I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site.  In fact, it looks like my last posts were made when I graduated from K-State for my undergrad.

Well, to say the least, my life has changed significantly since then: I’ve nearly finish graduate school, I’ve gotten a new job… and I got married.

Yeah, seems like a lot when I just put it there in single paragraph, huh?  So now I live in the Kansas City area, I work at Garmin, I attend K-State via distance education, and I’m married to my wife Kim.  I feel like I’ve settled into a pretty solid routine now: I go to work, I work on school, I spend time with Kim, I sleep and then I repeat.

In short, I hope to update this site a little more regularly, and I hope to get some content updated.

Stay tuned…

So, I hope this version works better for you.

Also, I guess someone decided to make a different Mythexport and include it in the Ubuntu repositories. After a bit a research it looks like this is a GSoC project. For the record: I am not affiliated with MythTV or Nuvexport. This is just a simple shell script that I wrote a long time ago. Sorry if I disappointed anyone.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon”, last week when it was officially released. I have to say, that this is the most impressive Linux distro that I’ve ever worked with. While it has its rough spots, like any OS, I have not booted back into Windows since the install. I’ve been using Ubuntu off-and-on since Dapper Drake in mid-2005. I would end up using it for a few days on my laptop, but then I’d simply end up booting back into Windows because something simply didn’t work the way I wanted. Back then, I had a hard time getting WPA, Standby, Hibernation, and other power management features working properly. However, with Gutsy, I’ve finally been able to solve my power management dilemmas and I’ve not looked back.

When I first booted to the live install CD and started the (very quick) install process, I was amazed at how much better WPA support was in Gutsy. I was able to see my wireless network and connect: No problems. So, during the 10 minute install process, I was able to browse Slashdot in Firefox. I’m pretty sure your mind would explode if you tried to do something like that with the Windows installer.

My power management problems, however, were a little harder to take care of. It turns out that my weird standby and hibernation issues could be traced to two things: the Nvidia binary driver, and my lack of a swap partition. The Nvidia driver sucks when it comes to ACPI. I found a few lines in /etc/default/acpi-defaults.conf that I had to comment out and…presto! Standby worked! Ubuntu could finally be a viable Windows replacement. Then, after trolling trough the Ubuntu forums for about an hour, I discovered that I was a little too quick to dismiss the installer’s dialog that insisted: “You NEED a swap partition, dummy!” I thought, it’s 2007, I’ve got 2GB of RAM, why would I need a swap partition? Oh, what’s that? That’s where your memory contents get dumped on hibernation? Oops, I can see why it didn’t work. I simply created a new partition with Gpartd on the handy live CD, and upon reboot hibernation worked flawlessly.

I’m pretty happy about Ubuntu as my new OS, but I still have a few gripes:

• Battery life just isn’t as long. After running powertop and disabling a whole bunch of services, I still can’t get the same battery life as I got in Windows. Progress has been made, but my laptop is still a little fireball while running Linux.
• I can’t seem to get Azureus to work. I read some comments about having to use gcj instead of the Java JRE. I’ll get it working, but it was just something that I wanted to work out of the box.

• Copying files between to SMB servers using Gnome’s VFS is sloooooooow and it just eats CPU power. I’m not sure why this is the case.

Well, there’s my two cents.

I used to like reading Digg. However, as of late, whenever I peruse the site, all I see are a bunch of stories written by 13-year old kids about Global Warming and why the iPhone is the best invention ever. So, instead, I opt to read the source of most of the interesting articles that end up on Digg: Slashdot, Ars Technica, Engadget, and others.

I’ve come up with a general rule-of-thumb for measuring the quality of a news source: The quality of a new source is inversely proportional to the number of exclamation points that can be found on the front page.

For example, reading the front page of these sites nets the following number of exclamation points:

• Ars Technica: 1
• Slashdot: 3
• Google News: 0
• BBC: 0
• Digg: 24

It’s summer again.  No school. Just work.

This summer I’m working as a Software Engineer Intern at Garmin.  Since they’re very hush hush about their work, I can’t really elaborate on what I do.  I enjoy my job, it just takes some adjustment to get used to working for 8 hours straight.  I have more free time than I do during the school year, and I enjoy having large blocks of free time, I just have a hard time concentrating on one task for hours on end.  I’m used to working on something as long as I’m willing and then taking a break.

Another good point about work: money.  It’s nice to no be ghetto poor all the time.   But now I’m faced with a new delima:  On what should I spend my newfound wealth?  I’d like to get a TV so I don’t have to borrow Ian’s, but I’d really like to get an HD LCD or Plasma.  Those tend to be pricey, but the prices come down quickly so I’m going to wait until the end of the summer.  I’m also crazy addicted to Guitar Hero II, so I think that I’m going to buy a Xbox 360 and the game.  It’ll cost me about $500 total, but I think it’s worth it.

Now that I’m two weeks into my sixth semester at K-State, I think I can make some objective comments on it. I’m taking Database Systems, Operating Systems, and Design of Digital Systems this semseter. (Lots of “Systems”). I’m pretty psyched about Operating Systems. I hear/know it’s a challenging course, but I’m very interested in the subject material. I’d really like to work on implementing low-level operating systems or write device drivers some day.

Which brings me to the next class on the list: Design of Digital Systems. This is basically an extension of EECE 241, that I took my Freshman year. (In fact, it was the first class that I took at K-State). So suffice it to say: I don’t remember much about this stuff. I’m really excited about this class, even though I’m the only Computer Science major that’s taking it. It can be a little intimidating to take a 500-level Electrical Engineering course when you’re not an Electrical Engineer. I’m keeping up well so far, I just hope they get past the physical stuff soon and we start looking at the desgin logic.

Now, onto Database Systems. I hadn’t every really put much thought into database systems before, and it’s one of the most foreign areas of Computer Science to me. This class should prove interesting, albeit a little on the boring and tedious. It’s going to contain some good information that any self-respecting Computer Scientist should know. Plus, I’ll finally get a chance to learn and practice server-side development. It’ll be nice to know how this blog actually works.

Other than “the big three”, I’m taking Written Communications, Computer Ethics, and Global Problems. I’m not really liking Written Communications so far. I don’t really like the busy work we’ve had to do and I’ve never done a research paper before. But, now I’ll get my chance. For this class’ final project we have to write a 15-20 page paper…single space. That’s pretty damn ridiculous if you ask me. But, nobody did. So I have to write it.

I think Global Problems will be a fun class. I’ve not had to take notes yet. Each lecture is like sitting through an episode of Connections. I like history and I’m good at remembering useless facts. This means the class will be cakewalk. Right?

I’m taking a lot more classes that involve writing this semester. I’m not sure if I like it. I’d MUCH rather do a math assignment or write a program than write an essay. But, if the essay is about something that I’m interested in, I usually do pretty well. On the whole, this is going to be different semester than what I’m used to.

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1. That was a huge pain in the ass. First, I decided it would be a good idea to start using the debian package to handle my wordpress updates. Not a good idea. There were bugs all over the place that I just now got fixed. But, there was still another problem: All of my custom pages were turned into categories and I had to manually go through and convert them back.

On the plus side, I like how everything feels a lot snappier. I read through their changelog and it looks as though they had a SQL expert from MySQL look over and optimize all of their queries. Kudos.

It seems as though nuvexport development has slowed recently. I’ve run into problems with ffmpeg throwing floating point exceptions when invoked from nuvexport.

After some discussion on the official nuvexport trac about the problem. It seems that the following patch fixes the problem:

--- nuvinfo.pm.orig     2006-10-02 23:42:17.000000000 -0400
+++ nuvinfo.pm  2006-10-12 16:58:12.000000000 -0400
@@ -184,10 +184,10 @@ package mythtv::nuvinfo;
($info{'width'})                 = $data =~ m/^ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=(d+)/m;
($info{'height'})                = $data =~ m/^ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=(d+)/m;
($info{'fps'})                   = $data =~ m/^ID_VIDEO_FPS=(d+(?:.d*)?)/m;
-        ($info{'audio_sample_rate'})     = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_RATE=(d+)/m;
-        ($info{'audio_bitrate'})         = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=(d+)/m;
+        ($info{'audio_sample_rate'})     = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_RATE=([1-9]d*)/m;
+        ($info{'audio_bitrate'})         = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=([1-9]d*)/m;
($info{'audio_bits_per_sample'}) = $data =~ m/^AUDIO:.+?ch,s*[su](8|16)/mi;
-        ($info{'audio_channels'})        = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_NCH=(d+)/m;
+        ($info{'audio_channels'})        = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_NCH=([1-9]d*)/m;
($info{'fps'})                   = $data =~ m/^ID_VIDEO_FPS=(d+(?:.d*)?)/m;
($info{'aspect'})                = $data =~ m/^ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=(d+(?:[.,]d*)?)/m;
($info{'audio_type'})            = $data =~ m/^ID_AUDIO_CODEC=(d+(?:.d*)?)/m;

I didn’t write this, but it solved a currently unresolved bug. Here’s a link to the original author’s patch.