Jwendl.NET

While working on a school project using wxPython and XML I was intrigued by the way that Python wants you to handle XML. You have three options, 1) expat, 2) SAX or 3) DOM. All three methods happen to be very disgusting to implement. I decided that it would be worth time spent to find a good way to convert XML to an extensible object structure. I actually found that method at this URL http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/149368. The best part of this snippet is that you can call an elements name, get their child, get the name of the child, get an attribute all really fast (because the author used expat).  

for child in element.children :
	if child.name == "Panel" : 
		pnl = wxPanel(frame, pos=(child.getAttribute("x"), child.getAttribute("y")), size=(child.getAttribute("width"), child.getAttribute("height"))) 
		for control in child.children : 
			self.setControl(pnl, control) panels.append(pnl) 
		else : 
			self.setControl(frame, child)

The end of the Spring Semester has arrived. I am at the point now where I do not have any more courses to take. I have a few projects to finish up hopefully during the summer time. There are two things I would like to note about this semester. The first being that it was very challenging, that is three of my courses made me think constantly and stretched my thought out beyond the limits that I thought it could travel. The second is that while I may be good at the class content, I totally suck at exams.

Another interesting point to make about right now, is that it is 12:30 am on a Sunday morning, and on channel 6 (Regional Channel or whatever) my professor for Intellectual History (HIST 3282) is being interviewed about his ideas of the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. I got a B in his class this semester and boy was that a tough B to get.

So a question to you as the reader: Do you attend, visit, watch, read or admire any works done by any professor's that you have taken courses with? So far on my list has:

• Professor Carl Sturtivant - CSCI 4131, CSCI 4041, CSCI 5421 and Advisor
• Professor Paul Beckmann - PSY 5051W
• J.B. Shank - HIST 3282
• Brian Dill - SOC 3701

These are professors that have left a definite impression on me and have changed the way I think and the way I react to the respective topics they have taught.

I have recently spent many, many long hours on homework pondering theorems of matrices and polynomials for Advanced Algorithms. I think it was a first for me personally to learn so many topics "on the fly" so to speak. I just really wish there were good text books on these topics. If there were I would go buy them. For instance where can I find a good book based soley on matrix operations (such as Determinants, Vandemonde Matrix, Matrix Multiplication).

We got to play around with Determinants of matrices by taking a Vandemonde Matrix as such:

Transform it into :

And then prove using induction that it equals :

In the end this homework assignment took me approximately 40 hours in the span of 5 days. The efforts of this homework could not have been possible though without the assisstance of people in ACM who reminded me exactly how to do things like finding the determinant (which I had no idea how to do).

This homework assignment is not the only thing I got the luxury to slave about. I took an exam yesterday in Biology which appeared to be simple. Of course the last exam I said that for in Biology I earned a 15 / 40 grade on, so I am skeptical. I also have a history paper that is due today that I just wrapped up an hour ago titled Bringing Knowledge to the Masses and the Conflict that Develops. It's a cheesy title I know, but how else could I talk about my two favorite philosopher's (Marx and Kant). Then this next week will bring about an 8 page paper about William the Conquorer campaign from Hastings to London. The interesting perspective I get to write about is how the heck he got food because he definitly could not have carried that much food in that amount of distance.

Many of the topics lately that I have to work on are interesting, but it is near impossible to actually learn when I have soo much grunt work to do. So if anyone is wondering "where is Justin?" or "why does Justin look like a zombie?" the aformentioned issues are the pure reason for that. This weekend all I plan is sleep, my wife on the other hand informed me last night that my weekend is pretty much booked. Such is the life of a married, working, schooling, ambitious, late 20-something!

I am soo glad to see the amount of fellowship that ACM is showing lately. We were able to setup a 35 person LAN party on Friday March 9th 2007. Some games that were played were DoTA, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Worms Armageddon. There were many people there and a lot of fun was had!

My gaming rig setup.

AcmLanParty-005.jpg

Pam getting sick of me taking photos.

AcmLanParty-016.jpg

Look at all of those people!

AcmLanParty-028.jpg

The ACM, CS, IEEE and ITLABS are getting ready to host another LAN party on April 20th. Keep your eyes peeled on their website. You can see more photos here and here.

Well our team got 8th place in the region, and 1st place on campus for the programming contest. We tried really hard and were right with many things that we did. One of the problems we kept getting a "wrong answer' on because the test cases were screwed up. I sent out a request to the judges to double check the test cases. They said the test cases and solutions were correct and our team had a "wrong answer". So we skipped it and moved on, only to find out an hour later our prediction was correct and their test cases were inaccurate.

When all was said and done we had 5 minutes left on the clock and we were almost done with our 6th problem out of ten when we had a formatting issue with printf. Then time was up, it is really so unforgiving. At least we competed and we got first place on the campus which is a good thing. Also getting 8th is not that bad either especially with the turnout of teams. You can look at the results here http://cs.unomaha.edu/~acmregn/rankorder.html so long as they keep the link up. Look for University of Minnesota : null_ptr

Afterwords I went to a buddy's house and played an X-box game called Gladiator and had a few drinks. I am nice and calm at the moment (almost ready to pass out.) Tomorrow I get to work on programming code all day long yay for me.