Birthday!

January 20, 2010 — Comments Closed

I’m 21 now! I don’t feel any older though. I get to enjoy alcoholic beverages in the USA (and other countries) now (not like I’m rushing to go get sloshed in the states though…)

I had such a sweet birthday — definitely the best birthday ever. It started on Monday (day before my birthday) with Disney movies: Beauty and the Beast & Little Mermaid. At 12am John wished me happy birthday. Then we went to bed. Some hours later I woke up and he made breakfast for me! Next time he came back to my room there was a yummy-looking omelette on the plate with a chocolate orange as well! Yummmm.

I seriously meant to go to class and then the library to study on the Tuesday (birthday), but that turned into: stay at home and watch Disney movies with John all day. Then I justified not doing any work on my birthday since it was my birthday, and I can always do work on the weekend. John also had a headache, so that was also a very valid reason to stay home :)

Between watching Pocahontas and Lion King (see note at the bottom about Lion King), John started making his cake for me: vanilla cake with chocolate icing and raspberry pie filling throughout. Mmmmm. Shortly after Lion King, I was then called downstairs to Andrew/Matt’s place. When I got down there, I couldn’t believe it: Gwynn had made me a cake that was shaped like a vaporeon! OMG It’s soooo awesome! I couldn’t wait to eat it, yet didn’t want to destroy the work! Meanwhile John was icing my other awesome cake. Sooo much cake!

After that was dinner time, and 6 awesome people + me went out to a place down King St that has awesome olive + grilled chicken pizza. Maria bought me a shot called a “muff diver”, which I didn’t know what it was at first. It came to the table and I was honestly a little scared — just a martini glass filled with whipped cream. Apparently the shot of Bailey’s/Kahlua was inside. I had to stick my face in and fish it out. It was interesting because the cup was too small to shove my face into… but I eventually got it. (I also couldn’t use my hands…) Someone from another table (that I knew) also bought me a shot that was also delicious ['crispy crunch'].

Following dinner we returned to my place and had mountains of cake. It was amazing just having all those awesome people around to share tons of cake with :D

I have sooo much junky food around the place now… Chocolate from Christmas left over, now tons of cake from my birthday, and cookies I made last week. Valentine’s day is also less than a month away now. So much cake to eat…

Note about Lion King: We watched the ’special edition’. It was no different from the original EXCEPT some super lame song they spliced into the movie. The scene where Zazu tells Moufasa of the ‘morning report’ is now a song. A horrible one at that. Simba also joins in with some stupid line about morning reports after the original cut of him pouncing on the annoying bird. It was soo bad. Fortunately that was the only lame thing that was added into this timeless classic.

Obligatory Christmas Post

December 24, 2009 — Comments Closed

I’m home back in Ottawa for the holidays, and finally taking my long awaited break from everything. Christmas is tomorrow, and it feels weird. I walked into a Wal-mart before heading home from Waterloo, and it had a Christmas count-down. It said there were 3 days left. I thought to myself: Just three? Wow.

I feel like I should be happier during my break… but I’m really not. Home is stressful, buying gifts was financially stressful today, and seeing my marks this evening was just icing on the cake for terribleness. Sighh. I’m so screwed for money in the coming months, it’s not even funny. I know my debt is not even that crazy right now opposed to other people, but I just feel so crappy about it. I feel like a failure for not being able to pay for school myself. Not really my fault though, as it costs a lot.

This coming school term will probably be a lot of fun, but I need to work really hard too. I guess that will be my ‘new year resolution’.

This is just one big complainy post now. :\

Modelling Small Systems with UML and dot/graphviz

December 3, 2009 — Comments Closed

The first (but hopefully not last) geeky instructional-type thing I’ll post.

What is UML, graphviz, dot?

UML stands for Unified Modelling language. A picture/diagram is used to represent a ’system’, by which I mean a program in this case. Wikipedia says “UML includes a set of graphical notation techniques to create visual models of software-intensive systems.”

Graphviz is a free set of software that allows you to describe graphs in various ways. Dot is a language – nothing more – that represents a graph. The graphviz software takes a description of a graph written in dot, and give you your image in various formats.

Dot is a simple language, and uses intuitive labels and values for things like edges and nodes. The hardest part is thinking of what you need, and finding the correct spelling of the attributes to apply to your node/edge. (But that can be found on the documentation site – and google).

To make any graphs, you need: graphiz (there are windows binaries, and packages in popular linux distributions). Dot is a tool included with graphviz. You also need a text editor. There are GUIs for making graphs (and OSes like OSX have larger programs that use graphviz) but I’m going to be on the command line in Ubuntu.

First graph

There are a couple types of graphs (that I’ve seen so far and used) and they are directed graphs and undirected graphs. Directed means that there are arrows and form a direct relationship between nodes, and undirected means there are no arrows between the nodes, and the path from one node to another is bidirectional.

So let’s make a graph now. The hello world of graphs:

digraph G {
    node [ shape="box" ]
    edge [ arrowhead="dot" ]

    Hello [ label="Hello" ]
    World [ label="World", color="blue" ]

    Hello -> World
}

(more…)