Moving to WordPress
I’ve decided to move from my own custom portfolio and blog backend, to the common word press software. I am hoping that now that it is easier to manage content / comments I may in fact post up some more information about my personal projects and experiences that I have had.
I have tried copying over the posts from my old system, but ended up entering them in the opposite order. I haven’t decided whether to go and fiddle with the database to get them the way I want them, but I may.
*Edit*, It looks like wordpress allows me to modify the published timestamps without modifying the databases. I have now set the posts to have the original date stamps so they are in the right order.
Very cool, WordPress. I may have underestimated you yet.
The Downfall of a Catchall Email
I’ve been using a catchall email address for a while now. This is an email that you attach to a domain name so that you can receive any email sent to the domain. For example, say I set up a catchall email address on the domain www.email.com. That would mean that emails sent to eli@email.com, php@email.com, dudeprogramminglolz@email.com would all go to the same inbox. I have found this to be very handy because I can give different emails to everyone without additional work on my part, and know who they are just from the email they sent the message to.
Why is this important you ask? Why can’t I just read the message and figure it out? Lets say you register on Site A with Email A. You then receive a message from Site B from Email A. What you can then infer is that Site B received or gained your email address from Site A. If spam continues from that email address, instead of just having to make a new email altogether, you can simply block incoming messages on that email address. I have found this to be much more helpful than I originally thought.
The problem I have stumbled upon however is that once I receive all of my emails from my catchall email address in my Thunderbird inbox, if I try to reply to an email, it then sends a response email from a different email address than the one I received it on. That means that if I reply to an email I received from haxorz@bbq.com, it might be sent on ihrtspiders@hotmail.com instead of haxorz@bbq.com. After being unable to find a solution to this problem I have decided to make a simple web mail client. The required change for this problem is to simply modify a mail header when you send an email.
Beginnings of College and the Start of New Projects
As my first blog message, I decided to talk a little bit about me and some of the things I’ve been doing so far in college. I go to University of Washington in Seattle, I’m currently a freshman. I attended a freshman pre-college…college experience. It was 5 weeks before school started and you take one class. It is just a time for freshman to get situated and used to going to a class, living in the dorms, and giving us an opportunity to make friends and browse the city.
The first week there I found a guy who lived in my hall who had direct-admissions into computer engineering, we became decent friends and started talking about what we have done previously in regards to computer programs and things we have built. He had a good amount of previous hardware experience, and with my experience from Pather with navigational systems and some simple artificial intelligence led us to the conclusion that we should try building a robot. I already had a small robotic kit from Oregon State University, one of their Tek-bots.
Our robot quickly came together, much faster than either of us expected. We had to put together all the circuit boards, wiring together all the hardware, making the battery chargers, motor controls, etc. We got everything put together in about two days and began looking for what we could start doing with it. Our first goal was to get the motors controlled by a little PIC micro controller that we had over a serial connection to a laptop we had. Our simple kit robot started with just a single micro controller, and quickly expanded to a tiny linux motherboard that we took out of a small laptop, giving us ram, much greater processing power, even an integrated graphics card (not like we had a screen), but who cares, like going overboard has ever stopped some ambitious college freshman with too much time on their hands.
Once the robot had the Linux board successfully integrated into its controls, th
e long serial cord tether connection the robot to the laptop became a bit annoying. So that led us to connect a laptop wi-fi card to the robot so that we could connect to it directly. After the robot was wireless, of course the next step was to make the robot move from keyboard control on the laptop. The Q and W keys made the left and right motors respectively move forward. The A and S keys made the motors stop, and the Z and X keys made the motors reverse. We became fairly adept at making the robot move around the room, and eventually roll down the halls into other people’s rooms, always a surprise to see.
My professor for my pre-college experience class was friends with a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department and he set us up a meeting for us to show him what we built. When we met with him, he showed us a project he was working on that I found very interesting. A swarm of 5 or 6 robots designed to create digital navigation maps of large areas. Each robot would be placed in a separate location and would begin mapping out their area. If the robots thought they had overlapping data, they would arrange a meeting location and if they were in-fact in the same location, they would mesh their data into a larger map and then go back out to continue discovering more area.
I thought I would be very happy working on that project with him, however he was not looking for any more researchers at that time. He got my friend and I in touch with another professor in the department of technical communications who was doing research on human-robot interactions and was receiving a fully equipped robot to work with. We took this opportunity and began officially doing undergraduate research very early in our freshman year of college. Her robot was a Peoplebot, a human sized robot designed for interaction and autonomous mobility.
So far we have set up the robot, installed the software and began poking around inside at the inner workings of its laser rangefinder, and arrays of sonar rangefinders. There is very interesting stuff for us to work with, I look forward to being able to work with it more.