Sports

So in today’s blog post I’m going to talk about my sports.

Water polo is a fall sport so from late August all the way through early November I play. If you don’t know what water polo is here is a definition from Wikipedia.

Water polo is a team water sport. The game consists of four quarters in which the two teams attempt to score goals by throwing the ball into their opponent’s goal. The team with the most goals at the end of the game wins the match. A team consists of 6 field players and one goalkeeper in the water at any one time.

Water polo is a very physical enduring sport. If I were to try to explain it I would say it is a combination of basketball, soccer and wrestling. I am in my Sophomore year and I have been playing since my Freshman year. Both times my team has gone to state and got in the top 3. Last year we won 3rd in state and this year we only lost by one in the finals and we got 2nd. I have learned a lot about what a family means through both of these years. You have two families, the family you are born into and then your sport family(I’ll refer to this as SF). Your SF will always be there for you and will always help you succeed and reach farther, they will help you when you are struggling and looking for someone to help you.  I have realized what this is this year. My water polo team became my second family. I will always be there for my family and I know they will always be there for me.

I also swim during the winter so the Monday after water polo is done all the way through the 2nd week of February. I am not as dedicated to swim team as I am to water polo at all, nor is any other water polo player that does swim team. I am a relatively fast swimmer I can make state times if I wanted to; but I cannot. Last year I swam so hard and so fast I injured both of my shoulders. I had to take a month and a half off and miss out on my opportunity of going to districts and/or state. I cannot make the times that some of my other players make but I still work my ass off and I swim as fast as I can without hurting myself any further.

If anyone is interested in the standings of my last water polo season they are here(https://goo.gl/imllk0) and I will update the post soon with some of my swim times from this year.

Merry Christmas

Sorry for not posting a blog on Sunday but you should understand due to it being Christmas.

I have been working through some few bugs on the Minecraft plugin I have been making. I am querying a table a lot getting different pieces of information but I came into a bug where the MySQL query code works just fine in PHPMyAdmin but through Minecraft it doesn’t work with my code. I am currently discussing it with some developers on SpigotMC.org. I have updated the GitLab repository with all up to date code. If you want to try to help me click here for a quick overview on what is happening.

For Christmas I got a DJI Phantom 3 Standard drone. I have to admit it is a lot of fun flying it! I have been flying it around my house and stuff and I am slowly getting better at it. I have uploaded some YouTube videos of me flying it. All footage is shot at 1440p at 30fps.

Blog Delay

This blog post is on hold until the 28th of December due to Christmas. Happy holidays everyone.

Snow Week

This week was cut short due to the amount of snow. I’ve been super busy with school work and projects. I was able to render a video of some work I did last week on the 11th. In brief this week was only 3 days long due to a giant snow storm that come through my state. 2-3 inches of snow were recorded in the first 3 hours. My normally 20 minute bus ride home turned into 2 hours. I didn’t work on the MrTickets project at all this week and I have family coming into town soon so the project is currently on hold. Below is a 10 minute video of some coding I did.

MrTickets Video?

My week was very exciting and boring at the same time. We only had a three day week due to a snow storm on Thursday and Friday. I took the time on Thursday and Friday to catch up on some work and to educate myself on some PHP videos on YouTube.

I normally write these the day before and just have them scheduled to come out the next day around noon but I was really focused on the MrTickets project that I completely forgot about it until right before midnight. I was able to record about 40 minutes of me working through something for the plugin and just shortened the time to 15 minutes. The GitLab repository is up to date and you can find it here. I uploaded the time lapse of me coding to YouTube and it will be provided below. Side note sorry that the video is a bit fuzzy I down scaled it from 1080p to 720p for a faster upload and render time, next video will be 1080p.

I’m sorry for the short blog post today, next weeks hopefully will be a bit more exciting.

CTF & Advent of Coding

I recently have been looking into CTFs(Capture the Flags). Let me quote CTFTime.org on what a CTF is,

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a special kind of information security competitions. There are three common types of CTFs: Jeopardy, Attack-Defense and mixed. Jeopardy-style CTFs has a couple of questions (tasks) in range of categories. For example, Web, Forensic, Crypto, Binary or something else.

 

I had a no school on Monday so I started working on a CTF made by Security Innovation called canyouhack.us. I was successfully able to make it past the first level. I can’t do any spoilers but you should be able to get it really quickly if you know what you are doing. I started working on the second part of it then I realized I needed to install Kali on one of my VM’s. I had install when I was doing my homework. By the time I finished my homework it was around 10:00pm and I had to get up pretty early the next day for school(4:45am).

School was pretty boring all week. Out of my 8 classes I take a day 3 to 4 of them had a sub. The students at my school including myself actually like learning since we are all focused on a certain career field in the future, and my school provides difficult classes for us to take to excel in those fields. The probably most exciting thing that happened this week was me watching YouTube videos on my school provided laptop during chemistry. In my engineering class we were working on statistical probability of things happening, my friend and I have already taken majority of stats before so we were able to finish it in an hour meanwhile the rest of the class took 3 to 4 days to complete the packet. The packet consisted of just some simple stat questions, for example, if you flipped a coin 50 times what was the experimental probability that it will land on heads, 22 times thus making it a 44% chance of landing heads versus tales.

On November 30th I was browsing Reddit during class and I found something called the Advent of Code. Advent of Code(AoC) is an Advent calendar that provides a programming challenge everyday at midnight EST. I bookmarked the website, AdventofCode.com, and I continued browsing Reddit. The next day, I remembered the AoC and went to the website to what the first day’s problem looked like. In a shortened down version you were dropped at point (0,0) facing North. You were then given instructions like R2, L3 which says go right of North and proceed 2 blocks East and then go left and go 3 blocks North. I read through the instructions a bit and realized this was a bit like taxicab geometry, where you have a starting point and a ending point and you have to calculate how blocks away your ending point is away from your starting point. I found someones code on the subreddit /r/AdventOfCode and I modified it so it would work for me and I put in my input to get my end point then I used the taxicab geometry formula and found out how many blocks away it was and then I submitted it to the website, all using a Python IDE online. I have completed days 1 thru 3 already.

Why I made this website

It’s probably very interesting seeing a 15 year old make a blog or even a website.  I read all these tech blogs and posts on Reddit from 25 to 30 year old about how their life and technology related jobs are going. But you never here about a teenagers point of view in the technology field. Actually that probably is wrong, you’ll have the occasional post asking “How do I DDOS?” or “I want to hack my school”. I am planing to bring weekly posts on Sunday nights about what I have learned throughout the week, what projects I have finished or I continue to work on or even my struggle going through high school(and yes I do know college is harder than high school). If you want a sentence from me explaining why I am doing this here it is; I am writing/creating this website because I want people to understand what teenagers are doing in the technology field.

Anyways I am going to explain a little bit about what I am currently working on in my free time. Side note when reading this I normally go off on tangents but it adds character to my writing.

I am currently creating a plugin for Minecraft servers that manages tickets. The server will take all the information and submit it to a MySQL table where then the information will be presented on a webpage on the server’s website. I am currently learning a lot about MySQL and how to get and submit information to tables for the webpage I making to get and also the server side to manage. The project is currently available on GitLab here, https://gitlab.com/MrMcaustin1/MrTickets. In the GitLab repository you can find all the code for the Minecraft plugin as well the server side mock up website that I took from a template then wrote my own webpage to incorporate onto it. The plugin is coded completely in Java and then the website is coded in a mix of PHP and HTML5. The code for the plugin is very messy, I free write most of it, meaning I just go into it having no idea how I am going to do it but I know what I want it to do; only small things I take from online forums I belong to like SpigotMC, Bukkit, and every programmers favorite Stack Overflow. I have completed about 30% of the plugins progress and if you want to keep up to date on the plugin go ahead and press the watch button on the GitLab project page. If you want to make suggestions go ahead and read the contributing guide. I push out the project every night after I finish working on the project.