Internship

Just received a letter stating that I was selected to receive a Jack Kent Cooke Fellowship for this summer. If I am chosen by a faculty research sponsor I get to spend either full or half time (40 or 20 hours a week) doing research at UM-Ann Arbor. I am really excited at this opportunity, and am very thankful to Mr. Harrill and Dr. Naber for providing the recommendations that made this possible. Here's to hoping everything goes smoothly!

Finals Week

Today marked the first day of finals week. My finals include Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, Engineering Physics, and Computer Science I (C++). Today I finished the Differential test, and tomorrow is Engineering Physics. For whatever reason I am really relaxed, who knows why.

I was getting sick of studying this past weekend and took an hour to write a little paper that introduces the basics of C programming, download-able here (pdf warning). It's nothing special, and I don't intend to distribute it like I did with my AVR screencast tutorial. Something fun to do I guess.

Back from SAE funded trip to Cobo.

Just got back from a trip to the Cobo center to watch a presentation on the Honda Insight and the Hondajet, presented by Yasunari Seki and Michimasa Fujino of Honda. That Hondajet is pretty awesome...

1 Month Left!

One month left of school! Just finished the Linear Algebra test covering eigens. I feel I did good, but I goofed up on the last problem. I made the foolish assumption to rely on my calculator. I used rref on a matrix with a variable, and since the rref function for the 89 runs it symbolically, it did not care about the fact that one of the row operations it made would be undefined at h=6. Lesson learned, never go beyond reduced echelon form (ref) using the calculator.

In other news, I've been messing around with Gameboy assembly. I decided to pick a very simple commercial platform to work with, just for the sake of learning (and fun!). The gameboy architecture is very simple and easy to work with, and after scouring the four corners of the internet through mountains of dead hyperlinks, I gathered up the necessary resources to both compile assembly into a gameboy ROM and even found a nice tile editor that outputs to Gameboy format. Since this is the original one, all I have to worry about is pixelated images with 4 colors. I don't intend to delve too deep into it all, just make a simple game to learn a bit about it. The Z80 like architecture is very familiar looking and has some interesting changes for use with the Gameboy. I chose to stay away from C simply because the libraries out there were next to non-existent and I wanted as much control and experience with the raw hardware as possible. As of now I have just a sprite that moves around the screen with arrow keys, but we'll see what I come up with in the future.