• Website Maintenance @ Brite-view.com / Zinnet
• Intern @ FreshBrain.org
• Lots of robotics stuff

My Senior Classes

• AP Physics B
• AP Calculus BC
• AP Government
• Economics
• English 4
• Choir 1

Catch ya’ll later.

So now, school has been tedious and time consuming. But I really like my classes this year. All my teachers are enjoyable (in different ways). I’m taking:

• AP Calculus AB
• AP Computer Science AB
• AP United States History
• English 3 (aka Counseling 101)
• Biology
• Spanish 3

and then… I have the usual stuff with robotics, client work (still), and some programming… Oh yeah, did I mention I need to study for SAT and SAT II’s as well?

I really hope I will be able to keep posting here though.

Some background information before I start rambling. Back in January in face of a 17 billion deficit, California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, proposed a 10% budget cut all across the board, including education. In California, K-14 public education is completely free, so 39% of the state budget goes into education, with a law that requires additional money to go into education every year.

I’m not sure why, but only until March did this start to become an issue in our school. Suddenly one day, all the teachers are panicking and brainwashing us that there will be a terrible budget cut and we’ll have less teachers, less staff, no athletics, no fun events, blah blah blah. Obviously, their jobs were at risk. The school staff started to tell students to write letters to the Governor. Heck, they even organized a protest that didn’t happen.

When I first heard of this issue, I already knew what these teachers were up to. Our teachers are hiding the facts from us. All they care about is their job, which is understandably fine. But as teachers, they should be informing us both sides to the issue. People thought that it was all “Arnold’s fault.” Clearly they were misinformed.

If anyone recalls, back in around 2001-2003, because of the dot-com bubble burst, California’s economy went into a short recession. The Governor at that time, Gray David, was recalled in 2003 because people were dissatisfied the way he managed the budget. That was the issue of the recall election, when Schwarzenegger was elected. California spends its money like how most Americans spend their money. If California makes $100,000 this year, it’ll spend $100,000 this year. For most occasions, it has been fine because California is growing at a rapid pace. But when you go into a recession, you have a huge problem because it’s not that easy to cut your budget once you already expand it. So in 2003, Schwarzenegger promised budget reform.

Ironically, his budget reforms never passed the legislature and here again he is faced with the same issue. Students don’t know that California’s budget system is fubar. We have no emergency funds that we can draw from when we have a budget crisis. We look at our budget on a year-to-year basis which obviously tells us that our state legislators are idiots!

So here we are five months later, the Governor is smart. He proposes a revised budget plan that gives NO cuts to education and actually gives additional funding, on the SAME day, my teachers were protesting against the cut. I still can’t stop laughing…

What’s even more pathetic is that NO ONE were informed about the revise the next day. I don’t even know if the teachers themselves know about this. A Facebook group that was protesting against the cut has no updated news about the revise.

What do we have left? Bunch of teachers who are happy they can keep their jobs and a bunch of students who are left believing “everything is Arnold’s fault.” Isn’t the whole purpose of school to teach people independent thinking?

P.S. Three political posts in a row? Something must be wrong with me.. At least the quality is getting better

This year, we didn’t have a food festival last semester because of our old-school principal but that’s beyond the reach of this blog since people from my school indeed read this blog. We had our first food festival in this school year today, with a catch. All food must be bought with “tickets.” Previously, it was essentially a cash-food exchange. Now they require students to purchase tickets then use tickets to buy the food because of “state law regulation” and “protection of the students.”

The first food festival this year was to be scheduled on Valentine’s Day but was “postponed” because clubs were protesting against this change. The reasons were clear; the change would most likely result in a loss for clubs because no one could predict the effect of the “tickets,” as it would be a hassle for most students. This time, they offered an incentive for clubs to sell food again, with same rules applying: they would advertise the food festival like crazy. Still one more catch, tickets could not be refunded. Though they can be used in next food festival, who is it to say that there will be a next one?

The show was up today. Out of the ~45 student organizations on campus, only seven came forth to sell food. Though all food was sold out, but clearly the clubs ordered less food to sell. The truth remains: tickets are a hassle to the students. Here I am to refute the reasons they gave for forcing ticket sales upon us.

I was walking out of class today for lunch and saw people start scrambling for food while many were turned down because they didn’t know they have to use tickets. Then, the most hypocritical thing popped out and almost made me throw up, seriously. Next to these stalls were the normal school lunch lines, where people could actually use “cash” to buy food. Amazing!

I guess school officials failed to realize the obvious point that people use cash to buy food all the time in schools, without any problems. Our school lunch lines are serviced by students, and so are food festival stalls. What difference does it make? Why do we pay taxes for such intelligent people to work for us.

I love the smell of irony.

So what have I been working on lately?

• Botball Robotics: The season started off in end of February and ends with a competition on April 19th. We’ve went through the whole brainstorming and building process and now we’re focusing on the programming. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using a language derived from C to program. The language itself is considerably powerful in our case but I must say robotics programming is like no other software programming. When we do web development or software development on the computer, we just compile/save and refresh the application to see if it works. However, the most redundant part and annoying part about robotics programming is that you have to constantly reset the 10′ by 8′ game board, running all over the room, only after one trial. Imagine doing this hundred or probably thousands of times. But this year is different than last year. I’m come to enjoy working with other programmers. It’s so much easier to split up the tasks, rather than having one-man-do-it-all.
  I’m keeping my hopes high for first place, but regardless of what place we get, I’ll still post the results here .
• Google Lunar X Prize R&D Challenge: The whole team worked very hard on this and I think our hard work payed off! We earned second place. We were asked to design a rover that would travel the moon. The challenge is indeed inspired from the Google Lunar X Prize Challenge, except in this case, we’re just designing the robot, not building them.
• Work: I’ve had a chance to continue developing products with a startup in New York. We’re working with the MyBB platform, so I had made several enhancements to the software that I may release in the future.
• USACO: Mgccl’s blog post led me to this competition. I thought since the training course was free and quite interesting, I’d give it a shot. I’ve completed two assignments in C but it’s been a real pain, especially dealing with pointers and strings. Everytime something compiles wrong, it makes me want to use Java more… Supposedly, if you do well in the compeitions held by USACO, you can move on to the International Olympiad in Informatics which is considered the field goal for high school students in computer science… I don’t see myself there any time soon though.
• Course Selection: Speaking of Java, it was course selection week a few weeks ago at my school. I’ve decided on what I want to take next year. The AP classes I’ll be taking are AP Computer Science, AP US History, and AP Calculus AB. It’s really two AP classes for me because APCS isn’t that much of a challenge for me. The other three regular classes will be English 3, Biology, and Spanish 3. They’re basically required by colleges as must-take courses. There is no way in the world I’ll be taking an AP English class, and don’t even mention biological sciences — I hate them.
• WordPress: I’ve been back on track, working closely with WordPress, especially after the 2.5 release. I’ve reworked our robotics team website. Everything is now powered by WordPress. In the summer, I’ll be enhancing this site with some custom WordPress plugin ideas I have.

What the hell? Since when did Taiwan become governed by China? It’s common sense that the Chinese Communist government has absolutely no sovereignty over the island of Taiwan. This isn’t even a debatable issue at all. China simply has no control of Taiwan and thus obviously, Taiwan isn’t a province of China. Even Google got heat for putting something similarly.

If you want to learn more about the Taiwan vs. China situation, read here.

P.S. Happy New Years!

I’ve been debating whether or not to move the EVHS Robotics website to be SilverStripe-powered. Previously, it had been backended with about 20 minutes worth of code that did really simple content management. I was the only one updating the content so I basically did my own HTML formatting. Now that I have the chance and I’ve never actually made a real website with SilverStripe, I decided to give it a go. The team website is now powered by SilverStripe.

A few things I’ve had to compromise or took me a little time on. I wanted to go with the Haze theme but turned out that there are a few perks with the CSS which resulted in me giving up. The default theme may be a little boring but it looks fine. Also, it had took me awhile to fix the typography stylesheet to make everything look right; I prefer bigger font sizes. I wanted to create a page with an iFrame that linked to our Google Calendar, so I had to set up a custom page type for that— pretty easy stuff.

But now with SilverStripe, I can extend the website easily now. If we needed a forum for collaboration, I could set that up integrated within minutes. This also gives me an opportunity to let my team members create accounts and manage the content.

Overall it has been nice for my first experience building a site with a MVC-based content system.

I’ve already finished translations for two modules and a quality assurance task. My fourth task was to build a widget. I chose to build a countdown widget because I thought that’d probably be more useful. If you want me help test it, you can download it here.

There are five event types you can choose. The widget will automatically detect/generate a pattern, so this is a one time configuration thing. Just enter in the first occurrence of an event, and you’re set. To make it timezone independent, you do have to make sure the date and time is in the same timezone as your server’s time.