FremLog

There are many ways to achieve the goal stated in the title of this post. Crime is one option. Several student bodies hold that organizations such as campus bookstores engage in it on a frequent, if not regular basis; though we can hardly blame “them.” We can, and do, blame semi-anonymous people on the internet however. People like “Thor”, who shoot lighting from their fists while cutting up cardboard yogurt boxes for use in shipping illicit materials via our great nation’s postal servicemen.

Allow me to elaborate. One of the used textbooks we bought off Amazon arrived today with the phrase, “EXAMINATION COPY” plastered in large, unfriendly letters across the front cover. An explosiony star-burst encouraged instructors to “keep the cost of textbooks down!” by “See back cover.” It was an intriguing invitation, though I am but a student. Yet, must not all good instructors frequently lower themselves to the status of student in order to expand their mind and return to professoring refreshed anew? Having thoroughly rationalized my position in the matter, I flipped the tome over. There were several lengthy paragraphs to which the star-burst indubitiously referred, but as the son of a lawyer my eyes were immediately drawn to the small print at the bottom.

Behold! Engraved in ink was a message from the publisher informing me that dissemination or resale of the work was prohibited.

I sensed irony.

A new wifi network appeared this morning, “Punknet.” Yes, Punknet. Seriously? I’m tempted to treat as I would an insolent newbie speaking in leet who endeavors to build a castle on a previously undiscovered tiny island just off the coast of my magnificent kingdom. Namely, by leading a raiding party party out to investigate and extend it either a boon of friendship or notification of doom. In this case, the signal pretty weak, so my glorious civilization and his rather less glorious might-be-mistaken-for civilization will probably be at peace. But one can never be too careful about anything with the word “punk” in it.

On the other hand, my wifi network is named after our cocker spaniel, so I suppose I can’t complain much about stupid names. Except that spaniels aren’t stupid. They’re amazing. How amazing? Cry  ’Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war!

Woah, so this is what sleep is like. *ahem*

Everything is all over the place in room. Most of my textbooks are about a fraction of a centimeter too tall to fit anywhere in my bookcases neatly. Random books I never use, various burned CD-Rs, and paper scrap litter various elevated surfaces; this is partially due to my philosophy that the easiest way to clean up a book case is to take everything off it, then put everything back on. The other part is due to the current complete lack of floor space. >_<

Summer of Code marches on! Except not. The new router I set up for family which seemed to work so nicely over Christmas break now seems barely capable of transmitting a signal which I can receive consistently. I get disconnected from our home network and reconnected to our neighbor’s stupid “linksys” signal every ten to thirty minutes. And just forget about it if someone is using the cordless phone or the microwave. A reconnect every ten to thirty minutes doesn’t seem too bad- and I keep telling myself this. And [sic, don't care] it woulden’t be, if I didn’t happen to be conversing with someone about how to fix it, or downloading an eclipse update, or something of that nature every time it happened.

Seriously! NetworkManager is driving me crazy. Why on earth can’t I easily blacklist this “linksys” network? It’s freaking weak, weaker than the signal I want to stay connected to. Wicd won’t connect to my network at all. It’s really rather messy. To compound the frustration, the wifi tool in XP seems to have a slightly longer timeout that NM, so I can stay connected in Windows but not Linux. The irony!

Also ironic: the IDE situation on Linux, which is usually my development platform of choice. I installed Arch Linux half way through this past semester because of issues with Ubuntu, and I’ve been absurdly busy since then. Thus, I’ve just been using Gedit and a terminal window with gcc, guile, or whatever compiler/interpreter the situation called for. No sense mucking around with a full fledged IDE for 200 line homework assignments. However, AbiWord has a lot of code. This is by far the most complex project I’ve worked on.

So, after getting thoroughly overwhelmed (and reminding myself that this was the planning/research phase and I didn’t have to start coding in earnest for another three weeks), I decided to take Eclipse for another spin. Problem: it won’t spin. After figuring out how Subclipse worked and getting things syncing off the AbiWord SVN, my wifi connection died, taking Eclipse with it mid-checkout. Now Eclipse freezes on the loading splash screen.

In between the lack of IDE and lack of stable internet connection, I’m getting pretty frustrated. So, I need a plan.

• Teh Internets
  • Construct a Pringles ™ antenna, slap it on the router and point it in the general direction of my laptop.
  • (Plan B) Install OpenWRT (or something similar) on the WRT54G router, then pump up the transmitting power. Pray that the router doesn’t overheat, the FCC doesn’t show up at my door, and that the router doesn’t brick. Any of these are bad as they mean potentially making the internet situation worse. Gah!
• Eclipse (Ideally, after fixing the wifi situation. It’s hard download packages and/or to flame people on IRC when one’s connection drops every other thing.)
  • Visit #archlinux. Complain. Get connection dropped. Be ignored by everyone. (Accomplished)
  • Run Eclipse and get some sort of terminal output. There must be a console debug argument or log or something somewhere.
  • If Eclipse won’t run at all, I’ll fall back upon the “pencil and paper” approach and try drawing out the relationship between things. You laugh, but it’s worked before.
• General Sanity
  • Unpack from school and get boxen out of room.
  • Find mouse. Battling my laptop’s touchpad is not aiding my mood.
  • Unruly mob! Unruly mob!
  • Get something done on AbiWord. Seriously.

That said, I’ve got quite enough to keep me busy right now. Over and out.

So, Facebook got a new feature, Facebook Chat. It looks a lot like Gtalk, but it can only be accessed online on the facebook website. It also comes with an annoying gray bar which covers the entire bottom of the screen and can’t be permanently removed. Joy.

So, I thought it would be a great idea to have Jabber support for this thing. I told them as much.

Will Facebook chat support Jabber in the future?

It would be a shame if it were browser-only or used some proprietary desktop client not compatible with Linux.

They replied.

Hi James,

Thank you for your interest in Facebook Chat.  Unfortunately, the features offered by Facebook Chat do not necessarily match those of other chat clients.  Additionally, Facebook Chat cannot currently be integrated with third party chat applications.  We will keep your suggestion in mind and welcome your feedback as we continue to improve this feature.  Let me know if you have any further questions.

Features? Facebook Chat has features? Additionally, I distinctly remember the word “future” being in there someplace. Meh. Open standards! Interoperability! Pretty please?

Wee! The end of the school year is in sight. Honestly, I felt a lot more in control this point last semester. Since spring break, everything seems like it’s been a blur. An accelerating blur. I can hardly even remember the last week. Well, I can remember specific details about it and sort of piece things together, but I can’t really picture it as a whole. This is probably because I’ve had a bizarre cold/allergy thing coming on, followed by lots of sleeplessness. I have taken to measuring the days past by noting the number of tissues piling up in the trash bag under the sink. That’s probably not a good sign.

Notable events this week have included:

• Getting back an operating systems assignment and not failing. Doing considerably better than failing. Yay.
  • Good thing too, because I was up ’till three AM working on that. >_<
• RAM from NewEgg arriving. Subsequently, my Linux desktop runs a lot zippier and Guild Wars runs smoothly (There are several other games I’d like to test, but haven’t had time). I can have a lot more stuff open before swapping kicks in. In fact, I haven’t managed to hit that point yet. Yay. The laptop also seems to be dumping out a bit more heat. I’m guessing this has impacted the battery life in some way, but my battery is basically a 15 minute UPS at this point.
• Learning that even though you can implement procedural algorithms in a functional language, it doesn’t mean that you should. TEA looses a ton of elegance when written in Haskell. Not to mention it becomes a ton harder to read and understand. Quite disappointing.
  • Thank you Jurassic Park. You have given me a phrase I can apply to just about anything.
  • Taking two programming courses at once is interesting. There is always something due. Always.
• Racquetball tonight? I want to play racquetball. I’ve hardly moved at all this semester, unless you count walking to classes and SAGA. Need physical motion.
• Attending physics TI this evening and having a personal tutor of whom to ask stupid questions.
• Almost walking into a lightpost on Wednesday. This was my second clue that I needed more sleep. (The first was how tired I was.
• Not recalling having difficulty forming coherent sentances while sleep deprived. Amazing! My personal theory is that all speech is simply bypassing the mental facalties. Um, yay?
• Everything I write eventually turning into bulleted lists. Normally I’m able to supress this urge and make the English flow like butter on a rabid bald monkey, but I suspect the aforementioned lack of sleep is overwhelming my English facilities.

My desire to play racquetball seems to be being fulfuilled. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and loose miserably.

So, there’s a third round of Hootenanny auditions. Huzzah!This means the chances of skit from James entering in the running again is much higher than it was several days ago, when the chances were zero.

We even have (extremely busy and pressed for time) actors this time.

To prepare (and because most of the penn2ers are noobs and needed to see it anyway), I watched about half an hour of the show from last year. My previous skit? Painful. Horribly painful and embarrassing. We were nervous, we fudged up lines, and most of the (extremely frequent) puns were either too subtle to show up in dialog, or not funny when they did. Overall, it just didn’t flow well at all.

Part of the issue was just how long and elaborate the lines were. Having taken speech since than, I now realize that part of the issue was that the script was not written to be verbal. One of the great and unique things about authors like Dickens and Wodehouse is that most of their work reads great on paper and sounds great when read out loud. I definitely lack that gift. Hence, the target time for this year is two to three minutes. Much longer than that, and the audience looses interest.

Another part of it was just The Stage and Preparation. Joking around and having fun with a skit while auditioning was great. We were all loose, we had scripts, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we had was a decent skit. I was wrong, but it didn’t really matter at that point because we didn’t know I was wrong, and it’s much easier to convince people that your skit is funny if you think it’s funny.

However, as the event drew closer, I became completely immersed in the dialog. I began to doubt that it was really as humorous as I’d previously supposed. Others in the cast felt the same way, so we began to edit. Humor is so much easier to deliver if you know exactly what part is supposed to be humorous. You can build up to it, emphasize it, and all sorts of wonderful things like that. But after going through the same lines so many times, we lost track of what was funny.

The writer behind Portal was interviewed recently, and he said something that resonated with me.

“Tough guy dialogue is just about as macho the 50th time you hear it. Funny dialogue is funny once — maybe.”

I can’t really say much about macho dialog as I can’t write it without instantly deleting my work and washing my hands to get rid of the slimy cliche,  but the latter part is definitely true about humor. This year, I am relying much more heavily on 3rd parties to see how much they laugh when reading the script.

But there are still issues. Especially tying it off neatly. Everyone loves a climax directly followed by a witty comment. Do you have any idea how insane that is to write? This is why half my skits don’t even have real endings and sort of trail off into the distance, much like this post.

Ah, well. At least I can write code.

My roommate and I are both nerds. My nerdy nature is probably already widely known to people online (due in part to this blog), and to associates in The Real World (due to my attire, language, topics of conversation, and general social awkwardness). However, I felt it necessary to establish that my roommate is with me on this.

So, what did we do with part of our extended, three day weekend? No, I can truthfully say that it had absolutely nothing to do with the dixie-cups. No! We were constructive! We built a Beowulf cluster!

Behold: Project FragMano.

While, in the past, a project to get a permanent gaming server running for my dorm floor was titled this, the majority of gamers are gone, and it’s much too cool a name to waste.

What you see here (aside from my back and amazing Hootenuity t-shirt) is our (poor) estimate of about 3.5Ghz of combined processing power. They’ll be running Ubuntu Linux (server install) with OpenMosix. We’ll use them for rendering Blender stuff, possibly a little folding@home, and (of course) seeing if we can program games that utilize the cluster effectively.

Right now, the task is getting the stupid things running, much less talking to each other. Two of them are missing vital organs such as hard disks, ram and cables. One of them is missing a processor. A few are under the mistaken belief that they have no physical storage media implanted within them.We’re working on it. Andy is a hybrid hardware/software guy, and I’m mostly software, so it works out quite nicely. My priority is installing Linux, recompiling the kernel, and getting the cluster software on as many of them as possible, while he figures out the happy hardware and network configuration. Or something. In theory.

We would like to note that there are now no less than eleven x86 based machines in the room. There are even more computers than that if you count our calculators, the hacked routers, and Andy’s game console. Isn’t being a computer science major just amazing?

Check out our Flickr stream for more photos of our progress as it develops.

This is how I spend so much stupid time not doing homework.

1. I need to do physics homework like a good student
2. It’s online! How handy. Let’s go to Lon-Cappa
3. Hmm. This problem requires that I use the gravitational acceleration constant for the moon. I don’t know that, and it’s not stated in the problem or the book.
4. I know! Wikipedia. Not always 100% reliable, but can be handy for things like this.
5. That’s a really short article. Doesn’t have the number I need. But hey, look! It’s a reference to faked moon landings. Wow!
6. Ok, don’t get distracted. Some other website must have it.
7. Volia! 1.62m/s^2. How easy!
8. Gah! It says the answer was wrong! Stupid site gave me bad info. Good thing I’ve still got four tries left on the problem.
9. Click! I close the tab of the treacherous website. Oh, look. It’s the wikipedia page on faked moon landings.
10. Time passes…
11. Wait, it’s how late? Gah!

Tune in next week, when James SSHes to letnet… and certain doom!

I just completed the first programming assignment of the semester! Huzzah. Clock time: about five hours for ~100 lines of code. Blah. Most of the main code was written in like fourty-five minutes. Alll the rest was debug. *sigh*.

I assume C++ gets faster with practice. Python, thou shall be missed.

While preparing for my world lit final exam, I used the study sheet prepared by the professor to aid in memorizing facts about Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, Epictetus, Justin Martyer, and many others.

Upon receiving the exam, one of the first questions I saw was similar to (but not the same as) the following:

Which masterwork featured the character Gilgamesh?
A. The Odyssey
B. The Aeneid
C. The Epic of Gilgamesh

I’m so glad I studied into the wee hours of the morning for this thing. I can’t decide whether to be happy or depressed.