Nicholas Wellcome

Applied Math / Computer Science Major / Web Developer


Public Tasks

About

Nicholas Wellcome

A junior applied math/computer science double major in his second semester at Stony Brook. Orignally from Dutchess county NY, he is now living near Stony Brook and writing about himself in the third person. Much can be said about Nicholas, that he thinks in web-software, admires simple design, is an archetypal INTJ and would be nocturnal if left to his own devices.

Work

  • Summer 2004 - Summer 2006: A golf course - mind you he was 16-17 and needed to buy a car for the next thing.
  • Fall 2006 - Fall 2007: Teaching Learning Center at Dutchess Community College - Primarily maintaining and troubleshooting Blackboard for faculty and so many ad-hoc web projects.
  • Spring 2008 - Fall 2008: Community Relations and Graphics at Dutchess Community College - as a "web support specialist" intern, helped keep the college website going until the new one was rolled out a semester later.
  • Summer 2008 - Fall 2008: Ashworth Creative - as a web developer, threw together something like 6 gorgeous websites in two months with a bloody amazing design-aholic designer then had to move to Long Island to continue school, still does spot jobs to mantain those sites.
  • Fall 2008 - present: it's a secret! That launches in the spring.

Check out the other tabs to see things he has recently worked on for various classes - it won't all make sense out of the context of the class but at least some of it looks cool.

Contact

The easiest and best way to get in touch with me is my email:
email address

Links to his other sites:

DCC - Dutchess Community College (had access revoke when he transferred, been meaning to fix that).
Pandora - what music he listens to.
NGH - a photoblog/webcomic (only updated off-semester).

AMS345 - Computational Geometry - Spring 2009

Prof. Joe Mitchell - Couse Link

Projects

Triagulate - J. O'Rourke's "Triangulate" in JavaScript

CSE373 - Algorithms - Fall 2009

Prof. Ker-I Ko - Course Link

Projects

A Dynamic Programming Approach to Finding an "Optimal"* Decomposition of a Convex Polygon into Triangles

EST393 - Project Management - Spring 2009

Prof. Peter Wan

Projects

Individual Research
"Modern Web-Based Project Collaboration Software"
pdf - html - docx - doc

Group Project Forum

Blog

New Machine

October 12, 2009

I've been looking to upgrade my PC for a about a year. Recently, I had the money saved up and my friend was also looking to upgrade his box so we agreed that I'd buy the parts he's replacing off him - then stuff happened and I didn't have the money but he went ahead and bought the parts and now I'm sort of lease-to-owning the old parts from him. They are as follows:

  • AMD Phenom II X4 940
  • Corsair CM2X2048-8500C5D
  • Asus M3N-HT Deluxe

I'm down at Stony Brook and he's upstate so before I came up to visit and get the parts he threw them together with what he had lying around and, well look:




Yes, that's right, he managed to get Windows 3.1 running on it. It boots too fast to see the load screen. It recognizes almost 1 MB of the 2 GB of RAM. It uses a mystical driver he named "BANANA" that lets it use a USB mouse. Somehow the CD drive works in DOS. And... the color scheme was set to Hot Dog Stand.

I almost want to keep it this way. Most likely I'll load it up with some Commander Keen, Jill of the Jungle, Sim City, Xargon and any other of my old 3.1 and OS/2 games I can find then drop in a new HDD and keep the old one for when I'm feeling nostalgic.

Last Straw

May 7, 2009

I know that one of the most popular things to do on the Internets is to complain about Micro$oft. Normally I just keep it to myself but I want this in writing for my own sake.

I will not install Microsoft Office ever again.

I don't care if it's for someone else, I will give them Open Office or some other product, I may even install OO without telling them.

You see, I needed a new laptopfor class following the untimely death by melted GPU of my Acer Asipre 9300. I ended up with a Lenovo IdeaPad s10e from Newegg and I love the little guy. The smaller keyboard took some getting used to, as did understanding that its little Intel Atom can't do HD video and something else at the same time. Other than that, it's perfect. I carry it with me everywhere. Under normal use the battery lasts about 5 hours - there was even one day when it was called on to do 4 presentations spanning a little over an hour in total (because it was the only working laptop available) and that left it with over 2/3 battery for the rest of the day - plenty.

Another speed bumb in getting the s10e set up is the fact that it has no optical drive. This is no problem normally, I just install Daemon tools and make ISOs of the things I have only in disk form and install them that way. Lenovo was also thoughtful enough to have Micro$oft Office already installed and the Norton install files there but Norton not installed! Lenovo, I love you guys for not installing Norton, that is such a pain to get rid of, thank you.

Okay, so why am I complaining? M$ Office was understandbly a trial version, and it told me every time I started it up "You aren't required to now, but to make the registration process easier you should enter your product key here". Okay, well I have this copy of M$ Office enterprise I bought through the university, but evidently that key isn't good enough. So the semester moves along and I flip the little guy open tonight to finish off a term paper due Friday. Guess what, the trial is over, no warning, never told me how long the trial was - I'm guessing it was 30 days. So then what does it do? Hold your files hostage. Seriously, you can look at them but not edit them or print or copy from them.

Now, you already know this isn't the end of the road for me the power-user. I have a copy that I presume I can make an ISO of and transfer it over and of course in a pinch there's Google Docs that I can upload it to - assuming I have an internet connection, which I don't at the moment. So what now? If I were joe-average-user with an Internet connection I would probably just buy another key for $50. But say joe-average-user doesn't have an internet connection and his term paper is due tomorrow - he fails. Thankfully I have the Open Office install files on hand in my pack of things I keep around to install on new machines.

So that's that. M$ Office comes off all the computers (and it's too bad because I actually liked the 2007 interface and from what I'm seen I am one of the few people in IT who did), I don't care if I have to start writing papers in LaTex, I am not going to use software that will hold my documents hostage. Now if Ubuntu would stop breaking every other version upgrade I would be 100% on that too, but that's another story - I'd like to figure my current problem with 9.04 out before I write about it.

Apartment Hunting Round 2

April 19, 2009

My Desk

Just when I've finally established a cave comparable to my original upstate it's time to be moving on. The renter's market has changed significantly (understatement) since last summer and it's time to see if I can move out of a basement and into a place with windows - yeah, windows.

Update: I gave myself two weeks to look around and I didn't find anything that I was really excited about. Then, directly upon giving up my landlord told me that my roommate was moving out - so now instead of a room I am looking for a roommate. I'm ok with this, I hope I can find someone through a friend - so if anyone out there is interested, get it in touch!

The Coldest Place on Earth

March 25, 2009

Is room S-114 in the physics building. There a group lead by Prof. Dominik Schneble does ultracold atomic physics experiments, "ultracold" meaning 21ľK - that is on the order of 10^-6 Kelvin. To put this in perspective Schneble will tell you that if you stretched the Kelvin tempurature scale from New York to California, California being summer tempurature (300 K) and New York being absolute 0, Nevada would be winter temperatures, Chicago would be superfliud helium (77 K) and half an inch in front of you in New York would be the tempuratures in his exeriment.

At those temperatures some particles (bosons) go into a very strange state of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates wherein almost all the particles are confined to the lowest quantum state so quantum mechanical phenomenon become visble on a macroscopic scale, specifically, you can see matter waves begin to intefere with one another. Now, we normally think of that kind of interaction happening on a scale so small that we can't measure it directly, but in his experiment you can. As Schneble says, if you worked in his lab this kind of quantum phenomemon as opposed to our classical physics would be your everyday experience and you would see the world very differently - "the world isn't that simple, it's a lot more interesting".

Open Source Un/Aware

March 17, 2009

Today I gave a presentation about the open-source vs free software debate in my professional ethics in computer science class. I was suprised to discover the range of prior knowledge about the issue; there were students whose eyes glazed over at "free as in free speech, not free beer" and others who had been to see Eric S. Raymond last week. Up until now I had assumed that if you were in any way involved with information technology, computer science or programming then you would at least be aware open source as a concept if not the whole free software movement - for those unitiated "open source" and "free software" do not mean the same thing, see Richard Stallman's "Why open source misses the point of free software". Now I find that this is not true, at least here at Stony Brook. My only explanaition is that proprietary software tends to find people here whereas free/open source software generally has to be found - and evidently there are curious and some geniunely incurious students here.

Pi Day!

March 14th, 2009

I give you, our pi day pie:

our pi pie

Early Morning Physics

March 10th, 2009

I sit on the concrete steps in front of the Staller Center at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, March 10th finishing a lab on the photoelectric effect for my Modern Physics class. The temperature sensors in my laptop tell me that the ambient temperature is 32F - but I believe only because they don't go any lower. We were measuring Planck's constant and the results are quite bad - 57% error - but in our defense the apparatus we were using was created pre-1977 and Planck's constant is on the order of 1x10^-25.

The cold morning air is wonderful, though now less wonderful that I haven't moved from the shade for half an hour. I've made a deal with myself that if I can finish the error analysis on this graph before I can't feel my fingers then I deserve to go inside and get some coffee.