Dreamin' Again

Wow...I'm really slacking on this. Anyway, a few weeks ago, as mentioned by Trevin (whose blog you should read, if you don't already), was the Career Fair. I feel like it was smaller than usual, although the spring career fair is always small, so it could just be perception (I haven't gotten around to going to the office of career services yet and asking). However, there was a company there called DreamHost. They are a web hosting company founded in '97 by four Mudders. They've managed to keep quite a bit of the informal, friendly feeling of Mudd in their company, which is completely amazing...check out their "don't be a jackass" policy (at Mudd we are told during orientation that you'll generally be okay if you try not to be a jackass...it makes everything a lot more chill than it might otherwise be).

In addition to being pretty chill, they're remarkably helpful. They have a status blog to inform you when things go down and a twitter account that will tweet status changes. Beyond that, they have the best administrative backend I've ever seen. They really make it a snap to do most things. The two coolest things that I've come across so far are the one-click installs and SSH access. The second, SSH access, is nice because it lets you have control over your own files in a way that is comfortable to most of the CS majors here at Mudd -- we use the Unix shell for much of our work, so we get quite comfortable using it. Most places only give you FTP access.

The one-click installs are truely cool, though. DreamHost has gotten together a number of popular packages (WordPress, Drupal, ZenPhoto, etc.) and created an incredibly simple installer. You just click on the package you want, it walks you through everything you need to create, and then deploys the package where you asked it to. It also has a button labeled "update" that will update your packages to the most recent release just as easily. Truly, it is crazy.

Anyway, I need to think up a really awesome domain name, and then I'll probably start blogging over there once I graduate.

I'll try to have more updates for you this semester....

~Kyle Marsh

Prezi: The Coolest Thing Since...Dinosaurs, I Guess. Or Rocket Ships. Those are cool too.

One of my clinic teammates is really excited about making good presentations. This is great, because he's imparted that excitement onto our team. Probably everyone reading this has heard advice like "don't read off your slides" and "Don't write paragraphs for each bullet point", but I'm willing to bet that relatively few of you have ever tried to make a presentation that completely gets away from the PowerPoint paradigm. PowerPoint, an ancient relic of a past age that's too cumbersome to know that it's dead, encourages slides that look like this:

+--------+
| Title |
|*bullet |
|*bullet |
+--------+
or perhaps this:
+----------+
| Title |
|*bul |pic||
|*bul |___||
+----------+

*edit: HTML's reluctance to insert multiple spaces into a web page made this asciiart somewhat unpleasant to draw...Non-breaking spaces fixed it.

This makes for a very dull presentation, even with an enthusiastic speaker. This is, certainly, a valid style of presentation, but relatively few topics actually benefit from it, and very few presenters know how to make it work to their advantage. It became mainstream because it was just about the limit of what PowerPoint (and computers, really) could do back in the old days. PowerPoint, being a part of the most prolific productivity software suite ever, reached the masses, and an entire generation of students was brought up learning how to use it and carrying that knowledge into the business world.

Unfortunately, they mostly learned how to use the very basic features. PowerPoint has grown beyond its original limitations, but people have stayed behind and still mostly use the basic templates depicted above.

Enter Keynote. I am a PC user -- I run Windows XP on my Tablet PC and Ubuntu Linux on my (distressingly old) desktop. That said, Apple's Keynote software left me speechless the first time I used it. Nearly as intuitive as the iPod, I sat down and knew how to do nearly anything the instant I first tried. It made building a presentation fun, like the classier breed of really horrible Flash games you find online and can't stop playing.

The two presentations that my clinic team has done were built using Keynote, and both were probably among the best presentations that have been given for clinic projects (in my completely informed and unbiased opinion). Instead of bullet points, we had little circles representing our users that scooted around the screen, and lines that appeared between them, and several other gimmicky animations that really made the presentation far more interesting that a static screen full of bullet points.

3 days ago Marty came into my room and said "I just IM'd you a link...check this out." The link was http://prezi.com, and the "this" to check out was one of the samples at the bottom of the home page. Go there. View the three samples. You'll be amazed.

This is cooler than dinosaurs, cooler than space ships, cooler than those awful flash games, and even cooler than sliced bread (although there is some debate about the dinosaurs). This program, called Prezi by taking the Hungarian dimunitive form of the English word "presentation", tries to escape slides altogether. It is a seriously cool piece of software that really has the potential to change the way people give presentations.

Three of my clinic teammates have signed up to be Beta testers, so with any luck our final presentation will be given using Prezi. For those of you interested in it, you can check out the Prezi blog at http://blog.prezi.com and you can follow several of the founders on Twitter.

~KMarsh

And so I emerge victorious from the black depths!

Welcome back. Sorry it's taken me this long to update, but I am indeed back at Mudd and the semester has gotten underway. Today's title refers to my first time in a darkroom since senior year of high school. I'm taking intermediate B&W photography this semester and the darkroom here is somewhat different than what we had in high school. It's also in the sub-basement of the physics building. Next to rooms with really big lasers.

In other news, I decided not to continue with Russian this semester, so in addition to photography I'm taking Philosophy of Mind on CMC, Clinic, Tools, and independent study with Professor Dodds. It's a light semester with only 12 units (I can't get on the Dean's List for this semester because of this, for instance), but I think I'll be very happy with my decisions.

In addition to all the academic classes I'm taking I also am taking 2 ballroom dance classes on Pomona. Pomona has a dance department whose students study modern dance, ballet, and other expressive dance forms. Mudders can take those classes for Humanities credits (that department is where I did my humanities concentration in Movement Studies, actually), but the ballroom dance classes are perhaps more accurately called "lessons" and are taken for PE credit (0 credits at Mudd, but you're required to take at least 3 pe classes before you graduate. I think I'm up to 10 now, 2 of which I helped teach...). The head of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Paul Roach, is a recent Pomona College alumnus and teaches the ballroom classes. He's a very funny guy and has a unique style of teaching dance to large groups that I find to be very similar to the style employed by my martial arts instructor before I left for college. This semester I'm taking Silver (intermediate level) International Standard Dance and Silver Social Dance.

Standard is Paul's personal favorite dancing, and it is much more commonly danced in competition than socially (except, perhaps, for weddings you rarely see it in social situations) so that class is very exacting. That class drives us very hard for technique. The 5 Standard dances are Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz. This semester we are starting with Waltz and then moving on to Tango. Last year Liz and I took the Bronze (beginning) International Standard Dance class in which we spent most of our time on Quickstep, but also learned some Waltz and ended with Viennese Waltz. I've never danced Standard Tango and I'm really looking forward to that.

The social dance class is one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. Bronze Social was alright, but the goal there was mostly to teach an enormous group of people the basic steps to a number of common dances (Cha-cha, Salsa, Triple-Step Swing, Polka and Lindy) and to try to get people out of their shells and make them more comfortable in social situations (while Mudd is the most technical school of the 5-C's, the others are no slouches and the difference between college students and high school students is, in some cases, only spelling, so social interaction can be a foreign concept to many people.

Silver Social, on the other hand, is an amazing class. Paul deliberately told us not to form lines like most of the dance classes and the result is a very organic and fairly chaotic group of fairly good dancers who are learning how to be themselves while dancing and look good while having fun on the dance floor. It is more fun than I can do justice to and I suspect will be a very, very good source of stress relief later on in the semester.

Dancing is fun, and I'm really glad I started taking these classes while I was at college.

~KMarsh

Would M'lady Care to Dance?

The Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, California plays host to the quarterly Gaskell Ball. Gaskell's is a social ball set in the Victorian era.  The signature dance is the Viennese waltz (danced in the old social style, rather than modern ballroom style) but other dances make more than token appearances, such as polka (deadly, high-velocity, skipping), heel-toe galop (aim and charge at other couples in utter chaos), polka mazurka-waltz (slow Viennese waltz with a kick every half turn to warn off hapless dancers and small children), schottiche (German interpretation of what the French thought the Scotts were doing...or something), and some insane set dances with names like "The Jolly Dog Polka" and "Sir Roger de Coverly" (the latter is often followed on the setlist by the "de Coverly Recovery Waltz").  They have a live band, Brassworks, who, incidentally, played at SteampunkCon earlier this year.

The regulars are generally the same people who work at renaissance faires and things like The Great Dickens Christmas Fair.  This means two things: first, the people are a little bit strange.  Second, the costumes are AMAZING.  Many of the people make

 their own costumes and they are phenomenal.  My girlfriend made my vest and tailcoat as well as her dress.  She's actually the only active member of the sewing club at Mudd aside from Professor Sparks, who makes positively stunning quilts.  They hope to get more members soon, so if you've an interest in sewing (or learning to sew) you should be pleased to hear that you'll have an outlet at Mudd for your creative urges.  And time.  Sort of.  This dress took Liz 2 years from start to finish, but most of the work was done last semester in preparation for Gaskell's (the ruffles, unseen in this picture took 8 hours of labor each...there are 5 of them.  I can't possibly imagine spending an entire work week doing nothing but ruffles).

Oh, and I mentioned the bizarre dance that is the Schottiche earlier.  It's danced to 4 counts as follows: step-step-step-HOP, step-step-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP!  You can do any number of variants, like the Goose-step Schottiche for a military aspect, the Vecchi Schottiche for a sketchy old man aspect, or the ever-popular Penguin Schottiche for a hilarious and somewhat cute aspect.  This dance is usually danced in the shuttle position (partners side-by-side, hands held across the front of their bodies) rather than a traditional ballroom position: your partner's knee comes sharply up with each HOP....  Penguin Schottiche, however, is usually danced in something akin to a conga line.  Oh, and Schottiche is pronounced "shoddish" (like the pokemon).

In addition to dancing, I also took pictures.  I'm taking Intermediate Black and White Photography next semester (in addition to 2 dance classes, clinic, a philosophy class, and independent study...) and my grandparents gave me their old Canon A1 to use.  It's about 30 years old and hasn't been used in nearly that long so I took it with me to the ball to see how it worked.  That film is in the shop tonight getting developed (the first three pictures here were taken on my digital camera), so stand by for an update when I get it back and digitized.  Until then, happy holidays!

~KMarsh

Apprentice Products Pitches Guitar Trainer to VC's

Apprentice Products. The name 4 HMC students gave the mock company they created for Professor Evans' "Enterprise and the Entreprenuer" class. Their flagship product: Guitar Trainer. A week and a half ago four of us sat across a table from three venture capitalists, all of whom have been successful enough in the startup world to fund startups themselves. Chris Seib, Marco Thompson, and Eric Johnson took the time out of their busy schedules to drive/fly to Mudd (yes, Eric flew himself and Marco in in from San Diego in his Piper Saratoga II, tail no. N392HP. No, I didn't fly back with them) and listen to a bunch of students organized into made-up companies ask them for $2-5 Million in funding.

The whole class was fascinating -- Professor Evans has helped many student-born companies get off the ground (some succeed, others...he calls them "smoking black holes") and he told us the stories of several of them, including why they failed or some of they things they did correctly that contributed to their successes.  He lectured on the different facets involved in building a startup company and the importance of paying attention to them all.  The pitch to the VC's was the final project and really the thing the class had been building to the entire time.  The VC's listened to our pitches and gave really great feedback -- they do this sort of thing for a living, so they're rather adept at it.  After class we went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant with Chris (an HMC alumnus, actually) and had a wonderful meal while chatting with him.  All in all, a really cool experience unlike anything I think I would have gotten anywhere else.

~KMarsh

Python is Your Friend

I said I'd mention when I wrote twitter scripts and true to my word here's the first script I've written to interact with twitter. I was quite surprised to not find a command-line twitter client in the Ubuntu repositories, but perhaps it's because python makes it so easy:

#!/usr/bin/python
import twitter
from sys import argv
api = twitter.Api(username='askForCharon', password='redacted')
status = api.PostUpdate(argv[1])
api.ClearCredentials()

There's the entirety of my script. It knows my credentials (although I'm loathe to write anything that stores a password in plaintext) and takes the message to tweet on the command line. A slightly more sophisticated version would include a check to make sure the message was <= 140 characters. I wrote this for clinic, actually. I was getting ready to start a long-running job and I wanted to be alerted when it finished (particularly if it failed), so I wrote this script and ran the following:

>my_long_job ; tweet "The job finished with status $? at `date`."

This is instructive to budding linux users:

• The semicolon means run the second command (tweet) after the first (my_long_job) finishes.
• The '$?' is a shell variable that holds the exit status of the last command run.
• `date` runs the `date' program and puts the output into the string.
• I put the argument to `tweet' in double quotes because the shell will provide variable expansion in a double-quoted string, but will use a single-quoted string verbatim (I wanted it to actually expand $? and `date` into their values, not pass those characters to my program).
  

If I end up writing a more complete command-line tweet-er I'll post it here. Also, if someone could let me know of a better way to post code snippets on blogger I'd be grateful, because this is terrible.

~KMarsh

Reactions

Just a quick note for everyone...I've enabled "reactions" for this blog, so below every post you should see buttons for "Tell me more!" and "Not interested". If you liked the post and want me to blog about similar things, click "Tell me more!" and if you think I should be posting about different things (more relevant to Mudd, less technical, more lolcats, etc.) click "Not interested".

Look forward to a post next week (probably not this weekend) about the final days of the semester.

~KMarsh