The heavens opened and dumped pretty white flakes on the front range this past week. Golden, where we live, received just under 3 feet of snow. The snow from this year's blizzard wasn't as moisture packed as the last one we had in 2003.
The melting has just begun -it will be a while before our yard looses its snow-sea.
Here are some pictures:
We received at least 5 inches last night. Wet snow. See what happens when you have wet snow and elms that haven't lost many leaves yet.
Before:
After:
Jennie and I spent part of Saturday doing cleanup duty.
I never mentioned how I did on Round 1. I didn't do as badly as I thought I might, I believe bugs in my code was my downfall. I made it into the quarter finals.
Round 2 of our competition at work didn't have as much participation. There were only 5 'bots submitted this time. This go 'round, I dominated. I maintained my way-point movement system and focused on my radar control. I improved my aiming by adding a rudimentary linear predictive targeting system.
The RoboLeague platform was used to run a bunch of one on one battles for the participating robots. This method takes a lot less time than doing it by hand and having the computer render the bots movements on the screen. Once you've set up the league participants you push a button and then wait for the computer to run through its calculations and spit out the results.
For my troubles I was awarded a half pound of the most expensive coffee from Starbucks.
I've also posted my bot at an online robot repository: http://robocoderepository.com/
. There is an online Roborumble competition that I've entered. You can see my ranking details here and the general rankings here. I made it up to spot 407 with the 0.0.1 version of my bot. I just uploaded version 0.0.2, it will be a while before it gets anywhere.
The Roborumble works in the following manner: People run an application on their machines that downloads robots from the robot repository and pits them against one another then it uploads the results which are used to create the ranking details.
I think we'll be having another competition in the first quarter of next year. I'm hoping to defend my title. We'll see.
Our roommate, Mendy, lived and worked at a horse farm before coming to live with us. Here are some photos of the '06 crops. Cute, aren't they? The farm is in the vicinity of Colorado Springs.
I don't know if anyone has noticed how I updated my blog so I'm going to spell it out. I spent a little time a couple weeks ago enhancing the way images are displayed in my blogger layout tempate. Try clicking on one of the images. You'll see that the page no longer navigates away from the blog to the image. Instead a HTML <div> object is made visible and brought to the front of the viewing area and the larger image is loaded and displayed. This concept is referred to by some as a "lightbox."
Once the lightbox has been displayed, you can navigate between all the pictures on the site by clicking on the right or left side of the picture to move forward or backward respectively. You can close the lightbox either by clicking the close label at the bottom border or by scrolling down the page and clicking somewhere else.
I didn't do all the programming for the lightbox I just wired it up. There is a lot of javascript code that was written by others being used. The main lightbox library came from: http://www.huddletogether.com. Blogger doesn't allow you to upload scripts that they will host so I had to post them on my own site. It is common curtousy to not link images and scripts from others sites.
The little work I did do was to write some code to iterate over all the pictures and attach the lightbox functionality to them. If I didn't do this, then I'd have to add a special attribute by hand to all the images as I upload them. By doing it dynamically when the page is loaded I don't have to remember to do it when putting together a post. I'm also grabbing the blog-entry title and placing it on the lightbox to give the picture a description.
Here's an example of what it looks like:
Our good friend, Lyanne, got married this past weekend. Her Dad is a farmer, this explains their unique mode of transportation from the church, where the ceremony was held, to the reception site.
Congratulations!
Jennie and I took her sister and her husband, Courtenay and Joe, on a packing trip to White Ranch this past weekend. This was our second attempt, thus we are now experts that have it all figured out. Hah! Not really.
Initial packing. We did a much better job packing this time. We needed only one additional packing bag even though there were two more people. Our pack saddle outfit came with three bags.
It was very windy and cold during the afternoon and evening.
Jennie led the way with the horses while the three of us hiked in. Notice the canvas bag on top of Anne, we didn't use it on our first trip.
Pit stop. Cody carried the horse food while Anne carried almost everything else.
This time we chose campsite #4 because it is very close in proximity to the provided corrals.
For dinner we planned on having Lucky Bean soup and hamburgers. The buns got left behind, so we ended up having flat, round, patties of ground beef instead.
Heading Back
I rode Cody and led Anne most of the way home this time.
Courtenay gave it a try too. Great job!
One of my colleagues at work is facilitating a Robocode competition. Robocode is a Java-based framework for developing virtual robots. Once developed, these robots are placed in a “battleground” where they attempt to defeat each other. Please see http://robocode.sourceforge.net/. We are going to have a bracketed competition of 1v1 this coming Friday and then a meelee competition where everyone is put on the board.
I've spent close to 25 hours so far learning how it works and developing my robot. The hardest part so far has been the geometry that is required to direct the robot, interact with the surroundings, run the radar, and aim its gun.
Have you looked at a Unit Circle lately? Do you remember the Law of Sines/Cosines (SSS, SAS), the Pythagorean Theorem? I sure haven't. My math knowledge after many years of non-use has declined to a horrid state. The programming I do at work doesn't involve any geometry so this exercise has been enjoyable. Jennie even sat down and helped me with one problem that still vexes me.
I've decided on a way-point sytem for the bot to used during its navigation. Basically I picked a bunch of spots on the battlefield, put them in an ordered collection, then when the bot starts up it merrily goes on its way from point to point. Nothing fancy, but it will appear at first to be random and I doubt anyone here has put in the time to do pattern matching yet. I still need to add code to retreat in the opposite direction if the realizes it is going to get too close to the other bot.
In addition to the gun, the bot has a radar providing it with information about opponents when the radar pings them. This also must be controlled by code I've written.
My bot's name is 'UnderDog' I don't feel it will do very well as there are some very smart people in my office. We'll see though. I did 'pimp' my bot by adding some short audio clips that will be played at the appropriate times. One of my favorites is: here
Here's a quick video of another persons bot.
Well it finally happened. I had avoided it up until this point. Have you figured it out yet? Probably not. Well, this evening, after a great session of wake boarding with my friend Justin and his dad at Sloan's Lake, we stopped at Starbucks and I had my very first coffee concoction. I believe it was a venti Espresso thing with caramel and milk. It was pretty good, but I should have gotten the decaf.
