Does Today Exist?

Date: 2002-02-08 11:00:37

I have a feeling my English classes are conspiring to kill me. Dr. Nosworthy finally got around to telling us when everything would be due, since our schedule has slipped a little. No one actually bothered to turn in the philosophical paper rough draft, which could have been due today. It's now officially due on Monday, so I should work on it before then. (I got the brilliant idea to assert that the DMCA was a good idea, for the hell of it. I'm now tempted to write a satirical paper. Perhaps I should review "A Modest Proposal" a few times.)

My other English class (which would be the popular literature class) is currently a little more entertaining. I get to put off writing a paper on Walt Whitman's poetry until next Friday. (It was initially supposed to be due this coming Monday.) Wednesday night I read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (a short story which the Oracle should be able to reveal; it was written prior to 1920 (namely 1844), so it's in the public domain). I liked it more than any other story (or the horrid poetry) we've read so far; it was vaguely scifiish, and borrowed a bit from Frankenstein. I think it would make an excellent episode of The Outer Limits. Last night I read four nearly-random chapters from The Scarlet Letter, which was a bit odd. Dr. Aamodt managed to clear up most of my questions about the book in class today.

For the cs club meeting, nothing at Blockbuster jumped off the shelf and screamed "rent us! rent us!", and TRON wasn't in, so we watched Johnny Mnemonic from Tedbuster. It was fun, but still B-grade. I think I'll have to read Gibson's short story again. (If I can ever get some recreational reading time. That, and I want to read Cryptonomicon again, and Quicksilver as soon as I can get my hands on a copy. Plus, I have Dune sitting unread on my shelf. My queue isn't short.)

Then there's the cs club contest (which is absurdly simple, but entertaining anyway): figure out if a linked list is looped or not. I threw together a binary search tree, but it currently has no mechanism to balance itself, so it's currently exhibiting worst-case performance because the pointers I new are allocated in sequential order. We'll have to see. I really don't have any time for recreational coding at the moment, but I have plenty of things to do. (The Google contest looks intriguing as well. Several days ago I was thinking it would be way-cool to create a map of the web: which pages link to others, and how fun it'd be to run it on Google's database.)

Still on the cs club meeting topic. I got bored Wednesday (which I shouldn't really have done, but I couldn't help myself) and hacked joystick support into atris. (That would be my assembly tetris implementation, which should get its own webpage sometime soon. Like that'll ever happen. In the interim, this will get you the exe and asm source: atris-0.2.zip.) I punched code on Ziyal and then walked to Gem's apartment to assemble it and get it running. (I have neither a copy of vmware nor a spare consumer-grade Windows box with a gameport floating around.) The joystick calibration and direction detection code worked on the first assemble, although I did have to tweak the source to get it to assemble first. A few more bugfixes and tweaks got it working. I headed back to campus, appropriated a spare box from the cs lab (which has a case identical to Defiant's, complete with a fake floppy drive cover), created a win95 bootfloppy, and booted. My Gravis Gamepad failed to work. I hypothesized that the spare soundcard I threw in was a plug-and-play card and was refusing to function, even for the gameport, until the operating system acknowledged its existence. The lack of a functioning joystick thwarted our attempt to play Tetris at the meeting. Maybe I'll get around to getting it to work by the next meeting.