Things to do this summer

Today was the last actual school day of the 2014-15 academic year for me (yay finals are done!) so now it's summer. This means I have a lot of time on my hands, and I hope to accomplish something more publicly visible than reading a bunch of interesting stuff on the Internet, as much as I like doing that. These are my ideas:

• Make Abiathar Online. This will require learning JavaScript, which is something I really should do. It would also be my first actual open-source project. (I'd accept pull requests and everything!)
• Improve Abiathar (the real, desktop one) in some way. It would be kind of neat to have an integrated graphics editor, but there's not a huge amount of demand for that. Reinventing Abiathar as a total modding solution (texts, sprite behaviors, etc.) would be really awesome and also a huge amount of work. Note that such a program was the original goal of FMod, which turned into FleexCore2, which powers Abiathar.
• Learn C++. This is another language serious developers should know, and I don't. I'm picking up a few concepts through my wanderings into P/Invoke, but I'm still up in managed .NET where memory allocations poof in and out of existence when you need it. The Windows API is another thing I should know my way around, even if only to understand what Raymond Chen is talking about.
• Make Ineffable Learning. I'm kind of afraid to start this because I've never had any serious success in web programming and I'm afraid I'll royally mess up the architecture right off the starting line. The point of Abiathar Online was to get experience in web development, but it occurs to me now that those are two different types of web programming (one client-side and the other mostly server-side). There are always volunteers though - this wasn't really meant to be an individual project.
• Learn mobile app development. Having a snazzy new Android smartphone seems like a great opportunity to start creating apps for phones. That's a huge market, and I'm missing out by not knowing anything about it.
• Practice chess. I still play chess, but not a whole lot; I'm not currently getting any better. There are books of openings I should study, and online games might be helpful as well.
• Not forget all the Chinese I learned. I'm not sure where to find good resources for learning the language that are Internetty and also free. The Chinese StackExchange might help. I could also try to narrate things in Chinese to myself.
• Do things with friends. Being an introvert means I can get along fine alone (look at all these other things I could be doing by myself!) but it'd be nice to chat with people? Maybe? I guess socialism socialization is a good thing.
• Create documentation. Abiathar's manual hasn't been updated in a long time; it's pretty out-of-date. I should hammer out the updates to that document and maybe rearrange or split up the "advanced use" section. Or, I could just create bite-sized demo/tutorial videos and add them to the new Abiathar video documentation playlist.
• Write more meaningful blog posts. I find that I'm pushing half-baked thoughts out onto the Internet in the name of consistent posting. Maybe I should try to get some really interesting, thought-provoking essays together in a less spontaneous writing style. (I do have a couple serious topics I want to cover thoroughly but haven't done the necessary research.)

Exams and Plain Text Degradation

Today I had the lovely semiannual experience of taking some final exams. On one of them, the teacher had to post some corrections to errata on the exam document: some numbers were messed up because the text editor the teacher used apparently doesn't do superscripts. (But it could do Rockwell font and BOLD ITALICIZE UNDERLINE ALLCAPS what is allegedly REALLY IMPORTANT.) So, numbers in scientific notation like 10⁶ appeared as something plain-texty like 106, which is very much a different number.

Over the course of this course (ha ha), I have several times had to guess whether a number just a shade over 100 was actually that number or a misformatting of 10 to the something. In science, exactness is a big deal, so lack of text layout capability is kind of a problem.

So, my advice to teachers and anybody dealing with text in which superscripts or other non-linear text layouts may appear:

• Use a real word processor, not just a rich text editor (WordPad). You'll have lots more features at your disposal, and your document will look a lot nicer.
• Do the essential formatting as you go. Don't write something like "9.9 * 104", promising yourself that you'll come back later and fix it. (You probably won't.) Instead, learn the features of your word processor thoroughly enough that you can do formatting immediately. "9.9 ∙ 10⁴" can't be that hard to type.
• Write like it matters. If you want your students to write academic-quality scientific papers, you should be a good example of that writing style all the time. You should proofread to make sure that there aren't any "102"s left over and while you're at it, prettify the IMPORTANCE EXPLOSION into something more professional.

Here's to all the students preparing for finals!

Mark Junk/Phishing Mail as Spam

We all get the Nigerian prince scams, the webmail upgrade phishing attempts, the Viagra commercials, and all that trash in our e-mail inboxes. I can't be the only one whose e-mail management usually consists of striking the Delete key five or six times on useless messages.

However, when you get a message that is really junk/spam/phishing (rather than just something uninteresting), you should be pressing the Spam button rather than Delete. Most e-mail providers use that feedback to power a Bayesian spam recognition algorithm, which will lower the chance of you and other people getting similar junk again. By flagging spam as such, you help yourself and others.

Now I wish mail clients had a standard shortcut to mark a message as spam and delete it. Maybe Shift+Delete?

New

Today was a very exciting day for me. Three important things happened, all in the span of eight hours.

For the past semester, I have been taking NETW 274, a preparation course for the CompTIA Security+ certification, at a local college. Today was the certification exam, first thing in the morning. I finished the test in about one hour, and passed (854 on a scale of 100-900, minimum passing score is 750). I got a report printed out that tells me how to get the certificate. So, I am now a certified security professional!

Seeing as I had time to spare, I went to the DMV to attempt my driver's license road test. After two hours of waiting and occasionally showing people paperwork, I got on the road. The actual test was very easy and very short, just a few minutes of driving around the local neighborhood. There was a bit of backing up and something of a quiz on wheel directions when parking, but fortunately no parallel parking. When we got back to the DMV, the examiner noted that my backing up was a little "strange" and I drove much slower than necessary. Now, there were absolutely no speed limit signs anywhere in the area, and since I was not familiar with the region, I assumed it was 25. (It was a small town.) The examiner never explicitly said that I passed, but she directed me to the photography place after we were done, so I did get my license!

Then, after school, my parents surprised me with a new smartphone, which was conveniently included as part of a package as they upgraded their phones. Mine is an HTC Desire 612, running Android. I have only done enough with it to figure out how to call and text, but I'm sure I'll figure out more as I use it. This is actually the first phone I have ever owned. It will make communication with people much more convenient. And, I can start trying mobile development!

The Common Arrangement of Lanthanides and Actinides is Misleading

Today is in the AP Exam week. Here's to chemistry students!

On most periodic tables, lanthanum through lutetium and actinium through lawrencium are popped out of the main table into their own little section. This confuses some people (especially when new to atomic chemistry, or when first seeing the periodic table). Really, the lanthanides and actinides should be in with the rest of the table, but including them would make it super wide (see the Wide mode of this dynamic online periodic table). The shape of the table is important when learning about quantum properties of atoms and electron orbitals.

On a periodic table that I have, lanthanum and actinium are stylized with the same color as the transition metals. This is incredibly misleading. It suggests that those two elements should be in the blank spot in the table, followed by the injected 2-tall row of extra metals. That would create something like this:

*
**
**
***  !!  *** <chart continues to the right>
***      ***
**L...******
**A...******

Notice that blank space? It has a single column of transition metals (wrongly including La and Ac) on the left, the lanthanide and actinide series under it, and the rest of the transition metals to the right. That would split the transition metals, which is obviously not right.

In reality, La and Ac each start a 2-tall "valley" in the periodic table immediately after the "s" shell of groups 1 and 2. The last element in each series, lutetium and lawrencium respectively, are actually part of the standard transition metal series (the "d" block/shell). Sadly, even the colorations on the excellent PTable.com I linked earlier are misleading in this regard.

I wish Lu and Lr would be put in the blank space frequently reserved for a pointer to the pop-out, and a thick line placed between Ba-Lu and Ra-Lr pointing to rows consisting of La to Yb and Ac to No.

If I ran the world!

Farm in Spring

As spring rolls on and summer approaches, things have been happening around the farm. I selected some interesting pictures that represent what's going on:

The hoophouse's plastic was repaired, making it suitable for housing plants

The year's shipment of bees arrived and have been placed into actual hives

Holes were drilled and mulched for the addition of 400 more blueberry plants

The chickens continue to roam around - a new shipment of chicks arrived

The cats continue to manage the mouse population