sorry for any spelling mistakes, they’re using FireFox v1.5, which doesn’t have spell checking. 🙁

Bravo.