More than meets the eye

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University. DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

Well now that site visit is over (and has been over for awhile), we've been spending most of our time writing rev. 2 of all our code. That means searching through everything we've written for little comments like:

//temporary hack

//this is ugly, but it will work

//i can't believe i'm doing this

...etc., and replacing that code with stuff that's faster and more general. For me I find the best way is just to start from scratch, copying and pasting where appropriate, which is why PosteriorPose, Local Map, and Track Generator are all getting a complete overhaul. Well, that and the fact that I'm more of a pencil pusher than a coder, so it usually takes me a couple tries before I get something that works decently fast. Making stuff general is tough work indeed, and often I find myself spending Sundays and Mondays rewriting the stuff I wrote the previous Thursday and Friday. Today I can proudly say that PosteriorPose is finished and quite general. I doubt it will work, but if it does, it will be very powerful.

(Umm by the way, PosteriorPose is our system for positioning our car on the course accurately... think of it as GPS + local positioning)

I've spent the past two weeks fixing that one up, designing the revisions, and arguing about interfaces. Right now I'm living in a magic bubble, a deluded world in which I believe no conversation I have today will force me to rewrite anything I wrote over the weeked. Don't mind me, just let me live in my deluded world for a few moments longer. That's the advantage of being an early bird among late-nighters: I get a few hours each morning to pretend that I'm making forward progress. I can even ignore the emails the guys sent to me last night at 4:00 am... if they were up that late then it will be at least noon before I see them.

On another note, I came in this morning to find the Spirit fixed:

It hasn't looked this good since the little joyride after site visit. I was curious about the origins of the sudden zeal for repairing it, but then I saw this:

If you can't read that, it says, "Keyboard held hostage, fix Spirit." So that explains that.

And on one final note, I saw Transformers a few days ago. I was entirely skeptical going into that movie, but it ended up being fantastic. See, I grew up with Transformers. I had a lot of the toys, I saw all the episodes on TV, and I spent more than one Halloween parading around as Soundwave, Bumblebee, or Optimus. To me that cartoon is something almost sacred, a little pocket of my childhood that I can always count on to remind me why I fool around with all this robotics crap all day. Of course in those days, all the transformers turned into other things- Vanettes and Beetles instead of Hummers and Camaros, but still, the movie held true to the spirit of the cartoon. The plotline was cheesy- just cheesy enough to take me back to the good old days. Twenty years later I still believe anything is possible, which is why I drive each day to an abandoned ammunitions surveillance building, park in a parking spot with "commander" stenciled in faded paint, and work on robots all day.

...some of them even look like they want to transform.