Solar Empire

I’m surfing the internet – from my python shell 😛

#!/usr/bin/python

import os,sys,math,socket

print “Hello world!”

print “Socket test”

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);
s.settimeout(10);
s.connect((“www.amssolarempire.com”,80));
#s.send(“HTTP REQUEST”);
msg = “GET / HTTP/1.1\n”;
msg = msg + “Host: amssolarempire.com\n”;
msg = msg + “Connection: close\n”;
msg = msg + “User-Agent: PythonExperiment\n”;
msg = msg + “\n”;
s.send(msg);
t = ” “;
ret = “”;
while(t!=””):
t = s.recv(1);
ret=ret+t;

print ret;

s.shutdown(0);
s.close();

Shapelib is coming along. I can now triangulate arbitrary manifold regions in two dimensions. (It may not be constrained delaunay though – I’m going to have to check).

One game that I have wasted far too much time on since passing quals has been Squad Software’s Kerbal Space Program. Kerbal Space Program is a game that puts you in charge of a space agency, throws an infinite number of rocketry parts at you, and lets you stick them together in almost any arbitrary way to construct spacecraft. The Kermen are a fairly bold lot – even with me in charge of rocket design, they still keep signing up. 😛

Anyway, you can build just about anything in this game. Orbital rockets, space stations, bases on other planets. With version 0.19, you can dock and un-dock modules that you launch to assemble arbitrarily complicated structures in orbit or elsewhere.

The fascinating thing about this game, apart from the completely freeform nature of what you can build, is the physics. The game physics are very challenging, because of the realism involved. If you play this game, and want to accomplish the more interesting stuff (landing your astronauts on the moon, getting them to rendezvous in orbit, getting them to another planet without running out of fuel), you’ll find yourself learning a great deal about orbital mechanics, and the basics of astronautical engineering and spaceflight. I’m an astronautical engineer, so I may have an advantage in this department – but it’s fascinating how easy it is to learn things when you are playing with it – when you can interact with a world and watch it respond in the context of a game.

As you build ever more complicated rockets, you’ll find yourself intuitively understanding things like why we stage them, how they fly, how you get into orbit, why Neil Armstrong and the rest of the lunar lander pilots had nerves of steel.

Version 0.19 also includes the rest of the Kerbal’s solar system. Pictured below are the Kerbal version of Mars (Duna), a sort of golden-age Venusian planet (Eve), and what happens when I try to land a lander in planetary gravity.

Carmly’s still thrilled to be on the surface and alive. The Kerbals are gung-ho like that. 😛 (For various values of alive). Lander 2 is still up there. Theoretically in the hands of a competent pilot, it could rescue him.

Hillariously exploding ill-assembled vehicles, and crashed landers aren’t the only threat to your overly trusting astronauts. Nothing quite conveys the eerie tension of interplanetary flight like this game. Watching your safe blue homeworld dwindle into a tiny dot lost against the stellar background. If you’ve got your carefully assembled mothership into solar orbit, then you’re still mostly at the mercy of solar gravity. Make a wrong move on your delicate maneuvers, and you may end up having to orbit the sun for an extra 3 years, or blow your maneuvering margin and get trapped millions of miles from anything.

Anyway, if you want a very fun crash course in what realistic space-travel is like, I can’t recommend this game highly enough.

I managed to pass the PhD qualifying exam yesterday. A semester of constant worry and cramming for this test have managed to pay off in the end. Now I will no longer need to focus so much on coursework, and can turn my attention fully to research. Anyway, that hurdle is passed.

The next challenge: What is the Thesis? 😛

Anyway, woohoo! Yes! Victory is mine!

So … Uncyclopedia has a bunch of hillarious misinformation (?) about Georgia Tech, one bit of which had me laughing like a maniac:

The typical study environment of tech students. This pentagram offers 360 degrees of studying wall also giving students direct access to the devil for bargaining purposes

Dead Week

Dead week is the name given to the week before finals by Techies. The name dead week is derived from the phrase “I wish I was dead”, because during dead week this is heard constantly. During this week students spend most of their time studying and bargaining with Satan to pass their classes. Satan typically asks for the blood of a non-virgin in exchange for a “C”, as opposed to the blood of a virgin, because he knows it will be harder for Techies to come across.

—–

I’m not into summoning the devil, so I figured I’d be pretty safe. However, I have noticed the “study circle” accumulating lately as I have been constantly cramming for quals …

So, I thought to build and administer one of those PhPBB forum things for my friends and family to post on. It was also a good experiment in administering database-backended php/javascript applications. The whole thing was a productive learning experience.

However, none of my acquaintances used it for much. In addition, it has been absolutely flooded with spambots. CAPTCHA does nothing -apparently someone has managed to get a decent OCR attached to their spambot system. I get hundreds of registrations per day from automated spam posters. It’s pretty annoying. I don’t know why people do it either. They couldn’t possibly get any add revenue from a spew of wordsalad advertising viagra and other less mentionable things in languages that the site can’t even display properly. Seriously, why put so much skill into creating programs to do something so useless?

Grrr. Anyway, even though registrations have to be approved, I have a backlog of several thousand now that are just clogging the database. Maybe if/when I have more interest in my blog, I can try again.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455

Apparently the LHC team has discovered a new particle in the 125.3 GeV mass range that they claim is consistent with their ideas about the Higg’s Boson. If this is so, then this is a big leap for the standard model.

I’ve noticed that keeping my attention on task has been getting difficult in the evenings. My mind has been wandering all over the place. Unfortunately, the internet aids and abets this tendency with a vengeance. So, to keep my mind from dissolving in endless distraction, I have been engaging in some attention control exercises I’ve come up with.

One of them involves drawing a black dot on a sheet of paper. I set my kitchen timer for 5 minutes, and stare at the black dot, not allowing my field of vision or my mind to wander from it for that period of time. I don’t know about you, but I’m finding this exercise to be almost physically painful. To stop thinking about every random thing going on in my head, and only about what I am consciously choosing to focus on is an extreme effort.

Of course, attention control *is* supposed to be a mental endurance exercise – I suppose it might get easier with time. My hope is that endurance in this regard translates over into being able to direct my attention on my projects.

(/Captain Kirk Scream)

I swear! McAfee is a *virus* all on it’s own. The things we do for security! It’s like the freaking TSA has set up shop in my computer. Not only does the firewall block access to the internet on startup (I have to disable the firewall, then unplug and replug my network cable), not only does it start scans which crash the computer, not only does it crash every time I try to download my e-mail, it makes everything run terribly slow.

I find myself booting into Linux more and more often, just to avoid the hideous slowdown incurred by running anti-virus software. On the plus side it’s been forever and a half since I’ve gotten infected by anything. On the negative side – is the cure worse than the disease?

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/01/usama-bin-laden-dead-say-sources/

Last night, news was released that Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by a small team of our ground forces. This is excellent news.

I’m actually very surprised he had survived this long – after his dead silence (as opposed to his usual propaganda output) following the Tora Bora bombing operation, I had assumed he must have died sometime during the opening part of the Afghanistan campaign.

With any luck, this will begin to collapse Al Qaeda’s resistance in Afghanistan. I don’t know the precise value of that man to their organization, but with something like $100M in funding from his family’s construction business, and him being the planner behind a few of the more deadly attacks, losing that has got to hurt them pretty badly.

In any case, the leader behind killing hundreds of people around the world, and 3000 Americans in 2001, is finally dead.