This past weekend I went home to Vermont for a few days, to relax and decompress from my busy life on co-op. While there, I did some things that I love, hiking and photography. Now that I have my new camera and tri-pod, I can do things I was unable to before. On Friday I hiked Mt. Cardigan in the White Mountains, and on the top, I took a 360 degree panorama, hoping to use Hugin to stitch it all back into one large image. When I returned to my computer, I installed Hugin, and dove right in, stepping through each tab, selecting control points, optimizing, adjusting the exposure and finally, stitching. I ran into two errors on my Xubuntu 8.10 (i386) laptop, first, the enfuse application was not installed automatically (due to a package move), and second, when I installed enfuse, the panorama turned out all curvy, like a sideways ’s’. To install enfuse, I downloaded the jaunty .deb package from here and used dpkg to install it. After tinkering for a while with settings to try and reduce the curvature, I tried returning to the first tab, which was an assistant of sorts, to see if it would help me. I clicked on the align and stitch buttons, and sure enough,a preview window of the panorama appeared, as straight as an arrow! Now that I got the process down, I’ve been taking a number of panorama’s (full 360s or partials) and put them on my Flickr.

Enjoy!

Ranok

I just made the discovery the other day that I’ve been on co-op for over a month, and time shows no sign of slowing down! For those of you who haven’t had the delight of hearing me expound on how much I love my co-op, I have really found a place where I fit in, am challenged everyday, and don’t have to do any tedious work, just cutting edge security research!

Anyways, now that I’ve gotten that over with, I was up at Clarkson the other week for the career fair, and I went up the night before for the COSI meeting. That evening a new member introduced a new project to add easy to use AI libraries to the Processing language. I thought that is might be a good idea to take a look at AI stuff before I take the class when I return, so I’m excited to dive in and learn what I can! Also, after learning how little I really know about virtualization, and seeing how popular it is, I thought I’d like to jump on the bandwagon and learn about it. Last night I bought Running Xen and its sister book The Definitive Guide to Xen and I proposed (through Zach) that to learn more about it, I’d like to form a rag tag groups of hackers and write our own, open-source virtualization application, whatever that entails. I hope to post soon as I start learning what I’m in for.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

With less than two weeks until I depart from Clarkson for winter break, it’s crunch time for my friends and I. Below is a list of the things I need to finish before I can pack my things and head home for some much deserved rest before my co-op:

• Final paper for ANTH330 due Monday
• CS350 final group project & presentation due Thursday
• Two CS456 assignments to polish up and turn in
• Final paper for CS456 due next Friday

After that is all taken care of, I have three finals next week to study for and take.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

After an early morning interview on Tuesday, I accepted an offer to go on a co-op to Assured Information Security! Even though it will be tough to leave my friends (especially the seniors) as I move 2.5 hours away, and disrupt my class schedule (pushing things back a semester), I think the hands-on work experience of applying the things I’ve learned, and learning more will be worth it. I now have the frantic task of trying to find a place to live, and thinking about what I need to take with me over winter break. I will be sure to visit Clarkson pretty regularly over the weekends so I won’t become a distant memory to those at Clarkson.

Peace and Chow,

Ranok

Assuming I’m not going on a co-op next semester, I will be taking the following classes next semester:

• CS 653 – Automated Reasoning
• HIST 350 – History of Nazi Germany
• LW 270 – Law and Society I
• MA 314 – Number Theory and Applications
• MP 551 – Open Source Software
• PY 310 – Human Sexuality
• STAT 383 – Applied Statistics I
• HLTH 108 – Basic EMT

Looks like I have a busy semester ahead of me :)

Peace and chow,

Ranok