Ben Murrell

It got up to 54 today, so Nick Pegg and I decided to go out for a ride. Nick’s got a scooter, I’ve got a 250 Kawasaki Ninja. After I shoveled the ice out of our steep driveway, we brought ‘em out of the basement. We rode around town for the most part, and I left my blinker on a couple of times which prompted Nick to pull over thinking I was in distress (oops!) I haven’t ridden since the end of November, so it was a blast. It’s not supposed to be this warm until next Friday, but I’ll probably take it out again then.

I got a new jacket as a birthday present – my original jacket is a mesh jacket with a waterproof / wind breaker insert. Riding in the original jacket under 70 was chilly, and under 60 was downright freezing. The new jacket is a textile jacket, and it goes further down my body – it’s made for riding in cooler weather, it’s supposed to be more water proof. Well, riding around town with Nick, my jacket kept me really warm (but never too warm). When I went out on the highway, my feet / butt were getting really cold since my shoes and jeans weren’t doing much for me, but my chest and arms were really warm. Towards the end of the highway ride, I could feel my arms cooling down a bit – this was my first time with the new jacket and I didn’t spend much time putting it on and adjusting it so I’m going to chalk it up to that.

Anyways, it was a good ride.

I’ve been learning OpenGL and the SDL over the last few weeks so I can build the visualizer for the Missouri S&T ACM MegaMiner AI tournament. It’s interesting, but not as conceptually interesting as my foray into device drivers / kernel modification / rootkits. In practice though, I am able to see the results of my work. With the basic rootkits, I could see a process disappear from the task manager or get a response to a packet from code I had embedded into the Windows kernel, but the feedback wasn’t nearly as fun to look at. I wrote a 3D Sierpinski Gasket generator, then I wrote a really basic simulation of a ball bouncing – even though they’re simple projects, the end results are rewarding and keep driving me to do more.

I’ve been following Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach Using OpenGL (4th Edition) pretty closely – I feel like I’ve learned a lot. It covers everything from the just getting started, to the conceptual stuff, to the nitty gritty math details, to the OpenGL API usage – it’s pretty nice. I remember the basics of the linear algebra, and I’m seeing a lot of familiar terms from Linear Algebra class… but this book brought it all together. Now a lot of the transformations make sense… things like projections, rotations, etc.

This week Berto and I are going to start working on one of my project ideas. I don’t want to go into great lengths about it since all we have is a basic idea and some prototype code I wrote over break, but it deals with stock markets, automation, and genetic programming. It will be interesting to see how far we get with it.