Today I received a gift all the way from UTC+8 land. Well, it was ordered by a person there, but shipped from within USA. It is a copy of "Linux Kernel Development, 2nd ed." I had the first edition for quite some time and I never finished reading it from cover to cover (but I did use for reference on quite a number of occassions.) And now I have 2nd edition of that book. I guess it is time to start on page 1, no? ;-) Thanks Obi.
I have decided to add another class to my course load. Since I had a couple of credits free (the whole scholarship thing) so I added COM 252-01 which is Advanced C++. I am 99.999% certain that I will not learn anything new there, but it’s good for at least two things…
Anyway, for the first homework we were supposed to write a program that converts between the celsius and fahrenheit scales. I got carried away (as always). This is sample session of my program…
You have: 50 reaumur
You want: romer
= 40.312500
You have: 212 fahrenheit
You want: newton
= 33.000000
You have: 5 celsius
You want: delise
= 142.500000
You have: 77 delise
You want: rankine
= 579.270020
It is obviously based on the great Unix/Linux utility ’units’ which unfortunately does not do temperature scales.
I have visited the city again. Got some snow pictures in Times Square and around the Empire State Building. I have to go through them, and sort them out. :-/
Yesterday (Saturday) against my better judgement, I went with my friend to the city to take some photos.
By the time we got back (~16:30) there was a plenty of snow around. Driving in it was kind of fun, but really dangerous. Going 20km/hr on average and still sliding quite a bit.
Just an update, the rending took 32 minutes and 26 seconds. That’s a lot!
I have rediscovered Cinelerra. It is one awesome program. Today I created first 40 seconds of about 2 minutes of final mini-movie…this is a second one I made..it’s really more of a music video than movie. It is about my neighbor’s cat. :-)
I also noticed that cinelerra can do motion tracking for during rendering. I’m testing it right now…5 second clip is rendering on my desktop for..umm..9 minutes already. I should get a better box for this. :-) This is my 2GHz P4 with 768MB RAM. Not as speedy as one would like, but it is going slooowly…Without the motion tracking those 5 seconds render in about 5-10 seconds. I sure hope this works well :-)
Thanks Obi….
Anyway, the DVD format was decided upon after a bunch of hare-brained marketroids sat down and said "how do pilfer as much money as possible from the unsuspecting public?"
Marketroid 1 : Oooh I know, we’ll have "regions"
Marketroid 2 : So that we can sell discounted DVD’s to developing countries? Marketroid 1 : Pfft. Who said anything about discounts? We just want to make their lives difficult.
* they all laugh *
Marketroid 2 : Hahaha, that’s great. And let’s lobby to make "unauthorized DVD players" illegal
Marketroid 3 : Brilliant plan! That way people who want to import DVD’s from other regions will have to buy seperate players! More $$$ for us!
* they all applause *
Marketroid 1 : But wait! What if those nasty dirty smelly "open sores" hippies try and break our encryption?
Marketroid 2 : WE ARREST THEM! HAHAHHAHA
Marketroid 3: I don’t think there’s a law we can use to arrest them for decrypting their own DVD’s
Marketroid 1 : Who says they OWN anything? We PWN THEM!
Marketroid 2 : I know, we’ll have the US pass a law to make it illegal
Marketroid 1 : That should be easy, we’ll just shove a huge wad of cash in some senators’ pockets like we usually do
Marketroid 2 : What about worldwide?
Marketroid 1 : Trade agreements
Marketroid 3 : What about rogue nations…like Iran?
Marketroid 2 : We’ll just have the US bomb them
* they all laugh again *
Thunderbird is one nice email client. I’m going to use it for work (along with IMAP server) while still keeping the cool Mutt for all my real email.
Ok, I decided to switch to Apache2. It is running right now, it broke a few projects of mine (most of which are dead so I don’t really care.) The main ones, checklist and jjchat work fine. phpMyAdmin, wiki work fine. phpnuke which I didn’t touch in about a year doesn’t want to work..I’ll probably nuke it anyway. I need to get back to AVAdmin as well. :-/
I have a wiki installed on my computer and I’m slowly moving all sort of things there. It’s really cool. I am using MediaWiki which is probably an overkill for this kind of database, but who cares? I have apache, php and mysql running no matter what, so what are the few hundred sql queries anyway?
It has 62.3MB in all the databases.
“This MySQL server has been running for 10 days, 4 hours, 27 minutes and 18 seconds. It started up on Dec 26, 2004 at 04:32 PM. Since its startup, 426,325 queries have been sent to the server.”
This means my “server” does about 0.48 requests per second. Of course this is an average so it doesn’t really mean anything.
Where was I? Ah, yes wiki…I’d recomend that everyone at least knows what a wiki is, they are a great concept, IMO.
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