I had an old machine lying around in the office room, so I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on it. ReactOS has also released a new version of their operating system.

Surprisingly, it seems that the WordPress blog software actually has its own AntiVirus for WordPress plugin. This extension can be used to scan your templates, in case they have been modified through an injection attack of some sort: such as through eval or base64_decode.

At this year’s Carolina Games Summit, Rogelio and I presented a talk on Introduction to Game AI Using Python. You can browse the project files for your own use (and experimentation!) at our GitHub page.

If you’re interested in learning more about Game AI, take a look at Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame by Will McGugan (Amazon), as well as Artificial Intelligence for Games by Ian Millington and John Funge (Amazon).

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend!

Colophon: The libraries PyGame and NumPy were used in the development of this demo. The PlanetCute prototyping tiles were used for the sprites, with the free background music provided by Deceased Superior Technician.

Attended a presentation by Thomas G. Dietterich on Machine Learning in Ecological Science and Environmental Management.

After a few e-mails back and forth, I gained access to the NCSU’s ARC Cluster. The hardware consists of 1728 cores on 108 compute nodes integrated by Advanced HPC. I’m particularly interested in finally having a real environment in which to experiment with NVIDIA CUDA.

Access to the cluster is firewalled; you can first SSH into a public-facing NCSU server, but I’ve found it easiest to use NCSU’s Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client. If you’re using Windows, you can use the PuTTY Key Generator to quickly create a SSH-2 DSA public/private key pair.

I’m signed up to attend this year’s Carolina Games Summit, hosted annually at Wayne Community College. If all goes to plan, I’ll also be presenting a talk at the same event on implementing game AI using Pygame.

I’ve been approved for in-state tuition rates at North Carolina State University starting this semester.

The review of your application and supporting documentation has been completed. I am pleased to advise that you have been reclassified as in-state for tuition purposes effective Spring 2012 semester.

At least something was accomplished this week.

I finally ditched Delicious and migrated my bookmarks to Pinboard.in. There was an initial hiccup with the confirmation e-mail due to what appears to be some mail server related issues, but it was eventually resolved through IRC.

I’ve upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.3.1. In doing so, I also changed the theme to Twenty Eleven, since the prior theme has not been maintained by the original author for a long time.

While doing the upgrade, I went ahead and installed the Quick Cache plugin.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.