C Hees . info

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation lately since I’m still working on my thesis and today I found this article:

http://hbr.org/2010/01/the-hbr-list-breakthrough-ideas-for-2010/ar/1

One of the things they claim in the article is that people get really motivated by progress. This makes sense to me cause it’s very demotivating when you’re not making any progress on your work. So maybe I need to focus on incremental progress to try to keep myself motivated.

Hoom hum. Yes I’m still alive.

Here’s something to keep you distracted =)

Since I’m moving I won’t have internet for a while so chees.info, luminocode.com, beardedrobot.com and theexperiencegame.com will be offline as of the 4th of July. My server will take the occasion to celebrate its freedom.

We got an apartment in Den Haag :) We’ll probably get the key on monday and we still need to do a lot with the walls and the floors before we can actually move in, but it’s happening. You can see the lovely video here.

I finally decided on a job so I’m gonna work on fancy webstuff at Q42! I’ll start in September so that leaves me some time to find an apartment in Den Haag, finish my MSc thesis, go to Poland with Ania, go to Hacking at Random and defend my thesis at the university. Hopefully it all fits in these 3 months =)Oh and talking about fancy webstuff: check out Google Wave. A couple of people from Q42 went to the Google IO conference where they saw this new system. They were very enthusiastic about it so maybe this could be part of my work at Q42.Anyway, it’s gonna be interesting :)

Finally a result!

…
Generation 42: 1.0
DEBUG: inserting step in the trace: CALL_METHOD, test () ON REF 0
DEBUG: inserting step in the trace: CALL_METHOD, plus3 () ON REF 0
DEBUG: inserting step in the trace: CALL_METHOD, plus3 () ON REF 0
DEBUG: inserting step in the trace: CALL_METHOD, plus3 () ON REF 0
Generation 43: 1.0
DEBUG: inserting step in the trace: CALL_METHOD, minus1 () ON REF 0
DEBUG: inserting step in the trace: CALL_METHOD, plus2 () ON REF 0
DEBUG: removing step from the trace: CALL_METHOD, plus2 () ON REF 0
test 33 -9 24
Generation 44: 0.0
Covering trace found!
The fitness of that trace is: 0.0
The length of that trace is: 54

Method: Examples.GATest.test_0
Target Path Count        : 2
Covered Path Count before: 1
Covered Path Count after : 2

Just so you know… this is a big breakthrough for me ;)
It’s really cool cause I can improve the coverage of T2 using my Genetic Algorithm :)
Now to make it work in more cases =)

At Sogyo the internet connection is really bad and often it just doesn’t work. Today Gmail didn’t work so I naturally assumed it was the Sogyo network again. But, after a while it turned out that the problem was really Gmail. I found a site that seems to check if a site is still working or not: downforeveryoneorjustme.com, but according to that site gmail was still up. I got kinda frustrated and started to doubt the Sogyo network again, but then I found a post of somebody who explained the power of Twitter. Just search for gmail down and you instantly know that you’re not the only one with the problem. Finally something useful that you can do with Twitter :P

Last night I had an urge to play with my Midi keyboard and since I’m better at coding than making actual music I decided to see if I could code something for my keyboard. The result was a color selector that you can control using the turnybuttonthingies (aka knobs) on my keyboard. It’s totally useless but cool that I actually know now how to read input from a midi port. I am already thinking if I can use my keyboard to make some kind of multiplayer game that you can play with 8 people at once on one keyboard. I have something in mind, but now that I know how to make it I’m not sure if I can put myself to actually implementing the whole thing :P So much to code, so little time.

Sogyo, the company where I’m doing my thesis project, had a video made:

At 2:13 you can almost see where I was working on genetic algorithms. But hmm, probably no more genetic algorithms for me since it turns out they might not be a very good solution to the problem. So byebye GA, hello dynamic symbolic execution? or thin path searching? or something else?

This is just cool: http://playauditorium.com/