Ryan Morlok’s Blog

There aren’t too many things out there that are funnier than my previous Chuck Norris post, but today I found one of them.
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If anyone is interested, you can check out my thesis project at http://www.morlok.net:8080/moses/. You can’t really do much with it yet, but things are finally starting to fall in place so I can start adding real functionality.  It’s unbelievable how much work it takes to get all the plumbing right for your object relational mapping, configurign Tomcat, etc.  Don’t be surprised if links take your to error pages and whatnot.  Things are definitely still in early development mode.

You can login using the usernames rmorlok2, rjohnson, student1, student2, student3.  Any random password will work for any of the usernames.

It’s probably because I’m trying to get work done on my thesis, but I couldn’t resist checking out YouTube this morning. I watched a full episode of cartoon Spiderman, and found a funny fake trailer (see full post, below). I figure I’ll find Salil Sundresh on this site at some point, as he does really awesome stuff with video. Maybe I’ll post some of his stuff if I can track it down on his personal website. (more…)

Well, it’s that time of year again. The birds are chirping, the grass is growing, and middle aged men in ugly cloths are drving around in little clown cars drinking beer. Yes, it’s golf season.

Actually, people have been playing golf for a while here (a friend from church had already been out 12 times a week ago), but today was my first day back on the course. Things went pretty well. I was striking the ball consistently off the tee, driving my opening shot well over 125 yards for most holes. My chipping and putting weren’t quite as consistent as I would have liked, though. There was more than one incident in which it took me a good 5 shots to sink the ball from about 5 feet off the green.

I ended the day with a 61 (I’ll leave you to guess if we played 9, 18, or were rained out after 6 holes). We played the official University of Illinois golf course. It’s rather large, with 36 holes available. The course definitely isn’t anything spectacular. I doubt if there is a 20 foot elevation difference over the entire span of the course. Pretty typical for Illinois golf, I would guess. What the course lacked in vertical variation, it made up for in distance — a lot of the holes were long par 4s, though there weren’t too many dog legs or water hazards. If I had to describe the UIUC golf course, I would say it plays a lot like Mike Brogan — long and straight. Ladies, back me up on this…

This one’s for Steve…

Took some video of Katy & friends playing DDR this last weekend. Katy is getting quite impressive. She can literally beat most people playing DDR sitting down. I also have a video of Dusty & Laura playing together. Awe…aren’t they cute…

Update: Wow, that wasn’t smart. Posted the full-size videos and as people started to download them, my ssh connection got really slow. Gotta prioritize the thesis over the videos, so here are smaller versions. Send me an email if you’d like the full resolution clips.

I thought I’d mention a funny story related to this semester’s final. For those of you who aren’t CS 105 TAs (which probably means you don’t care anyway), we use a Word document that defines a bunch of styles that have various meanings in the exam. There are the obvious ones that format code to a mono-spaced font and such, but there are also less intuitive ones that define an option (it’s a multiple choice test) for a question, as well as the correct answer. In semesters before my time, a TA had written a system in VBA to take this style information and generate the different forms of the exam (we have 4 forms for each exam, involving scambling the order of the questions as well as the order of the answers, to make cheating more difficult). This entire system is rather broken at this point, but the Word styles still remain.In the Word document the correct answer to every question appears as blue. If this is not changed prior the final print, the correct answers can be seen by looking for the answer that is not as crisp as the others (I refer to this as the Li-Lun method, for the TA who figured this out. It’s rather subtle, as the blue only elicits a slight gray-scale effect). Exams have gone to print with this problem before, but this was not the case this exam. As Marsha (the Professor) was preparing the exams for the printer this time, she did some sort of replace all to get rid of the blue (not exactly sure what happened). In any case, it messed up the formatting on quite a few questions, but to make matters worse, the problems wouldn’t affect all of the solution options of the questions. They would only start affecting the correct answer to the question, and every subsequent option in that question. As such, after a question or two, students would pick up on this and get the answers to these questions for free.

We first realized the problem when we gave the final early to a few students as part of a conflict exam. As the problem was discovered, Marsha sent out a panic email to the TA list. It was followed an hour or two later, with assurances that the problem had been resolved — we would be reprinting the exams. I was rather impressed that she had gotten testing services to do a reprint in that short of time. We needed the forms in about 19 hours, and very few of them were business hours (this was about 4 p.m.).

About 4 hours later, another panic email hits the TA list. Marsha had thought that there was another day before the final was to be given. It was 8 p.m., and she indicated that we would have to print things ourselves. Now, to understand the magnitude of that proposal, you have to understand the scale of the CS 105 final. We’re talking 850 students, with each exam being about 42 pages. That’s on the order of 35,000 pages to print, taking up about 17,000 sheets of paper (things are printed front-and-back). At that point I said I’d come in to campus, and we’d figure something out.

As I guessed, when we timed the printer, it took about 2:20 to print one copy of the exam (with staple). That’s about 34 hours to print the whole thing. Bear in mind that we needed the exam in about 12 hours at this point (it was pushing 10 o’clock). It might have technically been possible. We had 4 such printers at our disposal, so if we didn’t run out of paper, toner, or staples in them, we might have had a chance. I personally didn’t want to stay up all night to keep feeding the printer paper, so I managed to convice Marsha that we should just drop the affected questions, and go with the original version.

We typed up and printed out the errata. Normally we just post it on the overhead at the exam locations, but with this many questions being affected, I didn’t want to make it difficult for people to look over it carefully. Especially those in Foellinger (a large auditorium, where about 400 students are given the exam), where it is hard to see the overhead from the back of the room.

Everything ended up going well for the exam, but it was quite an ordeal to actually get to the point of administering the test.

I know that form doesn’t necessary follow function, but the design of this paper recycling bin seems counter-intuitive…

I thought I’d post my undergraduate honors thesis.  Honestly,it’s a lot more of a thesis than my Master’s one will be.  The work was real research as opposed to the project I’m doing now.  Honestly, what I’m doing now is more useful in my career, though, unless I end up doing work in the computer vision area (in which case I’ve really missed the boat on the stuff I’ve been studying in grad school).

Started writing my thesis today. Downloaded the requisite LaTeX files and got things going. Plugged in a few words to try things out. All in all, I think I’m about done, just slap a couple of figures in that puppy and add some references, and I’m good to go.

Not many people can say they have a ladybug hat…and back it up. Shanley, as he’s often known, is currently a Madison, WI resident, must to the dismay of the State of Hockey*. To say that there is no one on the planet that knows more about Hill-Murray hockey would still be one of the largest understatements ever made.

* Minnesota, the REAL State of Hockey. Not that bastard state Wisconsin that goes and doubles up in the guys & girls college hockey national championship while our girls were out competing the Olympics, and then gets their governor on the media claiming they’re the “new state of hockey”….oh it’s on Wisconsin…it’s on…