Here we goes, the mostly final version of my lit video.
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Hopefully, it’ll be good enough for an A… What’s your opinion?
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Pandora vs. Last.fm
I’m sure most of you know of the two top music sharing services – Pandora and Last.fm. They both use various methods to supply you with a playlist that you (hopefully) like, and fund themselves with ads and/or paid membership. The music quality on both services is really indistiguishable, so what I think the real deciding factor is the music selection.
Let’s face it, Pandora has a much better system for figuring out who wants what. Their “music genome project” learns your preferences faster than Last.fm’s scrobbling by far, and it tends to get more music that you may have heard of. Last.fm, in comparison, tends to have a lot more indie artists – both a good and a bad thing.
However, there are some caveats to Pandora: first of all, its only available in the United States. While that isn’t so much of a restriction for us, the fact is, you’ll have to use Last.fm or some other internet radio in the case that you go on vacation outside the country.
There is one real reason why I personally choose Last.fm over Pandora – their respective music libraries. Last.fm gives me much better music when i search for “classical” or “instrumental” – since neither are arguable popular, it is understandable why Pandora doesn’t spend effort on them. Also, Pandora has just about no songs in other languages – a search for “Jolin Tsai” returns zero results, while Last.fm easily compiles a list of Chinese artists to listen to.
Overall, my personal choice leans towards Last.fm… but if you don’t need multiligual music listenable outside the country, Pandora’s your best bet.
Business Project
So we’ve been told our Principles of Business final is to be a project. The guidelines are “something that shows off what you [the students] have learned in class”. Anyone have any ideas?
Pandora's Box No Sound
So… I added some more video and text. Hopefully it makes some sense now:
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However, I still need to get background music.
PluggableFramework
Pluggable Framework is a way to separate guns and movement into different classes, allowing for such classes to become “pluggable”. The trick to this is simple:
At the beginning of your overall robot, you first import the classes you wish to plugin.
import ry.gun.*; import ry.move.*;
Then, you place them in the variables section and declare them.
private static WaveMover movement; private static CircularTargeting gun; public PluggableFramework() { gun = new CircularTargeting(this); movement = new WaveMover(this);
That’s it for the setup. Now, in every method that you wish to carry over a function from, you would put
movement.onScannedRobot(e);
, for example, if you wished to put the movement code of WaveMover into onScannedRobot. Do this for all of the methods.
You’re Done! (at least in the PluggableFramework side).
Now, in the Gun/Movement side, you’d need to do a little work. A gun or a movement can’t be extends AdvancedRobot, so instead, you put a header like this:
public class LinearTargeting { private AdvancedRobot _robot; public LinearTargeting(AdvancedRobot robot) { _robot = robot; }
Every function that is part of AdvancedRobot should be prefixed with _robot. in order for it to work. Example:
_robot.setFire(1.9);
After you’re done with that… you’re usually done. Note that if you call
this, you may have to change it to
this._robotNote: Any and all code provided, if used in your robot, should have credit attributed to Robert Ying unless otherwise noted
Files:
Pluggable Framework
Linear Targeting
Circular Targeting
Head On Targeting
WaveSurfing
RandomMovement