Posted on Feb 26, 2009 at 10:41 PM
So, on the bus to UMass this morning I found myself trying to figure out the technicalities of a zombie-killing robot. Jason told me this would be my job in the zombie apocalypse, to make ‘a robot with chainsaws for arms to kill zombies’. But quickly I ran into issues. First: Is it remote controlled? If so, the hard part will be the building of it. If not, then not only do we get the hard part of building it, we also have to deal with computer vision, motion planning/obstacle detection, and teaching it the difference between zombies and humans (lest we unleash another menace onto the already apocalyptic world).
So okay, in both cases we still need to build it. How should it be built? The base would likely be wheels, not legs (because then we’d need to bring in how to walk, which is difficult, and honestly that’s not the important bit), then some kind of torso where all the computer bits would be, and some kind of power source (which I didn’t even get into). The arms, which were originally suggested to be chainsaws, would probably be better off as blades, I’m thinking circular saw type things. Well, maybe not. Admittedly, this is where I loose ground. Blades seemed lighter and easier to direct, but with enough power I suppose chainsaws would be too. Regardless, the robot would need to be made of some heavy duty materials, since I doubt the world will be nice to it. I mean, assuming a zombie hoard attacks it, it would probably be gnawed on.
But back to the controlling of it. As I said already, remote controlled would make the programming much easier, but I think would loose some of the functionality in that someone would need to be the one manning it. I also think that part of making this is so that we-the-survivors can just hide out in where ever and let it protect us. But to honestly get this working, we’d need a team. So, as I was conveniently on my way to robotics, I figured we can just take over the robotics lab and make the grad students do the programming. I’m sure my professor would find it an excellent learning experience.
That was way more entertaining than it should have been, but now my robotics hw won’t be nearly as painful. Practical applications!
Posted on Feb 02, 2009 at 02:21 PM
So I suppose I should write an update. I’ve got another plugin in the works, it’s essentially done but it’s very simple, and there are more features I want to add. It’s basically a horizontal navigation menu of your pages. So yes, it’s essentially wp_list_pages() in plugin form. But! Stylized a bit to be not so much a list as multiple levels. Anyway. It’s the kind of plugin that probably exists 100 times over and possibly better, but I was getting sick of using wp-andreas09′s navigation for a project at work and decided I could do so much better.
In any case, I’d like to add the ability to also display post categories, and whatever else you may want to have on a navigation bar. I’ll release the basic one first though, likely through WP’s plugin system (subversion? really? seems like an awful lot of touble just for a plugin…). Then I’ll probably work concurrently on a next version incorporating the above, and forked version which will allow dropdowns, if only because I just discovered jQuery and want to play. Or maybe some other functionality abusing jQuery (I don’t know why I hadn’t heard about this before, but I love it!).
Anyway, aside from plugin news I’m finally opening this site up for real, with just a warning. Since I’m never going to stop playing with the design of it anyway. So, ‘perpetually under construction, please watch for falling code.’ And now to play with plugins some more (… what homework?).
Posted on Dec 26, 2008 at 08:15 PM
Description: Enables intersection of categories: [your url]/?cat=1,2&and=1 will show posts only in both categories 1 and 2. [your url]/?cat=1,2&and=0 is the default functionality (shows posts from categories 1 or 2).
Author: Kelly Dwan
Version: 0.2
Wordpress 2.6 – 2.8
My first foray into the world of wordpress plugins, born of need for exactly that functionality. None of the functions we looked into seemed to work properly (there were conditions on the categories, it didn’t work with this version of wordpress…) so it seemed easier to write it myself.
To install, simply add the intersection.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory (remove the .txt extension), and activate the plugin. If, for some reason, you’re still using ver 0.1, and add the line:
<?php if ( function_exists('intersection') ) intersection();?>
in the header template (header.php).
I definitely welcome any comments or feedback, and if there are any questions I’ll try to answer as best I can.
EDIT 02/01/09: Clear up installation instructions.
EDIT 02/02/09: Edited meta in file header with a link to this exact post.
EDIT 06/13/09: New version with hooks, so you don’t even need to add code.
