keizo/weblog

from way back in June

Today I went to the Fremont fair with my sister and her boyfriend. We sat down in front of the river to eat hand dipped icecream bars. I ate mine rather quickly and let out a loud burp.

Sister: Jeez, don’t you know when it’s appropriate and not?!

Me: Sure. There’s naked people running around on the street. What does it matter if I burp!

Boyfriend: He’s got a point there.

fyi: there really are naked all over the place at the Fremont fair. We also saw Dave Matthew’s roaming around and yelling at Duck tours.

My most positive experience at Rensselaer has been the class Speech Communication with Merrill Whitburn. It may seem odd to choose a course such as this as my most positive experience, and actually I have a hard time calling it my single most positive experience. However, it was different from every other class I’ve taken in my four years achieving an aerospace and mechanical engineering degree and I would recommend it to every student at RPI that seriously wants to change the world.

As an engineer, most of my classes have been focused on theory and analysis: intro to engineering analysis, strengths of materials, thermal-fluids, elements of mechanical design and so on. These are all amazing classes in which I’ve learned more than I ever knew existed, but there has always been something missing. All of these classes lack any real social involvement with other students or the professor. In Speech Communication this is practically forced on you, and while this can be scary at first, it ends up being wildly fun.

Merrill’s booming voice and grand expectations are rather intimidating for the first few days of class, but it doesn’t take long to realize he’s one of the nicest people on campus. The class involves giving five five-minute presentations over the semester. After each speech your performance is critiqued. Merrill has the talent of utterly destroying any confidence you had in front of people, but then encourages you enough to help you improve ten-fold over the semester. Merrill is not the only one you have to watch out for, the rest of the class gets to rip you a new one as well. The fun part is that everyone has to go through with it — and there is an awesome sense of comradery in that.

Speech Communication is a class that I honestly enjoyed attending every time. My memory is filled with laughter, nervousness, and in the end confidence in my ability to give a presentation. If you have a free elective in your junior or senior year, take this class. It teaches you a skill that most people are deathly afraid of and will likely help you more in your career, life, business or secret plan to start a religion than any other single class at RPI.

This was my entry to the Union Challenge 10: “Describe your most positive Rensselaer experience ensuring that you focus on how it differed from your normal experiences and how this type of experience might be shared with others.”

When I was a freshman I would often meet a person and then not see them for a while. A few weeks later I would bump into them and realize I had no idea what their name was. A few months later I might see them in the dining hall and greet them briefly. A few years later I pass these people and think to myself ‘hey I should know that person’. More often then not, they briefly glance at me and then go their own way and I go on wondering if they were thinking the same thing as me. Of-course all these awkward situations are irrelevant with Mark Zuckerburg’s invention of Facebook. So whatever, my largest hurdle as a freshman is fixed; I can at least revel in the fact that I lived in a time before Facebook. The second biggest problem I had with student life freshman year was the overabundance of Internet. RPI should cut the cable.

RPI my take pride as the ‘most connected’ school, but seriously instant messaging people 3 rooms down the hall is stupid. Recently the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai decided to turn off Internet from 11pm to 12:30pm in all student dorms.[1] The dean Prakash Gopalan was quoted saying “The old hostel culture of camaraderie and socializing among students is gone. This is not healthy in our opinion.” Many students at RPI that don’t find community in Greek organizations or other campus clubs often spend lots of time in their room on the Internet. Turning off the Internet for a significant period of time during the day will force students out of their room and help reduce social awkwardness at RPI.

This would probably cause some people to get nuts and hate the school, but at least students would unite in thinking it’s a retarded policy. It’s not like people don’t complain about the school already — you can’t pass a tour group without someone at least commenting quietly “don’t come here.” Any good parent would recognize turning off the Internet as a good thing. In the end, people would be happier and complain less because now they have to talk to people in the real world, possibly developing friends in the process.

You might worry about students that really need to do work requiring the Internet. That’s not a problem; we all have laptops and could get online in dorm study rooms or elsewhere on campus. Jacks could even be installed in dorm hallways and students can all hang out in the hall if they want online.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6459295.stm

This was my entry for the Union Challenge 6: “Describe the largest hurdle in your student life experience at Rensselaer and propose a solution to the obstacle.” It was satire, but I’m starting to believe it would work.

I Never Talk On The First Date

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I sent this article to my sister: Growing up with hippie parents. Here’s what she said:

holy crap that seriously applies to us!! hilarious…. i can totally relate. i have to show andreas…. his childhood was very similar. we are always finding things that we had/did the same as kids… growing up on tofu and soymilk, etc. he’ll get a kick out of this… especially since now we are all at the age just like that lady where we are appreciating our upbringing and realizing that it’s in our blood whether we like it or not!! (thus the brilliant idea to quit our jobs and travel and be vagrants!)

I just searched for the book our upcoming commencement speaker Thomas L. Friedman wrote called The World is Flat. Apparently rpi only has the audio book. How sad. This confirms: engineers don’t read normal books. I emailed the people on Mr. Friedman’s website telling them.

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9 days of class to go; 6 months of work left to do.

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These guys deserve a link: end of the tute. The Folsom Library can slide down the hill for all I care.

Last night I was studying for my aeroelasticity test. I mentioned to my roommates that I needed a miracle. One of them suggested praying. After all that always works. God will swoop down and intervene.

Strangely though, someone died at RPI today causing the entire campus to shut down. Everyone was kicked out of classes. Tests were interrupted midpoint; students and faculty were told to go home. My test is postponed until Monday. Not really the kind of miracle I was looking for.

Rumor is that there was a gun involved. Someone else said there was a swat team running through the Low Building. The news says it’s a suspected a homicide or possibly self inflicted. Either way it’s pretty sad. There’s a local news article here.

update

from Shirley Ann Jackson

[...] Based on the results of the police investigation, and the results from the medical examiner, the death of the individual found in the Low Center for Industrial Innovation (CII) has been ruled a suicide. The victim has been identified by the police as Anson J. Tripp, a member of the Rensselaer class of 2000. According to Registrar records, he was not a currently enrolled Rensselaer student.

Earlier, when the circumstances were unclear, we cancelled classes and closed the campus in an abundance of caution. The Troy police investigators have completed a sweep of the Low Center, and other campus buildings have been secured by Rensselaer Public Safety.

[...]

I thank all members of the Rensselaer family for your patience and cooperation in very trying circumstances for all. I know this has been a difficult time for our community, and especially for the family and friends of Anson Tripp. On behalf of the Rensselaer community, I extend our deepest sympathy to them.

Before Flight Activities Rarely Seen By The General Public

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the question was If there was an empty 50×50ft space in the Union, what purpose would you give this space and why?

I wrote:

When I came to RPI my belongings consisted of one suitcase and two backpacks. Four years later I could probably fill three giant suitcases and five boxes of skateboards, electronics and books. Add on a couple more boxes for the cooking utensils, TV and foosball table. That’s more than triple the amount that I came in with. In May I’ll be leaving RPI and a lot of what I have accumulated behind. I imagine that many of the incoming or new off-campus students will be looking to purchase many of the items I plan to leave. Considering that there are 1000 other students in similar situations, creating a thrift store in the Student Union would be an ideal use for an empty 50×50 space, practical for the school and the students.

First of all, creating a thrift store would be a visible and socially responsible project for RPI. There is no better time to start recycling and reusing, and a thrift store in the Student Union would make that as easy as possible. This essay is too short to explain reasons to be green, but watch An Inconvenient Truth for an idea. Creating a thrift store so students create less waste and purchase fewer products form Walmart would be a step in the right direction. We would make Al Gore proud.

In addition, this place would be an amazing improvement to student life. Imagine a place stocked with items that only people very similar to you would own. There would be regular sets of quality speakers, kitchen items, books, video games, or anything else a student at RPI could want! All for thrifty prices!

Some might argue that Salvation Army and others already exist. I say this store would be better. It’s like the gym; you only go there if it’s not too far out your way. Creating an on campus thrift store would make it accessible enough to really be useful. Also, items could be sold on consignment so donators receive some portion of their items sale for even more incentive.

A thrift store in the Union would be an innovative and useful asset to the already successful facilities. With a little research and dedication to the project, a thrift store could fund itself and provide an amazing shopping and social experience to the faculty and students at RPI.

winners can be found here

This is primarily for Drupal people who are rating my summer of code application.

My notes on image/file handling in Drupal

My initial summer of code ideas for Drupal

Googtube module: A module I created

The main Drupal powered site I run

Another Drupal site I run

I’ve been researching this for a while. Images and files as nodes don’t feel right to me. In Drupal I have come to think of a node as any page that has the intention of being displayed. A typical node has some text content, often with other embedded content like images or videos. A node is the destination. Images are things that belong embedded in a node and are not the destination itself.

Typically in the computer science realm a node is a data abstraction that hold any type or object. Some argue that therefore an image or file should be their own node. However, images and files are typically not the destination — they are merely parts that belong in a node. Compare that to a C++ node used in a linked list. A C++ node might contain a class. This class would contain some variables. The variables in that class are equivalent to images and files. The variables are not a node in that list.

I think files should be implemented similar to the method that comments are implemented in Drupal.

The following are notes that I’ve gathered supporting this.

Dries summer of code proposal

Improved file handling. Make it possible to mix database and file system storage on a per post basis, further abstract the storage model so we can support distributed storage solutions (like Amazon S3), apply node-level permissions to a node’s files through a light-weight file.php layer. Do not implement files as nodes.

from Mar 2006, Dev list

Drupalista

Why don´t you get together and produce ONE killer-img-module? Why are there 10 different modules for image uploading and handling?

Make ONE. Only ONE that works, please.

Stefan Nagtegaai

There are so much image related modules in contrib, which are mostly redundant in (a great part of) their functionality.. So I think [Drupalista] is right..

from Dec 2005, Dev list

Earl Miles

For people who write articles on my site, I find simplicity to be the absolutely most important issue. They want to be able to attach an image to a node and be done with it. If they have to set up an image node and then figure out how to link that image node to their article, they’re going to have a lot fewer articles with images.

James Walker

well “set up an image node” doesn’t / shouldn’t need to involve going to node/add/image and creating the image then going back to node/add/story, etc.

I.e. img assist (and htmlarea) both allow you to create image nodes when you attach. I’ve heard both that img_assist is sliced bread and that it’s still too confusing, not right, something…

Rowan Kerr

You could keep “nodes” and “files” separate…

Where nodes are any kind of actual content that is typed into the site And files are anything that is uploaded by the user

Then you’d have node types and file types.. that could decide just how to display different things.

nodes would be stuff like: blog, page, article, book page, etc… files would be stuff like: document, image, spreadsheet, movie, audio…

Because files that are uploaded, I would not really expect should be given a normal title, body, published/unpublished, etc… that nodes (actual content) would have. Really, node’s don’t have a filename, file size, mime type, filesystem path, etc…

Then you get into more of a document management system where things are clearly defined instead of combining content and external files under one container.

I think this is the way to go, three base types: user, node, file

Tim Altman: Don’t forget comments.

Dries Buytaert

1) All downloadable files should be nodes.

I disagree with this. If the sole purpose of the file is to be downloadable, there is no value in making it a node. It adds clutter and administration overhead.

Robert Douglass

Let’s say that the relationship is called “attached file”. The next step is to be able to search through all existing nodes that can possibly fill the roll of “attached file” while creating a new node. A current limitation of our system is that I’d have to upload the same PDF 3 times if I want to have it appear on 3 different nodes. This, we can all recognize, is crap. I should be able to reuse the already uploaded PDF. This raises two issues: a search interface for media assets is hard to build. Image assist is the best working example we have, and with all due respect to its greatness, it is still clunky (haven’t tried the newest version though).

on the fence / for nodes

There was lots more than this, but I only copied these.

Ber Kessels

This is a point of endless discussion in Drupal.

In myworld a node is a “thing” where all sorts of data meet. The node is nothing more then an entity to bind that data and make it a “thing”.

Unfortunately, in Drupal nodes are only used for content. For posts, to be more precisely. So over time drupaleers tend to think about a node as a post. Rather then the much more powerfull abstract “thing”it actually is.

So, in this a file would be nothing more then a “thing” of type “document”, “image” etc.

Sebastian wrote:

Frankly I feel all images should be a node. Even if an image is included in a content node just for spice or illustration, very likely these images could be thumbnails that link to a larger version. Same story if I include a true photo in a content node, it will most likely also be a thumbnail linking to the full image node. So I see no reason to build two frameworks for handling images when one will do. Why the arbitrary separation? They should all be nodes, and if we need organizational separation of “photos-available-in-galleries” vs “spice-and-illustration-images”, that should be handled via taxonomy, and only the desired terms made available in menus/galleries.