Oh happy day

Today was quite the day. We had our first big presentation at work, which was a bit scary but went well. We had to present to our second-line manager, who was in town (from Germany) for a little while and decided she would schedule an hour for us to present the project to her. For several reasons, my team (with no input from me) decided that I would basically do the whole presentation and they would each chime in only a minute or two (the presentation lasted an hour). The fact that I was basically representing the whole team made me a bit more nervous than the fact that it was a second line manager, but thankfully she was pretty laid-back and everything went well. So that was one good thing.

Then later in the day when I got back from lunch, Warren (my department's manager but do to an odd timing in my hiring not my official manager) called me into his office and told me that I did a really good job, which was nice of him. We chatted for a little while and then all of a sudden he asked me what my plan was for the next year or so job-wise. I told him that I in a perfect world I would get my Master's and then go right back to working where I am now, and that I would really love to work there during my next few semesters if I could. He said he was glad to know that and he would talk to Jeff (my official manager) about it. This is very encouraging, and boy would it ever make my financial situation a lot more solid for the next 9 months.

Then we had an IBM intern barbecue which was cool because it was getting paid to hang out at Bowdoin Park and eat free food, plus I saw a surprising number of people I know from Marist now, and it was nice to see them.

When I got home I decided to take advantage of my momentum and see if I could get Nina's wireless working. Her card had no drivers and we had no idea what it was but wireless is really the only convenient option for her given our apartment's setup so I decided to buckle down and see if I could figure it out. Then I realized that I bet Windows can tell you the PCI IDs for a card and fortunately I was right. The device ID was 8180 so tada it's a Realtek 8180 and that was all set. The only thing I had trouble with was it kept asking for IPs outside my network range and since my DHCP server wasn't being very intelligent it was getting them and then of course not being able to communicate with anything, including the router. I fixed this though. Read on for the exciting conclusion.

Finally, I decided to master the configuration of dnsmasq (dns/dhcp server running on my router) and make it use static configuration for selected computers so that any computer that I plan on having on my network regularly will always get the same IP, and also make it so they can communicate with each other using hostnames, not IP addresses. This wasn't terribly difficult, because the syntax is quite simple, but I'm still proud of it.

And tomorrow's Friday. :)

And another thing

One last quick thought before I go to bed. Today when I was making a graphic for an upcoming presentation at work, I once again reiterated that The Gimp was downright impossible sometimes. Sean pointed out that The Gimp is an image manipulator, not an image creator. He told me to try out this thing called Inkscape. It's a vector drawing program (think Flash or Adobe Illustrator), so its images scale beautifully and it's got a pretty nice interface once you stop trying to use it like it's The Gimp. My favorite thing so far is the clone feature. If you need to have two things that are identical but in different locations, then you can draw it once and create a clone, which at first seems like a simple copy and paste but then you realize that if you decide you don't like them you can make the change on one and it will propogate to all the clones. Really cool.

It also has all those nifty things like aligning shapes with each other and whatnot that The Gimp can't do. I guess it has something to do with the fact that each thing you draw in Inkscape is an object, not just an action that changes some pixels, so the program knows where the center is and can change the color property even if things are partially obscuring it, and other such things as well.

Anyway, it's very cool. I highly suggest giving it a shot for anything from complex graphics to quick doodles.

Ninja'd, router. Ninja'd.

Over the past few days, various attempts on my part to get the router to cooperate have spiraled out of control and this morning I finally managed to lock myself out of even the failsafe mode. The router was still functioning but it just wouldn't let me connect in any way. It was time for Kershaw.

About five minutes after he got his hands on it, he guessed that it was at least still asking for an IP on the WAN (read: internet) port, and logically set up a DHCP server to give it one. This then gave him an entry point where he discovered that essentially everything in memory was completely whacked. The thing wasn't even bringing up the LAN interfaces at all, and seemed to have forgotten which interfaces were even supposed to be LAN. A little poking around and some looking up of things and everything seemed fine. I brought it home (this was done at Sci-Fi night at Sean's) and everything is shiny. So go Mike.

My next task (I should be able to do this one without too much pain) is to configure the dnsmasq setup on the router so that the various machines that will connect to it regularly (my stuff, Nina's comp, Matt and Mike's respective laptops) will actually get static IPs and resolvable hostnames. This would make transferring things between them much simpler, and also allow for port forwarding, which would be nice. There is of course the danger of making it so that no one can get an IP but that's what failsafe mode is for. And of course there's always Mike...

Back online, mostly

Ah, it's nice to be back online again. Granted, right now we can't get the router to get an IP from the cable modem so it's just one computer at a time, but that's a heck of a lot better than the no internet at all that we've had for the last 3 weeks or so. We also have cable now; we aren't watching a ton of TV but it's so nice to have something other than video games for electronic entertainment and the free month of HBO is kind of neat.

Also, right now I'm trying out my new keyboard and I'm liking it so far. It's one of those fancy ergonomic split keyboards. I bought my desk at Staples today and while I was there I noticed the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (twice as cool as 2000), and according to the girl that was getting the desk for us I have 14 days to return it with the packaging if I don't like it. It works well enough in Linux (not every single key sends a keycode but enough for my use), and I've gotta say it's really quite comfortable. It's also not quite as drastic as ergonomic keyboards were when they first came out (no tiny keys) so it's not too weird to get used to. The only thing I'm having trouble with is using Ctrl or Alt key combos and getting back to the home position quickly, but I'll get used to that.

Finally tapping an available resource

Yesterday was clean-up day. I vacuumed the apartment for probably over an hour, because the previous tenants apparently had no idea how to use the crevice tool on their vacuum. The carpet and wood trim at the edges of the room actually changed color when I cleaned them. That was kind of gross, but the pound and half of dust I got out of the living room really gave me a sense of accomplishment. Nina vacuumed her room as well and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, so the house is looking pretty nice right now.

Then we headed to the space, which was a full house (a rather rare occasion) for more clean-up. This was the best kind of clean-up though, where something is picked up and its owner has 30 seconds to identify it and defend its usefullness our it gets thrown out. A lot of stuff got thrown out, and what didn't was reorganized rather effectively.

Then me, Nina, Matt, Mike, Sean and Susan went to this place called Millhouse Panda. It's a slightly upscale Chinese place, and it was a great time. We laughed a ton and I got the *ahem* "Peking Chicken Stuffed With Mushrooms On a Bed Of Steamed Vegetables." Also known as number 28. It was really good, and for desert we got fried apples. They had so much sugar on them. It was great.

And as for this resource I'm finally tapping, you might notice that I am posting to my blog, which means I'm using the internet, and it's not a work day. This is possible because I finally realized I live 45 seconds away from the Space, which has a whole lot of internet available. We'll be getting cable and internet at the house on Friday, and this (plus work) should hold me over nicely until then.

Final thing before I leave you alone. The main reason I really want internet these days is for my money stuff, especially since I've bought a lot of stuff lately and I'm switching banks to a Hudson Valley one, and I've got to say that the Hudson Valley one is pretty sweet. Better interest, slim-to-none for account minimums, ATMs that you can deposit a check at and it will actually read the numbers right off the check and confirm the amount with you, and most importantly (as of right now), their routing number listed right on their website. This is clutch because I'm running out of money in my Rockville checking account and have no convenient (or fast) way of putting it back in, but I've got to pay off my credit card somehow and I have a couple paychecks just sitting in my HVCU account.

At least it got figured out eventually

This is for the programmers.

Over the past two days, I've spent about 9 hours trying to do something at work involving Xen and squashfs, a special filesystem. It needed into the kernel, and the way you do this is place a patch in the appropriately named "patches" directory in the build tree and tada it gets pulled in next to you build. Pretty nifty, except something has been going wrong and squashfs support just wasn't happening. I think I finally just found the problem. It seems that the make scripts look for any *.patch files in the patches directory. For example, my patch could be called something like squashfs-3.0.patch. However, if you name it squashfs-3.0-patch, your patch will not be pulled in and it will take you a long time to notice this. Nine hours for a fucking period. Oy.