Despite being massively hosed, I ended up doing a lot of fun things this weekend!

On Thursday:

• I relished in not having to stay up late, because no 2.004 pset was due the next day!
• Went running, that’s always fun

On Friday:

• Went to SK’s Novemberfest
• Went ice skating with some friends in Johnson ice rink. I’m still pretty bad at ice skating though!
• Had an impromptu dance party in my wing, complete with disco-ball action and booming bass from my amp

On Saturday night:

• Went to the MIT Chorallaries concert in 10-250 – it was great! Makes me want to learn to sing, haha
• Hung out with some friends
• Went to an interesting party at Skullhouse (an MIT fraternity) with WS and some other friends

On Sunday:

• Helped my friend WS teach a beatboxing class for Splash. That was fun! The kids seemed to really enjoy it, too
• Got a free Chinese-food dinner for teaching! Quite tasty indeed

Cheers!

You may have noticed lately that I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts with pictures in them. That’s because I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Tech’s cameras! On Wednesday, I volunteered for an assignment to photograph MIThenge, the twice-annual phenomenon in which the setting sun is perfectly aligned with the infinite corridor. The sun rays come in through the huge class paned windows in Lobby 7 and seem to set the infinite ablaze with an orange glow. Unfortunately this time around, the atmosphere did not cooperate; it was too cloudy to effectively see the sun. Oh well… I did get to hang out with some friends for a while waiting waiting though! Here are two more pics that I took, before and after MIThenge:

The view walking to campus. A wide angle lense does a really good job making the point at making the point of showing where the sidewalk ends!

Cheers!

I recently joined the Tech as a photographer, and they have some really nice cameras! Tonight I went out to play with some of their lenses so that I’d become more familiar with them. Here are a few shots I took of MIT’s Lobby 10, Killian Court, and Boston:

After a seeming black-hole of packing, unpacking, and reshuffling, I’m finally all moved back into MIT! It was quite a tiring day; I was exhausted by the time I was finished. But of course a little fatigue is no match for a short power-nap, which can do wonders. After a little while, I felt awake, energetic, and ready to go so I took a little walk around next house and the MIT campus. A little later that night, some good friends and I decided to go party hopping, as it being MIT’s rush week and all. We visited PBE, but left after waiting because the line to get to their rooftop party was too long, so then we stopped by No. 6 club and had some fun dancing there. A few of us decided we were hungry afterwards, so we decided to head to LaVerde’s, which was to our dismay closed. On the way back we found that PBE’s line had disappeared, and we got in with a minimal wait and danced a bit more on their roofdeck (great view).

It’s good to be back at MIT, but I’ll certainly sleep soundly tonight!

I know I haven’t blogged in a while (again), so here goes! I’ll finally write about some of the things that I said I’d write about in my last post, starting with a PHP class I taught a few weeks ago.

PHP is a really knarley web-programming language – it stands for “PHP: Hypertext Prepreocessor” (yes, a recursive acroynum!). On Tuesday, January 13th from 7:30 – 10:30 PM, I taught a caffeinated crash course in PHP through SIPB, a computer group on campus. By caffeinated, I’m not referring to actual beverages. Rather, this refers to the jam-packed nature of the course, as SIPB’s caffeinated crash courses tend to pack a gargantuous amount of information (such as an entire programming language) into a relatively short amount of time (just 3 hours).

My PHP class went very well I think, and I was very happy that there was a good turn out at the event (I’d estimate around 30-40 ish people showed up). Here’s a picture of it:

In case you’re interested in seeing some of the lecture slides/topics I covered in class, here is a link to the class website:

http://sipb-iap.scripts.mit.edu/2009/cccphp/

It was fun! This was my first time teaching a class, and I enjoyed it a lot. I do admit that I was nervous before class started, but after I got the hang of things, it turned out to be pretty fun!

I have free time! These past few days, I’ve taken various pictures from around campus. The last two are long-exposure pics with some tone-mapping signal processing applied. I like photography!

Lately in my dorm, some fellow nerds and I are founding a new student group:  “Next Make.” This is a group that is, well, dedicated to making things. Our goals are to further Mens et Manus at MIT and to generally build neat things. Some of our ideas for projects include 3D printers, arcade machines, things that you can ride, etc., just to name a few. I’m going to be a co-webmaster with another student on campus, JWC, and together we’ve been working on setting up the webserver that will host NextMake’s website. Already we’ve set up an Arch Linux server on xvm.mit.edu (a virtual-machine hosting website open to MIT students), along with Apache and PHP. We’ve also reserved the name next-make.mit.edu, so once our website is complete, people will be able to go to http://next-make.mit.edu/.

Some things that we plan to put on the website are blogs, forums, etc., some of which will be viewable and editable only by members of NextMake. So, a cool project that JWC and I came up with is to create an MIT Certificate authentication system for the blogs and other areas of the website. Since every MIT student has an MIT certificate, and most MIT websites authenticate people via their certificates, wouldn’t it make sense for us to make certificates instead of requiring users to memorize usernames/passwords to use the NextMake blogs? We thought so! So in other words, WordPress would know who people are based on their certificates, and not require any usernames or passwords from users trying to log in.

So, since I have no work at all during this great winter break, I thought I’d look around in my WordPress blog install (the one you’re looking at now!) and try to figure out away to get MIT Certificate Authentication working. Since this site is hosted at scripts.mit.edu, which already takes care of the Apache-side of requiring MIT certificates, I only needed to poke around WordPress’s PHP code (hooray for PHP!). Yesterday I finished programming a WordPress plugin that allows MIT certificate authentication! I was very excited when I finished; and it was surpringly doable. I figured that making a WordPress plugin would be ridiculously complicated, but WordPress is very well-designed and extendable. It works on this blog; I can now log in with my certificates without having to type my blog’s username and password. Once JWC and I work on the next-make.mit.edu server a bit more, we can just drop this plugin into the WordPress intsall there, and we should have certificate-based authentication working in no time. Here is a screen shot of me logging into my blog with my MIT certificates instead of having to type my username and password:

Now that finals are over, I have free time again! It’s really great to be around MIT and have absolutely nothing to do. That doesn’t happen very often! Coincidentally enough, there was also a massive snow storm on Friday, the day after my exams ended. We usually get less snow in Boston than in the more western parts of the state (such as my hometown), probably because Boston is so close to the ocean. However, we certainly did get our fair share of snow during this snow storm! Here is what Boston looked like the night before the snow started. This is what the Harvard Bridge/Prudential Center area usually looks like from my wing’s main lounge:

And here is what it looked like during the middle of the snowstorm on Friday:

We could hardly see across the river! In fact, visibility decreased even more after this picture was taken. And the Charles River began to freeze over.

Another view across the river, this time of part of BU’s campus.

Road conditions got considerably worse than this as the storm went on. I took these pictures earlier in the day.

So, with some intense snow outside, what is there to do but have a loud music/dancing/disco party in the main lounge? None of my friends and I could come up with any better ideas, so this is exactly what we decided to do! We got a hold of some ridiculously loud speakers, cranked them to full volume, and had a great time. Though there wasn’t really very much dancing, there was certainly a lot of loud music! Here are (some of) the culprit speakers (no, the hat doesn’t make any noise. Our speakers were just being festive, that’s all):

ALso, since I have a disco ball in my room (hooray!) …

… I decided to take it out to the main lounge to enhance the party experience :

It was a pretty good time! We could hear the music throughout at least half of the 5th floor, and it was audible as well a floor below us. I love loud speakers!

That night, some friends from my wing and I decided to go sledding, which was also a lot of fun! We found a great incline on campus, took our sleds, and had some fun. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera with me (didn’t want it to get wet!), so I don’t have any pictures of it.

The next day (Saturday) was when I was scheduled to leave MIT and go home for winter break, which necessitated some packing. Here are some of the bags that I packed in my room. To be quite honest, I’m not really sure why I bothered to take pictures of this; perhaps it was because I was bored. Or perhaps it was because I secretly feel guilty about not blogging enough in the past few weeks and so I’m subconsciously trying to compensate my blogging about everything, including the rather mundane details of packing. Or perhaps I just like taking pictures with my camera. I leave it up to the reader to decide:

While packing, I found my friend Keldin eating pasta in the main lounge. Here’s an intense action-shot:

Oh, and on an un-related side note, we’re going to set up a public Athena machine in our main lounge! How exciting. It’s not set up yet, but here is a picture of the beast-to-be, eagerly awaiting it’s Athena-ification:

This computer used to belong to a friend down the hall (me and some other friends got it for him off of Reuse as a birthday present last year!), but not that said friend has another computer, he doesn’t really need this one as much. It’s a Pentium III, but it does have a nice dedicated graphics card that is capable of smoothly running desktop-effects on Ubuntu. It will make a fantastic Athena machine.

So, that’s it for now! Right now I’m back at home, and it’s snowing again. I think we’re going to get around another 6 inches of snow, and judging from how hard it’s snowing right now, I’d certainly believe it. Cheers!

I’m very excited, because I’m going to be teaching an IAP class with SIPB! SIPB stands for “Student Information Processing Board,” and it’s a neat computer club on campus that does all sorts of awesome/crazy things for MIT people, like make a virtual machine server, an Athena dialup, a way to make Ubuntu/Debian act like Athena, etc.

I’m going to be teaching a Caffeinated Crash Course in PHP on Wednesday, January 21 from 7:30 – 10:30 PM in room 1-115! Although there won’t actually be any caffeine per say, the title of the series (there are “caffeinated crash courses” in a bunch of other programming languages, too) gets across the point that a lot of information is being jam-packed into a really short amount of time. If you haven’t heard of it before, PHP is a programming language that basically makes websites. You may have seem some websites that end in .php instead of .htm – those all use PHP.

Here is the course-description that I wrote:

Some topics I’m thinking about including:

1. What is PHP, and what it can be used for
2. PHP history
3. How PHP works (the code runs on the server, which sends HTML to the client, etc.)
4. Syntax of the language
5. Typical uses of PHP
6. A few programming examples

I’m really excited about teaching this class!! If you think of any other topics that would be neat to cover, let me know!

For those who don’t know, I have a computer server in my room (basically a computer that’s connected to the internet that sits around for a while and waits for requests) called electron-monkey! It’s an old Dell Optiplex GX50 1.1 GHz Celeron processor. Here are some pictures of my good old buddy:

The computer, under my desk:

My keboard:

You may ask, why do I call this computer electron-monkey? To be honest, I’m not really sure myself! It sounded like a good idea at the time… and computers do sort of “juggle” electrons… sort of…

I had previously been using electron-monkey as a webserver, so if you went to http://electron-monkey.mit.edu, you’d get the website that’s on my computer. It wasn’t running Windows; instead it was running a distribution of Linux known as Ubuntu that’s quite popular and known for it’s user-friendly-ness.

I was certainly very happy with my Ubuntu system, but being the daring and fearless adventurer that I am, I decided to try and install Athena on electron-monkey . Athena is the computer operating system developed here at MIT, and it’s what all of the computer clusters around campus run. It’s pretty useful for doing a lot of things, such as talking to other people across campus, using the internet and checking email, and running cool Athena-only software. I really like Athena, so I figured I’d install the Athena linux variant on electron-monkey.

Searching through some documentation online, I found that there’s actually an Athena install image available from the MIT website. So, I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD, and ran it on electron-monkey to install Athena. And the best part is, it worked!! Here are some pictures of my new friend, running our favorite operating system:

The IS&T Athena screen saver

The Athena login screen. Note that it automagically detected that my computer was electron-monkey.mit.edu!

Myself logged into Athena:

So, this made my day! This means that, while in Next House, I’ll theoretically never have to go to the Athena cluster again, because I can just use the personal machine in my room… unless I have to print something…

I’m still figuring out a lot of stuff about how Athena works, so right now my website (http://electron-monkey.mit.edu) isn’t functioning. There’s still quite a bit of tweaking to do, but I’m very happy that I have a personal Athena workstation!