Railpad is up!

Railpad is up for testing: http://cat.cs.washington.edu

Spot the Diff

So, I finally finished up with my partner on the ray tracing graphics project. We thought we had everything finished until we heard that we would be graded on a pixel-by-pixel basis. We scoured all of the example render scenes and discovered a few abnormalities.

If you have ever played "Spot the Difference," you know what the next 10 hours of debugging was like. Pixel intensities, edge noise, shadow shading ... everything had to be checked.

Update: Jon Su wasn't there to help the other TA's with the pixel-checker, so all of the extra work we put into the project was for naught.

Business is interesting

I visited the business school for a seminar today that was posted on the CS mailing list.

I ended up shaking hands with the CEO of Starbucks.

Business is interesting.

Back to Work

I wasted a few hours watching music videos on youtube. I guess that makes up for all the time I’ve spent away from the TV.

Distractions like these aren’t necessarily bad. In support of my opinion, Bertrand Russell, British author, mathematician, & philosopher says,

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

I really need to buckle down now and learn this Ruby on Rails framework. Our team’s beta release is due in two weeks and we don’t even know the tools yet. Wish us luck!

OS X Fast OS Switching

I usually use all three major operating systems: Windows, OS X, and Linux. Now, I can use them on the same computer, at the same time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbt9upE6hpM

Adsense ramblings

I've earned a grand total of $0.06 from Google's Adsense. I hypothesize that optimal ad placement is highly correlated with fooling site users into thinking that the information at the other end of an ad link is supremely relavent first party information instead of a third party ad. Clicking ads may cause an unpleasant and confusing internet experience to internet neophytes. Additionally, I hypothesize that many users who may visit this site use Firefox with Adblock, and thus have all ads disabled. Neither of these hypotheses have been tested.




Sometimes, I just click the links that appear at the top of Google's search results because the non-ad link may be further down the page. I'm not fooled into thinking the ad is a search result, but it's easier to click a link that's at the top of a search results list than to scan through the items in the list looking for the non-ad link corresponding to the desired website.




So, on to a tangential topic.
What happens when Firefox gets more widespread, and more people use Adblock? Will the internet as we know it cease to exist? Google seems to be diversifying already -- getting widespread first, and then figuring out how to monetize their ubiquity. Perhaps they'll be able to keep their revenue up without relying on tricky ads.

Mac Revolution

Very Cool.