Robots Fighting Fires

The DPRG held the regional for the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest in Dallas today. I took a few photos and will try to post them tomorrow or Monday on robots.net along with a summary of the action.

Otherwise, I spent the day hacking on a Perl/DBI/PostgreSQL project. I’m looking forward to the release of PostgreSQL v7.1 (which will happen real soon now, hopefully). I keep hearing good things about how fast it is.

I also ran across the new 1040.com tax form for recently laid-off employees of dot-coms. I know a few people who’ll need it this year.

DPRG Regional Fire-Fighting Robot Contest

Sunday we dragged the mower and weed-whacking equipment out of the garage and spent the day trying to make our front and back yard look acceptable again.

With all the stuff going on this weekend, I didn’t get to make it out to the DPRG-sponsored regional fire fighting contest at the Science Place. Fortunately, Robert Jordon took some photos of the event and posted the results on the DPRG mailing list. One of these days I need to get back to work on my ‘bot, who has been lying dormant under the workbench for over a year.

If I get time today, I’m going to take a look at the mod_virgule code and see if I can’t put together a patch to give it a little more flexibility in user name support.

Thunderstorms and Robots

There’s a good size thunderstorm going on outside right now. From the look of the radar images it’ll probably be raining for most of the night. I’ve been working on a new Perl program (GPL’ed of course!) which I’ve decided to call “Event Horizon”. Its purpose is to generate an ASCII and HTML format event calendar. I’m going to use it specifically to help bring the Robot Competition List up to date again. I’ve neglected the list for over a year because it’s so time consuming to update. I expect to have the first new version out around the beginning of June.