Good News for Next Semester

Two good things happened today. The first was that I visited the Registrar's Office today and confirmed the rumor going around my grad classes that grad students only need to take 9 credits per semester to be counted as full-time students. The second was Dr. Coleman saying he'd be up for doing an independent study with me next semester. I want to do XenGL as a project. It's got network programming, threading, and graphics, so that's lots of stuff to impress the people who have to approve the proposal (Dr. Coleman included). He actually hasn't even heard everything yet, but I'm sure he'll like it, since he teaches the network programming and game programming classes, which means he likes networked stuff and likes graphics. The only bump in the road could be that I want to do it in Python instead of Java, but I think I can get through that easily.

So, put these two things together with the fact that I only need 9 more credits to graduate and you get me only take two sit-in classes next semester. I have one that's required (Advanced Theory of Programming Languages), and right now I'm torn between Game Programming and Compilers. Both should be fun, Compilers probably contains more cool/really good to know information but also probably more work. The deciding factor honestly might come down to scheduling, but even then I'm torn. If I do Game Programming, I have six hours of class on Monday and then nothing else for the rest of the week. If I do Compilers, I have one night class on Monday and one on Wednesday. At first I thought the split option would be better, but that could lead to problems for Sci-Fi night. Comments and discussion welcome.

Yea that was fast.

Less than half a day's worth of actually being able to monitor progress and fix bugs and I'm up and running with probably 90% of my stuff back in place. Configuring X was a bit of a bear, since it's not just "emerge nvidia-drivers; modprobe nvidia," and I've still got some tweaking to do, but things went pretty painlessly all told and it's completely usable.

Some of the things on the TODO list:

• Can't mount my USB drive. Gotta try it on the tower to see where the problem lies. (Edit: Got it. Kernel had wrong default codepage set for vfat.)
  
• Gotta see if/how well suspend can work.
• Talk to Sean to see if we can remember what fixed the problem with alt+k,k in ion3. I think it was a matter of him giving me a different tarball but not sure.
• Lots of rc files and that kind of thing need to get moved off the tower and restored from the USB drive.
• Configure tpb font and display position so it's actually readable. (Edit: got that as well, but I can't get tpb to start on boot with /etc/init.d/local...)
  

Oh and glxgears is rocking out at 1400 fps on average. :)

Yay new laptop.

Installing the new laptop now. I did in fact get the 14.1" 1400x1050 res. screen, so that's good. A quick boot into Windows confirmed that everything is working hardware-wise so it's off to Gentoo-land. Shouldn't be too long with a dual-dore 1.83 GHz.

Oh and for the record there is an sse3 extension set. It's called pni in kernel land (Prescott New Instructions) after the core that introduced it.

More Wigu?

This is cool, it looks like Jeffrey Rowland brought back Wigu. That might explain why overcompensating has been so stagnant for the past few weeks.

Swap partitions.

Do they still tell you to make those things twice the size of your RAM? I'm not so keen on the idea of taking 2 of my 60 gigs out of the rotation for use only when a gig of RAM isn't enough.

Early Christmas

The new laptop, whose estimated shipping date was December 7th, arrived in Vernon this morning, which is pretty awesome because hopefully I'll be done with this contracting work right before I go home for Thanksgiving, which means I'll be able to spend plenty of time playing with it. I figure I'll boot it into Windows just once to make sure all the hardware is working (and that I got the right screen) and then immediately throw in the Gentoo install CD. I found this article on thinkwiki.org specifically about installing Gentoo on the T60p, which should be close enough to the T60 to get most if not all things working properly. And it's not like I don't know some of the best linux people around anyway, both of whom have fairly extensive experience with linux on IBM laptops.

Yesterday Went Well

Yesterday I had a meeting with Dr. Krembs and the potential client. It was way out in Kingston so that was a bit of a drive but it wasn't a bad one. The scenery was pretty nice and there wasn't much traffic. The whole thing felt pretty odd for me, because I was sitting down to talk about the code and the project requirements and all that but at the end after everything was agreed I had the option of saying, "No thanks," and walking away from the whole thing. It's something I've never experienced before; in school and internships and the like when you talk requirements it's already been decided that you are going to do the work. The other thing that felt weird was that I could take the contract for the stuff he needs ASAP and when I was done with that I would be under no obligation to help him with anything else. I really like the idea, but it's taking some getting used to.

In the end I had some reservations but decided to take the job, mainly because we were able to pin the requirements down well enough and I'm comfortable with them, and because this is the first work Dr. Krembs has brought me so I really didn't want to turn it down unless it seemed awful. Besides, I just bought a new laptop, and while price had not been set yet I knew it would go at least a good way to paying that off.

I wasn't present for price-setting, for which I was very thankful. It's not something I'm really good at; I'm always worried that I'm going to overshoot and embarrass myself so I undershoot. This is obviously not the path to financial independence, but this is why Dr. Krembs handles those details. I estimated 40 work hours for the things he needed, and as I was driving home she called and said I'd get $1000 for the job. If it actually works out to 40 hours, that's 25 an hour. That's less than I made an hour at IBM this summer, but more than twice what I make at Marist now and more than three times what I made at Marist last year, so obviously quite happy with that. And of course if I can get it done faster than it's even better.

The other piece of good yesterday was that I got an email from Lenovo and my laptop shipped yesterday. Unfortunately it appears to be shipping from Hong Kong, which means it has to clear customs, but maybe I'll get lucky and it will move fast, although I guess it will probably come to the country on the west coast. But at any rate it's way better than shipping on December 7th like they said it would.

Enough Already

I'm sitting here in the Donnelly lab surrounded by the great unwashed waiting for Windows XP to finish decompressing my god damn Distributed Systems project and all I really want to do is go home and sleep. I realize that the semester is almost over, but the end can't come soon enough at this point. I'm ready to be done with school. I realize that this won't garner much sympathy with my PhD friends out there, but four years of college was enough for me. I'm sick of homework, group projects, deadlines, Java, Eclipse, and being graded.

Yea yea, I know, I get most of that shit at work too, but it's different. So different. For one thing, you get fucking paid for it. And for another, there's the schedule. I would gladly trade in the ability to sleep until 10:00 for the ability to know I won't be debugging some piece of shit threaded Java code written by an idiot grad student a year and a half ago when I'm supposed to be watching the Giants.

Well it's finally done. Time to stop whining and finish this shit.

Jay the Sub-Contractor

I know two posts in two minutes is weird but they are so totally different it seemed warranted. Today was a first for me; I agreed to a job as a freelance contractor. Well sub-contractor. Or something. At any rate, Dr. Krembs (former Computer Graphics and Math professor at Marist) is freelancing as a consultant (I think that's the title) and one of her clients is doing some web-app thing and his developer sort of up and left, so she asked me if I was interested. It's PHP, and the little bit she could tell me without an NDA seemed interesting/painless enough so I took it. I guess it's not really a big deal, but for some reason the idea is very exciting to me. Plus it can get me some big fancy words on my Resume just in time for The Great Post-Graduation Job Hunt.

Deer here.

We have plenty of dear in the area, but generally they stay away from the city, what with it not having any woods, and are mostly found out by Hyde Park or LaGrange. At least that's where I tend to see them. But today while waiting to cross Route 9 (leaving campus after class) two dear came charging out of a thick fog and went across the Fulton Street crosswalk; it was a minor miracle that nobody hit them considering the fog cut visibility to like 30 feet right there and it was pitch black. To put this into perspective for Vernon people who might read this, picture that spot on Route 83 where the Vernon CVS is, across from that bank, only with less trees in the area.

Thankfully nothing bad came of it but it was one of the stranger things I've ever witnessed at that intersection.

The Shadow Comes For Us All

Man look how emo that sounds. Where's my eyeliner?

Last night, in an incident that harkens back to the days of my hermit crab Chippy and Mom's "Why won't this door shut no matter how many times I slam it?" my laptop was perched atop the TV tray that was unknowingly blocking the reclination of a chair, and as they say in the wrestling world, it took a pretty solid bump. Took it like a champ even.

It was fine for a few hours, and then things slowly ground to a halt. I thought firefox had eaten the system like it has been known to do (embedded flash videos are an evil thing), so I just rebooted, and then watched for two minutes as the grub menu struggled into view. For Windows users, imagine the Windows XP logo where that scrolly thing is moving about a centimeter a minute. I had other things to be doing, so I just shut it off and left it alone until today.

Only today, it didn't turn on. So I reseated the RAM, and it still didn't turn on. After brunch Matt and Mike came over and we tried virtually every possible permutation of disconnecting and reconnecting things, and it did turn on occasionally. Emphasis on occasionally. And without any rhyme nor reason. It was eventually determined that something involving the chip (more specifically its cooling) had gone tragically wrong. So we set about opening that part up to see what we could do, since at this point we couldn't really make things worse anyway.

It is riveted together. Like, you know, the Brooklyn Bridge.

And so, I used Matt's employee serial number and ordered a IBM Thinkpad T60 today. It has a 14.1 inch screen, a 1.83 GHz centrino, 1 Gig of RAM, and a 60 Gig hard drive. And it cost me under 1200 bucks. It's not money I would have spent now if I had the choice, but it's one hell of an upgrade from a maybe 12 inch screen, 192 Megs of Ram, and a 600 MHz Pentium 3.

In some way, I'm gonna miss the Vaio, in that same way people miss their 9 year old Bronco when they get a new F-350. And I'm gonna need new stickers.

[Update] The estimated ship date is December 7th. So not cool.

Food Chainsaws

Everyone was back in Vernon this weekend for my Aunt Doreen's 50th birthday party (well we were in Chesire for the party but you know what I mean) and as always it was nice to see everybody. I don't have much of a coherent narrative for the weekend so I'll just throw out some thoughts. I finally got to see Moriah's engagement ring (I guess I haven't mentioned that here yet but pretty much anyone who reads it already knows about it) and it's very pretty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's something I could see myself picking out.

Moriah and Josh got an awesome new tropical fish while we were there and I picked up Final Fantasy XII. Haven't fired it up yet but will soon; I'm excited about the new battle system; it's not turn-based anymore and you essentially script your allies' actions, which appeals to the programmer in me.

There was a multi-town power outage shortly before we left on Sunday. Those are always interesting, but this was kind of cool because the moon was so full you could still see around outside and stuff. It only lasted a few hours.

Mom gave me and Nina a bunch of things from Mem's kitchen. My two favorites are a big solid cutting board that actually has a meat side and a non-meat side, with a big groove, nay, juice moat around the meat side, and one of those electric carving knives. It's a rather new one, too. Now I know I'm not exactly carving giant slabs of meat all the time, but there's something about owning what is essentially an electric chainsaw for food that is just great. Actually I guess it operates more like a hedge trimmer than a chainsaw...

That's still pretty cool.

Recovering Nicely

Newegg once again came through huge on shipping and so my drive arrive about 20 hours after it was ordered, despite being on 2-day shipping; it's now resting comfortably in the tower on a laptop/IDE adapter. Well, not so comfortably really; I've slammed it with somewhere over 300 packages in the last 24 hours. You see, the cool thing about Gentoo is that I can use my Athlon XP and chroot to build the entire system even though it's going to be running on a Pentium-III, so I decided to take full advantage of this and speed up the recovery process by about three days. Today at some point I'll get Mike over here and we'll reassemble the laptop with its drive. Then we just need to get the bootloader squared away (really the only part that's tricky when you build a system inside another one) and we should be good to go.

Good to go, that is, once I configure fluxbox and figure out if I like it. You see, the laptop has been running Waimea (lightest, simplest window manager I've ever used) since 2002, and Waimea has been dead since about 2002 and a half.