March 03, 2003

AIBO and more..

Well, I think I finally figured out how to capture an image using the camera inbuilt as part of the Sony AIBO robot dog. Unfortunately, just before I made this 'amazing breakthrough', the battery in the dog ran out of charge, and thus, I'm sitting here waiting to test my code. I feel almost like a programmer back in the days of 'punch cards', since there is little I can do until I get results back to determine if my program is correct or not.

In other random thoughts, I need to make this webpage a full 'portal' including my timetable, calender, tasklist and anything else I can think of like that, since I'll be changing between computers relatively frequently.

My rant of the day:

Friday I was kindly asked if it was possible for me to only accept a room on the Logan campus of the university I study at, since rooms on the Nathan campus are quite crowded already. I agreed in order to make life easier for the people allocating rooms, and put in a request for some equipment to make my life as a student easier. This equipment list wasn't terribly extensive, consisting of:

4 black dell computers (Griffith Uni appears to have two kinds of computers, older Compaq models, and newer black dell models with a burner/DVD-ROM combo drive) so that we could back up our work to CD, etc. (4 because there are 4 honors students currently on the Logan Campus, i.e. 1 machine each).

A printer to allow us to print stuff without disturbing the staff who 'live' in the room where the single printer is currently.

Optionally, a scanner would have been useful to scan some research papers, etc so that we could avoid costing the school the expense of photocopying them.

However, I recieved an e-mail today, and to quote it: "Unfortunately, the latest computers, printers & scanners will not be available to you."

Whilst that is annoying, this next sentence is the one that really upsets me: "When the computers are provided, they will be imaged in such a way that will wipe anything on the PC hard drive, so you will need to save your work to somewhere other than the PC hard drive."

Since my understanding is that the compaq computers do not have burners, I'm unclear as to what I'm supposed to save my data to.

Bah!

Posted by Lemming at March 3, 2003 02:08 PM