Unfortunately, I was sick for most of the weekend, which made it difficult to get much accomplished. Still, I at least managed to complete the assignments for this week’s Stanford ML and AI classes.

Brewster has been sent to Dog Diggity Daycare for the days when I’m out for long periods of time. This has been happening quite often lately since I’ve been extremely busy with recording subject studies.

Today was Brewster’s first day.

I selected the books for Database Applications (to be renamed Database Programming at Wayne Community College) for next year:

• PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide, 4/E by Larry Ullman
• HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS by Patrick Griffiths

Both books are published by Pearson.

I will be retiring Don Gosselin’s PHP Programming with MySQL, 2nd Edition, at the end of this semester. His books in general appear to receive poor reviews, anyway.

From Hacker News, found the AI Challenge, sponsored by Google:

The Google AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. Using one of the easy-to-use starter kits, you will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination.

I also watched the CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate, which was by far the most entertaining debate yet.

It seems that Spring 2012 course registration is today.

I discovered that SSH publickey authentication won’t work on NCSU’s Linux servers due to the fact that the AFS filesystem uses Kerberos. HelpDesk ticket was 1583449.

This blog is now running with mod_fcgid and suEXEC support; I’ll need to port over the remaining sites one day.

At the last minute, I signed up for Stanford’s Machine Learning class, taught by Professor Andrew Ng. It looks like it will be an interesting course, and I’m exciting that many Universities are now opening up their educational materials to the general public.

I’m also signed up for Stanford’s Introduction to AI class, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

I installed GNU Octave.

However mundane, I think I’m going to start posting in my blog again. My reference material will continue to be hosted on my Wiki.

I taught a lecture for Object-Oriented Languages and Systems on Elegance and Inheritance.

I decided to be a bit nostalgic and installed TinyFugue on tango. I quickly found that many of my favorite MUDs from my younger years are still around (though barely populated with users these days), including DragonMUD and InfinityMUD. I found a few new ones as well: BatMUD and Aardwolf.

For dinner, Laurel and I went to Five Guys.