New Years Resolutions & Predictions for 2010

New Years Resolutions:

1. I will be more of an aggressive and assertive person.

Top 6 Christmas Songs

Context: A friend of mine asked me for a challenge: pick out six Christmas songs from my collection, and make a compilation with another six songs chosen by another friend of ours.  This was my post to the Facebook note:

Oh, hey! What’s up? (12/14 edition)

So, it’s been a long, long time since I posted in my dairy.  This is because of finals, relationship issues, lots of stuff – things that I’ll post about today.  Hooray.

The State of WELSH

Yeah, so school is done and I have time to actually write my blog.

I finished this semester at 10:30 pm last night, finishing a paper on WELSH. So, now, I am going to tell you where WELSH is.

WELSH has network communications that allows a user to connect to a server and run certain commands remotely.  Anything that produces text output on the WELSH console will work (so, things like process and file management, not necessarily opening files) will work.  Everything that is sent in between client and server is encrypted in 128-bit Rjaindaul (I never know how to spell it right) encryption.

• However I am not releasing a new beta of WELSH 2 with this feature in for a few reasons:
• It’s still relatively untested, due to problems with actually using .NET’s constructs for using symmetric encryption.  I couldn’t get CryptoStreams, so I decided to emulate them with ICryptoTransform.  However, I haven’t had time due to finals to actually test my solution, and if anything goes wrong, I predict it’s with the facts that the strings are encoded and re-encoded from UTF-8 to Base64, rather then the encryption itself.
• Despite the fact that it is encrypted, I couldn’t get a password system working correctly (probably related to my earlier problems with CryptoStreams), so essentially, it is possible for a malicious entity to wreck your machine.

Essentially, I will not be releasing a new version until I get a password system working, which is one of the goals for the next month.  Other things that will be accomplished: “easy” paths, more mathematical operators (exponent), error logging, fixing WELSH files and another big round of refactoring.  Also,  time -month and time -year will be implemented, and general parsing fixes.

I predict these features will be done by 1/12/10.

Also, I will be presenting WELSH to the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges South Central Region conference at St. Edwards in Austin, TX on April 23-24.  I will also be published in their proceedings as well as the “Electronic Student Paper Journal for Computing Sciences in Colleges”.

So check it out!

Use MySQL to Create CSV Files

At my job, often we have to do reports.  These dreaded CSV files are usually approached with a mix of Ruby and different languages to mash what we want to down.

My Views on the SU Name Change and Football Team

So, the university I go to and soon-to-be alma mater, Southwestern University, has some sort of strategic plan in it’s grips to try to make the university better to go to starting in five to ten years.  Or something that.

The 1995 Guide to Understanding Twitter

Twitter is a hard thing to understand for users who are not already Twitter users.  The microblogging service has a veil around it – it seems either extremely redundant or stupid at first glance.

Fit Journey Week 25

Weight: 203.2 (-48.2 lbs cum./-2.6 week)
BMI: 27.6

Even despite going to College Station and not exercising while eating carbs and drinking a singular margarita, I still managed to lose weight.  Woo!

ACM Battle of the Brains 2009: Oh God, My Brain

So, I’ve been to three ACM/IBM sponsored programming contest, and my team has usually does pretty good – last year, we made 6th overall.

This year?  Oh god.

Fit Journey: Week 24

Weight: 205.8 (-45.6 lbs cum./-1.0 week)
BMI: 27.9

It’s a small loss, but it’s a good loss – we’re finally (barely) passed the 206 mark.  Now, I just need to keep going, and we’ll go far.