Family Back
This week went by quickly. This is especially so, since I had to take care of the dog. I can now see why single people generally don't have dogs: they tend to take all of your spare time. I'm actually happy people are back so that she's not my responsibility anymore.

Thursday evening had a superb sunset enhanced by some interesting rain clouds. There is another really good photo where the sky is an awesome orange-to-blue gradient. It's too similar to the one with the power lines posted a while ago.

The work week was extremely productive. I finally got X.org packages working in a reliable fashion. Things are looking up there. Too bad school starts in three weeks.

Regarding school, I finally pitched a decent fourth-year project. My idea involves making a 'floating' platform, where three or four downward-pointing fans make it hover 5 to 10cm off the ground. The point of the project is to design the hardware and software to keep the thing level and steady. It will use gyros to know which fans need to be sped up or slowed down to maintain level. Assuming it gets accepted, it will be quite a challenge to design and contruct.

I spent some time today playing with Celestia. The new release is supposed to be this weekend. An interesting discovery was that the GL problems everyone on ATI cards is experiencing might be caused by the X.org server rather than Celestia or the ATI drivers. The latest snapshop from X.org looks promising, but the ATI drivers don't seem to be able to run any GL programs without crashing X. Hopefully those issues can be resolved.