Cogitations by Brad

I was driving today, and I was thinking, why don’t normal cars have an autopilot yet? It’s very much possible with the power of computers. I’m sure they have cars that do it, but with a pretty big price tag.

It really wouldn’t be that hard. Some sensors for lines in the road, sensors to test the distance of obstacles in front of you, and a camera to record speed limit and other road signs. They already have distance sensors for backing up, but front sensors would have to be able to sense for a longer distance.

It would need to disengage during bad weather, traffic, or extreme road conditions. I would have an aggressive knob, to know what the minimum preferred speed is (least aggressive would use the least gas).

I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, but it’s possible if a car company would just do it, and they could go a long ways. There would have to be “Not Responsibile in case of X” clauses that the person would have to agree to, and lots of safety issues as well.

I would go for a car with autopilot.

I just bought my new laptop a couple of months ago, but there’s some things I need to do first.

The 40GB Hard Drive isn’t going to work for long. I do have a hard drive my brother had that he couldn’t use, but unfortunately, I really need to have windows to where I can dual boot it with Ubuntu. I don’t have a copy of windows lying around (XP would do). They should make a Priceless Edition. I have a product key on the bottom of the laptop for XP Tablet Edition, but I’d have to pay $40 to get it from Toshiba.

I also need RAM. It’s got a 512MB Stick, but, boy, does it get slow when I have 15 windows open when I’m at work.

Maybe I’ll go get some RAM in the next couple of days.

Edit: 1.5 GB > 512 MB. I got an upgrade in RAM, and the difference looks amazing so far. I’ll have to run it for a while to know for sure, but loading the O/S seems slightly faster, and web-browsing seems better as well.

Announcing the newest version of Exposong! It now has on-screen notification, show logo, and some major bug fixes.

I’ve removed the BETA status, because I think it’s ready for production usage in certain situations. It might be easier for those who have good experience with computers, because there’s not an actual installer, and it requires a few extra programs (See Installation). Maybe by next version I’ll have at least a Windows installer. The NSIS installer is plenty confusing, but I’ll take a shot at making it.

If you need lyrics, Christian Devotional Lyrics is a good resource.

A lot of presentation programs has animation. One good thing about animation is that the movement signals a slide change. A lot of times, I notice when I follow along with a song while someone is presenting, if my eyes move at the same time that the screen changes, then I don’t realize it’s changed, and I’m lost for a bit. Animations solves that, and as long as they’re not so crazy that they distract from the purpose of presenting content, I think animations can be good.

I think Clutter would be a good option to create animations. It has some built in stuff, and uses OpenGL to render these. I’ve just looked at some of the docs and stuff, so I don’t quite get it all yet, but the built-in animations look good, and the videos I’ve seen are impressive. I may have to take a look at some of the examples to see what exactly can be done.

One issue that I have is that there is no windows executable. I may have to create a fallback, just in case the user doesn’t have it installed, or doesn’t have 3D available (or some may not even want animation).

Clutter looks pretty exciting, and maybe it will have matured a bit by the time I get Exposong 1.0 released.

Sendmail’s security measures are getting in my way. I have a program that simply needs to restart sendmail as the apache user, and it’s even got the setuid bit set, but sendmail still won’t let me do it. When security becomes this extreme, we’ve got a problem.

I only work 5 hours a day on average, but this accounting class on top of working takes a lot of brain cycles up. I get to accounting, and with nothing left to give accounting. I usually leave work earlier, but today, I left at 5, leaving 30 minutes at home before I have to leave for class.

I don’t like having little personal relationship with people here. I talk to people at church, and my boss at work on some days, but I just don’t have a social life other than that.

New Release of Exposong. New in this release is image presentations, and information is shown on lyrics presentations.

A lot of churches have either moved or are moving to using overhead slides, but a lot of them don’t know a lot about the hardware and software available to them. I think by advising these churches on a good solution, I could know the right solution to save them money, and get a portion of the money that was saved by the congregation for my service.

This idea stems from a website I did for a guy that advised people on a another issue, but it’s consulting work, which is this idea.

Maybe I won’t have to charge a lot if I have another full time job, and just charge enough to cover costs, but if I decided to try and use this as an income, I don’t see any immediate problems with it. I might could even build some of the hardware, and become a wholesaler to make the product even cheaper while retaining more of the profit. Both sides would benefit.

I wish some people would come with disclaimers on their forehead. (And I’m not talking about you, the person reading this, because you yourself, are perfect as you are ). It could say, “I’m not rational,” or “I think too highly of myself.” Maybe even, “I have too much money and it’s going to cost you a lot to be my friend because I don’t know what efficiency is.”

Maybe I just need to learn to say no.

Since my accident, I haven’t updated this thing much. Maybe that’s because of the condition of my fingers. I had major lacerations on the outside 3 fingers of my left hand, and had to have stitches, and wear bandages for the past 3 weeks on them. I’ve seen a hand doctor twice, and this last time, he told me that I was ready to start using them a little more.

I’m still going to be wearing a wrap on my middle finger, but the outside two are actually healing nicely. The pinky has definite scars, and the ring finger still has a spot that is healing, but they’re good enough that I don’t have to protect them as much.

I’ve been doing sporatic work on Exposong, including getting image slides, but nothing to show for it yet. I’ll actually be starting back to work on Tuesday, so I’ll be looking forward to getting back to work.