Work is fantastic
August 10th, 2006Yeah Here are some photos of my workspace…
.jpg "Coffee Machine 1")
coffee machine 2…
.jpg "Coffee machine 2")
My desk…
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Working
July 13th, 2006Other things that have happened to me is that I got to eat a lot of Noodle King and I got angry at the sony shop because I didn’t like an MP3 player I bought from them. I wish I got an Iriver instead. I feel that Sony (and I am trying to be delicate here because I don’t want to be sued for libel) are not the company they used to be. I remember that every thing that Sony made (except that ATRAC format) was good. Their Trinitron TVs were great, they invented the walkman, they had heaps of R&D. I had this minidisk player from them and it worked for 5 years perfectly even after been dropped several hundred times. For all I know its probably still working now but it was stolen. This MP3 player I got was plastic and felt flimsy. If you pressed the fast-forward button (or even accidentaly tapped it) it would rewind. I took it back and they gave me a new one which was even worse. I took that one back and asked for my money back and they refused (they also refused to put in writing that they refused to give my money back). I told the manager that Australian consumer law says that he must give me back my money if the product is faulty and he said that it didn’t. He had the web in the shop on display and I asked him if he cared to look at the consumer affairs website and he kept saying that he didn’t have to because he ‘already had’. He also told me that he didn’t believe that the product was faulty (a fast-forward button that rewinds is not faulty?) and that he only exchanged the item before because he was being kind to me. Anyhow he eventually gave me a 3rd MP3 player and it was also a little faulty but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first two so I will just stick with that.
Now I feel that I will never buy another Sony product again for these reasons; Their shop acted illegally when they refused to refund my money (they would give me store credit but as I said I have no need for anything Sony), the product is advertised as a mp3 player but the files are stored in those om files on the drive. It claims that it is playing MP3 and the conversion is quick so I get the impression that what happens is that it wraps the MP3 file in the same container file that ATRAC uses so Sony can encrypt the music. This is annoying because ATRAC is a proprietary codec that only works with windows, and I use Linux (I have to dual boot to put the music on–I was aware of this when I bought it tho’). The software (that you have to use to put music on the device) is slow. They claim that atrac is as good as mp3 but in a double blinded test of different codecs it rated the lowest everytime. And finally they stopped making robodogs which sucks because they are cool and robocup depends on them. Anyway I think its silly that they didn’t try to make me happy as a customer because now I wont purchase their products again and I was even considering buying a Sony Ericsson at the time.
Holidays!
June 21st, 2006
Since I’ve been busy at uni I haven’t noticed how much more I like Sydney than Perth. Today Kobi had her last exam and I met her in the city afterwards. We had a wonderful dinner at Mother Chus and then we went for a beautiful evening stroll through Hyde Park, caught a train to Circular Quay and ate gelati on the steps of the Opera House. Tomorrow we are going to the art gallery and the botanical gardens. These would be the perfect holidays except I have to spend a good amount of time learning maths since I need to do a few courses on it for uni–scary! This has been a weird semester for me—Greek mythology, astronomy, experimental robotics, etc. All together I took 5 courses and 2 of them I started in week 5.
The greatest web based game on earth.
March 29th, 2006OK if you are reading this and you haven’t played Carnage Blender then click here and begin playing it now.
Happy Time Sudoku!
January 21st, 2006
Over here in Sydney I was bored waiting to buy a monitor so I kept myself busy by playing sudoku. When I got bored with sudoku I decided to design a sudoku program. When I got my monitor I started programming the game. I tried my best to think of a name for the program and decided to call it ‘happy time sudoku’ because it was the corniest thing I could think off. It was programmed in java since JBuilder was still on my hard drive from last semester. It started with all the right OO concepts in mind but then I just wanted to finish it so the code became a bit messy. On another note my transfer to UNSW was successful on the first round of offers so I am relieved and can’t wait to use the heated indoor pool 
Moved to Sydney
January 2nd, 2006Hey guys I have moved to Sydney now, so no net for a while and no updates to this site… I will get back to write some thing in a few days… I have interviews with Sydney Uni and UNSW here in two days, so I will be nicely engaged in nerdy things.
regards
Jesse
REFUGEES ARE WELCOME, RACISTS ARE NOT
December 11th, 2005
Over here in Australia the media has been stirring up racism for Christmas. Yesterday my partner Kobi received an email petition from an old school mate requesting non-Christians and non-white Australians to leave the country. Today several people and an ambulance driver where attacked in Sydney by a racist riot. They are now in hospital. Every day for the last year I seem to be arguing with some middle class friend with limited social knowledge that discrimination against aboriginals, Asians, Americans, Indonesians, or anyone on the basis of their nationality is racism.
But now things have changed. Now people are getting attacked by morons. As far as I care now, we are all responsible for those riots. I will no longer argue with you, no matter who you are. If you are racist or xenophobic in any way I don’t want to argue anymore… you can just fuck off. That’s right I don’t want to know you. My forefathers fought wars against racism and it’s a sad day for Australia when it creeps back in.
Regards,
Jesse
Server load button for blogs
November 19th, 2005It’s really late. I mean it’s late as in 3:30am and I have exams to study for, an operation that I should be recovering from, house moving I should be doing and a upset spouse who wants me to be in bed, and yet I stay up coding this little plug in for no reason what so ever. Anyhow this is a button for your blogs that shows your sever load at the time the page is loaded. It will only work on unix/linux based servers. This is what it looks like;
It’s easy to install, just copy the source into your directory and link to it as if it was an image. I will put the source up tomorrow after I have time to neaten it up so check back in 12 hours if you want a copy.
Update I have put the source up: you can download it here. I would really appreciate it if you set the button up as a link pointing back to my site, but you don’t have to if you don’t want.
Chess club :)
November 13th, 2005I have installed Online Chess Club on to the site. So if anyone wants they can email me and I will set them up with an account and we can play chess. The link to the page is http://jesse.bur.st/chess.
Bagh Chal development continuing.
November 8th, 2005I have some pressing matters to deal with over the next few weeks, but after then I will be continuing my work on bagh chal. This is after I received a nice letter from the net by some one who used my software. In the meantime I’ll try to sketch out some new algorithms while stuck on public transport to improve the games intelligence.
