Firewall not enabled by default in Mac OS X Leopard
August 30th, 2008Whoa. I have been helping a friend of mine set up her new Mac laptop, so another one of my friends, as self-professed Mac enthusiast, gave me his list of what he does to set up a fresh Mac. I skimmed over it, and relished this glaring block of text:
TURN THE FIREWALL ON. It’s in the Security pane. Turn it on, and leave it that way. That it ships turned off is just arrogant and stupid.
If you don’t know, firewalls are one of the most basic forms of security, and for it to be OFF by default is just ridiculous! I even had to confirm with the author of this list, and do research to confirm that this is the case, because it is simply crazy for the firewall to be off by default. (Note: the firewall is on my default in both Windows XP and Vista.) This really annoys me. If the firewall was off by default on Windows and on by default in OS X people on the Internet would throw shit. This is clearly a double-standard in how people judge Windows and OS X.
Clearly opinion: Being an avid Windows user myself, it has been a very enlightening learning experience working with this Mac. My conclusions so far have been that things that are important to me are simply easier in Windows and/or that Windows has more complete implementations of features. But more on that in later posts.
Got a new Sapphire HD 3850 (ATI Video Card)
August 5th, 2008Yes, this is another one of those, "I’m going to show pictures of my computer" posts.
I got a new graphics card in the mail today. It’s a Sapphire HD 3850, which is a (you guessed it) ATI Radeon HD 3850 manufactured by Sapphire. The cool thing about this card, other than it uses PCI-express 2.0, is that the thing is fanless. Yesterday I had a fanless MSI card with an ATI Redeon HD 2600XT chip in it, so I was ready for an upgrade.
Here’s what came in the box. The card (which looks kick-ass) and an S-video to component, S-video to composite, and DVI to HDMI adapters. 
More RAM: Copy says, "NOM NOM NOM"
June 20th, 2008I just got two 2GB RAM modules for my desktop computer. With the two 1GB modules that are already installed, I will have a total of 6GB in that sucker. Gone will be the days of closing programs. Thank goodness!
Maze-Solving Robot
March 13th, 2008Botball is an annual robotics competition. I am part of the Botball club at my high school, and I thought I would share a little project that I just finished.
My goal was to have a generic robot with a camera on it that all of the club members could write code for. First the task was to make the robot bounce around in an arena marked off with red tape, then the goal was to make the robot follow a line (curvy, with sharp edges, with dead ends, whatever), then it was to make the robot solve a maze. It was a lot of fun, and a great learning experience.
One look at the robot shows that I definitely care about software way more than hardware.
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It may not look like much, but surely you know that personality is more important than appearance, and besides this little guy has spunk. If I were to continue this project, though, the next step would be to make him less fat.
Here’s the maze. In theory the robot can solve any maze of this style. (Yes, the end of the maze is a mouse pad. 
)
Here is the robot solving the maze. Keep in mind that the robot can be placed in any part of the maze with the end anywhere else in the maze.Â
I found by experimentation that the longest time it can take the robot to solve this maze, given any start and any end, is 1 minute and 54 seconds.
If there’s one bit of advice that I think new Botball members need to know, it’s to be patient. The first version of my maze-solving code was really just code that made the robot follow lines. A later version would only solve a maze if it never encountered a dead end, and there’s always the version of the code that makes the robot flail about sporadically. So be patient, and don’t try to tackle the whole project at once. Get little pieces to work, and use that to build off of. I in no way assert to be the authority on robotics, but I have learned a thing or two. 
Oh, also precise names. Don’t go calling methods “dog” or “cat”.
Here I made a video explaining in general terms how the robot stays on track when following a wall:
So you may want the code to mess around with, and if you do then you’re in luck! Not only is there a link to download the code at the bottom of this post, but I also recorded two videos of me explaining it, or attempting to anyway.  Warning: It may be a little boring!
In this video I explain the defines, whose values you can change to make the robot behave differently:
In this video I explain how the rest of the code works:
(Note: I found an error in the deadEndInSight method. I fixed it incorrectly on video, but it should be right in the download below.)
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