Tommy Li

I've spent the last week hacking together the netcode for storing and retrieving the Texts. It works! It can be improved but the general thing works great. I can now store arbitrary texts for any user, and then retrieve them through the Jabber XMPP connection with another client! I guess that means the basic functionality is all done. I'm so happy!

Now time to flesh out the details...

I went to Prom - again. The preparation was pretty hellish, but the night itself turned out to be wonderful. Afterwards, we went - sweatered of course, because of the night cold - to a certain patch of sand in which we first cuddled, and cuddled - this time wearing ridiculous formal attire. It was a pretty perfect ending to the night. I actually didn't think I'd go to Prom once, and in an interesting turn of fate, I've been twice. I expect this to be the last time.

As for Impulsestorm2, the basic text-client and IM client is done. I could refine those two things, but I think the next step is to bite the bullet and write the server-side Jabber component. I'm fairly excited. It all seems to be coming together now.

I also need to write a library (probably in C or C++) that will convert Wikitext-like markup (including LaTeX math) into HTML and (PNG or MathML). Actually, that's a very seperable part of the project and someone else could do that. Will anyone please do that? I'll be your friend - and more... Oh... damn it, no one will.

Yesterday I noticed that my PDA would no longer charge when put in its cradle. This probably leads to most people buying a new charger or contacting customer service, but that is not the way of the citizen-engineer.

The first thing I suspected was that my AC/DC adapter was no longer working. I took out my multimeter and found that it was actually fine - it put out a nice voltage of 5.8V or so, (while ignoring my increasingly angry girlfriend, who was at my house).

I then suspected a faulty connection. I took a look in the hole where you plug in the DC adapter and noticed that the inner-pin on the female end was not protruding as usual. I determined that it was either broken-off or pushed in. To verify this, I stuck a paper clip to temporarily bridge the electrical gap and put my PDA in. Sure enough, when the circuit was thus completed, the PDA charged as normal. At this point I was forced to put aside this problem by Emily.

A day later, I was alone. I unscrewed and then then opened up the cradle and found that the pin had indeed been somehow pushed in. I pushed it back out, reassembled it, and now my PDA is happily charging. Thus I fixed my PDA cradle/charger with a paper clip, screwdriver, and my brain.

My point is this: before you go rushing off to customer service or the store for a new device, take 10-15 minutes to analyze what could be going wrong with your device and use the basic understanding of electricity that everyone posesses. Be a citizen-engineer. Save time, money, gasoline, and the environment. Then brag about it online and in general be a total badass. Contact me for details.

I'm probably going to GPL the new Impulsestorm client, that is, make it an open-source product. One of the libraries I'm looking to use is also under GPL and I don't really want to pay the fees for a commercial license (~=$200 for the upcoming release). I'm not sure... maybe I'll just pay it to keep it closed source - but for what?

I also posted the source code to my LiveJournal Wiper (finally). It's under BSD if anyone is interested (probably no one is).

On the last post, I mentioned not feeling happy or well. However, now that I'm back at college, I'm happy again. I rock. I thought the unhappiness was due to dreading the return to college, but now that I'm here, I'm very happy again. It must have been some property of Winter Break that was making me unhappy.

On the Impulsestorm front, I've more-or-less decided, over the last two years, to make Impulsestorm a Jabber extension. That is, to leverage the existing and extendable Jabber instant messenging protocol to allow users to do what I want.

Winter break has been great. I got an A+, an A, and an A- in my three classes Physics, Linear Algebra, and American Novel, respectively.

Though ever since I went under anesthesia to get my wisdom teeth removed, I've been feeling sort of blue. Maybe it's due to my general lack of exercise since then. I'm guessing that's it... Well, I've had some exercise, but not as much as before.

I've always been cheery and optimistic, but suddenly I feel like St. Peter in The Professor's House. Do I have to live life without delight? I feel pretty uninterested in the things that used to be fun... I have second doubts about growing up. I want more excitement in my life. Maybe that is the root of my discontent. I'm not really feeling depressed so much as a nagging feeling of discontent. Maybe I need to make changes in my life because my current lifestyle is no longer fulfilling to me.

Yes, perhaps soon I'll need to make such changes. Emily suggested that I see a therapist. Fuck that. I'm too much of a badass to need therapy or drugs. I don't believe in drugs for the winter blues.

Soon, winter break will arrive. It will be awesome. I'm just going to hang out with my friends and Emily all day.

But first I have to finish Finals. I wish I didn't have to take those finals. Progress on Impulsestorm2 is picking up. I'm pretty excited about that. Programming IS2 is interfering with my schoolwork.

Thanksgiving Weekend was so fun. It was awesome hanging out with my high school friends again. I'm not happy to be back at school. It seems like I've been gone for a week when I've really only been away for four days. Ah... back to college.

Sometimes I wonder if I really want to grow up or just hang out with my friends all day.

I'm may be hired by a professor in the UCLA Political Science department to learn the Python programming language and program a web application that allows the public to visualize the voting records of various legislative bodies in the country.

I need to resume work on Impulsestorm 2. I did a lot of work during the week before school started but am now finding that I have less time for this. It's so hard to allocate time for all the things I want to do.

I spent a good time configuring my spare wireless router and a very nice girl across the hall let me place it in her room. I now have wireless internet access for my PDA in the floor lounge and the lounge of the floor below me. It may reach further down, though I'm not sure. I can now stream music off of Radio Free Colorado off the internet through my PDA in the floor lounges!

A week ago, I came up with a great way of finding all vectors orthogonal to a given set of vectors. I don't know if it's a known method. I'll publish it when I have time. Maybe it is not yet known and my idea is novel...

I got two articles of new clothing today to replace two articles I recently decommissioned for being too old and no longer insulating.

My mom also taught me how to sew so I could customize them (replace buttons with vecro for quicker access). Every man should learn how to sew. It's really useful. You can modify your clothing to better suit your purposes.

Girls have unlimited capacity to come up with bullshit in English class.

I bet they love English because no one ever tells them how wrong they are. I should let them know.

I'd like to see them try to pull this bullshit in Physics.

Web pages load slow here because there are a lot of people using the Internet here at UCLA. This is perfect application of QoS software, which can prioritize certain traffic, like HTTP, over other less important traffic, like FastTrack-Kazaa.

Tomorrow I'm going down to the Student Technology Center and asking if they have QoS control software active on the network. If they don't, I'm going to have to slap someone there.

I bet my webpages load slowly because some dude is getting an extra 3KB/s on his porn download, and it is absolutely ridiculous.

In other news, I also realize that I'm pretty much a retired gamer. I play 1 hour like once every 3 weeks or so. I may be out of it, but I think I can still pwnx0r n00bs if I am called to duty. Mmmm makes me want to play Starcraft and spider mine people mericilessly.

There was this one Physics problem that I must have poured 5 hours into before finally getting it. Very quickly I knew how to do it (setting d(d)/d(theta)=0), but I got very lost in the math.

It was just trigonometric identities, but having two angles and a bunch of sines and cosines all over the place just intimidated me. It was so messy!

"There's just no way in hell I could possibly find the derivative of that."

But no, I could have easily differentiated it. Since I was just differentiating for theta, everything else was a constant. And since it was equal to zero, all the other terms can just be divided out on both sides. I just had never dealt with such a complex problem before and lost my wits temporarily.

I was very happy when I finally did get it right.

Here's the problem if anyone is curious:

A person stands at the base of a hill that is a straight incline making an angle (phi) with the horizontal. For a given initial speed v0, at which angle theta (to the horizontal) should objects be thrown so as the distance d they land up the hill is as large as possible.

College seems much more intense than high schools in terms of academics. I have to work 2-3 times harder than I did in high school just to keep up. I can't bullshit anything. I genuinely have to attend the lectures and read the book intensely just to vaguely get the concepts in math.

Linear algebra is so tough. I wish I were back in Calculus. I should have majored in Sociology instead of Physics.

Two of my articles of clothing now have critical grass stains. It'll probably be a big pain to get out - so I probably won't bother. I got them sliding down the hill in front of Royce hall on a block of ice.

I figure that it's better to have done fun things and wear stained clothes than it is to be fashionable and have never done anything at all.

I'm at college now and I think it's pretty cool. There is this one guy on my floor who builds battle-robots and plays Warhammer and wishes to roleplay. I sense that he'll be a good friend of mine.

I think I'll either seek employment with the Student Technology Center, which manages the network and provides technical support to the UCLA student populace, or seek programming jobs with individual departments. In any case, I wish to work - for both money and to maintain balance in my life.

I think I'm overqualified to work with the STC; it'll be a brain dead job installing and configuring networks or fixing messed-up computers of students. However, I will get to meet a lot of new people. I'm not sure what I want to do.

Says one to the other: "Yep, it's a beaut. Just got it. It's like it was designed for me. Greatest degree of control I've ever had. I tell it to go, and it really goes! God damn it, it missed a spot on my hood."

This refers to the recent TIME article, The Condi Doctrine.

When I read about Condoleezza Rice's vigorous push to get a draft constitution pounded out before a certain deadline, I was immediately reminded of a similar event in history. During the drafting of the American Constitution, the major issue that divided Americans at the time was also simply "kicked down the road". That led to a civil war that claimed 600000 lives. Rice's hope that Iraq's constitution can be quickly drafted without addressing the major divisive issues is unrealistic and irresponsible. It signals that the Administration really cares about looking good rather than building a stable democratic nation, undermining our entire purpose of being there. We've committed ourselves to building a new Iraq. Let's do it right.