Two days ago, I got MySQL 5 running. True, it is only alpha, but let me tell you, views are awesome. Triggers are kind of cool. Stored procedures are there too. Anyway, right now my desktop has both 4.1 and 5-alpha running :-D Maybe I should try to do something fun, like installing yet another mediawiki, or changing some settings and test the PHP-based chat system I and a friend of mine wrote about a year ago.
There was an airshow (yesterday and today) at Jones Beach. It was quite nice. I went today, spent 6 hours there, got burned by the sun, slightly dehydrated, sand everywhere, and took about 200 photos. I’ll post some soon.
According to a study conducted by an experienced Linux user, who decided to "[check] how Microsoft is doing in its attempt to make a desktop operating system as usable as Linux." He wrote up his findings for everyone to see.
In other Microsoft-related news, the IE team "announced" that IE 7 will have tabs, just like Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari. I am waiting for Microsoft to start marketing it as if after years of hard research they developed the first tabbed browser. I read some of the comments for that blog entry at msdn, and I really liked one idea: IE is the least favorite browser. That is because most people that know of alternatives to IE use them.
Few days ago, I had a dream that I was in my high school’s auditorium. I was walking toward the stage, and someone appeared. He was not quite human. I recognized his face..it was Weyoun. Then the auditorium changed into a football (the real one, not the american one) field in a wooded area. It was a nice day, sunny, but not too sunny. There was a path all the way around the field. I was standing next to the path near the centerline. Interestingly enough, there were highschool-field benches only on the short sides of the field. On each side, they were divided into three sections - the end two slightly rotated to face the field more directly. For whatever reason I decided to run along the field (on the grass), not wanting to interrupt the game, and then I started to climb up the seats. The benches were stacked up about 15 to 20 rows..enough to make the last row about 10 meters off ground. About half way up, they started to just collapse downward. I kept on climbing, until the middle section was completely collapsed. I saw a path that went all the way around the stadium, and it seemed like a good place to keep running. And so I did. I made it all the way back to where I met Weyoun; he was gone, but two or three friends of mine were walking around the field on the same path I was running on, I said something like hello, and kept on running. About 20 meters later, I passed someone who was walking a dog on the same path. It was…John Kerry. Yes, the guy that lost the presidential election not so long ago. I stopped running, and started chating with him. I don’t know what we talked about, but it was interesting.
That’s it, I woke up after that.
Well, after basicaly two months, I have seen all of Deep Space 9. It is a great series, and I’d like to get my own DVD set. :-) <message type="subliminal">go to Amazon, buy a season or two and give them to me</message>. Anyway, that’s it. In about a week or two, I’ll start watching The Original Series. That should take about a month (only 3 seasons). So, in other words…I have seen:
Today I decided to seriously try out cogito. The BK replacement written mostly by Linus Torvalds (the git part) and Peter Baudis (the cogito part). Initially it went smoothly. I cloned Linus’s tree, and then created clones for watch64 & 64network repos. Then I just imported the patch generated by BK. Done! Simple, isn’t it? It would be if that was all the work needed. I went on to create simple_n64 repo, the same way…clone linux-2.6, patch..oh wait..the patch depends on watch64. Ok, no problem, add new branch to pointing to watch64 repo, update! Bam! Boom! Zap! Screeeeech! Major failure. After few lines of what looked like good progress:
fatal: write-tree: not able to write tree cg-commit: write-tree failed cg-merge: COMMIT FAILED, retry manually fatal: you need to resolve your current index first
Yeah, that’s it for now..I’ll leave cogito alone for maybe a day, and then I’ll come back.
Today was a very interesting day. My (almost former) school (yep, I’m transfering to Stony Brook University) was holding a High School programming competition. This was the 4th time I attended, but this time I was one of the people that made sure the competition went smoothly (which, for the most part, it did). That by itself would have been interesting, but there is more… The school invited an Academic Relations Manager from…you’ll never guess…Microsoft. Yes, the same Microsoft that sells Windows, Office, etcetera. This MS employee was quite interesting, first of all, he knew what he was talking about. And second of all, he was fun to get along with. Me, being the Linux enthusiast I am, had to poke fun at things MS related, and he “retaliated” with anti-Linux comments. Nothing evil, just fun.
Fairly early on, I made it clear that I like Linux. I didn’t say anything, I let Tux do all the talking…
Yes, I started creating that nametag before everyone in the room (some other students helping with things, professors, and the guest speaker.) I remember hearing one of the professors say something, about me liking Linux, to which the speaker replied with “That’s all right, he’ll grow out of it.” I couldn’t help but say that I used to like Windows a lot, but I grew out of it :-)
After I printed the nametag out, and some of the people dispersed, I had a very pleasant conversation with him about many things. A conversation laced with comments about MS and Linux.
There was even a suggestion of interning for Microsoft, to which I replied with a question about the ownership of any code I’d write. That was a bad question. And I don’t think I would mind interning for MS under the right conditions:
The plan would be to go there, and either have good time and learn something and use it on Linux, or be miserable and grow even fonder of Linux. Either way, I’d win. :-)
As I mentioned (or maybe only hinted) before, we talked about many things, including evil monopolies. We agreed on the fact that IBM is evil, and Google has a great potential of becoming evil. I didn’t go into a discussion about MS being a monopoly because the answer is simple and obvious: it is. Now, is that good or bad? That depends on your point of view. And I think it would be useless to argue about whether or not MS is an evil monopoly with someone who works there, just like it wouldn’t make sense for a MS employee to argue about it with a Linux geek.
For one of my anti-MS comments, I revealed the secret “plan” of Linux — to take over MS. When I made the analogy of Linux being brought to MS by one of its employees and then spreading like a plague, he said that it is a great analogy, that Linux is a plauge. :-) What I didn’t realize at the time is, people fear plagues :-D
During the conversation I couldn’t resist, and had to offer of a copy of Linux. :-) Overall, up to this point, I agreed with everything, except the obvious anti-Linux jokes.
A few hours passed, the programming part of the competition occured (I’ll post a link to the problems once they are up), and everyone assembled for diner, ate the diner, and prepared for the guest speaker’s talk. The title was, “The Future”. Before the talk, I saw the title and made a simple comment: “Belongs to Linux” that sparked a mini-demo of one of the nice TabletPCs with the screens that can rotate 180 degrees. He also showed how you can “draw” on the screen, by crossing out the title of the slideshow. I saw that there was “Microsoft” written there as well (no real surprised, after all, he works for MS). I couldn’t resist, but comment again: “The future isn’t Microsoft.” I’m not really sure if I am making myself clear, but I did really enjoy the conversations, because it is not always you meet a representative of the devil ;-) and it was fun throwing subtle anti-MS comments here and there, and listening to subtle anti-Linux comments as well.
The talk was targeted at the high school students, and could be sumed up in one question: “Why study Computer Science?” He talked about everything really, from offshoring to the idea that knowing how to program can help you in everyday life. One thing that drove me nuts was the word innovation. I know that the definition is positive (the act of starting something for the first time), but I just can’t forget the movie Antitrust, which gives the word a very negative conotation. I also think that it is a major buzz-word, used by marketing people to get people to trust, and buy the companies (this doesn’t apply only to MS) software.
Personally, I think that the greatest anti comment from him was a very well presented implication that academics/Linux users don’t want to get anything done.
Anyway, enough of me rambling, it was a fun experience. I know that I wasn’t objective, it’s hard to be, but I know that he wasn’t completely objective either — after all, his paychecks come from MS.
I am sure this will create a comment or two from the few readers of my blog. Please comment if you wish.
Finally, almost after a year of having my laptop which has a soundcard that cannot handle other audio output streams if artsd decides to monopolize it, I got fed up and decided to set up dmix. Let me tell you, ALSA RULEZ!!!!!11!!!!oneone
Here’s what I had to do…I created a file /.asoundrc and put in this:
pcm.ossmix {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 8192
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "ossmix"
}
pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "ossmix"
}
ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}
That’s it! Now I can play music, have Gaim warn on me, and terminals can beep on me all at the same time. Now..who says Linux isn’t ready for desktop?
Ok, it is official, I’m transfering out of St. Joseph’s College. Starting in September, I’ll be attending Stony Brook University. Yay!
About two weeks ago, I happened to enter a networking class and after being informed that there was to be a tour of the networking facilities I decided to stick around. The tour happened as scheduled, and I saw what drives St. Joseph’s computer network. Some L2 and L3 switches (3com), some Sun and IBM boxes, bunch of fiber, and a lot of phone wire. On our way back to the classroom, I decided to ask the speaker why they MAC-filter the network traffic (even though they only use wired ethernet.) Anyway, about a week later, I saw the speaker and I decided to ask him for some webspace on the school website for our student chapter of ACM (believe it or not, there isn’t a single club that had a webpage on the sjcny.edu domain. All the clubs use Geocities for web and yahoo for email. Anyway, back to the story…) He remembered me, and told me that he isn’t in charge of the website, but that he can get me in touch with the webmaster. Fast forward about a week…I decided I should try to get a hold of the webmaster, so I went and visited his office. His reply to my question was: "Sure, what do you need?" To make long story short, I got the club a nice sjcny.edu URL, with PHP and MySQL support. Just what I need to set up a MediaWiki. :-) I actually set it up on my desktop, and there are a number of pages finished. Now that I’m thinking more about the implementation, I think I’ll get the club an sjcny.edu email address ;-)
Other things I can think of right now that I should do sometime soon…I absolutely hate what my resume looks like. I have to rewrite it in LaTeX. Then I have a ton of my personal sw projects which are getting nowhere. That reminds me, I should put some more work into the elevator simulator. I have this idea of removing all the random number generator stuff from the elevsim program, and instead making a second binary which generates the events using a well defined protocol which elevsim can read. This would of course mean, that implementing a real sensor array support would be trivial. All that would have to be done is the conversion of the sensory inputs into the well defined protocol. It will probably be something as simple as:
X:param1:param2:param3...
where X is a command character (this means we have 26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, 10 digits, and a bunch of misc characters giving us the total of at least 90 commands.), and a number of parameters delimited by colons. Each command of course would start on a new line. Very simple protocol format, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s just a thought. If I do make hardware sensor array easily implementable, I’ll have no choice but to implement it and create a model elevator system to test it on :-)
I think that’s enough for today :-)
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