Sunday, July 30, 2006

Oblivion Part 2

I'm back soon, as vowed by me.

So a while after that BlueVoice blog, I was planning to post about the brief change in our group's independent practicum project and about Manny Pacquiao's win (again!) and how much I hated him even more. But it seemed I did not find the timing, or right mood, to blog about it. Perhaps I was too worried of academic concerns and school duties.

Oh by the way, I was "appointed" the president of our sub-department. Appointed, huh? A president should be elected. Then the elected president 'appoints' people to be members of his cabinet. Whatever... I don't even have a cabinet. Just the rest of the officers. It's a good thing that I get along with them easily. Just last Monday, we had a meeting and discussed the annual acquaintance party, which will be held after all. At first, I planned not to have one because it really doesn't serve its purpose and is expensive. But then I realized from the other officers that many (probably most) of the AICG students are looking forward to an acquaintance party so they can get to meet, and perhaps welcome, the first years. I hope this hospitality is genuine.

So I should be moving on to the two things I should've blogged about ages ago.

First about our project. After contemplating on BlueVoice, we decided to look for another proposal. Honestly, I forgot our reasons for dropping BlueVoice. Maybe because it was risky and expensive. So anyway, we were debating on Game of the Generals with higher AI, or Source Code Similarity Detection. I was more inclined to the latter, but the other two were more interested with the game. Even though there was a majority, we still decided to seek for the moderator's recommendation. And she preferred the Source Code Similarity Detection. Victory for me! But it was useless victory shortly afterwards. When we had a consultation for our supposed-to-be-adviser for the source code thingy, he revealed to us that a better existing system, called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity), is free after all. We thought it was charging. So we had to drop it. No significance, no approval, no project.

We looked into the BlueVoice idea again. We were able to discuss it with a faculty member, who then suggested that it can be worth a project. So we built on that idea, prepared the first draft, and slightly changed its name, to BlueTalk. The moderator said that it can be promising. Only a few things were required to be revised in our drafts. Now, we are working on the final draft of our proposal. Hopefully, it's on its way to full approval.

I'm not in the mood to lambaste Pacman right now. Besides, it would take a lot of words that I can separate them to another post. And that's what I'll do...

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Oblivion

Wow. The start of my (hopefully) final year in AdZU was a humongous pain in the ASS that kept me from wasting time on blogging. Well, actually, my layouting "duties" in the college magazine was the royal burden, which cut majorly into my academic and family life. The poky office PC and late articles just made everything worse. At least just last Wednesday, I finally got rid of the printout dummy and CD contaning the Corel file and all the fonts we have in the Beacon PC and sent them to the printing press miles away from here. No major layouting for the next few months...

My problem now is catching up with my studies. So far, I still haven't opened and tested any of the GL files I have ALREADY downloaded ages ago. The same thing with the assembly codes for another class. But I'm more interested with the former. Assembly... is... no words can contain my frustration with it. This primitive computer language is so far the hardest to learn. It has the weirdest syntax and function words, like MOV, INT (w/c usually is a data type in other languages), ah, al, ax, bl, dx, LEA (who the hell is she anyway?!), and other blah blah blah.

I have to pause here. Firefox said that it needs to restart the PC for updating, my Dad is asking me to cook breakfast, and I can't wait to savor another cup of coffee. I'll post soon... ^_^