What a past 6 months it has been. Who would have ever known senior life was going to be this crazy? It seems just yesterday I was seemingly making my way through the passing crowds in between classes junior year and yet here we are again, senior year, except it has been a roller coaster ride from the start.
Between classes, homework, studying, college apps, personal statements, SATs, robotics club, MyBB, NCAAbbs and client’s websites, this blog was pushed to the back burner. Tonight I find myself, for what seems like the first time in a lifetime, with time to simply reflect on the past 6 months.
Ending Junior year, I started my summer job at ActiveVideo Networks again as the SQA Intern which was definately a really good experience. I also managed to visit Washington D.C., for my first time ever, twice. The first time being with my robotics team, attending the Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) and the second time with my family for a short vacation and then a wedding down in North Carolina (a very beautiful state, btw!).
As always, I continued my development work with MyBB and IT functions for NCAAbbs. In fact, we made some significant changes, including opening up our development servers and source code to the public. As always we kept up with security and maintenance releases, and I even have some tidbits to share further down in this post. But back to the story first:
Senior year opened with a bumpy start. The AP Computer Science class I was going to take was canceled because they couldn’t find a replacement teacher (the old one had to take a leave of absence for the year). It practically ruined my chance for attending one of the UC’s (University of California), as I wouldn’t have an AP class under my belt, and in turn neither the extra GPA points nor the AP test. That dampened my mood quite a bit. Second off, my counselors (whom are hard enough to work with in the first place) changed my schedule 3 times consecutively, making me run around at lunches and breaks to find a teacher whom I could TA for and wasn’t already taken. I ended up as the Drama department’s TA, ironically enough, which was the last place I was expecting my academic life to turn towards. Surprisingly it has ended up being, thus far, a very intriguing experience; there are definately very interesting things to learn from a drama class.
Just as I was settling into my senior classes and classmates, SATs, college apps, and robotics club hit me like a 2 ton Honda Pilot. The next 4 months consisted of 19 hour days, frantic studying, club co-managing, eye-tearing 4 hour test taking and answer bubbling. Fortunately, I was able to get through most of it early. As for my friends, well, they are all freaking out right about now, realizing all the work they need to finish quickly. Fortunately I am able to help them out with answering their application submission questions, editing their personal statements, etc. I still have one last single SAT 2 test in December, but once that is done I am never touching an SAT test again in my entire life.
More significantly, in between all this, my robotics team participated at a competition called CalGames where we placed 1st in the end. Doubled with one of our team member’s birthdays it ended on an awesome note. (We are the teal shirts below)
(A closeup of our team during a competition game. Go! Go! Go!)
(I’m unfortunately hidden behind another team member)
The robot in action:
Now that you’ve seen all that, let me momentarily show off some of my work. As I became the lead programmer of the robotics team, I was given the opportunity to learn a completely new coding language, one which is called LabView. It’s an industry standard program that is primarily used in the programming of robotics or being able to control mechanical or electrical parts.
There is too much code to show and explain all, so I won’t even try. However, let me give you a general overview. This is the Robot Main.vi code which is the highest level of the robot and the central interface to all of the robots functions and executions. Following the flow of the code hierarchy, will be lower level functions. Each “Block” you see in the code is basically a “function” in programmer layman terms. The difference between this language and most others is this is by default a highly multi-threaded language.
Gallery:
So as you can see, the robot may only do a few things, but a lot of work goes into making it do those few things extremely well.
All in all I have had a terrific time on the robotics team, but in these dwindling economic teams we have had trouble sustaining the club. This year we are faced again with the challenge of keeping our club open and running. Our robotics club is by nature very expensive in comparison to many of the other clubs, but in contrast it provides an extremely rich experience that prepares the students much more for the real world experience in their various relating industries than any book or test can do. Our expenses for the club are around $19,000 annually (http://evhsrobotics.com/files/2009-2010/Sponsor%20Packet%2009-10.pdf – page 6). Most of the costs are for materials or registration fees to compete in competitions. If you can provide assistance or know of a company or someone else who can, please feel free to leave a comment below or visit our club’s website at http://evhsrobotics.com/ and we will get in contact with you! We also accept in-kind donations and negotiate with companies for competitive prices for various materials. We could definitely use every bit of help we can possibly get.
On a different subject, we are nearing feature-completion of MyBB 1.6. This means that within the next month we should see MyBB 1.6 in public beta and out soon after that. First though, we are going to make a maintenance release for the MyBB 1.4 series within the next couple of weeks. MyBB 1.4.10 will be the last release of the MyBB series, excluding any security vulnerability releases.
As I have reiterated over the past year, MyBB 1.6 won’t be as drastic of a change as MyBB 1.4 was. As MyBB 2.0 will be a complete rewrite, we are aiming MyBB 1.6 to have much less “behind-the-scene” changes than MyBB 1.4 had. This means that most of your plugins will still work with very little change (most simply the version compatibility indicator), and themes should be easily upgradable too. This will allow us to aim the of end the MyBB 1.x series on a great note and put it to rest in an honorable way.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to post any comments, questions, suggestions or concerns.
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I have been preoccupied with school and other activities so I haven’t had as much time here. However, I’ve found a few moments to show off the new UI changes to the MyBB Merge System that have been in development for the past several months.
The main greeting page:
This page is largely the same in previous releases, but the version number is now shown always in the header so users can more easily provide the version number and make sure they are running an updated version.
The requirements check page:
This page is brand new. It allows us to make sure the user is running the latest version and that the /convert/logs/ directory is writable so that if there are issues later on, they can be resolved more easily by providing debug logs. The Merge System won’t allow you to continue until you are running the latest version and the logs directory is writable.
The testing information page:
This page is also brand new. It is there to describe to the user how they should report problems.
The board selection page:
This page is largely the same, except you’ll notice that support for a couple more versions are available for some supported forums.
The module selection page:
Again, you will notice it is largely the same. However a few modules are missing. We have removed support for Avatars a few other ones which weren’t standardized among the board’s. Why did we remove them? They were simply too high-maintenance, didn’t work very well for many people, and didn’t seem extremely essential to converting a forum over.
The database configuration page:
It is essentially the same as last time, though it has been tweaked a bit and a couple of annoying bugs were fixed with it.
The database configuration page (2):
This page is run right after you enter in the database configuration details. This is a completely new page. Before, you would just be sitting and waiting for a long time wondering what was going on behind the scenes. Now it informs you with this new page. It checks the database details, and shows a progress bar describing what is going on at that moment. As you can see it was adding an import_uid field to my trunk_posts table.
The options configuration page:
This page has been completely redesigned from the old boring plain version that you’ve seen in old versions of the Merge System. It sports a count of how many it will import, and provide you with a nice clean interface for how many it should import per page and whether or not it should auto-redirect. The new default for “import per page” is 1000, except for attachments which is 20 since those take considerably longer to import.
The actual in-process import page:
This page has again been completely redesigned. Old versions sported a long list of
Now it is a simple progress bar with what exactly it is importing below it.
Once the posts page is run, a counters rebuild page is run.
The rebuilding counters page:
This page rebuilds the counters because data such as the amount of posts, threads, users, etc are notorious for falling out of sync through various bugs in any forum software. So as such, the Merge System simply does a clean fresh recount of all of the counters. This will make sure that the counters are correct and in-sync.
The cleanup page:
This page is completely new. In previous versions when you pressed the “Cleanup” button or if the Merge System had completed importing all the data in all of the modules, you would be left hanging with a blank page for a while as the Merge System ran some commands to “cleanup”. This now sports a new page with a nice progress bar and an indicator telling you exactly what is going on. In this screenshot the import_pmid column is being removed from the trunk_privatemessages table.
The completion page:
This page is the same as all the other previous versions, however, the reports generated are improved.
The reports generated page:
This is a sample HTML report. You will notice that the “Total Query Time” is much better formatted and there is a new “Errors” part to the report. The “Errors” section is mainly used for any errors that pop-up during attachment conversion that are unexpected and couldn’t be handled properly. This gives you a chance to correct those errors manually.
You will notice that the Merge System now uses nicer formatted numbers (comma separated) as a visual nicety and many other tweaks and improvements such as much better attachment handling. The Merge System will now check that it will be able to import attachments properly and if not, it will tell you as such and give you a chance to correct the issues so the Merge System can properly continue.
This blog post only showcases the new UI of the Merge System. What you don’t see is the completely rewritten framework and back-end to the Merge System. It now sports a much more uniform, OOP architecture that minimizes code repetition, improves consistency, improves performance, debugging capabilities, simplifies previously complex code, introduces unit testing abilities for even greater stability, and cleans up old, outdated code overall.
I hope you have enjoyed this preview to the new MyBB Merge System. It is still up in the air whether this will be a beta release, RC release or a final release and there is currently no exact release date planned. We are currently in the testing phases of the new Merge System and we hope we can box it up and send it out soon.
MyBB 1.4.5 was released a little over a week ago, and I have been monitoring the release and so far we’ve only had a few regressions pop-up. This release was a very successful release to say the least. It’s gone through:
Developer Testing
SQA Testing
A Private, 2-week, beta test
SQA Testing has proven to be a very successful team, spotting errors in fixes and code the developers have written. The private beta identified 19 new issues that were fixed for MyBB 1.4.5 and also confirmed 39 fixes (the fixes that weren’t already confirmed by SQA) were working and if not were fixed to work.
Not being under the pressure of having to make a release because of a security bulletin has made this a great release as well as it wasn’t “rushed,” unlike past released. We’ve also had a fairly decent staff restructure and things are running more smoothly now. A blog post on the exacts of the staff restructure will be made in the following weeks, on the Official MyBB Blog.
MyBB Team Positions
We’re always looking out for new potential. If you want to be on the MyBB Team, you just have to show:
You are dedicated and active to the project
You speak English very well and have good communication skills
You have good knowledge of how MyBB works and in the position you want to take up
If you don’t feel like we’re noticing you it’s probably just because we’re too busy making the next version of MyBB! So just shoot a Team Leader a Private Message to get their attention. Remember though, your chances are considerably increased if you stand out with the three suggestions listed above.
Yesterday was the three year anniversary of being with the MyBB Team. It has been a great learning experience thus far and I have learned so much more being on the team-in terms of collaberation, project management, communication, and programming practices- that any standard school class could not have even gotten close to teaching. Today, I find myself in a position where I must refocus my learning to school itself instead of something “real world” like being a manager of a successful online software.
The problem
Our school system sucks. Plain and simple. Expectations are so high, and students are being pushed so hard these day that it is now, more then ever before, about beating the system then actually sitting down and doing and honest days learning. Face it, do any of you remember half the things that are taught to you in high school? Let me give you an example, to put it in perspective.
When I took Algebra 2 during high school, I would routinely not understand a word problem, or a formula. I would ask my friends, whom had already taken the Algebra 2 course and went on into math analysis or above. I asked four of those friends at random, the same question. Three of those four friends didn’t know what to do what-so-ever and the fourth had to correct himself twice before he got it right. Mind you, these are students who had already taken the Algebrea 2 course. Can you answer it, without looking up how to do it?
“The Student Senate consists of 6 seniors, 5 juniors, 4 soppomores, and 3 freshmen. How many different committees of exactly 3 senisor, 3 juniors, 4 sophomores, and no freshmen can be chosen?”
If you did that right you should have used the nCr combination theorem. It should work out as the following:
= 6C3 X 5C3 X 4C4 X 3C0
= (6!/3!3!) X (5!/2!3!) X (4!/0!4!) X (3!/3!0!)
= ((6X5X4)/(3X2X1)) X ((5X4)/(2X1)) X (1) X (1)
=20 X 10 X 1 X 1
= 200
So, were you honestly able to do that without using some sort of help?
For most of you, the answer is no. We students remember the lessons until the test, then we forgot about them, repeat that until the semester is over, generally don’t do so well of the midterm or final, and scrape by. For those of us who are not so lucky in managing to scrape by, we take summer school, and that solves everything.
Teachers
Teachers are a huge apart of what a student actually learns long-term and the grade we get in our classes. There are some really good teachers out there, but I’d say the majority are just “okay” with the last few being “bad”.
I’d classify teachers under the following categories:
A great teacher is smart, understands students and gets them “involved” with the lessons via projects, partner collaboration, music, and movie clips, does not give out “busy work”, does not have random mood swings [and if they do, tells the class they're not up for being silly that day, or likewise], and creates a comfortable environment in the class.
A good teacher is smart, only has average communication and collaboration skills, has periodic random mood swings [without justification or being forthright], gives out a small amount of “busy work”, piles up a lot of homework without respecting or considering what other prearrangement’s and events students might have.
A bad teacher is sufficient in the subject they teach, but has bad grammar or bad English such as that students have a hard time understanding the teacher, gives out homework without teaching the lesson, spends considerable time during class doing nothing and the class doing nothing productive, blames the class for “being behind”, gives tests that take longer then the amount of time during that period and always has to curve tests because they are too hard (and are not AP classes), and is unable to understand and help students figure out problems in the very own lesson they are supposed to teach.
Summer School
It is general knowledge [the same view is shared by many teachers as well] that summer school is where you come to when you fail a class, sit on your tush for several weeks, and pass the class. At our school [information that has directly been shared by teachers to students] we have P.E. teachers, during summer school, teaching Algebra 2 and math analysis classes.
No one expects a student to go into a class and spend that amount of time and come out and have actually learned something. In addition, laws, reform acts, and rising pressure on the schools to put out numbers and statistics that show a high amount of passing students and students that pass state tests create this problem where teachers teach to strict and boring guidelines. Everyone becomes so antsy about the tests that we forget how students actually learn and we train them with a piece of paper and a pencil, to soak up information until the test, and then we squeeze them dry to restart for the next semester. Students learn if something is “memorable.” For example, why would I ever need to know the order and the names of all of our Presidents? The simple answer is, I have a higher chance of dying in a car crash then ever using that information in all my life for a real purpose. Something I would remember though, is how an electric circuit works because that directly relates to many things around me in my life.
SAT & Subject Tests
Everyone in California takes the SAT and SAT Subject Tests as it is one of the main criteria for being accepted into a college. The funny thing is, it’s not even really a test of your knowledge. When I took the Practice SAT, I did not even have close to enough time to finish all the questions in the sections, as it is timed. I understand they do not want people just sitting there all day, but I like to read through things a couple times to make sure I understand what it is that they are asking on the question. In my area of expertise, if I screw up one character, everything can go to hell.
So what now? Hm, oh look. SAT Training courses! So great, now because I paid with my arm and a leg, I can pass up everyone else on the SAT test because now I’ve been drilled so much on how to take a test, I can get a much better score.
Wait just a second now. So now, the reason I could be accepted to a college is because I was able to take a test faster then the other person? What kind of bull!@#$ reason is that? What is the whole point of colleges? To prepare us to work in the “real world” environment, right? So now, because I can take a test really fast I can now go to college, get a degree, and get a good job, where at I would never ever have to take a test fast in the rest of my entire life? In addition, is it not our very own teachers telling us to take our time so we don’t miss something?
And yet, after all of those issues aren’t we still churning out successful people? People whom are successful not because of how fast they can take a test or if they know Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, but instead if they can sit down and do what needs to be done for a specific position in a company. Sounds pretty straightforward to me.
We have all of this mold building on top of this bubble wrapped, gilded, waxed, tummy-tucked school system and its starting to smell.
I come to school Monday and walking towards 1st period a bunch of trees were cut in half and left hanging upside down.
The next day, get to school and during 3rd period the D building, administrative building, was locked down with local cops, the fire department, medics, FBI, and Haz-Mat. Someone sent 10 snail mail messages all containing a white powder which at the time they thought was anthrax. Turned out to be a harmless powder though (talcum powder). In one of the last snail mail messages apparently they had a list of “demands” and some gripes about school policies (something about the hat policy from what I heard) and mentioned that this “wasn’t their first time”.
Today, I get to school and there is a swastika etched into the schools main lawn and earlier that morning thieves broke into a gun store in the city and stole more than 100 guns, two being shotguns.
There is rumors going around that there will be a code red tomorrow (drill, I believe) and some sort of safety talk – Not sure though.
All in all, this kinda sucks. Life couldn’t be busier for me and for all of this to happen on top of that just really feels like a jab to the stomach. Most of the students up until now have been pretty mellow about the whole thing, but who knows how things will go tomorrow. Hopefully things will just continue normally and the whole incident just blows over. None of us need more drama in this world.
The worst part is, this community is a generally friendly community, so it’s surprising/sad to see it happening.
The old domain out, and the new domain in! It was about time for a change and besides that “http://thetikitiki.com” is not exactly easy to tell people. I purchased ryangordon.net for my blog and I am now using it as my primary domain instead of thetikitiki.com. The old domain will still be around for a while and it should redirect you to ryangordon.net.
For the past month, I’ve been working with my school’s Robotics team. We took on a 6-week intensive project on building a robot that in the end results in a 120 pound, 5 ft tall robot.
That video was taken after 22 hours of straight work (9:00 AM Sunday-5:00AM Monday last week) at 3:00 AM in the morning at NASA Aimes in California, the day the robot was due to be shipped off. In fact, I wrote up the 5 stages to sleep deprivation:
1. Confusion
2. Organized Chaos
3. Pissiness
4. Drunkeness (including a bit of singing – aka Tired High) 5. Half brain function
Anyway, the objective of the competition is to collect what they call “space rocks” and put them into an opponents trailer. The “space rocks” come from outside by another team member that throws them in or by another robot. Our robot pretty much sucks them in if it passes over them and we can store them up and shoot them pretty accurately from a close range into an opponents trailer.
Our team will be competing in the FIRST competition at Davis College in California. I certainly have had fun helping to build and program this robot. I got to use lots of loud and powerful machines in building this robot as more then 80% of the robot was custom made and all of it was put together by hand. I hope we put up a good show at Davis and have fun doing it. Perhaps we’ll even go to the nationals at Atlantis.
If you would like to check out more, our robotics club has an entire site for it at http://evhsrobotics.com/.
Never develop your application to “second-guess” or “compensate.” Doing so will only give the impression that the application is smarter then it actually is, and eventually intent-errors will plague you. Remember, computers are built on the foundation that it cannot guess correctly what you want. That is why everything is explicit. Don’t be Microsoft and end up having to fix it several years later.
Expect the unexpected
There is absolutely no doubt that you will run into issues you never dreamed you would encounter with your application. Your best bet is to prepare yourself for these issues as much as possible. I recommend two or three punching bags.
Experience, Experience, Experience
Experience drives good practices. Good practices lead to a good product. I cannot stress that enough. However, you must remain assert because experience cannot be born overnight. Only through time will you will gain experience. But experience does not end because time never stops ticking.
Start small
No one likes a “showoff”, nor could you ever be one without an onion- Layers upon layers of work, built upon previous layers, and layers before that- All the way down to the fine idea that sparked your creation. If you try to take on something big, first thing, you will fail. You will loose yourself upon the thousands and thousands of standards, features, ideologies, et cetera, that need to be accounted for in order to make a program good. So start small and don’t spread yourself too thin. Focus on the functionality first, worry about the design and other necessities later.
Be Creative
There are no limits to your imagination. Write down all of your ideas and consult your friends and others on ideas and feedback as well. The best thing to do is implement all the ideas you and others reasonably have first. If you plan on doing it later, don’t. Do it now. If you delay it for a future version, it will only be harder. If you will, once you bake a cake, you can’t easily go back and change the filling.
Has it been quite a year! I’ve extended the levees on the boundary of my knowledge and filled even further the never ceasing quicksand trap of friends and family. And with that in mind:
A look back on my own life:
I got my drivers permit
I worked for ActiveVideo Networks during the summer as an Intern under SQA/Development
MyBB 1.4 was released, receiving a huge upgrade to MyBB 1.2. We:
It’s about time I got a domain and as you can see you’ve probably been redirected from the old tiki.rct3x.net domain to the new http://thetikitiki.com/ domain. In large part thanks to my brother as a birthday present. I also now have a PayPal account properly setup which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.
In other news, MyBB 1.4 Beta Refresh 3 has been released to the beta testers and it will be the last one- providing no big issues pop up and the bug flow continues to slow- before we decide what to do next. We can either choose a public beta or push it out as the final release of 1.4.
There are many other things that I’ve been up to apart from MyBB. Just this last week I had a 3 page research essay due on Monday, a 5 minute video presentation for Spanish due Wednesday, a geometry test on Thursday, and a PowerPoint due Friday. And then all the normal homework the teachers feel they need to assign on top of that. And to top it all off I came down with a really bad cold. Next week I’ll be doing a History presentation. Then in two weeks I’ll be doing my finals for all the rest of my classes and then on to my possible Internship over the summer. Oh and I’ll be needing to get my driving and work permits.
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