Thoughts and Ramblings

Removing X

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:50:36 +0000

For many years (decades) I’ve used one form or another of an X11 server on Macs to run various Linux/Unix graphical utilities with the latest server being XQuartz. The problem is that in the time since I switched to using Nix for my package management, I have twice encountered issues where the XQuartz build is broken. Combine this with the fact that XQuartz is really no longer maintained, this raises the question on whether I should be using it any longer.

WSL2 Start on Boot

Sat, 24 May 2025 17:32:01 +0000

In setting up SSH into an Linux install in WSL2, I’ve found guides on how to do this setup. While most contain the similar steps for setting up SSH, they have very different mechanisms for making it start on boot, of which almost none work.

Setting up SSH

First I’ll assume you are running WSL2 and have installed a debian based linux within it.

Launch the WSL instance and inside it execute:
```
sudo apt install openssh-server
```
Run ip addr show to get the IP address of this VM to be used later

Launch your favorite shell on the windows side and run:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”Open Port 2222 for WSL2” dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=2222
netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 listenport=2222 connectaddress=172.23.129.80 connectport=22

and substitute the IP address you obtained earlier for the connectaddress in the second line.

Execute netsh interface portproxy show v4tov4 to confirm it is set correctly (and you can run netsh int portproxy reset all to remove the entries if you need).

(A step or two may be missing above but this is the gist and I’m not trying to make a comprehensive guide for this part)

Nix on Mac

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:45:28 +0000

A couple of months ago, I started using Nix on the Mac instead of homebrew. This included setting up home-manager and nix-darwin. There are a lot of setup guides on these and I’m not going to repeat that work. I will mention some pieces that I found particularly annoying and their solutions.

Multiple Repositories

Nix allows you to specify multiple repositories where it can fetch code. However, getting this to work with home-manager can be annoyingly difficult to figure out, especially if you use a flake with multiple files like myself. This is how I got it to work:

Our Bureaucracy

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 18:32:57 +0000

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the phrase our democracy and how those using the phrase do not intend the word our to include the general public. However, in the past few weeks I saw on X that this is far better described by substituting the word bureaucracy for the word democracy (as reiterated by this tweet by Elon Musk).

So there you go: Trump is a threat to our bureaucracy. It’s true and that exactly why people elected him. The people want a threat to the bureaucracy to bring it to heel. The mainstream (lamestream to many of us former listeners) press tried to tell us all along but they just couldn’t get it quite right. Perhaps they believed that if they did, even more would vote for Trump?

Badblocks

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 10:18:05 +0000

I was looking into mechanisms to test out new hard drives and ran across the program badblocks which can perform such testing and even a script which wraps this. Though it seems that badblocks has an issue with the block count being only a 32-bit integer so if you want to perform the test on a drive bigger than 16TB, you need to use a block size of 8192 or larger. In further examination of the documentation, I saw there is an option about the number of blocks which are tested at a time and this value defaults to 64. I searched to see if increasing this value can have a speed impact and many commented that doesn’t seem to have any effect.

Only Tax Payers Vote

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 20:54:28 +0000

In “Starship Troopers” Heinlein proposed the idea that only citizens can vote and only those who served in the military can become citizens (no inheritance of citizenship). The idea is interesting in that voting is limited to only those with skin in the game (military service). While I read the novel many years ago, recently I considered an similar interesting thought experiment:

What if only tax payers can vote? Here, by “tax payers” I mean those who net pay money to the government. So if someone receives $4k from the government but pay only $3k in taxes, this person doesn’t qualify. But if this same person paid $5k in taxes, then they would. How would the US be different if this were the case?

Deep State

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 17:43:07 +0000

It’s no secret that the culture inside Washington is different from the rest of the nation. It is so strong that many elected officials who go to Washington get corrupted into betraying their principles and becoming one of them. They are told “how things are done” and accept it as they chip away at their integrity until they are no longer the same person. This is one of the ways the culture in Washington encourages a type of group-think. Eventually most everyone ends up buying into the mentality if they spend enough time there.

Our "Democracy"

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:48:34 +0000

When I was in Greece a bit over a year ago, I hiked up to The Acropolis with some friends. While up there, I heard a tour guide mention that what the ancient Greeks called democracy is not the same as what we call democracy. The reason is because the Greeks had a democracy. What is called “democracy” in western nations isn’t.

The founding fathers of the United States expressly didn’t want a democracy as a system of governance. They likened a democracy to “mob rule” and knew that it wouldn’t last. Instead they created a republic, in an attempt to stave off the degradation into an oligarchy. For an overview of the systems of government, see https://youtu.be/VogzExP3qhI

"Our" Democracy

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 23:28:56 +0000

The phrase “Our Democracy” is often repeated by politicians particularly when when claiming something is a “threat to our democracy.” The phrase is meant to scare because the people will assume that the “our” includes them. What if doesn’t? What if the “our” is not the country as a whole but just the Washington insiders?

With this definition of “our” in mind, the phrase “threat to our democracy” make much more sense. The threat isn’t to the country or to a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” but rather a threat to the Washington insiders who’ve long since abandoned the task of working for the people. So when you hear about a “threat to our democracy,” just remember the “our” is not you.

3 Seasons on a Streaming Service

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 23:31:16 +0000

When The Expanse was cancelled on the SYFY channel, I somewhat expected it as it was too good for that network (I was shocked something so good was ever on that channel in the first place). Then when I found out it was picked up by Amazon, I had mixed feelings. While it meant the show would continue, it also meant that it would not persist for more than 3 additional seasons. I really wanted to see a Magnetar class ship on the screen but alas it was not meant to be. So, with a few exceptions, why is it that a show doesn’t persist more than 3 seasons on a streaming service?

Waiting to Start Watching a Show

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 23:09:25 +0000

When Netflix started its streaming service, people got used to binge watching a show. The trend increased when streaming services started their original series and would drop and entire season of a show simultaneously. In the past few years, these services started spreading out the release of episodes in a season for some shows but that doesn’t mean people will watch the episodes on the same schedule. Instead, most people will wait for the entire season to be available so as to not get caught up in the story and be stuck waiting for the next episode.

New Internet Service

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 01:51:00 +0000

I got new internet service in the past month. Frontier ran fiber into my neighborhood and I’ve been enjoying the benefits ever since. As you can see I have symmetric gigabit.

New Router

This change did require that I get a new router. Previously I had a Netgate 3100 which was supposed to be able to handle faster than gigabit speeds but in reality it didn’t. It was even worse when you used VLANs, maxing in the ~600Mbps range. I found at least two different threads asking Netgate about this and both with unanswered. Interestingly this device appears to no longer be for sale. I wonder if lack of performance is why.

App Disk Images

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 01:51:00 +0000

If you’ve ever installed Xcode via the Mac App Store, you know it can take an hour to install. The reason is not due to its size but the large number of individual files. What if it didn’t have so many small files? Could optimizations made here apply to other apps as well?

Overview

The idea is simple: instead of storing apps as a constellation of individual files, instead store a disk image with its own filesystem. The idea isn’t new and has been used elsewhere and so much of what I’m going to outline here is what one familiar with the idea might expect. So instead of an app being a directory, its current representation, the contents of that directory exist in a read-only filesytem stored in a disk image. Then the app is really a single file, the image itself. Accessing contents within the app is simply traversing the filesystem within the image.

Redesign of Time Machine

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 01:51:00 +0000

It’s no secret that Apple’s Time Machine backup solution is clunky at best. For those who are unaware, it backs up a Mac to an HFS+ filesystem using directory hard links. The biggest problem with this is that HFS+ was an old filesystem when Time Machine was first designed and it’s gotten even older since. These days Apple uses APFS as their filesystem on computers and iOS devices but the Time Machine backup still uses the fragile HFS+ filesystem for its backups. If you select a backup target that’s not HFS+, such as a network share, it creates a sparse disk image there and creates an HFS+ filesystem in that image. I question whether there was a better way. There is but I wouldn’t expect Apple to bother actually implementing it because, well, they don’t actually seem to care about quality anymore.

Mike's Old Car

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 21:21:00 +0000

“You should’ve received a notice in the mail about your car’s warranty.” We’ve all had the calls trying to sell us an “extended warranty” for our cars. They rank among everyone’s favorites right beside the scammers from India who try to steal credit card numbers. Most people hang up on these calls but for several years I didn’t.

The Credit Card Scammers

With many of the Credit Card scammers, I tended to answer a few questions seemingly reasonably (as far as they knew), and then I would ask, “do you feel good with what you do with your life?” This tended to really change the conversation where I would tend to try to get them to admit that they are actually a scammer. Some adamantly refused to give up the ruse, even after being caught in numerous logical contradictions. Most would hang up around this point but I did get a few to start questioning what they were doing.

Grace has $20 in Her Account

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 23:40:00 +0000

Grace has $20 in her bank account in Pittsburgh, PA as of 7AM this morning. I’ve never met Grace and yet I know this fact about her. I also know her phone number and when she met with people at this bank about her account. How do I know all of this? Grace gave her bank the wrong email address. This XKCD comic exemplifies it well:

Over 40 different people have provided companies my email address instead of their own. As a result I have had information sent to me that includes their addresses, phone numbers, names, and other details. The only thing I have never had sent to me is their real email address.

My Current Media Setup

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 21:21:00 +0000

After changing my blog over to Hugo, I had to go through many posts to clean up conversion issues and I noticed that I hadn’t mentioned anything about my media setup since 2018. I have since changed the hardware, OS, and softare I use for playback.

Hardware

For the hardware I bought a “Phantom Canyon” Intel NUC. This machine only needs to have RAM, SSD, and OS added to it and it is ready to go.

Switched to Hugo

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 23:37:00 +0000

You may have noticed that this blog looks a bit different. I’ve decided to ditch wordpress and switch the blog over to Hugo. The primary reason is the maintenance cost for a wordpress installation. This cost comes is two forms:

Keeping wordpress up to date
Moderating comments

Keeping up to date

I know that the first can be mitigated by moving over to wordpress’s hosting but I liked the advantages of my domain hosted on my server. It allowed me to put hidden content at URLs of my choosing which I often did for distributing files to others too large to send via email.

Using Netflix DVDs to Measure The Post Office Decline

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 15:32:38 +0000

I subscribe to Netflix’s DVD by mail service occasionally (yes they still have it). I subscribe until I’ve run through the queue of movies I’d like to see, cancel, and repeat a year later. I’ve done this for several years now and the for the past few years I’ve tracked when disks should arrive and when they actually do. It’s uncommon for a disk to be late but 2022 has seen a dramatic decline in the service the post office delivers.

GF(5^2)

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 23:22:50 +0000

I got curious about the design of a puzzle a few weeks back using $GF(5)$, or more specifically, the extension field $GF(5^2)$. I was hoping that I could find pre-computed examples and while I found many examples of lectures discussing $GF(5)$, I didn’t find anything with extension fields of it. So I wrote a quick program to find primitive polynomials of degree 2 over $GF(5)$. For what I had in mind I needed 6 primitive polynomials which could be selected for construction of this field but sadly that was not the case. Since I went through the work to find all possible polynomials and I didn’t find anyone else that had done so, I decided I’d make a blog post of them in case it’s useful to someone else.

The Appearance of Truth

Fri, 21 May 2021 20:15:36 +0000

I’ve had a scene from the movie “Man of the Year (2006)” rolling around in my mind for the past several weeks. For those who’ve not seen the movie, it about a comedian by the name of Tom Dobbs, played by Robin Williams, who decides to run for president as a third-party candidate. While he isn’t on the ballot in every state, he does win the states where he is on the ballot and achieves the majority of electoral votes to become the next President of the United States. Many of the voting machines used in the election were made by a company called Delacroy, and after the election one of its employees, Eleanor Green, played by Laura Linney, performs a unit test (or possibly systems test) on the devices. She discovers that when the devices are given a known set of input votes, the tally isn’t consistent with that input; it was miscounting. The reason for the error is related to the fact that the candidates have repeated letters in their names and the double b in Dobbs is the real reason why he won these states. (As a professional software developer, this is an idiotic rational unless the software is doing something really screwy with the candidates names. The names should be nothing more than an opaque string but I digress) So she first takes this to her boss, Stewart, played by Jeff Goldblum, and he decides try to supress this information presumably for he sake of the company’s reputation. Anyway, she managed to convince Dobbs of all this, he withdraws from the race, and as a result Time Magazine names him Man of the Year.

A Litany of Netflix Screw-ups

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 20:50:15 +0000

For those unaware, Netflix still does their DVD by mail service. Both my dad and I have subscribed to this in the past. Occasionally when I would visit my parents (200 miles away), I would change the shipping address on my account to his place so my DVDs would be sent there and change it back when I would leave (relevant later in this post). We both hit the point where every movie in our queue had a wait on it so we both cancelled the service. We’ve done this twice before. Now, several months later, we both decided that we should renew the service because enough movies have been released in the mean time that we should go several months until this occurs again.

Plex Media Player Appliance Using Ubuntu

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:22:07 +0000

Running the embedded version of Plex Media Player requires several compromises when a better experience can be obtained by using a full OS install. So I went through the steps to install PMP on an Ubuntu installation. Not only do I have a powerful playback appliance for Plex but I also have a computer where I can use a browser or any other application where I would want the computer displayed on a TV.

Using ACLs to Solve Permissions Issues

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 18:32:04 +0000

One of the more annoying issues that can impact novices on Linux systems is handling permissions across multiple users. One of the contexts where I see this the most is on the Plex forums where users have to deal with allowing the Plex Media Server to see their media when it runs as a different user. Years ago I solved this problem on my system with using ACLs and I’ve never had to deal with the permissions on my media since.

Why I Cancelled Netflix

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 19:15:40 +0000

When I first subscribed to Netflix’s streaming service, it was a great way to watch movies and shows that I had missed through other sources. I started regularly visiting sites that tracked what’s been added to the service and adding items as a result. Then it changed.

Competition

It seems strange but the addition of competition in streaming service providers seems to have been a detriment for the consumer. Prior to this, the content owners had a choice of whether they wanted to get streaming royalties at a price that Netflix was wiling to pay or get none at all. Then when competing services started to arise, particularly Amazon, these content owners could play the services off of one another to get a higher royalty and offer exclusivity at a premium. With this change, the consumer must subscribe to multiple streaming services to get the equivalent content that used to be available on a single service.

Are Apple's Best Days Behind Us?

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 20:18:18 +0000

Have you noticed a decline in Apple’s software quality over the past few years?

I have been asking this question of users of Apple’s products among my friends, family, coworkers, and others over the past year or two and the results have been quite telling. They have all reluctantly answered YES. None of them have anything against Apple and they all are long time users of Apple’s products, but they are all tumbling to the fact that the software quality used to be better. It’s not just limited to the Mac side either; they are noticing the same decline on iOS as well.

Consistent 24p on OpenPHT

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 23:57:34 +0000

For quite a while, I’ve been having issues with OpenELEC (OE) based devices detecting the 24p frame rate (23.976 frames per second) on my TV. Usually when I play something in 24p and the TV doesn’t switch into this mode, I will reboot the OE player and it would resolve the problem. Then after the TV is turned off and later turned back on, about 1/4 of the time, the problem would resurface. I’ve seen this behavior with both OpenPHT (and it’s predecessor Plex Home Theater) and Plex Media Player. I finally got annoyed enough with the situation that I decided to do something about it.

My experience with Plex and an HD HomeRun on Suddenlink

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 15:19:39 +0000

Now that Plex supports watching LiveTV and DVR that works with the HD Homerun, I looked into what was available to me in my area. Since I don’t live in a major city, the over the air options are quite limited, as in 4 broadcasters including a PBS affiliate. Since I was already a Suddenlink customer through their internet service, I looked at their TV offerings. Essentially I can add their SL200 for ~$35 more than the internet service alone(This was a blatant lie! It’s really $50). So, I bought an HD HomeRun Prime and added the service with a CableCard.

Docker in FreeNAS 9.10 (Part 2)

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 23:06:12 +0000

In my previous post, I outlined how to use docker within FreeNAS 9.10. While FreeNAS 10 adds docker support as a first class citizen, most of the functionality is available in FreeNAS 9.10. The primary piece that is missing from FreeNAS 9.10 is the 9pfs (virtFS) support in bhyve. I mentioned that I share media and other pieces via CIFS to the VM and that databases should be local. Now I’ll describe how exactly I deal with the configuration.

Docker in FreeNAS 9.10

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 18:15:24 +0000

As some may know, Docker is being added to FreeNAS 10, but it is still in beta and not for production use. However, if you have upgraded to FreeNAS 9.10, you can use Docker. It’s just not integrated into the UI and you must do everything from the command-line.

IOHyve

First iohyve must be setup. FreeNAS 9.10 comes with iohyve already but it must be configured. As root, run:

iohyve setup pool=<storage pool> kmod=1 net=<NIC>

In my case I set storage pool to my main pool and NIC to my primary NIC (igb0). This will create a new dataset on the specified pool called iohyve and create a few more datasets underneath. Then in the web GUI -> System -> Tunables, you should add iohyve_enable with a value of YES in the rc.conf and make sure it is enabled. Also add iohyve_flags with a value of kmod=1 net=igb0 in the rc.conf and make sure it is enabled. I included my configuration above but you should change net to match your configuration.

Split Home Networks

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 21:59:51 +0000

Lately there have been numerous reports of devices bought for the home rife with security vulnerabilities which expose the user’s home network to external attacks. For example, Baby Monitors are often constructed in the cheapest manner possible by those who have no real understanding of security. Sometimes these companies demand that a bad review on Amazon pointing out such vulnerabilities be turned into a good one. The list goes on and on. This is an issue because many of these devices can be used as launching points to create numerous attacks inside the user’s network nullifying the protections provided by the NAT router. Clearly such devices cannot be trusted to exist on a home network and still trust that network.

iTunes Music Skipping in Background

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 14:31:52 +0000

In one of the El Capitan updates, I had issues where iTunes playback would start skipping when the CPU was under heavy load. I noticed that if I brought iTunes to the foreground, the skipping stopped, but if the heavy CPU load application was in the foreground, it resumed. Being a developer, this meant that my music would continually skip whenever I compiled something, which is a common occurrence. I was able to conclude that App Nap was the culprit and disabled it.

FreeNAS Internal Backups

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 15:43:09 +0000

I’ve changed my media storage system from the Linux setup I outlined earlier to FreeNAS. In the process of the transition, I built an entirely new server using a Norco 4224 as the case and a Xeon processor with ECC. Since FreeNAS makes ZFS so easy and doesn’t suffer from several of the problems of ZFS on Linux, I elected to use this OS for my storage going forth. The only issue I had to resolve was how I would handle backups.

Yosemite Install Can't Be Verified

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 02:52:51 +0000

This weekend, I noticed that the spinning hard drive in my MacBook Pro was dying. I ordered a replacement, installed it, then proceeded to install Yosemite. After counting the numerous Yosemite installer bugs, I noticed an unusual one:

This copy of the Install OS X Yosemite application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading.

My searches for this didn’t yield a useful solution so I figured out what the problem really was: Since I disconnected the battery as part of my install process, the computer was completely without power for a moment and loss the date/time. So, I set the date in the terminal using the date command, and then the above mentioned error went away.

Not All Packets Are Equal

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 15:26:35 +0000

The term Net Neutrality covers a lot of hotly debated topics but at its core is whether ISPs should be allowed to treat some traffic differently. In the midst of the discussion, one minor fact seems to have been lost: Not all packets are truly equal.

Around 10 years ago, I had DSL with 768kbps down and 128kbps up. I quickly learned that if I did any upload at all, the download speeds suffered greatly. Upon investigation, I discovered that the outgoing control packets, such as ACK packets, were being stuffed in the same queue as outgoing data packets. One of the solutions was to employ egress traffic shaping. This was simply prioritizing control packets such as ACK, SYN, and RST, followed by small packets all ahead of the large data packets. The result: uploading data no longer slowed downloads. Today, with much higher speeds, this shaping has less benefit, but it is not gone.

My Media Setup - Part 3

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 00:16:38 +0000

In my previous post I outlined the issues with using the GoogleTV for playback and I promised to outline my new client.

The Hardware

Since a list makes this easier, I’ll present the hardware that way:

First the computer: I bought an Intel NUC (D54250WYKH) as the base machine. If you wish to get the same, be sure you get a version with the power cord as it is not a standard PC power cord.
4G, DDR3 1600 1.35V, Crucial stick (the 1.35V is very important)
Intel 7260 +Bluetooth card (WiFi and Bluetooth)
Kingston Digital 30GB SSDNow mS200 mSATA
mini HDMI male to HDMI female adapter (the NUC has a mini HDMI port). I bought this from Monoprice along with other cables.
Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo. I find this useful when I need a keyboard or mouse from across the room.
A USB keyboard for the initial setup

Not mentioned above is the requirement of an HDMI receiver between the TV and NUC. The NUC can be configured to use analog audio output or passing audio directly to a TV over the HDMI, but a receiver provides the best audio experience.

My Media Setup - Part 2

Sat, 02 Aug 2014 04:29:42 +0000

Since my last post on the topic, my client and server software have changed. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I now work part time for Plex, though all of my decisions outlined in this post were made before that time.

Necessity for the change

I started to get frustrated with some of the limitations of the GoogleTV:

The platform seemed to become stagnate (and the pending AndroidTV hadn’t been announced yet). It became clear that some of the limitations were never going to be resolved.
The device is supposed to passthrough DTS, but it will occasionally fail for a second during playback. It does this both on optical and HDMI. I tended to resolved this by transcoding the DTS to AC3 with the more problematic movies.
The device is supposed to play VC-1, but it would stutter during playback if the content was in an MKV file. It did not if the content was in a MPEG-TS. This problem does not exist during disk playback. I resorted to transcoding VC-1 content to AVC.
The device is supposed to passthrough HD-audio such as DTS-HD and TrueHD. It does this with playback of a disk, but not from MKV files nor MPEG-TS.

Clearly the best solution is a computer since it has no problem with all of these.

Using Homebrew

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 04:00:22 +0000

I’ve been using the mac long enough that I’ve gone through several of the package management systems for installing additional open source tools. I started off with Fink which I really liked since it was based on dpkg. Then it became clear that the community had switched to using Mac Ports (formerly Darwin Ports). I was a bit disappointed with this because the package management wasn’t as good as it was with Fink, but it kept pace with the newer OSs better than Fink. Now the community has shifted again, this time to Homebrew. Homebrew seems to have learned a lot of lessons from the previous. The most notable is that most of the Formulas are in binaries and they use git for the formula list rather than rsync for the port list. Also anyone wanting to make a formula would fork the repo on github, commit their formula, and initiate a pull request. Given this adds simplicity on the developers, hopefully homebrew will last longer than the others.

Swift First Impressions

Sat, 14 Jun 2014 17:30:54 +0000

So, for those developers living under a rock for the past 2 weeks, Apple introduced their new programming language Swift. They stated that the language has been in development for 4 years, so it is safe to assume that the language’s definition is fairly stable. Since I wrote several posts on what Objective C can learn from java, such as this most recent one, along with what it has learned, I should at least look at Swift. I have not yet actually programmed anything yet in Swift, but I have read through it’s documentation. If I got anything wrong in this post, call me on it.

Disabling Nvidia

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 17:38:23 +0000

I have a MacBook Pro made in 2010 which is among the models which received faulty Nvidia chips. After this was discovered, Apple decided to extend the warrantee for the chips to 3 years. Instead of proactively replacing the faulty chips, they required that the machine exhibit the problem before they would consider replacement.

So, like clockwork, my computer’s Nvidia chip fails after the 3 years. It results in kernel panics in the GPU driver about once a week. Searching for this yields numerous similar results all stemming from the graphics card asserting its manufacturing flaw. Finally, since my computer is now more than 3 years old, Apple will not fix it without payment of several hundred dollars.

Mobile Passwords

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:34:54 +0000

Lately there have been several Ars articles discussing passwords and online security. In today’s world, people generally use passwords which are completely inadequate for securing anything, much less private or financial data. Additionally, the “tricks” people are taught on securing their passwords are the wrong lessons (cue obligatory xkcd). So, one of the best solutions is to use a password management system, such as 1Password or LastPass. This solves the problem of weak passwords and the memorization factor, but that still leaves the creation of a strong password for the password manager. A great deal of attention has been given toward creating a strong password, but it is geared toward a computer and not a mobile device. So, how does one create a secure password on a mobile device, particularly in the context of an encryption key.

A Month with AppCode

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:45:43 +0000

Anyone who uses multiple IDEs along with Xcode recognizes just how far behind Xcode is compared to others. I would even go as far as to argue it is at least half a decade behind Eclipse. Features which I have long grown use to having are completely absent in Xcode. Then, about a month ago, I discovered AppCode and started using it for my Obj-C development at work. I could repeat the feature set mentioned on their website, but instead I’ll assume you’ve read that and outline the crucial parts.

Using Single Vendor Credit Card Numbers with Amazon

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:03:26 +0000

I often use single vendor credit card numbers for my online transactions because in the event of a breach or theft, the numbers cannot be used elsewhere. Many credit card companies offer these under other names, such as Discover who calls these “Secure Online Account Numbers.” These work really well, except for the fact that these do not work well with Amazon purchases. There are a few other cases they fail, but Amazon is the biggest nuisance for me.

Suddenlink's Speed

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 04:20:52 +0000

Suddenlink seems to think that this is 15Mbps:

I’ve called them at 5-10 times in the past few weeks, and this is still the speed that I get. I have tried changing modems and three separate technicians have said that my connection is good and yet it is no better. This is consistent across nearly every evening. Using these numbers, if I were to extrapolate the speed to the 50Mbps plan, I’d still not get achieve 15Mbps in the evenings.

What Objective-C Has Learned

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:14:00 +0000

In a few of my recent posts, I outlined some things which I believe that Objective-C can learn from Java, the most recent discussing error handling. In order to avoid the impression that I may not like Objective-C, I figured I should outline some of what I believe are the most important improvements Objective-C has made.

Properties

When properties were first introduced, I read several who described them as simply syntax sugar. While they didn’t initially add much of anything that couldn’t already be done in the language before, they did yield one important feature: generated code. The code necessary in a setter, in particular the releasing of a previous value and setting the new value, was often fraught with errors. Despite code examples on a proper setter from Apple, I saw several cases where a setter failed to release the previous value, or retain the new value, or more commonly, do those two in the correct order. Enabling the compiler to generate this code for the programmer removed many of these errors.

Tooling Matters

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:16:40 +0000

In the debate between Mercurial and Git, I’ve long held the side of Mercurial. This is mostly due to the fact that Mercurial’s commands are far easier to understand, but I’ve also liked the fact that Mercurial doesn’t encourage rewriting a repository’s history as much as Git does. This has encouraged me to seek to use Mercurial as my favored DVCS, but that’s now changing.

Mercurial has a tremendous advantage in that it’s command structure is easier to understand. I’ve enjoyed this feature having come from SVN, and every time I have to use Git, it makes me want to scream (and has literally made me do so one a few occasions). The usability of the command line is severely relegated when one starts to use tooling present in IDEs, file browsers, and other UIs. In this case, one needs only to go to the command line for very advance operations, in which case both DVCSs require looking up the command structure to understand how to accomplish the task.

My Media Setup

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 21:14:45 +0000

While I’ve described some of the pieces in my media setup, I have not described it as a whole. I started the process when I got annoyed with DVDs that don’t allow you to skip the copyright warnings, commentary disclaimers, trailers, endless menus, studio logos, and other crap when I simply wanted to watch the movie. It was time for something better, and now I have it.

Storage

I’ve written some on my storage setup before, but I’ll describe it briefly here. I bought an Antec 300 case, Intel server-class motherboard, 6 WD 2TB Black drives (before the flood that drove up the prices), and 4G of RAM (later upgraded to 12GB). The machine is booting Ubuntu 11.10 (not yet upgraded to 12.04) off a pair of USB flash drives which are configured in a software mirror. The 6 drives are configured in a raidz2 configuration (raid6 redundancy) yielding 8TB of disk space (or 7.2TB if you count in base 2 instead of 10). The raid contains all the media is an a sub-filesystem so it can be snapshotted/backed up independently (taking advantage of ZFS’s capabilities here).

So Long Perian

Mon, 21 May 2012 01:55:21 +0000

By now, most of your are familiar with our announcement that the Perian team is retiring. It was a long time coming, but still a sad day none the less. I can see that the community reaction is that of disappointment as well. Perian was so quiet in its arrival that I never stopped to realize how loud its departure may be. So I decided to recount my history with the project, through its trials and its joys. It was a wonderful ride, but now we leave it behind and ride off into the sunset.

What Objective-C can learn from Java, Part 5 (Exceptions)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:32:47 +0000

This is one past the last is a series of blog posts I’m writing on things that Objective-C can learn from Java. I’m writing this because I’m seeing a series of ignorant tweets stating how much Java sucks. The other parts can be found here:

Anyone who programs in Java for a short period of time becomes well aware of Java’s exceptions. To the new programmer, they may be a bit of an annoyance, but to anyone designing enterprise-level code, they are a necessity. Objective-C has exceptions too, but they are so weakly defined in the language and so overlooked, it’s almost as if they were nothing more than an afterthought. In fact, one can argue that the exception handling in C++ is superior to what one would find in Objective-C.

Switched to Linux

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 02:54:25 +0000

In one of my previous posts, I had mentioned how to install FreeBSD on ZFS. I was doing this for my file server, which I ran in this configuration for quite some time. It worked well for a while, but then I decided that FreeBSD was too constraining. This came when I was attempting to setup a process to rip media from DVDs and BluRay disks. I noticed that Handbrake doesn’t run natively, but is available via a port. The port doesn’t contain the GUI though; everything must be done on the command line. Then I looked at the tools necessary to rip from a BluRay disk, most notably MakeMKV. I could not get this tool to run on FreeBSD at all. Lastly, I could not execute any SWT-based java application because there is no native library for SWT in FreeBSD and the linux compatibility layer didn’t cut it.

Goodbye Roku, Hello GoogleTV

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:37:46 +0000

In my previous post, I said “I think Iâ€™ll elect to forgo a player for an external drive and rip every disk that I might buy.” That thought didn’t last very long. I decided to buy a Sony NSZ-GT1 which contains both a BluRay player and a GoogleTV together. I did this because I finally realized that the Roku that bought was never going to live up to my requirements, especially amid their numerous regressions in firmware updates.

The Case for Ripping Media

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:17:23 +0000

As some of you may know, I’ve ripped every DVD I own and store them on a file server. It’s a lot of space and it took a lot of time, but for my uses, it’s worth it.

I started this because one movie, I don’t remember which one, forced me to wait on FBI warning, another copyright violation warning, the same in French, and a disclaimer. Then it displayed two previews and a lengthy menu before I could hit play. This was followed by another lengthy menu animation, studio logos, and finally the movie. In the whole process, the studio logos and the previews were the only portions I was able to skip, the other screens marked as not skippable on the DVD. Now that I have my DVDs ripped, when I want to watch a movie, I browse my collection on the TV, and play the movie. No warnings, no menus, just the movie. I actually moved 8 months ago, and I have yet to unpack the DVD player.

FreeBSD with ZFS root

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:00:55 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been busy with a new job, new house, and a bunch of other things. One of these things was setting up my new file server. This is something that’s been in the works for a long time, as can be seen from the various posts on ZFS. I spent a long time researching this, and finally came up with my solution:

I did consider FreeNAS for a really long time. It is essentially a FreeBSD install with most of the administrative work done for you through a web-based GUI. It hit most of my checkboxes in that it supported ZFS, AFP, Bonjour, and a few others. While this is nice, I found it also to be limiting when one wants to stray off the beaten path. I didn’t want to lose ZFS, but I wanted something where I could tinker. I decided to go with FreeBSD.

What Objective-C can learn from Java, Part 4 (Namespace)

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 21:18:40 +0000

This is the last is a series of blog posts I’m writing on things that Objective-C can learn from Java. The other parts can be found here:

For one who has programmed in other object oriented languages, Objective-C stands out with its complete lack of namespace. As a result, classes have a prefix, such as Apple’s common NS and UI prefixes. On the mac side of things, every class under the sun seemed to start with NS, such as NSString, and confusion is added when on the iOS side, several classes start with UI, such as UIView. This is due to the fact that without a concept of namespace, Objective-C cannot have two classes with the same name, regardless of whether the classes are public or not.

What Objective-C can learn from Java, Part 3 (Single Source File)

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:16:28 +0000

This is the third is a series of blog posts I’m writing on things that Objective-C can learn from Java. The other parts can be found here:

Objective-C still retains a lot of its heritage from it’s C beginnings. This includes using two files, a header and a source file, for each class. In a strictly object oriented environment, the header file contains the class definition (super-class and instance variables), public property definitions, and any public function declarations. The source file contains all of the function implementations, including synthesize statements. In contrast, Java contains all the functions of both files in a single file. To one who knows better, as in one who has used the single file environment, the two files for each class becomes a pain.

What Objective-C can learn from Java, Part 2 (Abstract Classes)

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:54:20 +0000

This is the second is a series of blog posts I’m writing on things that Objective-C can learn from Java. The other parts can be found here:

When one is using object oriented design, a common practice is to lump similar classes together with a common super-class and include the common functionality in that super-class. In doing such design, a common problem is for the super-class to require some information that can only be computed by the sub-class. The solution is for the super-class to make a function call on itself which the sub-class implements. For example, I recently designed a class which simplifies storage of an object in a SQL row, but it knows nothing about the actual field names or values stored in the database. In this case, I made a function, which subclasses implement, to retrieve this data. In Java, this is simply done through an abstract method in an abstract class.

What Objective-C can learn from Java, Part 1 (Generics)

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 22:38:29 +0000

This is the first is a series of blog posts I’m going to write over the next several days on things that Objective-C can learn from Java. I’ve been programming in Java since 1997, and in Objective-C since 2001. The two languages have a lot of similarities, but there are a few design principles in which Java excels and Objective-C is left behind. This is understandable considering that Objective-C is older than Java, and Java borrowed heavily from Objective-C when it was designed. In this series I’m only going to discuss changes to the language; these items will have very little, if any, impact on the runtime. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to use Java’s terminology since it is more familiar with the programming public. This means I’ll talk about functions instead of selectors, and interfaces instead of protocols.

Trac.fcgi Memory Usage

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:06:28 +0000

I’ve been slowly transitioning to using nginx as the web front-end in an effort to reduce Apache’s memory usage. In keeping with this task, I’m moving more and more off of Apache. One piece I recently moved was trac, transitioning to using it directly by nginx by running it in fast-cgi mode where as previously it was running as cgi though Apache.

While fast-cgi is faster, it has inherent issues, such as any memory leak can result in ever growing memory usage, which is exactly why Apache has a setting for each child to serve a limited number of requests before exiting. Trac.fcgi has no such directive, and has the equivalent of a large memory leak, a non-expiring cache. While it’s not as bad as a memory leak, which will indefinitely grow instead of reaching a limit, if the cache size is larger than the available memory for trac to use, it’s just as serious. The only solution, without fixing trac’s caching mechanisms, is to restart trac periodically, but during the time trac is restarting, all requests are lost, causing bad gateway errors to the user. Additionally, the restart needs to be done manually. Clearly not an ideal solution.

Google Link Redirection (cont.)

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 14:04:21 +0000

Earlier I wrote about google’s link redirection. I have finally finished my testing of a Safari extension which kills this behavior. I didn’t want to release this extension until the updating mechanism worked and that is what took me so long. Anyway, here is the the extension. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Why you shouldn't buy A Flip Camera

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:59:54 +0000

So, my parents were using a Flip Ultra HD to record sermons. This camera has a serious flaw which the company has acknowledged and failed to fix. First, the camera has 8GB of memory which it formats into a FAT-32 filesystem. This filesystem has a well known limitation where it cannot have a file which exceeds 4GB in size. The Flip camera, when recoding in HD, will hit this limitation in about an hour (depending on the motion in the video). The simple solution to this is to simply split the recording into multiple files so as to not cause any issues. Pure Digital Technologies, Inc, unlike their competitors, doesn’t seem to have figured out this simple solution but instead elected to have the camera beep and turn itself off. This completely violates what a consumer would expect out of a camera in that it will continually record until it is out of power or out of memory, or in the old days, tape.

Googleâ€™s Link Redirection

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:42:50 +0000

Google, for quite some time, has been redirected clicks on links in their search results to www.google.com/url?…. While I don’t approve of such practices, I didn’t mind it so much since this is presumably an effort to improve their search results. That changed recently, when I noticed that my history in Safari was filled with entries containing that URL as the title. Considering the fact that I often use the history to re-find a page with pertinent information, this is bordering on making my browser usage useless. Note: I tend to cmd-click links so they show up in new tabs. If you just click the link, the title in the history is correct.

Text Compression Code Released

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:36:22 +0000

After it’s original post, I got a request for the code I used in my text compression technique. I’ve not gotten around to cleaning up the code and separating it from it’s test environment so it can be distributed separately. You can read more about it in its own page.

Sometime soon, I’ll get around to releasing my code for fetching old Escape Pod episodes that I hinted at earlier.

Text Compression

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:32:46 +0000

As outlined in the original post, I wrote a text compression routine using huffman encoding on words which achieved a higher compression ratio than gzip while being more usable for decompression of segments. I’ve finally packaged the code together under the MIT license. I ask that those who find it useful credit me with the library and submit back changes (though neither is required under the license). Anyway, on to the details of the library:

ZFS on Western Digital EARS drives

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:21:23 +0000

According to the stats, my previous post was one of the more popular on this site. This was in response to a question I was asking myself before building a NAS box at home. In looking at the components to use in building it, I came across another question. How does one fix the performance of ZFS on Western Digital’s green drives with model numbers ending in “EARS” (WD15EARS, WD20EARS, etc)? I’ve split this into sections, with a bold title, so readers can read the parts that are most interesting. I’ve described why WD changed their drives, why this is a problem, what the solutions are. Hope you enjoy this.

ZFS on different sized disks

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:04:20 +0000

Note: Following this is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t comfortable with partitioning, then don’t follow the steps here. I’ve read many posts on how to handle ZFS/Raid-Z on differently sized disks. The goal is to gain the most disk space availability while still retaining the redundancy of surviving a single disk failure. The posts I’ve read either would achieve the theoretical capacity, or be capable of expansion, but not both. I devised a way to get both at the same time, and it’s relatively simple.

Common Media Player Framework

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:27:43 +0000

About 3 weeks ago, Kevin (developer of NitoTV) and I decided it was a bit silly how we were each writing playback mechanisms on the AppleTV with little to no collaboration between us. So, we decided to write a Common Media Player Framework, which is licensed using LGPL.

Kevin sent me the code he used for DVD playback inside NitoTV as a place to start. I stripped it down to a smaller piece, and started the framework. After I had it doing basic playback, I worked on overlays to provide feedback to the user. Now, hitting up and down changes the overlays between normal, chapter view, audio/subtitle selection, and zoom.

Chapter Overlay

Passed My Defense

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:29:44 +0000

I haven’t posted here in a while, and with good reason. About two weeks ago, I passed my Ph.D. defense. So, come May, I will officially have a doctorate in Computer Engineering, though I am effectively done with my degree.

Legacy Comments:

Steve - Feb 15, 2010

Looks like I get to be the first (at least on your blog here) to congratulate you - great job, Graham!

Incorrect Podcast Order on my iPod

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:00:05 +0000

One of these days I will learn not to grab the latest and “greatest” software the moment it comes out. Yesterday, I upgraded my iTunes to version 9 and my iPod Touch’s firmware to 3.1.1. Then, I noticed that one of my podcasts was out of order, and furthermore, the release date was no longer showing up on the iPod itself. Strangely, only one podcast was having this issue.

I started to suspect that this was my fault, since this one podcast, Escape Pod was a podcast I was listening by going through its archives. I had written a program which downloads the archived episodes, and modifies the ID3 tags so iTunes will properly recognize the file as a podcast and insert it into its database as if it had downloaded it itself. Getting the release date working correctly was one of the harder points, so I figured that I still didn’t have it quite correct and the new iPod firmware was being more sensitive to it. I got even more annoyed by the fact that iTunes, after upgrading my iPod’s firmware, decided to trash the old firmware versions preventing me from ever downgrading.

Text Compression Techniques

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:17:20 +0000

A friend of mine develops on an Bible application for the iPhone, BibleXpress. Since his application includes several translations with the app, he once mentioned to me the possibility of compressing them to save space. Any compression that is done must achieve a good ratio, but more importantly, decompression must be fast. I took it upon myself to find a compression algorithm that could fit the bill.

In my test case, I worked with the NASB translation of the Bible. The raw text of this translation, minus formatting and book/chapter/verse identifiers is 3.965MB. Since the iPhone already has zlib, using gzip compression is an obvious choice. When compressed with gzip, the file size becomes 1.189MB, a significant savings. Even though bzip2 is not readily available on the iPhone (at least not that I could find), I tested its compression which produced a file size of 0.8548MB. While these mechanisms provide a significantly smaller file, when one desires a certain portion of the file, one must first decompress the entire file up to that point. This is an expensive operation on a small device such as the iPhone.

New Car

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:33:22 +0000

Well, after much hassle, I now have a new car. Here are some pictures:

New Car Front

New Car Side

The whole ordeal was mostly due to the CARS program, which is often known by “Cash for Clunkers”. Anyway, I finally got that resolved and got a lot more for my old truck than I would have ever gotten in trade-in value. So now I have a VW Jetta, and so far I’m happy with it. I just need to get used to driving a car instead of a truck, but otherwise it drives well.

Using Newer Subversion in Xcode

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:05:47 +0000

I use MacPorts to get a whole host of utilities. In addition, I’ve always used it to obtain later versions of subversion that the one provided with the OS. Xcode, on the other hand, is locked into using the version of Subversion which is installed in /usr (currently version 1.4.4 where as I have 1.6.3). Since I often work in the command line, eventually I will use the newer version of Subversion on a directory which I also use in Xcode. This causes a problem since the command line utility will upgrade the local repository format in such a way that old versions of Subversion (Xcode’s) cannot use it.

Working With Core Data

Wed, 20 May 2009 21:49:34 +0000

When I redesigned Sapphire, I decided that the metadata back end would be best served by Apple’s Core Data Framework. While the framework has a lot of power, several shortcomings in the implementation hindered its potential.

First, I should start with the many things that Apple did correctly in Core Data.

The whole data model with relationships and properties is quite powerful. With this data model, one can represent many data sets in a simple manner, such as the example below:

core-data-model

This example shows part of the data model within Sapphire pertaining to TV shows, where a TV shows contains multiple seasons, each of which contains multiple episodes. Additionally, an episode contains one or more sub-episodes, to handle the case where a single file or DVD contains multiple episodes. Lastly, the show and season objects extend from a superclass CategoryDirectory, which contains some common properties to all collections.
Since the relationships are defined, they can be automatically maintained. In the above example, if an episode’s show relationship is set to a particular TVShow object, that show’s object will automatically have the episode added to its episodes relationship.
Delete rules can be set such that if an object is removed, the delete can cascade to remove other objects as well. This is useful in the case of removing a directory, and all the files and directories contained within it.
Saving to a file is easy since the details of reading and writing a file are handled by Core Data
While I didn’t use it, undo management is also built into the system.

So, with all these advantages, why is Core Data not used more often. The answer is that it contains numerous short comings.

Growing Sense of Entitlement

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:45:09 +0000

As many of you know, I work on Open Source Software (OSS). This means I release several projects free of charge that I create using my time. I’ve gotten a large amount of appreciation from users, but there is another side that’s quite disturbing. What’s worse is it appears to be indicative of a far more serious problem.

Often a user will ask for a feature that is not implemented. Sometimes I like the feature and it’s something I’ll use myself so I implement it immediately, sometimes it’s one I’ll work on if I have time, and other times I don’t care for it at all so I suggest that others work on it. I take a similar response to bugs, but with respect to whether I can reproduce it. Bugs I cannot reproduce nor fix tend to go unchanged. Most take these responses in stride, but there are some who do not, in particular, those reporting an issue that I cannot reproduce, and fail to give me the required information. A few of these, whom I will call the demanding consumer, demand their wishes to be met entirely at my cost in terms of time and effort. In the past few years, I’ve noticed this group grow in size.

Why I Hate Microsoft Software

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:43:34 +0000

So, I occasionally get asked why I hate Microsoft software so much, and today was a great example of my rationale.

I was working with a tremendous amount of data within Excel. Due to how the data was generated, I actually needed the transpose of the data in the spreadsheet. I spent nearly an hour trying to find the transpose function which used to be in the “Paste Special” function, but now appears to have been removed. I searched the help, and found nothing helpful. Google’s results pointed to the “Paste Special” function which I know no longer contains a transpose.

Digital TV Delay

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:54:35 +0000

As I am sure many are aware, the digital TV changeover has been delayed. Several broadcasters elected to change to their digital transmissions on Feb 17th anyway, while others delayed. So what are the results of this delay?

While I was at my parents’ in the country, I did a quick scan of the analog and digital transmissions. My parents are about an hour or hour and a half drive away from two large cities, and before Feb 17th, they could only receive one station in digital (because it was more local). I discovered that the remaining stations fell into one of three categories:

Bad DVD Packaging

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:16:00 +0000

The Simpsons has packaged their season DVDs in unusual ways before, but the eleventh season takes the cake in being both cheap and destructive to the media. The DVDs are wedged in between two pieces of cardboard so tightly that one has to pinch it with two fingers to pull it out, scratching the disk’s surface in the process. What possessed these people to be so callous with delicate media? Do they secretly hope you destroy the disk and have to buy a new one? So, if anyone out there buys this set, get some DVD cases as well, so that you do not destroy the media over the years with this package.

Fighting with Sync by Microsoft

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 14:49:07 +0000

My Grandfather just bought a new pickup, which he enjoyed showing to the rest of the family. Since Ford spent months trying to fulfill his order, he was about to give up when the dealership found a vehicle similar to what he wanted, but included several features he did not want, and thus didn’t pay for. (With behavior like this, no wonder the auto companies are failing, but that’s another discussion). One such item was Sync, by Microsoft.

How to Not Recruit

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:26:48 +0000

A few weeks ago, the Student Engineers’ Council held their Career Fair, which they do every semester. Basically, hundreds of companies reserve a table in an attempt to find people to fill their positions. In the many career fairs I have attended, I have notice a few different method of recruitment.

Collect as many resumes as possible, moving on to the next person as quickly as possible.
Direct the person to apply for a job on their website.
Actively seek particular people to fill the exact need you have.

The first strategy effectively a scatter shot approach. It has the disadvantage of leaving the recruiter a large stack of resumes to process in order to select which applicants they wish to interview. I can see how this is a tempting approach, because the more you collect, the more likely that the best person is in that stack somewhere. The issue is they are in there somewhere, and you still have to find them. While it is possible, this leaves a very low likelihood that a tired recruiter is going to find the best applicant in the stack within the time frame required for the upcoming on-campus interviews. The second strategy is, in my humble opinion, the lazy approach. I have seen too many companies take this stance, and I have to wonder how well it works. Make no doubt about it, they are spending thousands to send their recruiters here, and if all they do is tell people to apply on their website, I have to wonder why they bother at all. I suppose it gives some name recognition, but it can’t be worth that much compared to other approaches. Personally, I have never gone to such a company’s website, nor have any of my friends told me they’ve done the same. I have only looked at companies who have actually shown genuine interest. The third strategy is definitely the most work. I could count on my hands the number I have seen take this approach, but that number is obviously limited to those interested in my field. This can range from calling people out of the crowd at a career fair, to recruiting in the buildings where they attend class, to contacting professors wishing to talk to their students. Iâ€™ve seen posts on Slashdot by employers asking how they can attract the people who are really good in their field. They recognize the fact that some employees are capable of doing the work of 2, 3, or more. Employing such a person is very beneficial, even if they have to be compensated considerably more than other employees. Of the approaches I listed above, only the third would attract them to such a company, where the first two are likely to turn them off. So, in response to this, Iâ€™ve decided to only seek employers who really care to find someone to fit a need. I went to the career fair in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals, and I didn’t give out my resume unless I was asked. The end result: the recruiters didn’t care what I was wearing (if they did, I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway), and I remembered everyone I talked to. This time around, I spoke to very few recruiters, but I don’t doubt that I spoke to those who best fit what I was looking for.

Thrashing Server

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:25:14 +0000

Well, last Sunday, we released a new version of Perian. It didn’t occur to me at the the time that this would mean a large number of people would be visiting the site. Anyway, Monday morning I noticed that the web server was very slow, which began my fun. I decided that the best course of action was to increase the number of servers. The system had CPU to spare as well as memory, so this is the natural choice. So, I increased the number, restarted the web server, and it helped, some. So, I increased the number further, reloaded the web server, and watched top for cpu and memory usage. I kept increasing the number, until I realized that reloading the web server didn’t actually reload this part of the configuration and I needed to restart the web server. So, I restarted the web server, and watched top in horror as the server ran out of memory and started swapping. I quickly issued a /etc/init.d/apache2 stop command, but the command never completed. I quickly scrambled to see if there was any other shells I could gain to the server. Everything was running horribly slow because the server was thrashing. It became clear to me about 10 minutes later that the kill process was not keeping up with the new apache processes being created; so I must do something to stop the new apache processes first. So, I had the sense to issue a iptables -A INPUT -p tcp dport 80 -j DROP. This firewalled off the web server from the entire world. Then, over the course of the next minute, the server starts becoming responsive again. Finally, I managed to actually kill the web server, set it’s child count to a more reasonable value, and start it back up again. Then, a quick flush of the firewall rules, and it was working again. If I didn’t have the sense to run this, I likely would have had to resort to a reboot of the server into single user mode; a prospect to which I was not very amenable. So, one of these days Iâ€™ll reconfigure the thing to use the threaded version of the web server; however, php doesn’t work there, so I guess Iâ€™ll have to use some sort of workaround.

Firewall Ban Activated

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:21:42 +0000

Well, shortly after my last post, the Chinese spammer struck again. I just blocked a bit over half a million addresses in China in response. I have no tolerance for such things, I don’t trust anyone in China to care enough to do anything about this guy; so blocking is really the best recourse.

Turn the Firewall Around

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:56:25 +0000

I’ve noticed that a large proportion of spam showing up on my sites is coming from China, trying to promote chinese businesses. One annoying individual in particular likes to spam trac, by creating a username of “add” and spamming after logging in. In the past, I tried deleting the spam, removing the account, and then banning the IP address, but this moron just does it again from a new IP address. I’ve found that by editing the password file, and adding a “*LW*” to the hashed password, I can lock him out from future spamming, but this method is only effective till he uses a different username.

Decline of Local Bookstores

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:34:01 +0000

Today I went to a local Barnes & Noble to purchase some books. The books aren’t the current best sellers, but they are quite well known, so the store should have had them. Since they were science and religious in nature, I looked in both sections. After 30 minutes, I found numerous books on the same topics, but none of the ones I wanted. This was frustrating to the point that I wished for a card catalog like a library just so I could figure out where the store would put them. Eventually I gave up, walked out and decided to just look online.

Wall•E

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:31:20 +0000

Some friends and I went to see Wall•E last night. It is definitely the funniest movie I have seen all year and I’m glad to see that Pixar hasn’t gone too far downhill. I was afraid that Disney would attempt to destroy them, but it seems they haven’t succeeded quite yet.

On the other hand, the movie did have a lot of technical point which were severely wrong.

One scene had a space ship traveling through a large sphere of satellites to get away from Earth. You cannot have a sphere of satellites in orbit and expect them to stay up for a year, much less 700. They’d crash into each other and change their orbits.
Even with satellites in the same orbit, you cannot have them sitting within a meter of each other for the same reason.
Rotating a ship in space doesn’t change the gravity experienced on the ship (to get any gravity in the first place requires creating it yourself, but that’s another issue).
The movie shows a spaceship dumping a large chunk of trash into space. While this make be a convenient means of waste disposal, the sheer mass of disposal shown is completely impractical for a space ship of that size. It would have lost it’s entire mass to trash within a year and it was supposed to be there for 700. What happened to conservation of mass?
And the biggest issue: I seriously doubt that humans have the ability to trash the planet to the extent shown in the film, even if we wanted to. We just don’t have that kind of an impact on our environment. Besides, even if we did, rather than sending the entire population to space while cleaning up the planet, wouldn’t it be more practical and cheaper to just send up the trash for disposal?

There are a few more issues; but if you ignore the distortion of science and reason, the movie is quite enjoyable. The sad thing is, the movie could have adhered to both science and reason without destroying the major plot points.

Xcode Filling Log Files

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:35:27 +0000

If anyone has ever used Xcode, and tried to debug an app through console messages, then they know how annoying this can be without the development tools getting in the way. An example for me is debugging a frontrow plugin, where sometimes it is easier to print debug info to the console rather than the trouble of using a second machine to fire up gdb. Anyway, Xcode is very good at spewing lots of extraneous and effectively useless information to the console log, such as the following: 6/13/08 5:19:17 PM Xcode[32580] Xcode(32580,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x456bee0, has non-zero refcount = 1 Of the past 4000 messages in the console, over 3500 of these were xcode. That’s including debugging information from my programs. This is one of the most annoying examples of development tools hindering the development they are supposed to enable.

AC3 Passthrough Compatibility Matrix

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:36:47 +0000

Since some parts of AC3 passthrough work, and others do not, I decided to create a bit of a compatibility matrix to summarize it. I’ve added the related bug id’s I’ve reported, which have gone unanswered, in parentheses.

The latest version of perian (to be released soon), will choose between using the hack method for passthrough, and Apple’s method. Anywhere labeled “Hack” will never work with Apple’s method, so it is bypassed to avoid their broken code. The hack does not work with all 5.1 receivers. Taking a file format which is not properly framed, and making it into a .mov file will not correct the framing. Likewise, it will not destroy the framing of a properly framed file format.

Rescuing videos from AVI

Thu, 29 May 2008 05:11:07 +0000

As I wrote in a previous entry, people have used avi for things which it was never designed. One of the more notable examples is multi-channel audio bitstreams. In addition, the people who make such files went as far as to do in the completely wrong manner. So, as a result, I looked for a way to rescue data from the avi format so it is actually usable.

Basically, use mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix to convert the avi file to an mkv file. Then, open the file with Perian, and save it as a .mov file. The result is a file which both has the proper framing for AC3 data, and also has the proper frame decode and display information. This means that one can do real AC3 passthrough on avi files. Maybe this will be the ultimate solution.

Java in Xcode

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:38:06 +0000

Well, I have had reason with my research to do some Java development. No biggie, Xcode supports Java too, right? Wrong! well mostly. This all came to a head when I downloaded the latest beta of Xcode (which I am only using because these fix a serious performance issue with the non-beta releases). After the last download, I found 4 distinct bugs in 2 hours, and I’m still finding them. Two of these are Java related, so I gave up, and looked for alternatives.

Limited Real AC3 Passthrough

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:27:52 +0000

Well, I got to fiddling around with the existing passthrough on the AppleTV. I found where it works, and where it doesn’t. AC3 passthrough does work in .mov files with 48KHz files, of any bit rate. I did this with importing a .ac3 file into .mov, and adding a video track (ATV doesn’t like playing audio only files). I still need to test 44.1KHz, and 32KHz, but they are a bit harder to find. I have still to come across one of them.

Expensive Hotels internet access

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:34:23 +0000

Well, Infocom is over and I am back home. While I was there, I often used my iPod Touch to do quick things on the net when pulling out the laptop would have taken too much time. The only issue is the wireless AP there required a web based login where one would have to enter in the email address they used to register for the conference. This can be annoying at best on the iPod when all I really wanted to do was look up something really quick and this stage takes 50-80% of the time.

The Hall of Shame

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:26:33 +0000

So, the good folk over at FFmpeg have stared a Hall of Shame. Basically, it is a page of projects which are using FFmpeg in direct violation of its license. The developers have asked that people link to that page, thereby increasing its ranking in Google. Well, here’s my part. Why should I care about this? Simple, if you look at the list of projects using FFmpeg, you will see Perian listed. Some parts of Perian rely so heavily on FFmpeg that it has an entire section in the code base. Going further, some of the Perian developers are contributing back to FFmpeg, so our copyright is being infringed along with many others.

Start of Infocom

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:58:01 +0000

Well, I am currently at Infocom. Getting here was a lot of fun because I had to wake up at 5am to drive to Houston and catch my flight here. In theory, I could have flown out of College Station, but all too often it is faster to drive to Houston than it is to fly. Then, when I got the rental car, I noticed it was made by Hyundai. I immediately remembered the old episode of Top Gear I watched the previous night where they “accidentally” called the Hyundai Accent the “Hyundai Accident.” I thought to myself, “did I get an accident?” I guess I should feel better that it was a Sonata instead, but the car still sucks. It has no acceleration, and if I hit the gas, I can count the seconds it takes for the idiotic automatic transmission to realize that it needs to downshift to actually go anywhere. Oh, and the engine has to be on to shift from drive to park. What engineer thought that would be a good idea?

New iPod Touch

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:56:02 +0000

Well, after quite a while of looking at them, I finally decided to buy an iPod Touch. In fact, I wrote this blog post using it. The hardest part is to force yourself to stop correcting your mistakes, and trust that it can correctly figure out what you meant and correct it for you. The auto correction is definitely a necessity, but it isn’t as effective for those who can’t spell, like me. Regardless, it is time to close since typing on this keyboard is getting quite tedious. I’ll follow up later with pictures and the like when I am back on a more powerful computer.

Where's real AC3 Passthrough on the Mac?

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:11:17 +0000

In my previous post, I discussed how to do AC3 passthrough using Perian. Unfortunately, this method is really a hack, and doesn’t work in all situations. There is a better solution though.

Apple has enabled AC3 passthrough with Quicktime. They have enabled it on the AppleTV to support playback of their HD movies. The code for passthrough is even in the latest version of Quicktime on the desktop, but the celebration ends there. Apple has not exposed a method for enabling passthrough on the desktop either through the user interface, or a hidden preference. They have not even exposed a method for developers to use it through Quicktime (I’ve tried).

The Correct Way to Enable AC3 Passthrough with Quicktime

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:36:35 +0000

I have seen a few people post methods about enabling AC3 passthrough, and many of them are overly complicated or in some cases even wrong. This also serves as the first place to describe how to enable DTS passthrough. Since I designed the code that actually does this, I’ll list the steps here:
Note: This does not work with all receivers. If these instructions fail for you, most likely your receiver will not work with this. Passthrough is still a hack, and thus this hack is still outside of the specs.
Note 2: Apple broke AC3 rather seriously in QT 7.3 (bug id 5594478, go tell them to fix it). If have a .mov file, open it, and it says that it is stereo audio rather than 5.1, this is a symptom of that bug. You will need to have at least Perian 1.1 and re-open the original file that made the .mov file. This bug has been fixed in 7.4.5, but any .mov files created with QT 7.3 or 7.4 are still affected by this bug.
Note 3: Perian 1.1.4 contains a bug in which DTS passthrough fails to work. This will be fixed in the next version. This has been fixed in Perian 1.2, released Dec 17, 2009.

Followup to Open Source Attitudes

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:13:23 +0000

Over half a year ago (that’s way to long to get back to this), I posted an blog entry on what I have observed in open source attitudes. I received a number of comments, the most interesting which is Daniel’s. What I found the most fascinating was the two opposite views I got in the comments.

First, there were the developers, who seemed to largely agree with my comments. Then there were the users, who took offense at some of my comments, or the way that open source developers have treated them in the past.

Perian 1.1 Released

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:27:04 +0000

For those who don’t know yet, Perian version 1.1 has been released. This one was a long time coming, including large sections of code which were written for 1.1 before 1.0 was even released.

Now it is time to sit back, relax, and get some sleep before the bug reports start piling in.

Sourceforge SPAM

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:08:19 +0000

Yes, sourceforge.net has resorted to spamming its users. I have received a number of emails from this “Sourceforge.net Marketplace”. In the past, I just let the spam catcher correctly junk them, but today I got annoyed with it. I looked at the bottom of the email, and I see

This email was sent to: xxxx@users.sourceforge.net if you would prefer not to receive information about SourceForge.net Marketplace, please update your communication preferences by visiting the Profile Center.

The Road to Perian 1.1

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:19:21 +0000

Well, it started before 1.0 was even released. We started looking at methods to optimize the routines within Perian to run even faster. The road has been a bit of a long one. Now, we are in a private beta. The beta has been opened to those who have donated to the project as well as personal friends of developers. We often get the question as to why we limited the beta to donators. I find more often than not that such people are the kind who think they deserve something to which they have no right to have (see Open Source Attitudes). The reason we did this is simple. We didn’t want the beta to be fully public, but we wanted more testers. Those who have donated have already shown they use and care about the project, so they are a natural choice.

Google's Analytics Mistake

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:45:20 +0000

So, as I said earlier, I have started using Google Analytics. Google now suggests some new code to use in running the analytics. The problem: it’s broken! Here’s their code:

<script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? " https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write("\<script src='" + gaJsHost + " google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'>\<\/script>" );

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x"); pageTracker._initData(); pageTracker._trackPageview(); </script>

Now for what is broken:

There is a space between the " and google-analytics.com. This causes browsers to load the wrong (and invalid) address
Code that is dependent on code in the ga.js is executed immediately after the html is written to load the external javascript. There is no explicit indication as to the order this should be done. Race condition!

So, here is the fixed code:

Switching back to Safari

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:03:40 +0000

A while ago, I switched to Firefox since it supported several features I liked, the most notable being an ad blocker. Â I knew that there were ad blockers for Safari, but none of them were very good. Â All required manually managing the block list, which is just painful.Yesterday, I found out aboutÂ Safari Adblock,Â which has support for the ad block lists, likeÂ Adblock PlusÂ in Firefox. Â So, I decided to install it, and finally opened Safari to try it out. Â No adblock; nothing. Â It didn’t do anything. Â I then tried another account on my computer and it worked there, so it was something specific to my account. Â I finally noticed that the adblocker was an Input Manager, so I researched reasons why one wouldn’t load. Â I finally ran acrossÂ this post, which described some of the problems. Â Mine was simply that my user belonged to the wheel group.The solution seemed to be simply remove my user from the wheel group. Â It wasn’t so easy in practice. Â Since leopard, NetInfo is gone, and so it the nice tool used to edit the group associations. Â I had to find out how to use the new tool on the command line, and then remove the group that way. Â Then, it turns out you have to reboot for it to fully take effect (which is ridiculous). Â Finally, I was able to test out Safari, at the cost of no longer being able to su to root (my account is not an administrator account for good reason).The Good:

Apple has become the new Microsoft

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:30:48 +0000

So, people often ask me, why do I not use Windows. The reason is simple, nothing works right. Granted, many thing work, but none of them correctly. There are little tiny bugs in everything that, if the programmers had any competence in design, shouldn’t exist. Now Apple has fallen to the same regime.

I have been running Leopard for some time now. I don’t think a single day has gone by without running into a notable bug. To make matters worse, none of them were fixed with the recent update. That means I get frustrated every day with things that don’t work correctly, which is reminiscent of my experience on windows.

Sapphire Plugin

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:34:18 +0000

Well, it’s official. Sapphire, one of the best AppleTV plugins, has released beta 4. This is a major upgrade from beta 3, adding support for movies and improvements overall. One of the most interesting features is that this version also works as a frontrow plugin in Leopard. As far as I have been able to find out, this is the first plugin to do this, which means it could open up a whole new world for frontrow. Previously, it was limited to those with an AppleTV, but now, anyone with a mac can use it. The only question is how many would find it useful?

Key Fixed

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:52:53 +0000

Well, after all the fun in my previous post on my laptop’s keyboard, I have finally gotten the key fixed. I set an appointment for the Apple Store in Austin as I was driving through there this past weekend. I just showed up, opened the computer, showed him the key, he popped it in. That’s it. I spent more time walking into the store itself than I did getting the thing fixed.

Sometimes you just got to laugh

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:07:20 +0000

I got this 419 scam today, and I decided to read it critically just for fun. I started to laugh at some of the word choices, so I decided to share (emphasis mine):

Dear Sir,

No name, OK

I am a solicitor and I am the personal attorney to Late Mr Alex Tamu.

Wow. Tamu is a person and not just an acronym for my university?

I am writing you to receive this funds 9.5m$ before it is seized by the bank where the funds is deposited.

Broken Key

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:29:54 +0000

Well, a key broke on my MacBook Pro’s keyboard. I noticed the tab key was a bit loose yesterday, and today it won’t stay down. I called Apple Support about it since this computer is covered by AppleCare, and after spending over 30 minutes waiting to talk to someone, I was told there is absolutely nothing they can do short of sending me a box to have the computer shipped to them, or bringing it into a repair place locally so they can take the computer away for several days.

Custom RSS Feeds

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 03:15:44 +0000

So, lets break down the problem. I use RSS feeds a lot to read the news. For the uninitiated, RSS feeds (which stands for Really Simple Syndication), are a nice way to aggregate multiple sources and see changes from said sources in a convenient manner. Basically, I can see the headlines from many locations in one place and read the articles I want. Sounds good, right?

It would be, but most sites have only a single sentence description for the “article” which means you have to load the full site to realize that, more often than not, the article isn’t something you wanted to read, or so horribly written you wish you hadn’t read it. To make matters worse, some even go as far as to insert ads into the RSS feeds. Often the ad is bigger than the article description itself. Guess that means their articles aren’t good enough to bring traffic to their site so they feel they have to make money by inserting ads into their RSS feeds. This is akin to watching a commercial trying to get you to watch a new television show and inserting an ad in the middle of the commercial.

Analytics

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:30:55 +0000

So, I’ve been running Google Analytics on this site for a few months now. It is interesting that about a 1/4 of you are coming to this site directly, another 1/5 are linked here from other sites, and the rest of ya’ll are coming through search engines. More people are finding me through searches than I would have expected.

The search engines was interesting: First is the proportions. Google has the highest with about 95%, then comes yahoo. Rounding up the bottom is 4 searches from aol, and one from altavista (ah, I remember those days). Not one from live, hmm. I would normally attribute this to the very mac nature of my pages (which accounts for the searches on ac3 on the mac), but then I must consider the top searches which land them on my site. For some reason, people are finding me by searches for “female friend”, “girl questions”, and “dating friend”. I am not the top search result for any of those searches (thankfully considering that I am by no means an authority on the subject), but people seems to go far enough down to reach me.

Recruiting week

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 02:53:35 +0000

Well, this past week was full of recruiters on campus trying to hire people, well engineers. I participated in a few of the events, but missed the major one entirely.

It started on Monday with the welcome dinner. Essentially free food at the Hilton where students sit at a table with a recruiter. I sat with Texas Instruments, and it was interesting to hear what they had to say. Nothing too specific as this was little more than a meet and greet combined with free food.

Ripping DVDs to play on the AppleTV

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 01:59:53 +0000

First, I should start off with the prerequisites for the AppleTV itself.

I have hacked my ATV and installed Perian.
I also have installed Sapphire to play back the content.
And lastly, I have installed the USB kernel extensions to allow use of an external hard drive, but this piece is not a necessity.

The second piece I used is Handbrake to actually rip the DVDs.

Most people try to make the choice between AVI or MP4 file formats. There are problems with both of these approaches.

Quick vacation for the weekend

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:49:02 +0000

I visited my parents again this past weekend just to get a quick trip away from school. The outdoor kitties are acting much the same, with Guest Kitty lying around as usual for most of the day. I swear she is still too fat, but she may be getting better about that. OC (Orange Cat) has become much more friendly. He loves to be scratched, but he still hasn’t fully learned his name. Although, those who know cats will agree that he could have learned his name and is just not responding to it. Anyway, he posed for me to allow this photo:

OC_Sitting_on_the_Walk.jpg

New Hardware

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:41:58 +0000

It has been a while since I updated this. I promise a followup to my previous post about open source attitudes is coming up. I realized from the comments that a few of my statements didn’t come across exactly as I had intended them.

Well, with the Perian donations, Chris and I went to buy some AV equipment. This enables us to test out Perian in other situations than we had originally intended. Each of us got an AppleTV and a 5.1 system. As a result, I have already figured out a way to do AC3 passthrough in a much less hacky method, which means it should be more reliable. However, I found out that with some decoders, like the one my dad has, even this method still fails. Apparently, some decoders require that the SPDIF header specify that the data is encoded digital audio instead of searching for a correctly formatted header in the PCM data. Oh well.

Perian 1.0 Released

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:58:32 +0000

Finally, after the fiasco with macupdate, we really released version 1.0. Go get it.

AppleTV users, we suggest using ATV Loader to install it. Downloading the current package, and extracting the components out of it will work, but when it shows up on ATV Loader, that will be much simpler.

Legacy Comments:

stucka - Jan 12, 2008

sorry for my english. I fond in the web perian 1.1b for download , i read this beta is only for donate users, i am no a donate user for this moment but wath happend if i install this beta in my mac ?? please tell me why is only for donate users and why i fond this in te web? thanks an sorry for my english again. i am a latin guy

Open Source Attitudes

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:38:36 +0000

With my recent work on Fire, Adium, Perian, and A52Codec, I have come to realize several misunderstandings concerning open source software.

Ask anyone involved in Open Source Software (OSS), whether it be the users or the developers, and you will find there is often a disconnect between the two groups. The users are upset with the elitist attitudes of the developers and the developer are upset with the whining of the users. Why does this happen? The answer is simple, people are greedy.

Perian Woes

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 04:45:21 +0000

Well, we had some fun with Perian today. First it started when macupdate decided that they were going to post a fake 1.0 of Perian. You can read the details if you like. Since this is clearly something we didn’t want, we had to figure out how it happened. My guess is that someone saw the new website design in development within the subversion repository, clicked the download link that was there, and noticed it download a version later than what we have on the website.

Why Me?

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:38:59 +0000

Why did I get a email like this?

hi, my name is ****** from Brazil. I am a electrical enginnering student and I would like to know if someone has a program that calculate the transient stability with values of internal voltages of the machines. My program calculate a Load Flow for systems 9-bus and 14-bus, but need to find the values of pre fault and post fault and Variables of state e equilibry of machines I need simulate three phase short circuit considerated Fault period (tch) and generate Grafics angle X time and Grafics velocity X time I need to simulate a three phase short circuited with fault period tch and generate graphics with the results of anglextime and velocityx time bars voltage of system and internal voltage of generators. I have a doubt. What is the best language to develop this kind of program?Delphi or C++ Builder? Thanks

New Safari

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:41:47 +0000

Well, Apple released a beta of Safari 3.0 and so I decided to try it out. I had almost forgotten why I switched to Firefox until I was doing this post. Safari’s javascript was not up to par to work properly with wordpress, so I had to switch to a browser that was. Now, wordpress is hardwired to disable features on Safari, so I had to make it lie and claim it was Firefox in order to test them. Seems to work just fine.

Seeing the Railroad Bridge

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:57:35 +0000

It was nice to pull out the camera again after such a long hiatus. My parents took me to see an old railroad bridge across the Guadalupe River near Comfort, TX (GPS cords: 29Â°58'36’’ N 98Â°50'45’’ W). Anyway, here is a shot of the bridge from below:

Railroad_Bridge.jpg

We had to contend with several “Road Closed” signs and “No Parking” signs in order to see the thing. There was one case where a sign said that the road was closed at a fork in the road, leaving it ambiguous as to which one we should take. Anyway, you can clearly see why the road was closed below:

Water_over_Crossing.jpg

A tree down and about a foot of fast moving water over it. Don’t think I would want to cross that. At least the designers of the bridge had the sense to build it much higher than the river so it was safe from the recent flooding.

Nearing Release

Tue, 08 May 2007 02:06:24 +0000

Well, Perian is finally nearing a release. I wonder how much press we will get over this one, since it is finally hitting version 1.0. Chris (project manager) seems to think that Perian will be bigger than Adium (which he also manages). Considering how well version 0.5 has been received (over a quarter million downloads), I think I now believe him. Then we get to start work on version 1.1, which will include optimizations to what we did in 1.0.

Verify your burns

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:03:49 +0000

Well, for my future research, I needed a copy of ArcView. No big deal, it can be purchased form SELL here. Then they will burn you a disk and you are good to go, at least in theory.

I got my disk, and proceeded to spend several hours trying to install it. I kept thinking that there must have been something wrong with windows (usually there is whether things work or not), and so I went through the lovely process of repairing it. Eventually, I gave up and stuck the disk in my mac, only to notice several files on the disk were unreadable. So, I took the disk back and asked if they verify their burns and was told that they do not. They then offered to burn another disk for me.

Ditching VPN

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:58:57 +0000

Well, VPN induced a kernel panic the other day so finally I have had it. I emailed the security people at A&M and got the ball rolling on opening up my office machine through the firewall. I eventually got them to do it, so now I don’t need VPN again (with the exception of wireless connections without WPA). Now, just in case people don’t believe that the Cisco client can kernel panic, here is a snippet of the the panic log to prove it: Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies): com.cisco.nke.ipsec(1.0.0d1)@0x52186000

AC3 and Passthrough on the AppleTV and Macs

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:07:56 +0000

A few days ago, I managed to get my AC3 codec to do AC3 passthrough on the AppleTV. It wasn’t that hard once I stopped making stupid mistakes. Now, if you have a video file with AC3 audio along with a dolby digital decoder, you can play it on your AppleTV and enjoy full 5.1 dolby digital surround.

David Conrad later sent me a patch to make it work on PPC based macs. It is annoying not having a decoder to test these things on. I suppose that just adds to the challenge.

Career Center's Scam

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:02:17 +0000

Ok, so scam may be too strong of a word, but still, there is something seriously wrong with this. Essentially, the Career Center here can get a fee added to a student’s bill without informing them or getting their consent. Here is how it works:

The career center or others encourage companies to come to campus to find potential students
The company must do interviews that day or the next day in order to maintain their position on campus
The company likes a student and asks to interview them on campus. They have set aside a room to do that day’s interviews, and so they request a student at a certain time. They contact the student directly
The student shows up, and must sign in to indicate that they came.
The career center sees the student’s name, and if they don’t have the fee on their bill, it is added

This happened to me, and has happened to others as well. At no time during this sequence is the student informed about the fee, much less asked for their consent. I had to call them to get them to remove it. Guess I won’t interview on campus unless I see it worth paying $50 to do so.

Cell phone's battery

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 03:36:42 +0000

Well, it seems that the V3m’s battery life sucks. I am going to have to chalk this one up to Sprint’s stupidity. The same phone, with other carriers, is capable of lasting longer on the battery than Sprint’s. I even got their own employees to admit to this, but they insist that the fault does not lie with them (the company). They claim that the firmware for the phone is loaded by the manufacturer, Motorola, in a sort of sly way to pass the blame on to them. The problem is that I know the firmware is modified by the carrier and the manufacturer loads different firmware for different carriers. So that means they are really at fault. In the mean time, I have found a few ways to increase the battery life. The longest I have gotten it to last is 22 hours on a charge, but ATM, it has been 12 hours, and the battery indicator is showing 3 out of 3 bars, so maybe it will last longer this time. Anyway, the tips for a longer battery with Sprint:

Perian

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:00:49 +0000

I started work with Perian back in June of 2006 when Augie asked me, “say, any interest in updating the the ffmpeg based quicktime component?”. I admit, I was hesitant at first, but after a bit, I helped him set up a repository. At this point, I was hooked. I helped work on the following parts:

Made a script which could build ffmpeg as a universal library
Changed the data path for ffusion to expedite decoding
Worked out big and little endian issues
Increased the speed of ffmpeg’s decoding of H.264

Please check out my work on Perian’s main web page.

Messina Hof

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:00:06 +0000

Well, today I went on the tour of Messina Hof, a local winery. My mom insists that it is famous, but I am going to have to take her word for it. After the tour, they had a wine tasting. The had four wines for us:

Chardonnay
Gewurztraminer
Merlot
Port

I had never heard of the Gewurztraminer before, but I have to say that I liked it. Their port was also good, but I knew from the previous wine tasting that I liked port in general. Anyway, the place was pretty and definitely worth going.

New Cell Phone

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:29:15 +0000

Well, I finally did it. I changed my cell phone provider. I switched to Sprint. There were a few reasons for this. One of the more notable is that they seem to cover my parents’ place the best, and thus they changed as well. After my previous experience with Verizon, there was no way I would go back to them. In addition, there is the fact that they like to cripple their phones so you have to use (and pay) for their services instead of being able to use the capabilities they phone is supposed to have in order to sync with the computer.

Spring Break

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:15:13 +0000

Well, I just got back from spring break, and so now it is picture time. When I connected the camera to the computer, I realized I had pictures on there from January which I had not taken off. These pictures were just of the kitties, but still, I thought they were cute enough to include here:

Missie_Sunning.jpg

Hallie_Yawning.jpg

No, Hallie is not hissing or growling there, she is yawning, believe it or not.

Branchless Code

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:47:39 +0000

Apologies if this is technical, but since I learned something in this experiment, I thought I would write it up:

I remember going to a seminar a few weeks ago delivered by a faculty candidate which discussed the idea of how to get around the branch mis-prediction problem present in microprocessors. Anyway, her idea was to use predicated statements to make the instructions conditional on a comparison which may not have been completed yet. Essentially, when faced with a decision between two routes, the processor starts computation on both before it is even sure which it should take. Then, when the decision is known, it can proceed to throw out the results from the task it should not have started and only keep the results from the other. Her research mentioned using the processor’s internal register renaming system to prevent the results from the two colliding. There is a problem of both processor support as well as compiler support, as well as the fact that the active power in the processor is now increased. From the first two issues, I doubt we will ever see this come to light, especially when such things are already possible:

Fire's Death

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 12:09:23 +0000

Gee, a bunch happened at once. Maybe it is just that I have a little bit of time. Anyway, I have finally made the announcement on Fire’s death. This was a long time coming, but I had to wait for Adium 1.0 to come out since it contained the upgrade path from Fire. As is the case with many open source projects, there was developer turnover, but lately I had become the primary developer and most of the other devs moved on to other things. I didn’t want to go at it alone, so it was time to let go. Anyway, it is a bit sad to see it end. I have use the program since sometime in 2000, so it had become a part of my life, just don’t want it to become my life.

I finally Quit

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:12:24 +0000

Well, it has been a long time since I posted here. The reason is not lack of things to say, but in fact the opposite. Much has been going on, but so much of it is in an unresolved state, I don’t want to say anything here about it (since this is open to the public). I can say that I finally quite as the sysadmin. I told my advisor that that it was effective immediately. He didn’t try to stop me, but also there really is nothing he can do about it. I didn’t sign a contract, and I am not paid. The real question in my mind is why do it?

Fixing File Transfer

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:12:08 +0000

I work on Adium from time to time, and it currently has a major issue with file transfer. The problem is that the libgaim code used a particular method to detect if a socket was closed, but this method isn’t reliable since Adium wraps the sockets in CFSockets to detect activity. So, we had to use another method. I elected to take some code from Fire since I solved the same problem there a while back. Here it is for the curious:

New Semester

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 04:47:51 +0000

Well, the semester is now into its third week and things are going alright. I just had my first week of teaching lab, and things pretty much went as expected. The problem is that the students are expected to do some assembly within lab, but non of them have seen x86 assembly in class yet. Essentially, I had the fun of teaching them the basics of assembly just so they could do the lab.

Site Block in Search

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 19:55:09 +0000

Lately, since I have been investigating the idea of getting a new cell phone, I have started many searches on the topic. My parents just bought a Katana from Sanyo, and so I have been searching for information on their behalf as well. When I do certain searches in google, such as katana ringtone bitpim, I get a whole host of crap results from blogspot.com. So my solution: Whenever I do a search, I simply blog results from blogspot. So the above search becomes katana ringtone bitpim -site:blogspot.com and surprise surprise, I get relevant results!

Christmas

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 20:16:08 +0000

Well, Christmas has now come and gone. We all went to my grandparents’ house to celebrate along with my Aunt Cindy and her husband. We had our usual barbeque for lunch there.

Afterward, the kitties started their fun. Hallie showed us one again how much she loves to chew ribbon:

Hallie_Chewing_Ribbon.jpg

Missie joined in with her contribution by showing us all how loud her voice is:

Missie_Fussing.jpg

Much to our dismay, she continued show us her voice on the trip back home.

Starting Christmas Break

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:45:50 +0000

Well, Christmas break started on Saturday for me. Actually, you could argue that it started earlier, because on Friday I went with Aggie Christian Grads to view “The Nativity”. Was a pretty good movie. Later, we we got together and shared what amounted to too many deserts. Below is a group shot of most of the people there (I am on the left):

ACG_Christmas_Party.jpg

Although I have still done some research while here, it is nice to have a bit of a break. Two days ago, I saw some deer in the field next to the house. I tried to sneak up on them with the camera, but I managed to scare them before I could really get some good shots. I did managed to get a bit of a blurry shot of one leaping over the fence. Maybe next time I can be more quiet:

Deer_Leaping_Fence.jpg

Will Not Fix it

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:13:05 +0000

I had an interesting exchange with the CIS people here at TAMU concerning their VPN. A bit of background:

A&M uses Cisco’s VPN client (and there concentrator too IIRC).
There are two modes for the VPN. The normal mode which forwards all traffic through the VPN and the “split-tunnel” mode which only forwards TAMU destined traffic through the VPN
Upon connecting to the VPN, the client changes your DNS server settings to those specified by the server (in both modes)

I tend to use the split-tunnel mode more often than not because I only care to get through the firewall. Now here enters the situation. Slowly, when I was off campus, I noticed that I could not reach certain websites while using VPN. They were perfectly reachable when not using VPN though. So, I tracked down the problem and reported it:

Searching for Digital

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 02:28:55 +0000

My parents got a new HDTV. Good ol’ Walmart had their 6am sale on black friday, so we all piled in the truck early in the morning to pick up a good deal. Got it home and started to test it out. It seemed to work just fine.

We started testing out the HD part of the TV. Problem, my parents don’t live too near a big city, so all the stations are distant. As a result, picking up the digital channels can be painful. To make matters worse, when one does a rescan on the TV, it forgets all the previous digital channels it found. Here enters the method by which digital channels work. The digital channel for channel 5, for instance, is not on channel 5. It is somewhere else. My dad discovered that if one manually enters in the location for a digital channel, the TV can figure it out and pick it up. So, does one can play the guessing game to find them? Not quite. Government regulation to the rescue. The FCC has a database of all the stations and their licenses. So, simply look up the station by its call sign, location, and/or channel, and it list the info about them. Click on the engineering data, and there is the list of all their broadcast rights, including the channel where their digital transmission is hidden. So, simply tune it in, pray that the set can receive the weak signal, and then add it to the list. Ought to keep my parents busy for the next few weeks, assuming they aren’t still picking up signals from a few states away.

Engagement Party

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 02:52:50 +0000

Well, last night I went to a little get together to celebrate the engagement of some friends, Andrew and Jessica. It was nice to see Andrew no longer anxious about asking Jessica as he was when I had lunch with him on Thurs.

Anyway, now only a short two days before Thanksgiving. Hopefully they will pass quickly and without incident.

Bad Drainage

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 05:21:34 +0000

On Tuesday, I was sitting in my apartment, and I could hear the distinct sound of cars driving through water on the road. It was not supposed to rain so I looked outside and couldn’t see any water. I then went out to the parking lot, and I could see water flowing by very quickly about 3 inches deep. It was also very murky. The next day, I concluded that a water main broke somewhere nearby and that the water flowed down the street. In a great feat of design, the drainage seems to divert about 70% of the water flowing down the street into the parking lot to my apartment complex. Oh well, glad I didn’t have anywhere to go.

Wine Tasting

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:59:36 +0000

Last Thurs, the Adult, Graduate and Off Campus Student Services had a wine tasting. We had to sign up ahead of time, so a few friends and I went.

The had four wines there:

Penascal Sauvignon Blanc
Trentadue Old Patch Red
Charles Creek Miradero Merlot
Barros Imperial Ruby Port

I have to say. I learned a fair amount during the wine tasting. I never tried much wine, so it was nice to do something I never really tried.

Pepper Spray

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:43:04 +0000

Today when I went to go teach class, I was greeted by all of my students sitting outside the classroom. I figured this was another case of the previous prof not vacating the room on time. I was wrong

Turns out, someone had the brilliant idea of spraying the room with pepper spray. In the course of doing this, the room was effectively unusable, so we had to find another room in which to have class. Oh well, once we got the room, everything went OK.

Visiting the Parents

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:04:40 +0000

Last weekend, I went to visit my parents. On the drive down, I listed to the first two chapters of The Rookie (beware: not for children or those easily offended). I am listening to the next chapter as I write this. Started off well enough for one of Scott Sigler’s novels. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I decided to visit my parents this weekend was the fact that my grandparents would be there also. On Saturday, we went to Lost Maples State Park. While we were there, I manged to get a picture of my dad with his parents. Not the best of pictures, but difficult to get better when one party doesn’t like to cooperate. Here they are standing next to a rock formation that sort of looks like a giant mouth:

Family_in_Front_of_Mouthlike_Rock.jpg

Spammer

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:58:37 +0000

Lately someone has been trying to leave spam on the comments to this blog. Problem for him, comments are not displayed until I moderate them. Second problem, such attempts are logged. My response:

iptables -A INPUT -s 205.134.172.128/28 -j DROP

Bigger problem for him, I can enable the spam filtering.

On the plus side, it means that my blog is being noticed; otherwise it wouldn’t be important enough to try and spam.

Power Outage Aftermath

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 05:13:36 +0000

Well, for those not in the area, the power went out last night. I had decided to meet some a friend and his wife for dinner last night at McAlister’s. I arrived there when the power was flickering. The power went out while they were still on the way.

The problem for them: Many of the traffic lights don’t work when the power is out. To make matters worse, when the power was flickering, the lights would commonly shift from green to flashing red, causing many wrecks.

Stupid Dell

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:54:04 +0000

I swear, the more I deal with them, the more I hate dealing with Dell. Apple, on the other hand, becomes more pleasant the more I deal with them.

Last night, one of our Dell servers stopped working in many ways. I noticed most of the failures were “Input/Output Error”. A quick google search revealed that this is likely a bad HD. Well that is not Dell’s fault, but it is very unlikely for such a thing to happen when the system is new, and using hardware RAID-1 (mirroring). So, I get to the office and try to figure out what the deal is. Dell’s built in RAID controller (PERC 5i IIRC) decided to turn itself off. A quick reboot fixed it, but still, this should not have happened in an enterprise level system.

Perian released

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 02:44:26 +0000

Well, a project I have been working on for a few months saw some action. Perian was released today, but not before the site was linked by digg. Essentially the server (which is the same as this one) was pounded by at least 10-20 people every second. I had to reconfigure some of the server’s options, but once I did so, it withstood the load rather well.

Now to fix all the bugs reports which will start to flow in :)

Dealing with Verizon

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 04:04:25 +0000

I decided that I would not write about this until the entire matter is resolved; so here it goes.

On the 10th, I saw that my Verizon wireless bill was $272. I immediately called them to find out what the deal was. Turns out over $200 of that was data changes since I used my phone as a modem for my computer. Well, I did use it, but for the first two years I used this phone, I was never changed. The person I talked to promised to track it down and that I would receive a call within 3-5 days.

More recovery

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:50:58 +0000

Well, I have been slowly recovering all the data that I was lost. I went through and reposted all the images in the blog which were missing from the last time around. So now, there should no longer be any broken links on any of the pages.

I have been keeping busy with school and other things. Teaching my class has been fun, and not too much of a time sink. I will have to design the firs test sometime soon. That will certainly be an experience. Hopefully it is better than the time that I was a TA and gave out a quiz. It turned out to be entirely impossible. I best make sure I don’t repeat that.

Site back up, Sorta

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:20:34 +0000

I finally got the site is some sort of working order. I am slowly working on getting up in a much better way, but that will take time. The blog is back up, and I can’t recall if I have lost anything since my last backup. I may have, but I am not certain.

Anyway, the images are still broken, and I will get to them at some point. For now, I have something else to do, so I am off. Later.

Few Changes

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:34:02 +0000

It has been a while since I wrote here, but mostly it is because not much has changed. First of all, in fixing the leak I mentioned in my last post, the workman left a temporary fix and told me that sometime later someone would be by to fix it up. August came around and this had not happened. I guess the office never got told about this because when I told them, they got someone out to finish a few days later.

Leak and fourth

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 04:14:05 +0000

Well, I had fun two nights ago. The AC unit in my apartment was dripping. Nothing serious, and the 4th was coming up, so I figured I would tell them about it after the holiday (since the maintenance workers would be off). I had put a trash can under the drip, and it developed an inch of water in several hours. Nothing to difficult to deal with since I would be around.

Symphony

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:48:02 +0000

Last weekend, Matthew asked me if I was up to anything. I told him I wasn’t so he invited me to join him, his wife, and his parents. So, I headed out to his parents’ place in the country. We spent the afternoon swimming in the pool and then went on to Round Top in the evening. We heard the Texas Festival Orchestra perform at the Festival Institute. They played Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Overture, and Concerto in A for Calinet & Orchestra. After the intermission, they played Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. It was a pleasant surprise to find such a nice concert hall out in the middle of no where. Makes me wonder what other treasures are hiding out in the Texas countryside.

Slow Summer

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:22:04 +0000

Been a while since I have posted here. I expect most of the reason is due to the fact that the summer is progressing slowly. I did take off last weekend and spent time with the parents. We spent a fair amount of time watching the nine Doctor Who episodes I brought with me.

In the mean time, I started hosting the repository for perian, a project to bring ffmpeg codecs to QuickTime. Assuming that cross-compiling issues with ffmpeg can be dealt with, then it should work out well.

AC3 Codec released

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 04:08:46 +0000

Well, I am sure I am getting a lot more traffic on this site recently because I released the AC3 codec yesterday. Essentially I got tired of the fact that the two that I found didn’t work well on Intel Macs, so I took one and fixed it.

I already have one minor bug to fix (not worth releasing a new version though since it is just a version number). The next step is to figure out how to do AC3 passthrough. I am thinking I need to bug the Apple Engineers on the mailing lists in order to figure this one out.

Back

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 14:19:12 +0000

Well, I am finally back in College Station. When I got back last Wed, I had the surprise of finding that my apartment was over 80°. Turns out someone drove a truck through a transformer and it burned off the motors for the AC. They didn’t get it working again until Friday and it took all night for the temp to drop.

Anyway, I am starting to back into the swing of things called research. I should be able to get a fair amount done this summer, especially since most people are out of town.

AC-3

Mon, 22 May 2006 19:37:46 +0000

Well, my old Powerbook failed a few days ago, so I got a new Intel Powerbook (no, I will not use the stupid name). It is nice and fast. I may give a better review later, but for now, the biggest gripe I had so far was the fact that I couldn’t play videos with AC-3 audio anymore. So, I took the A52 Codec and modified its source so that it would work on Intel. While I was at it, I corrected numerous mistakes in the code (some even caused crashes), and made it work with the audio in AVI files. Anyway, if anyone needs it before the developer merges in my fixes, they can find it here.

Taking a Break

Sun, 14 May 2006 17:36:49 +0000

Well, it has been a while since I wrote here. I decided that I will stay here for the summer rather than go to work for MS. I actually got a survey asking why I had declined their offer, and so I had to actually think about it. Turns out, the job (or maybe the company) just didn’t see that interesting to me, at least not at that level of pay. A more interesting job, or more pay may have convinced me to go there.

Truck fixed

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 01:29:34 +0000

Well, I finally got the truck fixed. I had a lot of trouble finding a time when I could actually take the thing in, so I had a lot of time when I was just unable to bring the truck in. Anyway, after about 31 hours (mostly waiting for parts), they got it fixed. It was a bad rotor and distributer. I also had them replace the spark plugs and their wires as well (since they were pretty much due anyway). All in all, it costs about $500.

Repository Up

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 02:23:31 +0000

I have now set up the subversion repository for a project I wish to start. The basics of the project is to get the server side part of iSync working on a server other than Apple’s. If this is completed, I can fully drop my .Mac subscription, and lose nothing that I care about. I guess this should be a lesson on not to over charge for poor services. If you persist in such action, someone will come along and replace you. It may be an inferior product in some respects, but the price is hard to beat in this case (free). So far very little is there: http://trac.cod3r.com/mySync

3 Offers

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 13:50:24 +0000

Well, I managed to get 3 offers it appears. Apparently, this many offers is very rare, so procedures are a bit different. I have all the groups talk to me some more, and then I have to decide between them. I was not told how much the offers were, just that they would be the same regardless of which I choose.

I guess I will have to see which looks most interesting…

New site

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 03:29:43 +0000

Just a quick post to let you all know that I have moved the blog to a new site. I got tired of the unreliability of rosehosting.com and so Matthew and I went together to get a server with about 3 times the capacity from unixshell.com. We are splitting the cost, and I am paying $.50 more per month.

Hopefully this will mean a lot less downtime, so there shouldn’t be long outages lasting a few days any more. Anyway, until next time…

On the Plane

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 21:55:41 +0000

I thought that I would write a post while I was on the plane. I had the time, and since I already had one post stored on the computer, it really doesn’t make much difference to make another. I am currently flying first class back to DFW. It is much, much nicer than flying in the rest of the plane. I actually have room for the computer to open the screen all the way, in addition to not having it pressed against my chest. The nice, free breakfast along with the Chardonnay was a plus too.

More Flights

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 21:50:29 +0000

Everything was going well. I showed up to the interview about 30 minutes beforehand and everything seemed fine. It took the receptionist a while to find the my information, but I expected this was due to the change in location to Silicon Valley. I was wrong.

I was in the wrong place! They meant to send me to Seattle and changing it to Silicon Valley was a mistake. The result: I was to fly to Seattle at 5pm. At least I called Jason and had some lunch with him while I was there, so I got to see some of Palo Alto, and I learned that CA is not as bad as I had thought.

Fun with Flights

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:26:19 +0000

Well, I am now in Mountain View, CA, after some fun with the flights…

It started in College Station. The flight was supposed to leave at 2:02 or something like that. Everything was going fine until they told us the weather in Houston has delayed them an hour. Then, we got on the plan and were ready to leave around 3. Then they were told to delay another 20 minutes. Finally, we got underway around 3:20 or so, but didn’t land until 4:30. Why did it take so long? We flew in circles because the storm had still not left Houston. Anyway, once in Houston, everything went well. Tomorrow is the interview, so hopefully things will go well. I hope to see Jason tonight since he lives in the area…

Interviews and Scams

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:49:08 +0000

Well, MS has changed their mind… They want me to go to Silicon Valley instead of Seattle. I have to say, it is likely a much better place to go, so I am not really complaining. It was just interesting how they made the travel arrangements for me to go to Seattle before it all got straightened out. Interestingly enough, the trip to Seattle was supposed to be on a puddle jumper from CLL (College Station) to DFW, then direct to Seattle. The flight to Silicon Valley is the puddle jumper from CLL to IAH, and then direct to San Jose. Looks like a much better flight IMHO.

Spring Break

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:33:14 +0000

Well, spring break started off with moving offices…. I had a bit of confusion when it came down to which office I am to move in to. At first, I was supposed to move into 331C, which was at the very corner of the Computer Engineering Group’s new space. When I went to key control to get the key, they couldn’t find it. After some digging around, we found out that there was already two students in that office, so they had to find another one for me. So, then I was assigned 331E, a very large window office. Then they brought up the concern that if they hire a new faculty candidate, they would have to give him/her that room, and I would have to move again. Finally, I was assigned 331D, my final office, but there was a bunch of cubicle walls and other furniture in that room, so the movers had to move all of that out first. In the end, I got a slightly larger window office, but a worse view. At least I can tell when it is raining or not, so it is not a terrible loss. I am sure I will enjoy having more space though.

Screwy people?

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 04:20:17 +0000

Well, I had a nice time at my parents’ place. It was nice to get out of CS for a little while, and I did enjoy dad’s chocolate rum pie :)

I have noticed a tremendous number of access to this site trying to access sites other than this site. So, my solution, let them know quite concisely that they should go away:

Learn what DNS is and fix your computer!

Mail

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 02:35:59 +0000

People often ask my why I don’t check my snail-mail as often as they thing I should. So, in answer to that, here is the breakdown of what I get there:

70% trash (including envelopes and the like)
10% keep for records (bills and the like which I have already paid online)
15% shred (Things like credit card applications, checks, etc.)
5% actual important stuff

That breakdown should quite clearly demonstrate why I don’t check my snail-mail very often.

Veritas

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:24:29 +0000

Well, this week was the Veritas Forum. I really only went to one talk through the thing. Unfortunately, I really wanted to go to the one Tuesday Evening by Dr. Hugh Ross, but I couldn’t because of Breakaway. He had another presentation at 4 where he presented some of a scientific theory which includes a creator of the universe. There was one statement that he made during the talk that caught my attention. He said that the Intelligent Design that is taught in the schools actually has no scientific basis behind it. This explained some of the statements I have heard in the scientific community which I previously attributed to just whining. It didn’t occur to me that teaching of Intelligent Design in a science classroom would not be done on a scientific basis, because I knew such a basis and theory does exist. I hope that people will start to actually teach the science behind the origin of life. I imagine that teaching Intelligent Design from a scientific viewpoint will receive far less criticism, leaving much of the remaining critics to be nothing more than kids crying when they can’t get their way.

Locked out

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 21:08:34 +0000

Well, this weekend I went to my office to get a few things done. When I left my office to get something to eat, I shut the door behind me and realized that I had locked myself out. So… I called UPD, and they told me that they could not let me in unless it was a police or fire emergency. I then just resigned myself to just walking home and getting back in on Monday. Then I realized that both my truck and apartment key were on the same keyring, sitting on my desk in my office. I eventually ended up calling the Secretary for the Computer Engineering group and she was gracious enough to let me borrow the master key so I could get my own keys. Just at the moment I needed to get a ride to her house, I saw John in Zachary, which worked out nicely.

Interview

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 03:50:32 +0000

Well, today I had an interview with Microsoft. I can’t say that MS is high on my list of places to work, but there is no harm in working for them. I was given two puzzles to solve while I was there. A friend said that it would not be a good idea for me to present the solutions, but I can’t pass up presenting the problems themselves.

Write a function that when given a linked list returns a list with every group of 3 (or n) elements in reverse.
Place the numbers 1 through 8 in the following grid such that no two neighboring cells contain two consecutive numbers (I can’t draw worth anything in HTML, so numbers go where the X’s are) _XX_ XXXX _XX_

Anyway, I think that things went well. We will see if they contact me.

Is Valentine's Day too commercial?

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 03:16:24 +0000

When I was helping a student move a computer on Valentine’s Day, she asked if I was doing anything special for the day. I mentioned that I generally hate Valentine’s Day, and she asked if it was because of having to go out of buy something. Well, those who know me know that this is certainly not the case in my situation, simply because there is no one to give anything to. This did however, give me pause.

Long Day

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:43:52 +0000

Ahh… Been a while since I had a day like this. Yesterday, my partner and I spent a solid 7 hours, minus about 30 min for lunch, on homework. We had seven problems. I had solved the first one about a week before (the easiest one), and then we managed to complete 2 and 3 in the first four hours. 4, and 7 took us the remaining 3 hours that we worked on it. That leaves 5 and 6, of which I managed to figure out 6 last night in about an hour or two.

.Mac is not worth it

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:24:01 +0000

OK, I was listening to the MacCast and heard a review of iWeb which is part of iLife ‘06. This reminded me that I need to go on .mac rant, as I promised before:

Introduction I have had my .mac account for quite some time now. I had it back when it was free (and called iTools), and continued to use it when it was no longer free. I was content to pay for it at the time since I was reluctant to lose my mac.com email address.

All Men's

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 13:53:38 +0000

Last night was the “All Men’s” breakaway. It was a breakaway for just the guys. They do this every once in a while, mostly when they can’t reserve Reed Arena for that week. Since Rudder is too small to hold all of breakaway, usually they split it up like this instead of resorting to holding two breakaway’s in Rudder. The girls get their chance in two weeks.

Next week, the guys and girls are together. The speaker seemed to make a big deal about the fact that it was Valentine’s Day, so I am dreading what he may have to say. I guess I will just have to see.

Fire Development

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:33:09 +0000

I started using Fire back in the days of Mac OS X Server (before the public beta). It was the only IM client for the mac in those days. In 2002 or so, I created a small patch that fixed the get info within AIM and added the box to display profile information. After that, my development exploded to include the following items

Switch AIM back to the OSCAR protocol and added buddy icons as well as file transfer(first OS X client to do this)
Enabled Tabbed chat windows, and wrote two of the three different tab styles
Used xhtml as the logging format to save all the data and enable future expansion
Enabled multiple logins per service (much needed feature) for version 2.0
Wrote a new and more efficient buddy list for version 2.0
Massively optimized sections of code and reorganized the class hierarchy to a better design for version 2.0

The main webpage is located at http://fire.sourceforge.net

Kyocera Ringtone Converter for the Mac

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:28:29 +0000

Download The latest version of the Kyocera Ringtone Converter for the Mac.zip

About this Program This program was written by Graham Booker. I wrote this program shortly after getting my Kyocera 7135 in 2003 and being annoyed by the slight that was given to mac users by Kyocera not creating a ring tone converter for the mac. It is now 2005, and I got emailed by a nice user requesting some documentation, so I decided to write some.

More Moving

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 22:22:22 +0000

Well, Still moving things to this site… I just moved over the Poetry section. If you look really closely, you will see that the font has changed for my posts ;). I went through and cleaned up the horrible HTML code that was generated by my last software and survived the import here. It should be all cleaned up by now.

Well, today I went to the Superbowl party hosted by BCS GAP(Bryan-College Station Graduates and Professionals) and Aggie Christian Grads. It was fun, and some of the Superbowl ads were funny. I didn’t watch the game too closely, but I did get a chance to socialize with others. I had fun.

New Blog Site

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 01:07:27 +0000

Well, if you are reading this, then you know that I now have a new site to store my blogs. This is the reason why I have not posted much in a while; I have been moving things over to this site.

Some things to note: The address above is www.cod3r.com. I have actually owned this domain for more than a year now, but just didn’t do anything with it. I finally decided that if I wanted to really use it, I needed it to be hosted somewhere. I decided to buy what is known as a virtual private server. Basically, I am sharing resources on a real computer out in the world somewhere, but I have full privileges to my little piece of the server. I get 5G of disk storage and 500G of data transfer per month. One other advantage of running this server is I can do whatever I want with it. Basically pretend it is a slow server (by today’s standards, but still faster than my 5 year old linux box under my desk), with only 5G of HD space. For the curious, it is running Debian/Linux - Stable.

Not the only one with car issues

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:14:52 +0000

Well, Tuesday was the day for the Engineering Career fair. One of my friends came into town for it because he was recruiting for Raytheon. He came down monday and we went out to dinner. It was nice to see him again.

On the way down, shortly after going over some rough train tracks, his corvette started having some issues where it was loosing power. It was a small hiccup, and it didn’t do it again afterwards. Then, when he was trying to leave on his way to Dallas on Wednesday, it did it again, but this time it didn’t go away. He had to be towed back to college station where they looked at it. As a result, he spent the night at my apartment since he didn’t have his hotel room anymore. Microsoft had a Halo (computer game) tournament Wednesday night. We went to that because it was free food. On the whole it was fun to go to. In addition, I got to meet up with Noah who was a Microsoft recruiter. I had not seen him since last August.

Computer and Truck issues

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:15:51 +0000

It has been a while since I wrote here, and with good reason.

Sunday night, my computer froze. I looked at it very oddly because this is a far cry from normal. I was about to reboot it when it suddenly unfroze. A few minutes later, it froze again, and this time I heard the too familiar sound of a hard drive on its last leg. It was the the typical hard drive slowly failing kind of failure where the drive mostly works, but freezes every once in a while. So, I took the computer down and started using the laptop, very happy that the data is backed up.

Paid now

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 13:24:36 +0000

Well, the CE department decided that they were going to pay me now for my sysadmin work. So, that means that I will continue doing it. It is not too much work, but more than is worth doing for free.

Anyway, I am going to have the fun tonight of moving the user’s files over to the new hard drive space. Hopefully all will go well.

Christmas Vacation

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 17:18:33 +0000

Well, I left CS for the Christmas vacation and went to my parents’ place. Pretty much from the time I arrived Hallie decided to hiss at me from under the tree. I managed to get a picture of her giving me one of her glaring looks.

Hallie's_Glare.jpg

Friday, the 23rd, we all packed up the truck and went to my grandparents’ place in Fort Worth. We celebrated Christmas there along with my dad’s birthday the following day. I actually didn’t take very many pictures this time, but I got one of Hallie with some of the presents.

Hallie_With_Presents.jpg

She doesn’t want to be there and is looking for escape.

Semester Ending

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:26:11 +0000

Well, the semester is coming to an end. I have basically finished everything that I need to do for the end of the semester. I have a Christmas party left still, but that is just about it.

The laptop that my dad let me use seems to still be working just fine. Nothing wrong with it so far. I wonder if it is going to give me the same failure that it gave him. Strange.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:40:58 +0000

Well, thanksgiving has now come and gone. I have spent so long trying to catch up on things that I missed from being out of town that it has taken me a while to get back to this blog. I still have to clean up my apartment this week sometime and a few other things before I am caught up.

I went to my parents’ place over the weekend. My dad’s parents joined us on Friday, and we celebrated Thanksgiving then. It is nice to see the place finally built. Here is a picture of it completed.

Parent's_House.jpg

Now if only it would rain so the grass could grow.

More Computers

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:37:17 +0000

Well, it seems things came in pairs yesterday. Two broken computers, and two christmas party invitations. Oh well, at least one of those items was nice.

Got the sever up and running nearly back to where it should be. I took the old HD out, and used it in a FW enclosure and got all the data off of it. I have 5G to take with me tomorrow. That should be fun :) At least the server is back in operation, and it seems to be running just fine for now.

Laptop replacement

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:32:01 +0000

One way or another, I am going to replace this laptop. I have decided that $400 is not worth it to fix such an old computer. The question remains, should I replace it with an iBook, or go with the more expensive powerbook. The only reason to go with the powerbook is the bigger screen (got used to a 15" screen), but the iBook has nearly the same resolution as my current laptop (1024x768 vs. 1152x768). The other minor issues of note is the iBook can only video mirror (without a hack), and it doesn’t have gigabit ethernet. Is that worth $600 difference to me? I am holding out hope that I can get one of my dad’s old laptops working and then not have to replace it until the intel ones are out.

More laptop

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 11:02:04 +0000

Well, more work went into the laptop yesterday. I have gotten it to the point where it seems to be working. I further localized the problem to the graphics card on the logic board, which means if I really want to fix it, it will cost me $400, not worth it. Basically, if I push on the graphics card, it goes.

When I took it apart, I kept trying things such as disconnecting the internal screen and other stuff. I also oiled one of the hinges. Then I started putting it together, piece by piece, testing it at every stage. I eventually got it completely back together and could not get it to fail. This could be a good sign. I only need to to last at most 8 more months. Here is to hoping it will.

Laptop

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 22:03:27 +0000

Well, my time recently has been consumed by trying to fix my laptop. Here is the issue:

If I move the screen while the computer is on, the video card goes nuts. I thought it was the cable, but now I am not so sure. I have a small workaround. Put the computer to sleep, and do whatever, but once I wake it up, do not touch the screen under any circumstances. At least when the video card freaks out, I can still sleep the computer. At least I learned how to open the computer, remove the logic board, and generally put the thing into as many pieces as possible. I forgot to take pictures. Oh well, maybe next time.

Late

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:59:20 +0000

Not much happened at Breakaway this week with the exception of the fact that I was a lot later than normal. They did ask me to take the group picture, so here it is. Enjoy:

Breakaway_Leaders.jpg

More games

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 22:08:35 +0000

Well, I am going to write down what happened over the weekend before I forget. Basically, highlights for the weekend have mostly to do with sporting events. I went to the Volleyball game yesterday against Kansas State. I can now say the volleyball team is not loosing because of me. I had been to 4 of their games before, and they lost every one, but the beat k-state yesterday. Then I went to the soccer game against SMU. We beat them 4-2, so now the Aggies advance to the 3rd round and the sweet 16.

Week with a few games

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 22:33:56 +0000

Well, once again, a slow week. Saturday and Sunday were marked by not doing much at all. I can’t remember what I did, and there is nothing on my calendar, so that is no help. I think I did my project for Survivable Networks.

I did end up with Erin’s bike lock in my truck though. I noticed it on Saturday when I went to campus. Basically, it fell off her bike when I gave her a ride home on Thursday I was able to give it back to her on Sunday though. Then, on Wednesday morning, she emails me asking if I can bring my lock to school because she left her bike lock in a friend’s jeep. Now, tonight, she told me that she misplaced the key to my lock. Guess I should consider myself lucky that I have a spare one on my key ring. Strange as it may seem, I almost predicted this because I saw the one on my key ring and thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be funny if she tells me she lost the one I gave her?”

Silliness to start

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 21:36:01 +0000

Breakaway was mostly the normal this week with one exception. Several people resorted to silliness before breakaway. It started off with Rody dancing:

Roddy.jpg

And then these guys started leapfrogging each other:

Leapfrog_Guys.jpg

Leapfrog.jpg

Afterward, a guy said that he would help EQ the sound board next week. Then he got to talking to Cory about getting into Wedding Videography. Cory just got too busy with it to keep up so maybe that will work out well for him.

Project

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 15:02:44 +0000

Well, we have a project in class now. It is relatively simple. Find the shortest k-disjoint paths in a graph. Well, I got bored a bit on Sunday and didn’t feel like research, so I started coding. I wrote the graph, node, and edge data structures along with all its basics functions. I even went as far as to implement Dijsktra’s algorithm. I had to force myself to stop because I didn’t want to finish the thing before my partner and I met for the first time (tomorrow).

Slow weekend and week

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 22:01:08 +0000

This has been a slow time recently. I just don’t have much to do. During the entire weekend, I really didn’t do much. Friday I went to the Costume party done by Aggie Christian Grads. I had a good time. Got to meet some people there. I guess I will have to go to their bible studies now just so I can get to know them better. Saturday, I went to the Maroon and White game (baseball). It was interesting to see, and then went back to my office to do some research. Sunday, I can’t remember what I did. During this past week, I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. Just a normal week.

Trudging through

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 21:42:14 +0000

I am slowly getting through classes. Actually class is not really an issue anymore. It has gotten rather easy lately. I did get to thinking that I need to update my degree plan at some point. I looked at what I have left for minimum requirements. I need only 20 more hours, of which only 2 needs to be class. Good grief, I am closer than I thought.

My advisor wants to meet three times a week now. Likely a good idea. I mean, I need one more class, and then research and write my dissertation, and I am out of here!!!! I should get cracking and get it through.

Yet another week

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:20:50 +0000

Well, I had the fun of teaching Chris how to do the live stream. I get the feeling that he may not be doing it very often. There is hope that I can pass it off to someone. We had a meeting of the internet/email team before breakaway itself. Basically, we discussed where breakaway is going in the future in respect to the internet. I also snapped some pictures while I was there. One was of Curtis trying to get the TV working:

Curtis_Working_on_the_TV.jpg

As you can see, it is not working yet. He didn’t manage to fix it. It has a loose connection in there somewhere. Somebody is going to have to open it up with a soldering iron to actually fix the thing. I shot some random pictures, including this one:

Random_People_at_Breakaway.jpg

Three people enjoying themselves. The girl in the center wanted to be a part of a picture, so I let her enjoy the time.

Stuck doing jobs

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:19:33 +0000

People keep giving me tasks to do. I really wish they would find someone to replace me quickly. Today I kept trudging along in the task of ordering an Xserve Raid for the server. Whenever we get the thing, we will have 3TB of storage space. What makes this a pain is the fact that it is over $5000, so it has to go out for bid. Yuck. Right now I have to wait on email replies before I can go much further.

Blast from the past

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:17:37 +0000

I had someone ask me a few days ago if I was responsible for the Kyocera Ring tone generator for the mac. I had to let him know that I was guilty as charged. Anyway, I have put up a website for the thing. Hopefully this means that people actually use it. I changed the license of the software so I am basically giving it away now without the restrictions of the GPL. We will see if anything comes of it.

Return to blogging after nearly a year

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:36:43 +0000

After a really long time away, I decided to return to blogging.

Short summary of what happened since last time:

Erin had a nice graduation, and I cannot pass up the opportunity to display such a nice picture of her her

Erin's_Graduation.jpg

Nathan and Andrea have gotten married on Jan 8th. I had fun, and I caught the garter:

Catching_Garter.jpg

It was a great wedding.

My parents have retired and moved to Fredericksburg. Their house is still under construction, but should be open in the next few weeks. I hope to go there for thanksgiving.

Start of Category

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:36:36 +0000

A few things have changed with respect to breakaway.

First, the Internet/Email team has grown quite a bit recently. It went from 6 people (5 of which I never saw after the first meeting), to now about 8 people, all of whom I have actually seen more than once. In theory, I am supposed to be training a replacement, but that has not happened yet. Maybe this tuesday will prove to be better in that respect.

Ending

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:36:20 +0000

Things have picked up here. The EE department changed their name to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and as a result, they wanted to take ece.tamu.edu. This has created a bit of a mess. Second, the CE group is moving. We moved a bunch of people out of Zach 100m and are now doing renovations in the new space. Once done, everyone is going to move over there. Also, I was told about some new network changes that were going to happen in the near future. I could see the writing on the wall. There is going to be more work in the future. So here is the result:

In the next year

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:23:55 +0000

Well, it has been a year since I wrote here.

I made it though my 663 and 668 classes unscathed. I then took two 689 courses the next semester. One was on Peer to Peer networks, and the other was Fault Tolerance, a continuation of 668. Both were fun, but the P2P class required a lot of reading research papers. I enjoyed it though.

Now I am taking a single 689 class on Survivable Networks. It is mostly graph theory and how to make it so a network can survive a link cut, or a node cut or things like that. A lot of theory, but it could be practical in the end. I have to present a paper on the 15th, and we have a project to start. I will write later on how this goes.

WoW and camera

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:41:05 +0000

Well, the subject just about covers it. World of Warcraft went into open beta, and I have been playing it with nearly every free second that I have had. Nathan, Andrea, Andrew, and myself would go take several computers in the labs and play away. The public beta ended yesterday, so that means I have time to do the things that I have been lacking recently, such as school.

On a side note, my new camera came. It is so much better than my old I can’t believe it.

New_Camera.jpg

Yes, work!

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 19:22:25 +0000

Well, at the moment my only job is the System Administrator position within the ECE group. It is mostly a job where you don’t have to do too much, but every once in a while something comes up. Today, I got an email about how one user on the eceserver was using 1/3 of the cadence licenses for the EE group. They threatened to cut off access to the licensee from the ece server. It seems that this has been dealt with, but I sort of don’t really think it is over. I will likely hear more about it on monday.

Project and Traces

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 19:18:41 +0000

Well, this week I had to work on my project proposal for 663. I was at a near complete loss for what to do, but I put in a proposal for something combining streaming media and a peer to peer client. I have the sinking feeling that the prof will not like it, but we will see when that time comes. If he doesn’t like it, I can always propose something else and go with that.

Over a month

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 19:17:14 +0000

Hmm… it has been a long time since I have written anything here. I guess I haven’t really cared to mention what I am up to recently.

The office has been really cold recently. They had to adjust the temperature, but it still isn’t much better. The issue is the temperature control is two offices down with several computers in the room, so it is much warmer than ours, making it cold for us. So, the issue is there is not much that can be done about it. Once it gets cold enough that they start using heat instead of AC, it may be better.

Nearly a month, let lazyness abound

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:22:15 +0000

Well, it has been a long time since I have written here. I guess it is about time that I do again. Let’s see, what is new:

Well, I am starting to really like the new office. My new office-mate is Ian. He is a nice guy and we are getting along quite well. The only gripe that I have about the office is as of late, it has become quite cold. The AC is a bit too powerful in that room, but other than that, I like the place.

20 days, gosh I am lazy

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 21:18:49 +0000

Well, things have been interesting since last I wrote. A lot of things have changed.

First of all, summer sessions has ended. It is a time of transition. I am thankful to see that it seems the guy who would play his guitar at night has moved out. Hopefully this will mean more peaceful rests. Since the summer was ending an the fall starting up, the ECE group started to look for another admin since they had been without one for a bit. I was asked, and decided to take the position. I moved all my stuff yesterday, and that made for an interesting time. Already I am enjoying the window in just knowing what the weather is like. It was funny, the first thing I noticed after hooking everything up was that the 12 port switch was quite noisy. I never noticed it among the rumble of 100M. So now my office is in 315D WERC.

Two weeks

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:09:56 +0000

I guess it has been two months since I have written here. It is not hard to believe that it has been that long since I have been a bit busy over that time; even thought nothing has really happened.

The first thing of interest is that Nathan is now engaged. Not too much of a surprise, but still important to note. They are shooting for a Dec weeding, so that is going to be interesting. I am going to have to figure out how I am going to work out attending and going up to my grandparent’s house for Christmas. Time will tell how I manage to pull that one off. The only thing is, I haven’t seen anything of him since he told me about that. He has stopped coming around entirely. I guess that I am going to have to find a new set of friends here because he is a bit too ‘busy’ to come see me at any time it seems. I think I am going to run an experiment to see how long this goes. It is a bit upsetting that he has no time for me anymore when before when he knew me, he didn’t really have any friends. I guess I must be that forgettable. On the other hand, Matthew has become a lot more talkative. I don’t know what has really prompted that change, but it is nice to have him to talk to. I guess he is just getting bored at work at times. Hopefully it will continue.

Another week

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 22:31:39 +0000

Well, it has been another week since I have written here. Brian’s visit was interesting. I think the most interesting to see was how much he had changed after working out in the real world. Reality has set in and he has to do things like get up early and actually go to work. What a concept. It almost makes me scared of leaving and going out into the real world. It was fun to ride with him in his bright yellow vet though.

Spam

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 19:58:32 +0000

I used to think that spammers were some of the lowest form of life on this Earth, but I would have to say that the scammers are worse. I received the following scam a few days ago. I swear, I have never seen anything so despicable in my life:

Dear Beloved,

It is a privileged to hear from God and it gives me joy to relate my testimony to you haven received instruction from God through divine revelation.

work, work, work

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 19:44:21 +0000

I finally got some work done in my office today. Too often I had gone there and got nothing done. In playing with 10.4, I have discovered that it is not stable enough to really run. As a result, I think that I am going to switch back to just running 10.3. At least I got some coding done, now just need to get the socket connection back to working.

Interesting day

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:09:41 +0000

Well, I put the server back today, started her up, and watched the chaos begin. My first issue was running software update. The first run crashed, wonderful. I ran it again, and eventually got it all done. Then the guest account was still not completely locked down, so it was going up and down while the users gripped. After that, I looked at the web logs. There were several requests per second for the copyrighted material that cause the server to go down in the first place. I changed the .htaccess on the dir so that instead of presenting these users with a password, it returned a 410, GONE! Maybe the idiots will take a hint. I change it so that it logs the referrer URL as well, and found that this was linked from some ftp site. I may change it so it presents them with a page that says in not so nice terms to get lost.

Busy day

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:03:59 +0000

Today has been busy. First there was a new fire release, and so I had some fun dealing with that. Then I went and picked up the apple server so that we can re-do it. After I did that, I brought it back here and fixed a torrent of little bugs in fire when I copied the contents off the HD on the server for backup. Then, in order to test the bugs fixes, I pulled out the laptop and booted it into 10.2 for testing. The result, an interesting picture:

Work_on_Machines.jpg

Not much going on

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:20:23 +0000

Not much has been going on here. Fire has kept me a bit busy since I decided that it would be nice to go through and push for a 1.1 version relatively soon. Yahoo added to the fun because as of last night they decided they were going to block third party clients. That block lasted one day, we are back up and running.

I have decided that I am not going to live in this apartment again next year. The guy who lives behind me plays his guitar at all hours of the night, and the guys across from me have cars whose stereo you can hear a mile off. On top of that, they sit in the parking lot listening to their horrible music and do so at all hours of the night. On the plus side, the apartment has installed sun screens over the windows, so it should help with the heat. Time will tell.

Been a while

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 22:18:54 +0000

It now has been over a week since I have written here. I guess that has been since not much of interest has happened over the past week. Mostly I have spent time talking to some of the other developers and that is just about it.

My advisor suggested some more methods I could implement. I guess I should get down to writing them :)

I just finished a proposal for a new architecture in Fire to handle the accounts and services. We will see how it is accepted by the other devs.

Swimming to school

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 19:41:39 +0000

It has been a while since I have written in here. One of the more interesting things that has happened since was Sunday afternoon. Erin was up for an ultimate tournament, and so I went out there to watch her play. In the process, I managed to get a bit of a sunburn. Most of it being my nose. Oh well, I will survive. It was a nice day outside and we did have some time to spend together along with her friend Lauren. Now she has finally picked up the rest of her stuff. Maybe I will see her again in a week or two.

Getting work done

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 19:53:47 +0000

As a result of the fact that no one is in town, I have actually started to get some work done. Lately though, I have been burying myself in fire development because the other developers are just as available now as they were before the semester ended. I think that things may be changing as far as friendships go, and I may have to start re-evaluating some of my friends. Time will tell there.

No one is here

Tue, 18 May 2004 22:56:10 +0000

I swear, there is no one in town at all. I go wonder through Zachry, and I see about 3 people. I did run into one of my former students yesterday and one of his friends that reminds me greatly of Tim. I have had a few talks with Wenyan, but that is about all.

In the mean time, it is research and little else. I have gotten quite a bit done recently. I may actually get to writing soon.

Lazy Sunday

Sun, 16 May 2004 20:52:12 +0000

Well, another lazy Sunday has passed. Usually I do nothing but a bit of Fire development, but today I actually went to my office and worked on my research. I guess this will be a sign of what is to come for the remainder of this summer. Nothing but work, work, work. I hope that means that I will actually get some things done, but time will tell there if it actually happens or not.

Move out

Sat, 15 May 2004 22:13:00 +0000

Well, it was not me that moved out, but everyone else. I spent several hours helping Erin move out. I still remember how much junk I accumulated by my senior year. She couldn’t fit everything in her car so some of it is here in my apartment.

Now the issue is what to do now that everyone has left. There is literally nothing to do. I am trying to figure out if I know anyone who is still in town this summer. Nathan will be back in a week, but since he is dating Andrea, that means I will continue to only see him once in a blue moon.

Strange Week

Tue, 11 May 2004 22:08:37 +0000

I believe this is the first semester in which I didn’t have any finals. This made for a really strange week as everyone else was. I guess that it could be worse and I could be one of the many having to take a final, but in the mean time I get to tease everyone else.

In some ways I am looking forward to finals being over so that people might actually be able to talk, but I know that one this happens, everyone is going to leave town and I will see them once in a blue moon. Strange when you look at it that way. I guess that I will just have to look forward to the fall when life can return a bit to “normal”.

Another lazy Saturday

Sat, 08 May 2004 19:07:46 +0000

Well, today has been another lazy Saturday. Not much has been going on this day. I went to my office for a bit, came back, did some Fire development. I have spent most of the day listing to the Left Behind Series on audio books. Already more than half way through the series.

That is about all there is to report this day.

Back from Vacation

Fri, 07 May 2004 10:54:39 +0000

Well, I got back from my vacation with my parents in the Hill Country. It was nice to get away from school and do something else. Since I got back on Tuesday, this week has been rather strange. I have noticed a lot more people asking me how I was doing and things like that. I guess that I was missed a bit. Oh well.

Nothing much to report here. I have the cron job running to blog here, but it doesn’t work when I just close the program. Maybe it will eventually force me to do something. Anyway, another day at the office is in store for me. Until next time.

Another Month Later

Sun, 25 Apr 2004 13:23:44 +0000

Well, here we go, another month has passed, and I have not written in here. I guess that I am either too lazy, too busy, or both. Oh well. I am going to be spending the next week with my parents. It will be nice to spend some time away from school and doing nothing but relaxing work :). This should make an interesting week.

Fire development has really taken a turn. We released version 1.0, so I put my changes since then into CVS. Many like the changes. Most of them were long overdue. Time will tell where this goes.

One month later

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 19:26:31 +0000

Well, it has been a month since I wrote here. I guess I will continue the tradition of random entry times.

As for the card, I got it to work a bit. Intel hardware is still a piece of junk though. I want to throw the thing in the trash since that is where it belongs. I spent the past two weeks trying to get the optical ethernet cabling to work, and it didn’t. I found out that the firmware in the Dell Switch was being stupid and negotiating wrong. Well, I guess I should be happy that I got it to work now.

Next Day

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 21:14:23 +0000

What a surprise… I wrote in here the next day. Maybe I will actually make something of this blog yet.

I didn’t get much done at the office today. The card didn’t work again as usual. I spent most of the day going through mailing list archives to see if anyone else had this problem. I didn’t find any matches. That is worrisome because there is either no easy solution, or the thing is broken. I will put together a write-up of the problem and have Dr. Reddy send a message to the guy at Intel to see if he has any ideas.

2 months!

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 21:48:17 +0000

Good grief… Has it really been two months since I wrote in here? Wow, I guess that means I should be paying more attention to the thing.

My G5 has been behaving well. I have to watch myself on it so that I don’t spend all my time playing games. I have already beaten Halo, but that game is just too much fun to play. Strange that it can play so well only having 512MB of Ram. I still need to go order more. The laptop has actually become a portable computer now. It is nice to use it as such.

Semester coming to a close

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 20:29:56 +0000

Wow, has it really been that long since I made a post here? Nearly a month. Well, the G5 has preformed well over the past several weeks. I have been making good use of it on many occasions. I have drug it to Breakaway twice so far, and each time I have had to open it up to show the guts to people there. It is fun. I had predicted 2 weeks for the iPod, well, it is still not here. In calling about the status, I am told that it will be one week from now. As a result of them being so slow, I am going to get a $50 item free from the Apple Store. I decided on Halo. It is a fun game, and I have a computer that can handle it. I figured why not. I would not buy it on my own, but I didn’t see anything else there that I really wanted.

Order Here

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 17:25:21 +0000

Well, the entire order is finally here. The problem: the iPod has failed. I took it out, downloaded music to it, and let it charge until it said it was done. Then I took the thing jogging. After playing one song, the thing froze, so, I reset it. Play another song, freeze, reset. After about 5 resets, it only started showing a folder icon with an exclamation point on it. I took that to mean that it was a broken file system. I tried doing a reset on the thing, only to notice that I can hear things rattling around inside. I think the HD arm is broken. Going through the return procedure on the web site was no help because it said that the serial number is invalid. I had to wait the next day to call them to let me try to return the thing. What a pain. I predict at least 2 weeks before I get one back.

Screen here

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 18:07:26 +0000

Well, my new 20" Cinema display arrived. As you can see from the image, it is much bigger than my 15" powerbook screen. The first part of my new computer is here. Getting this picture lead to some fun. It turns out, the batteries in my camera were dead, so I had to try to charge them. I tried my keyboard’s in the mean time (wireless), and they didn’t work. I was starting to wonder if the camera was broken. I found some batteries, and they worked fine, so I guess I will have to replace the batteries in the keyboard sometime soon. Not too bad considering that I have not changed them for 15 months.

New_Screen_Behind_Powerbook.jpg

Busy, Busy, Busy

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 10:25:16 +0000

Well, yesterday I had my first presentation to my advisor and his other students. It was strange because I was not presenting research, but instead a tool that I had to use on the way. I got to talk about VMWare, which is basically a virtual machine. To my surprise, the others there thought that it might be useful tool for their research. Then afterward, I was talking with one of the students about how the network filtering works in the 2.4 linux kernels, and she suggested that I should present on that some time too, since most of them end up modifying the linux kernel to do their work.

End of another day

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 22:28:59 +0000

Well, it is the end of another day. I am sitting here listening to cmradio after having just finished the homework for CPSC 629. It is a great time to relax and talk with friends on IM. Last night was a great time at Breakaway. We had a record number of people on the stream. That is the most important because that is the part that I run. Anyway, it was lots of fun to set up three cameras again. We just need to get the static cam in a better position or more zoom. We will figure it out eventually. The evening was topped off by seeing Jason fall over the chairs for the second time that night.

First Post

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 18:51:31 +0000

Well, this is the first time that I have posted a blog. It seems to be all the rage around my friends, so I decided that I might as well start doing it as well. Truthfully, the only reason I am doing this is because a shareware blog software has been made free to me through my .mac account, so this is more of a test than anything else.

Well, this day has been a mishmash of various things. I ended up spending a lot of the day doing homework for CPCS 629. The homework for that class is long and tedious. At least 410 is just the opposite. The rest of the day has been spent wasting time. It is so nice to be during the weekend.

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