Kyle’s Weblog

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.

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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.