Author: onekopaka

The PT Cruiser is dead!

Yesterday, Chrysler had announced that they had ceased production of the PT Cruiser, or as many people like to call it, the PT Loser.

The PT Cruiser was rather popular at its launch, however has steadily declined. The PT Cruiser is hated for a great many problems, such as its gas mileage.

The PT Loser is classified as a “subcompact” car, however, gets worse gas mileage than a full size car. One of the reasons you would ever buy a subcompact car is to get better gas mileage. Seriously, Chrysler should not have let the PT Loser be so inefficient for its size.

Another important point is that the PT Loser is an unsafe vehicle, especially the convertible. In the convertible, there is a single bar across the vehicle (above the passengers), that if removed, the car would not be able to hold itself together. Talk about poor design.

So let us rejoice that this horrible vehicle is no longer being spewed out to terrorize the world.

Maple Valley Days 2010

Today, Maple Valley Days in 2010 wrapped up. Bear Metal, also known as The Tahoma Robotics Club, had the opportunity to participate in the parade for another year, as well as have a booth again.

This year, we brought all three of our remaining robots, Catalyst, Bearenstein, and Odyssey.

Continue reading “Maple Valley Days 2010”

Spamming Tactic: Exploiting Search Engines

It’s nothing new, but I see it happening right now. Spammers are searching for “leave a comment” on Google, and using those results to feed into spam bots that go and do the work. Google, please stop letting spammers search for “leave a comment”. Just block that string from being searched, as it won’t ever affect an actual user. Nobody would just be searching for “leave a comment” and not have  malicious intentions.

Software doesn’t have insight like this, and that’s why programmers must remain in the business. To help the software learn.

ARMOR LOCK!

So after a good weekend of playing Halo Reach Multiplayer Beta, I’ve been getting fairly good at the Armor Lock armor ability.

Chances if you’re reading this, you’ve played with me on the Reach MP beta. As always known, my gamertag is onekopaka, as shown on the Gamer Cards page. If you want to be a friend of me, don’t be annoying.

I’ll see you out in Matchmaking.

Turbo Conspiracy Wearies

If you haven’t noticed, the Rooster Teeth site’s navbar randomly will display secret messages.

I saw this and within half an hour dug up the JavaScript that makes it happen.

I’ve posted it on my pastebin here.

So the JavaScript originally had a lot of escaped text, which I unescaped for readability.

The messages in my copy are plaintext now.

Discuss what you think things mean in the comments.

One suggestion I heard is that Tex is saying these things, similar to the I Love Bees viral campaign.

Altana

Altana, a misspelling of the city Atlanta, where the FIRST world championship is held, is a running gag in our club. Originally, Fred, our current Vice President wrote on our website in 2008 “Were going to Altana!”

This year, at the Seattle Regional, we were the 2nd seeded team. Yes, 2nd out of 64 teams. We also had the most Coopertition ™ Points, and therefore got the Coopertition ™ Award. We also won the Industrial Design Award, sponsored by General Motors.

Unfortunately, we were knocked out in the semi-finals again by the eventual winners of the event, Team XBOT, Hotwire, and SOTA Bots, so congratulations! We also did not win the Chairman’s Award, however Skunkworks did, so congratulations to them. So we again don’t get to go to “Altana.”

In related news, Kevin Ross and Deb Mumm-Hill announced that the state government DOUBLED the FRC grant money, so that more FRC teams can be started. This lead to the announcement of a possible second regional in the Seattle area, which we hope will be timed so that our team can attend it as well as the current Seattle regional and the Portland regional.

Again with the mill type thing

Yesterday, Sunday, I got the opportunity to cut out some parts on our nice new mill we got last week. It’s fast.

So far, we’ve been running the mill with just spraying with WD-40 as a coolant, but once we get actual coolant running across the tool, we can cut even faster than with just WD-40.

The hard part of making a drain to recycle the coolant is mostly complete, Mr. Prelesnik, a fabrication mentor put in a drain hole, through the shower vinyl that covers the table the mill rests on.

Mill type thing

The Tahoma Robotics Club recently purchased a CNC mill that we got delivered to us yesterday. Today, we got the mill moving and running GCODE via the Mach3 Mill control interface. When we first connected to the mill, we were unable to move the X axis but after a complete reset of all the machines (mill controller and computer) and reseating of the parallel cable, we got control of that axis and ran a program that was cutting in mid-air.

Unfortunately, we cut a lubricating tube because our Z-limit switch didn’t function. Thankfully, that part is easily replaceable.

The mill is actually a manual -> CNC conversion done by IH CNC. Kudos to them as they gave us help over the phone, even at 21:00 their time zone.

I’ll eventually post pictures.