Snow

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.

Robocode: Round 2

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.

Junk in the Trunk?

I don't think so, these are our precious puppy dogs, Cody and Roco.

Down on the Ranch

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.

Enhanced Image Viewing

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: