Random ramblings, Volume… something something….

*****

I have noticed something strange about the office’s internet proxy/firewall. Like any place of work, the internet has restriction to prevent you from accidentally getting distracted and stop being productive. However, it seems pretty inconsistent at best.

While most social media (like Facebook and Twitter) are blocked but sites like Reddit, Imgur, Giphy and Youtube are fully accessible. Some news website that have live streaming feature get disabled by the proxy, and some don’t. Anything remotely related to Video games, even some wikipedia pages, is unaccessible but Twitch.tv, the biggest streaming website for video games, is not blocked. Some website won’t load images for no apparent reason.

I’m not sure how it supposed to work, be it web domain based or scanning pages for specific terms, but I am pretty sure it is not working the way it should…

*****

Talking about the office, something kinda annoying happened. I was working on this small project with another member of my team. The project was low key and only required minor changes so only he and I was working on it. All the changes were coded and regression tests went smoothly, I had the quality inspection meeting with him and he was happy with the work I had done. The only thing left to do was for him to sign-off on the QI form and the project would have been a slam dunk. Except he left the company, or possibly got fired (no official announcement was made by my manager, so I’m leaning toward the latter), before he signed off on the thing.

I now had to find a new analyst, explain to them my problem, go through the whole inspections again, miss the deadlines by like a week, just because that guy forgot to click a check box on a form. What a mess…

*****

So time ago, back when I was in college, I took this Computer Science class called “generative art”. Basically, it was a class about writing scripts that generated image and animation procedurally. We did this using a tool called Processing, which is basically Java/Javascript with a bunch of additional libraries for drawing stuff. I was a really cool concept because It allowed you to be creative and still have the logic and problem solving aspect of programing. There was always a lot of satisfaction when your code did what you want it to do, and some nice surprises when it did something you didn’t expect.

Anyways, the other day I got really bored and I started remember the good times I had in College… Ahhh, the ability to engage so many people about so many topic… Living with housemates that all had similar interests… having the ability to walk to different parts of campus and work where ever I wanted… Playing with liquid nitrogen in that one thermo-dynamics class… And that one computer science class on Generative art.

It got me thinking about what could be a fun project to do with processing, and then I had an idea… and immediately regretted it….

You see, when I get bored for too long, my imagination/problem solving skill are ready to spring into action and won’t stop until the thought is thoroughly explored. Which meant that when I realized I could probably easily do the falling code from The Matrix at like 10:30pm on Monday night, my brain went in full overdrive and I had a hard falling asleep, let alone standing still…

Anyways, I put a couple hours into it and made something quite satisfactory. It is nowhere near movie accurate but it feels close enough. I tried embedding the thing in the post but it doesn’t seem to work, but you can check it out here. Maybe I’ll come up with more fun stuff to make I’ll post more stuff.

*****