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Name

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 2 months ago


 

Part of our name stems from the fact that almost everyone on the team has, at some point, used some form of Unix and enjoyed it. But not all of it. Read on to discover the shocking truth.

 

The Name

The process of choosing "Grep Lurch Grab" as our team name has a long, rich history. Ok, so we came up with it in 15 minutes. But it does mean something.

 

Grep

Grep is a *NIX command that allows you to search for strings in a file. When used correctly, it is an amazingly powerful way to find items on your computer. In the same way, our first task on the Vex field is often to find those little colored balls. We search for points! Or truth. One of the two.

We also look for the best solution to our engeneering problems when designing our robot.

 

Lurch

From the Jargon File: walking drives

An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to ‘walk’ across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

 

Most of our early prototypes are like the "walking" disk-drives of old. They lurch menacingly from side to side, leaving a trail of screws and random electronic parts behind them. Worse then squarebot, even.

 

Grab

From the TK man pages:

grab - Confine pointer and keyboard events to a window sub-tree

(Ok, we admit it. We're kinda streaching the Unix refrences here.)

But anyway, after our robot has found the item in question and lurched accross the field to it, we grab it, with a glorious swipe of our arm. Net. Grabby thingie.

This also symbolizes the fact that we gain, we grab, knowledge about robotics during the course of the event.

 

The Logo

Around the time that James started playing Kingdom of Loathing, he started doodling stick figures everywhere. While talking to Christina about the logo, he happened to doodle a little dancing man. It looked like it was lurching. Soon, more stick figures appeared above the team name. The concept art was generaly liked by the rest of the team, so he drew it up in Inkscape. And talked about himself in 3rd person. The logo has been beautified a few times since then in The GIMP, but overall it's stayed pretty much the same.

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