Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The search for the omega star...

has ended after 13 months!

Approximately one year ago I discovered an origami omega star sitting on the top of the computer in my new office. I asked my colleges who had done it, but they told the star had been there for months now and nobody knew anymore who had folded it to begin with. As I was in the visitors room (reserved for visiting scientists or students staying less than 6 months), they told me that everything on the desk now belonged to me and that I could take the star home if I wanted to. I (as a shy intern) didn't dare to take it with me at the beginning. Instead I looked at it in detail when I was not working trying to figure out how it was folded. Of course, I looked all over the internet for the diagram and although I managed to find some pictures of the finished star, I wasn't able to find out neither the diagram nor the author.

When the internship ended I took the star home and left another unit origami piece there in return. In order to investigate how the units were put together I began to unfold it. However, my brilliant idea only resulted in the damaging of the units.

With the time my obsession with the star wore off. But yesterday, when looking for other origami diagrams, I found a video with the folding instructions for the so called "omega star", MY star.
The video was linked to a nice origami blog, where I even found the diagram!

It turns out that neither the unit folding, not the putting the units together is difficult at all. The only problem is the last step when the star shape is formed and where very careful folding is required. I've made two of these stars today...with far from perfect results. But like everything in this life, it is a matter of practice and soon I'll manage to fold one perfectly.

In the picture are the three stars. The one in the middle is the original one, which I even managed to repair.

Monday, September 22, 2008

I'm not really a ninja...

...BUT according to the LightBot game I'm ready to be a programmer (that's always good to know!).
I liked the game, It's simple but fun to play and the way of thinking really resembles the one you need to program for real. Besides, the robot is really cute!

Game instructions

Get the little robot to turn on the lights in all blue tiles.

The robot moves to the instructions provided in the right hand side of the screen.
The main method area is where your bot receives his orders from. You drag the instructions f
rom the top row into this field. The robot will cycle through these instructions.
You can choose from forward, right, left, jump, activate light and two function blocks.
These functions are declared in function field 1 and 2. This is a way to make it possible to repeat extensive instructions. Use this to reduce code as the main instruction field is limited to only 12 instructions.

Providing extensive instruction, making clever use of these function files is the main challenge in this game.




Here are some pics from the last levels but you will have to find the solutions for yourselves (and if you're lucky you might get some help when you're stuck like I did!).




As you can see I've been working A LOT these days...

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Sunday, September 14, 2008

10. 09. 08


After 07 (although officially 06 ) months working on my thesis project, today I finally managed to fully finish 05 thesis exemplars and delivered 04 of them to my 03 examiners and my 02 referees. So much happened around this 01 document and now it's all over.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Number of applications open vs. work output


These days my work efficiency can be measured as the number of applications opened simultaneously on my computer. Yesterday I even had to increase the number of spaces in the spaces application.


In one week I hope to be able to reduce all of those working applications to one: Quinn. Or maybe I'll alternate my tetris practice with something new and buy Spore?