Adventures of a Computer Engineer
Archive for May, 2010
Listening to #NoAgenda with @adamcurry and @therealdvorak live @ http://noagendastream.com in the morning. #ITM
Working on importing all my social network stuff to my website to make it automatic. Take a look. http://www.stevenviola.com
My Blog v2.0
May 20th
So many things are changing for me, moving back home, graduating from Binghamton, and converting my blog to Wordpress. My old blog was run on Drupal, and while I liked having the Drupal framework to mess around with, I never really needed it. In the 2 years I used Drupal, I only used it for blogging. WP makes things look cleaner and it makes life much easier. The switch was pretty easy, which surprised me, and I should be up and running. I want to get this Lifestream plugin thing to integrate nicely, so i can just populate the site between blog postings. Ideally I’d like each post on the Lifestream to have a little more meaning and not just be full of facebook notifications, and also have more pictures (it looks nice with flickr and youtube, but everything else is just boring and pictureless) but getting it to do exactly what I want means changing the plugin code, which will help me with learning how to make WP plugins.
As I mentioned, I have graduated from Binghamton University, and received my Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering Degree. Not having to write film noir essays, and read bioengineering research papers gives me more time to do things I enjoy, especially programming and engineering. I have many projects for the summer, which hopefully I document here. One idea i can now work on is a project manager to gather and organize all the ideas I have throughout the day, so I don’t forget them and miss out on the next big thing. The way I want it to be is every project is always evolving, and projects can be merged together.
Speaking of forgetting projects, when migrating the blog to Wordpress, I had more ideas for my Nixie clock, and i predict a Nixie Clock Part 2, and maybe Part 3 to wrap up the trilogy. I gained a tremendous amount of experience in the past 2 years, and things that seemed difficult or out of my league are simple for me now. I now know how to design, manufacture, and populate printed circuit boards, even with surface mount devices. A new project I can’t wait to tackle is getting my payphone to work. Since my last post, I acquired a payphone, and sucessfully opened it, and was able to place calls. Unfortunately the coin return coil doesn’t work properly, and I haven’t had much time to fix it, but I hope to get Skype calling independent of a PC on the payphone, which may be a challenge, but we’ll see.
Hopefully wordpress and my free webhost will be nice, and not give me any problems, so I can just focus on my projects and not have to worry about constantly fixing and maintaining everything. I look forward to enjoying my summer and the projects ahead of me, and will hopefully post again soon.
Google launches Google TVBoing Boing
May 20th
From the Official Google blog:
Guidelines for developers who wish to optimize their sites for Google TV are here. Google is working with Sony and Logitech to integrate TV sets, Blu-ray players and companion boxes with the offering, and compatible devices will go on sale this fall, at Best Buy stores throughout the USA. During today's launch event, Google execs showcased how Google TV will use the next generation of Adobe's Flash, which has been the subject of much controversy with Apple.Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV -- it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.
@Tomtiernan Wow, never thought I’d see the day. I’m back btw, unpacking, but ready to do the DS SLR thing whenever you are.
@suebasile Finally I have a reason to use Twitter
The 10 Best-Paying College MajorsThe Consumerist
May 10th
This is probably a little too late for those of you who will be graduating from college in the coming weeks, but might be quite helpful to anyone getting their high school diploma soon. A new study lists the 10 college majors that will net you the most income right away. And if you thought your thesis on Emily Dickinson was going to translate into paycheck poetry, you were mistaken.
In fact, not a single major that would be considered strictly liberal arts is on the list. Seven of the top spots are taken up by engineering gigs, with economics, physics and computer science filling the three remaining slots.
Of the 10 majors listed, Chemical Engineering has the biggest immediate payoff, with a starting median salary of $65,700/year. But it's Aerospace Engineering that pays off better in the long run, with a median mid-career salary of $109K/year.
Economics, the least "scientific" major on the list (in that you don't wear a lab coat), has the lowest starting median salary in the top 10, at $50,200/year. Meanwhile, among the top majors, Environmental Engineering has the lowest median mid-career salary -- $94,500, still more than I'll probably ever earn.
Here's the whole list, in graph form:
Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more. |
Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary [Payscale.com]
Color perception among XKCD readersBoing Boing
May 4th
Randall Munroe subjected readers of his XKCD webcomic to a fun and informative survey on color perception and categorization. The results are both informative and extremely XKCDish.
Color Survey Results (via @ossington)
Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey--men and women tended on average to call colors the same names. So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the 'most masculine' and 'most feminine' colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:
1. Dusty Teal
2. Blush Pink
3. Dusty Lavender
4. Butter Yellow
5. Dusky RoseOkay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let's take a look at the other list.
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men: 1. Penis
2. Gay
3. WTF
4. Dunno
5. BaigeI ... that's not my typo in #5--the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of "beige". And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn't just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter. I weep for my gender.
