Blast from the past... Back in the day, during our time as undergraduates at Clarkson University, Pete and I used to be an unstoppable software engineering duo. When tasked with designing an elevator simulation for our algorithms course, we laughed and then went WAY overboard.

Today, while going through some archives on The Way Back Machine, I found our elevator simulator - and thought I'd post it here.

I haven't looked at the source too closely yet, keep in mind we wrote this in our early days of experimenting with event-driven programming, XML parsing, and API design. You can download it here. Enjoy!

Once upon a time, I was an active and founding member of the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI). Many a good times were had in that lab, back before the renovations when the likes of myself, buzzco, figgy, dowem, cheesefry, and many others spent the better part of our undergraduate and, for some, graduate careers.

I discovered a long time ago that my blog had been removed from Planet COSI's blogroll. This was most likely the result of a period of time where I didn't maintain my site very well. In fact, for a few months before I wrote Blosxonomy (that site needs work, my apologies), my blog may not have even existed for a while.

So I finally got around to requesting that I be added back to Planet COSI. I don't blog too regularly anymore, but have been meaning to get back into the habit - particularly with all the cool new stuff I've been learning at IBM recently.

So, in the event that my feed makes the list again, just wanted to say "Hello, COSI!" - I'll try to drop in sometime and get back involved...

I recently wrote a letter to the editor to the Clarkson Integrator publicly insulting the Clarkson Senior Class for their behavior during Friday night's bar crawl.

Let me start by apologizing to the Clarkson Senior's, as I have since learned that the event was not a Clarkson sponsored event. That was a misunderstanding on my part, and I do offer my sincerest apologies.

My original comments still stand, only redirected specifically to those in attendance at the event, regardless of class year or university affiliation.

Further, I must now go on to state that my original comments towards certain members of Clarkson's student body (specifically those participating in issuing attacks against my property and character) have only been reaffirmed by the student response on the Clarkson DailyJolt forums. link.

While your personal attacks against me are unfounded, untrue, and further demonstrate a lack of maturity, I can tolerate those... however, your threats of personal property damage are intolerable.

I have filed reports with Campus Safety, Potsdam Police, and have indeed notified Maxfield's proprietors that one individual identified himself as a Chef at Maxfield's restaurant.

I have been in contact with the Senior Class president via email, and have apologized to him for singling out the Clarkson Senior Class. I also recognize that several of you posted in the forum's your feelings that the thread was irresponsible and immature. To anyone else who would like to contact me, you have my email address and I welcome your comments so long as they are void of personal attacks.

Wah... what a freakin day.

So I went to bed around 4am Thursday morning after a rockstar evening... only to be woken up at 7 by a friend who was stranded in what is best succinctly described as a long-winded-emergency-situation... so I got in my car to pick her up, brought her back to my place where we proceeded to sit on the couch in a half comatose state for several hours.

On my way to retrieve said friend, however, I discovered a foot long scratch/dent alongside my previously pristine 2004 VW GTI VR6 :(. So, naturally, I went to take a picture of the damage to report to insurace, only to discover that my brand f*cking new digital camera, is also broken. And wouldn't you know, while I'm leaning over to take a picture of my broken car with my broken camera, my brand new cell phone falls out of my pocket and lands on a rock?

Peter, Paul and Mary.

Anyway... highlight of my day - the lovely Josephine got in touch with me this evening and I wound up unwinding after work with her over a bottle of wine and some nice food at the First Crush. If you read this, baby, it's always a pleasure :).

So here I am.... 6:15 am on Friday morning, STILL UP (yeah, still... haven't slept since Monday night). I'm giving a final in less than 2 hours, and then have my department xmas party. I'm supposed to start making phone calls in 15 mintues to wake up some friends. You know, I had this silly preconception that finals week would be easier as a professor than it was as a student. But when all of a sudden, 80 people give a shit how they're doing, that makes for a stressful week.

Here's lookin foward to '07. To old friends, I miss you. To new ones, I love you all. And to ones I haven't met yet, well, just keep on keepin on.

That's right... word counter. Jeanna's students will know what I'm talking about.

For those of you that don't, this word counter, for one whole semester, was my pride and joy. Jeanna used this toy example program to help demonstrate how even the simplest programs, if not properly thought out and designed, can cause you massive headaches in a world where software consumers can't make up their minds. Jeanna would change the definition of what constitutes a "word" weekly, and off we'd go to adjust our counters - keeping in mind the end goal of having the fastest and most correct counter.

I'm pleased to say that my counter -- fully object oriented and extremely well designed -- was the second fastest in the class; beat out only by a man who some know as a maniac, others as my then-nemesis (due to our massively conflicting approaches to this project). He wrote his counter as a state machine, driven by goto's, in C. While unbeatable in speed, the low-level implementation required a complete re-write with each iteration. Mine only required a single line change, perhaps two or three depending how drastic the definition change was. But at most, I spent minutes each week on this project after my initial implementation*.

This application was also the start of my years-long const correctness frenzy. Check out the source -- it's const correct to the extreme!

You can download it here: word counter

* not including the time spent doing optimizations.

Clarkson University today announced an offer of immediate enrollment for up to 20 students who have paid tuition to Gulf Coast universities closed due to Katrina.

Further, President Collins announced that the University is aware of 85 alumni living in the area, and is offering university assisstance in relocation, employment opportunities, and schooling for their children this fall if needed.

So no matter how much you loved or hated your 4 (or 6 in many of our cases) years there, Clarkson's got your back in a crisis.

Thanks to an extremely generous gift from IBM, the Software Engineering program at Clarkson University now has an eBusiness Infrastructure Lab! This lab currently has four very high end desktop servers that will be used for, among other things, J2EE research, application development, and distributed application testing (ie, jETIA's development will be moving off my laptop onto something worthy of running an application server!)

The servers in this lab are now also the home of timfanelli.com and jetia.com!