cat /proc/claus | java

Recently, Marilia told me I was smelling cigarette smoke. It is that kind of thing that, while you absolutely can’t notice before someone point it out to you, after they do you can’t take your head from it.

So, in fact, my coat and my shirt were smelling strongly of cigarette. And that is the mystery:

I don’t smoke, no one in my laboratory smoke. When I go to a Cafe to study, I always sit in the non-smoking area. My RPG partners don’t smoke. How the hell my coat got infested by that strong cigarette smell?

Hmmm… :-/

Recently I saw in a forum this very neat flash based game. It is a geography quiz, where you have to try and get right the position of many cities in the world.

Try it!

Well. It is January 11th right now, but “write new year blog post” is still written in my todo list, so better get this done with.

2007 was an year that went by really fast. It’s first quarter was dominated by a bunch of fun trips that me and Marilia did together, but the second and third quarter were completely overshadowed by my master thesis. I spent way too much time working on my thesis and the experiments that were required to complete it, not to mention a number of related academic presentations.

The result of this, coupled with my usual procrastination, means that unlike most other years in my life, I feel that the circle of people that I share my life with shrank quite a bit in 2007. Not as many house parties, not as many events, very few nengajyos.

Because of that, while normally I don’t bother with New Year’s resolutions, I decided to do a big one: This year, I want to try and reverse what happened in 2007, by trying to talk more, and to more people - rekindle the contacts I have, and try to make new contacts.

… :-/ But just the fact that I’m writing this blog post in the 11th of January shows how well I’m doing so far. Well it is never late to set things right, specially in the second week of the year, right?

Like last year, I was invited by my advisor to work as a Teaching Advisor to his “robocup simulation” for the 3rd year undergrad students. Last year, the experience was not completely satisfying - the students didn’t seem to work very hard in their projects or the reports - it gave me a bad impression of the students in our undergrad course.

This year, however, the experience is being quite different. When I asked who had Java programming experience, most students raised their hands. Questions about the programming aspect of the assignment were made right on the first class. And there was this one group of students who all were running Ubuntu in their laptops. Seems that we might be seeing some interesting results this year. I hope so.

I also learned something about teaching in a programming laboratory course. On the first two days, there were almost no questions or clarifications requested of me. But on the second day I noticed that a team seemed to be dozing off. Two team members were just staring at the ceiling, and the other was just staring at the laptop monitor. I decided to ask if they had already decided on a strategy for the team and for their programming, and eventually they told me that they were not really sure on how to program a soccer strategy for independent agents. They had divided their group into those who would do the programming for the forward players, and those who would program the defence players. When I gave some very vague suggestions, they seemed to pick up interest and started to have some good ideas of their own.

It dawned on me that our work is much more than just grading reports and answering questions, but also to try and light the creative spark in the student’s head by showing some interest into what they are doing.

Let’s see if this year I can put together a programmed team of my own to compete with theirs in the last class.

Recently, I had a nasty problem with Eclipse in my Ubuntu Box. The GUI would not show me the code for some of my source files, saying that the text window couldn’t be displayed due to an internal error. For other files, it would display the code, but mark every line as an error, with spurious reasons like “can’t instance org.eclipse.something” or “java.util is not a valid library” or something similar.

The first time it happened to me, it was because Eclipse was wrongly using the Gnu Java compiler, instead of Sun’s JDK 1.6. I corrected the links with ‘update-alternatives’, and all was well.

Now it happened again to me earlier this week. This time out, I made sure that the GJC did not have a higher priority than sun’s java, but still the error remained. Today I found out that, for some reason, the fault was of the “system library” of the project. The system library was set to the “default” (sun’s java 1.6). When I manually set the path for the 1.6 library, eclipse started working again.

Hmmm. I feel like I have just patched the symptoms, instead of really solving the problem, but at least my system is working now. Hope this helps other people - and if anyone has a more “solid” way of fixing my system, feel free to comment.