pretendamazing

My internet has been having problems for a couple of days at home, so I contacted TW help via twitter this morning. Unsurprisingly, they want to rule out the router.

I had hoped to connect my MacBook Pro to the modem and share the connection out to the other computers, but that doesn’t seem to work. All googling for stuff while working on my research now gets to be done on my phone.

My modem is in my office, which has poor lighting and window setup so I use it as a store room. Instead of cleaning it to use it for one day and be near the computer that’s connected to see if it loses access, I wrote a script that will alert me if something goes wrong.

The email didn’t get sent as soon as network returned because Mail had complained about not being able to access servers, but after I manually dismissed those it sent out. The actual script I have running will send an email as shown but also display a message box with the email’s contents (most importantly the time).

After failing miserably in April, I decided I’d give 30 Days of Biking another shot.

I signed up on Dailymile (profile) and tracked my rides. I also joined two challenges: one was 30dob and the other was 125 miles in September.

I wasn’t sure how the 125 miles would go, but if I fail at it, oh well. My goal was to do the 30 days, whatever my total distance is.

Turns out 125 miles isn’t very far.

Those are my lifetime stats, starting from September 1^st. 302.04 miles in September, taking roughly 75.05 hours. Done.

Well, not quite. I’m going for another ride tonight.

Edit: Yup, I went for that other ride. 316.58 miles for September.

As most of the 3 or so people who read this probably know, I was busy last month taking and editing a ton of pictures of the 2010 Special Olympics National Games.

This was only the second SONG in the US ever and happened to be right here in Lincoln.

Since this blog is mostly me rambling on about things going on in my life, the SO posts wouldn’t fit terribly well. I emailed Thaddeus of To Do In This Town, a local site of upcoming events in Lincoln, and suggested that he start adding review style articles about events that did happen in this town, starting with me writing about the Games.

I’m continuing to write about things I go to, but for starters, here are my SONG articles:

1. Torch Run for the 2010 Special Olympics
2. Cessna Airlift Signals start to 2010 Special Olympics National Games
3. Opening Ceremony of the 2010 Special Olympics National Games in Lincoln Nebraska
4. S.O.N.G. Powerlifting Shows the Power of Sportsmanship.
5. Red Cross and Softball at the 2010 S.O.N.G.
6. Special Olympics Town
7. S.O.N.G. Closing Ceremony

Since the concert, I’ve been busy. Too busy!.

I’ve had a lot of side projects going on lately, but a few things have taken up considerable amounts of my time (and taken time away from the others).

Curly (awesome site, no?) and I are working on something awesome, but it’s slow moving as we’re both swamped with other things. But it will be grand.

I’ve taken a couple of trips so far since classes ended. I went back home for about a week with intent of it being a vacation. I brought my research laptop to spend a morning working on research. I ended up spending most of the time I was there working on that and a side project instead of actually taking a vacation. My body and brain are in serious need of rest, but at least that helped.

The second trip was two weekends ago. I went up to Sioux Falls and grabbed Trigg then went to Minneapolis for Travis’ birthday. Fun times. Buying drinks for pretty girls with a cell phone? Sounds like a good idea to me, Tim!

The last thing that’s taken any meaningful amount of time other than random small projects is photography. A flickrwalk here or there, a few odd shots somewhere, and editing the pictures. I always feel so horrible after I do that because it’s not at all related to the things I need to be doing, but it (helps) keep me sane, so I keep doing it.

By far, most of my time has been spent on my research.

In the last four weeks or so, I’ve been working on one thing: getting Xen working on the laptop I have from the department.

There’s this thing called PAE that allows a 32-bit machine to map up to 64gb of RAM. Awesome! You can use more than 4gb. Just one problem: the Pentium M with a 400mhz bus doesn’t support PAE.

All Linux distributions that I’ve tried have Xen packages, but they all require PAE. I haven’t found anything specifying either way, but it appears (based on paravirt_ops stuff I found) that newer versions of Xen flat-out require PAE.

With that assumption, it hit me that I should try an old version. So armed with Xen 3.0.4_1 and Linux 2.6.16.33-xen, I have Xen booting Ubuntu 9.04 with an old kernel. Win! I’m running into a slight problem though.

Apparently, 1gb of RAM is insufficient for Xen + Linux + default Ubuntu Desktop services. Processes keep getting killed. Specifically, modprobe and python are spawning over and over and being killed by Xen. If I log in, bash eventually gets killed. I asked in ##xen on freenode, but (as with other times I’ve tried), they’re completely worthless to me. My questions always go unanswered there. That’s a whole other rant.

I had about 10 minutes to kill before I had to pack my stuff and head to my meeting, thus a post! Time to go to a meeting then come home and deal with one of those side projects (trying to help a relative turn a GEDCOM file into a book, not going well) again and go back to research until bed. Fun fun fun! Vacation please?

Awesome.

np: Dub in Life from the album “Europop” by Eiffel 65

At our meeting this morning, Joe mentioned that my project this summer really needs some branding. That is, of course, unless we want a pink background and a logo that’s projected by copyright+trademark by an area school.

Given that awesome description, what could make it better? Joe had an idea: a gradient background.

Be careful what you wish for.

I apologize for the big white spots. I figured I shouldn’t show an unaltered image of my work here until it’s actually complete and can’t figure out how to do a simple blur in GIMP. I’m too lazy to Google it. Where’s Photoshop when I need it?

I want next month. Or at least the last week in this one.

Last week, my bike was broken. I walked to/from work, about 50 miles in total. While my legs were sore because I didn’t stretch at all the first day, it wasn’t too bad. Oh, except for ALL THE BLISTERS. They’re (mostly) healed now, though, and I have my bike back. Yay!

This week, I have work. Lots and lots of work. Without going into the boring details, my project for the summer is split up into a handful of milestones. The first one was simple, the second is where coding begins.

There wasn’t really much thought into how the milestones relate to each other when they were set. As it turns out, milestone 2 requires most of the functionality of milestone 3. During a meeting, this was pointed out and the milestones were going to be reworked. They weren’t.

The second milestone is due Wednesday. I’ve barely started on the second half of it. I think I could get it completed just during work, but I’m not sure, so I’m working extra. I worked a “short” 9 hour day today, biked home, showered and did some cleaning and such, then got my laptop set up to work here. I’ve been working since 18:30.

I’ll probably stay up until around midnight, sleep a few hours, get up and go to work. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck, all of the extra time spent these next few days means I’ll hopefully have a bunch of time to finish milestone 3 since the two pieces of that that I have left require a lot of extra learning.

On a non-work-related note, I get to see Lisa this weekend.

np: River’s Dance from the album “Firefly” by Greg Edmonson [I think I actually prefer the Serenity soundtrack. It has the whole orchestral thing going on too, but it has a lot of acoustic guitar too.]

Update: (2008-06-16 20:46)

    /**
     * Match a partial string in a column.
     *
     * Like will look for the pattern in the column given. Like accepts
     * the wildcards '_' matching a single character and '%' matching
     * any number of characters.
     *
     * @param string $expression the name of the expression to match on
     * @param string $pattern the pattern to match with.
     */
    public function like( $expression, $pattern )

Thank you, ezcDatabase! I’ve been trying to figure out how I could best implement a search feature. MySQL has a MATCH clause, but I don’t know if that’s SQL standard. Even if it is, which standard? SQL92? Some other? Which DBMS support it? We don’t necessarily want to tie our software to MySQL, even if it’s going to be run exclusively by us for the time being. It looks like ezcQueryExpression::like() might do what I need.

np: Red Hot Moon from the album “Indestructible” by Rancid

My bike is expensive.

First, I bought a $500 bike a bit over a year ago. In the past two weeks, the following have been added:

1. New wheels
2. Fenders to keep my clothes clean
3. A rear rack, which will work great for holding my lock
4. Lights^*

^* Coming soon; I’m deciding what ones to get

While it’s costing many, many, many times more than the price of my previous bikes (thanks for the years of horrible bicycles, Wal-Mart!), this one’s great.

The reason for the upgrades (some, like the lights, for legal reason; some, the fenders, for monetary issues; some, the rack and new wheels, for efficiency and convenience) are largely due to my job. I live on the south end of town and work on the north end. I could drive, but that would involve a lot of quarters in the parking meters or paying to park at the parking garage. It’s much cheaper, much healthier, and better for le monde to bike.

My estimate for the number of miles being around 1,200 for the summer. That’s simply for getting to and from work. According to the Calories Burned Estimator, I will burn about 1,800 calories a day if it takes 45 minutes each way. As I don’t have internet down there yet, I’ve been up in Brookings since I left Lincoln and don’t know how long it will take me to get to/from work. Also, that estimate is based on going 14-16 mph; they don’t offer anything higher. Add in everything that I’m likely to do on a daily basis and I’m up to 2,761

Update 1: Oh yeah, and I also have a new water bottle + holder and a speedometer/odometer/other-ometer. I’ve had them for longer than 2 weeks, but they still add to the massive cost of my bike hehe.

Update 2: I meant to link to this originally. It recommends you bike 2 miles a day. It’s great. Go buy yourself a bike and do it. NOW!

np: Alcohol from the album “Stunt” by Barenaked Ladies

As previously mentioned, I have a project for a class that involves modifying SSCLI.

I got a late start on the project with my two other classes taking constant priority over ARS. I got started on it Saturday; that’s still plenty of time to get it done on time. I got it on the system and building, woot. There’s just one problem: editing files in the VM is always really laggy for me, especially inside Visual Studio. Whether using VS or not, I don’t want to have to type 1 character/second to avoid massive typos.

So I’ll just mount the directory on the host (OS X). Wait, VMware is having issues (I’ve never had luck with VMware networking; Fusion generally plays nice but not now) so I can’t see the guest from the host. But the guest can see the host, so I’ll mount the source there! Cancel that, SSCLI won’t build. (It fails with spaces in the name and apparently with network drives.)

I set about looking for a Windows machine (XP SP 2+ or Server 2003+) that I could have full access to. Scott has an XP SP 3 laptop that he set up RDP on (which turned out to be insanely over-complicated for some reason) that he plugged into an ethernet port on his router and let me at.

But how do I get the files? Wait, I’m an idiot. Version control! While it took a few hours to do, I got the entire source tree in Subversion (it kept dying when I tried to add the entire directory tree; turns out it’s 372mb) and got it checked out on Scott’s laptop.

It won’t build. I tried everything I could. Platform SDK for Windows XP, Visual C++ 2008 Express (not supported). Visual C++ 2005 Express. Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2 + Visual C++ 2005 Express.

For now, I’ve gone back to the virtual machine. Then I had to check the entire source tree out. Except when the entire complex is empty, I’m lucky to get 90K/s down; 372mb of source != my friend.

I went to take a shower while it downloaded and realized I’m an idiot. With VMware Tools, I can drag and drop folders. Subversion checkouts are perfectly fine with being relocated. I could have drug /Users/rnelson/Documents/sscli to C:\sscli and it would have worked perfectly. I’m an idiot.

np: Nude from the album “In Rainbows” by Radiohead

I love Bad Religion.

Anyway…

My Algorithms class voted unanimously to forego a traditional final exam. There is a lot of material that Dr. Riedesel would like to cover, but with a review yesterday and no more class, he couldn’t. Yesterday we spent learning new material. For the final, we will read a chapter ahead of time, go and have an in-depth lecture for 1.5hr on the material, then finish with 30 minutes for a short quiz. Given that the second half of this class included NP-completeness, I’m really glad to not have a regular test. Of course, I’ll need to be able to quickly recognize and complete reductions somewhere in the near future, but I don’t want them hurting my grade any further right now.

I worked a bit on some Embedded Systems homework last night then spent the rest of the night (and early morning) hanging out with one of my roommates and friends. I got to bed around 2:55, fell asleep around 3:30.

I woke up (naturally, of course) around 7:30. I wasn’t tired until about 14:00. I spent the morning finishing my Embedded homework and started (then finished in the afternoon) my ARS final. The ARS final was supposed to take 1-1.5 hours to complete–it took me much more. I think I fell asleep for about 15 seconds at one point there. Oops. While it took forever to complete on such little sleep, it’s done now.

Aside from that pesky packing thing, a meeting with Witty late next week, and the last lecture+quiz in Algorithms, all I have left are two projects.

The first is my group project for Embedded. We’re making a wireless camera robot that we’ve named stalkerBot. I am writing the control software for the end-user. It’s (possibly) near complete. I’m mostly waiting on other bits to be finished at this point so that I can see what does/doesn’t work. I can only think of one other piece that needs to be finished before I can start testing. I will also be writing an initial revision of our documentation since I love writing.

The second is a research project for ARS. I am learning more about the type system in the SSCLI. This is what the meeting late next week with Witty will be about.

I’m out of here on Friday and heading to Sioux Falls for the summer. I’ll start work the next week and go until a few days before I need to be on campus in the fall.

np: Fucked Reality from the album “No Gods / No Managers” by Choking Victim