Tim's blog

Blog location changed!

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:57:02 -0400

Hey everyone. I've grown to really dislike serendipity, so I've switched over to Wordpress, and have converted my site to be just a blog (I rarely use Trac, and never for anything interesting, and those apps really needed to come down off the store).

See all the new WordPressy goodness here!

I feel like a cranky old man

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:47:49 -0400

Writing some code today, and I realized there's a list of features I've come to depend on in programming languages. Some of these are relatively "new" features in the world of languages, but I still get crotchety if the language at hand doesn't have:

Anonymous functions or lambdas (in C, function pointers are kinda close)
Array mapping
Type-checking comparison in weakly typed languages
Some kind of "friend" or "visible-to" accessibility indicator, for unit testing
Oh yeah, a good unit testing framework
Ternary if-then operator
Named arguments
Optional arguments

(Today's rant sponsored by PHP 5.2, which is missing several - but not all - of the features on this list.)

Tech blurbs

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:32:10 -0400

Two things, real quick:

If you're on a Mac, and you're using Time Machine, and you listen to a lot of music, and you wonder why your backup drive is getting like 300 MB of data every ten minutes, it's because iTunes is updating your music files with the "Play Count" field (see the Wiki article on ID3 for more), and Time Machine is detecting that as a file change and duly syncing it to your drive. That took me a while to figure out.
I need new blog software! I haven't written on here in like five months because I simply cannot stand the interface any more. Uploading media is a pain, sorting entries into multiple categories is problematic, and it's just kind of plain ugly (and I hate going through "themes" or "skins" or whatever the kids are calling them these days). I'm leaning WordPress, but commentary or advice is welcome. (It's a huge bonus if the platform you recommend has a Serendipity importer.)

One more note - as I was posting this entry, the trackback script choked and died in Chrome. So I guess that's another reason to switch.

A couple updates

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:58:40 -0500

So when they say winter quarter at Rose is hectic? They're not kidding. I just found my first solid chunk of downtime since I came back to school two weeks ago. What have I been up to, you ask?

For starters, the Festivus, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations that occurred over my last break were all most excellent. This year was the fifth consecutive Festivus celebrated within the group, and it was by far the smoothest a Festivus has ever gone. The Airing of Grievances was trouble-free, the introduction of a white elephant gift exchange went smoothly, and our Feats of Strength involved that classic game Set. For Christmas a few days later, hordes of relatives (from both sides of the family) descended on the house for almost an entire week all told. (Most hilarious was our cousin Keith, who's two and just being ridiculous all over the place. He got an iPod Touch for Christmas. He's two.) Lastly, New Year's went well overall, despite some illnesses on part of a couple of the partygoers. Mario Kart is never so hilarious as when played sleep-deprived at 4am.
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Not an impulse buy, I promise

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:06:24 -0500

My new guitar.

So the other day I bought a guitar.

A lot of people have been telling me that this seems really random - since when did I want to learn to play guitar? It's understandable, given that I didn't really talk to that many people about it ahead of time, but I've been looking to take up another musical instrument for awhile now. I wanted something more portable than the piano, which I played for a couple years way back when, but still relatively common and popular (so not the ocarina in my closet).

The MSU trip I took awhile ago was really what put "guitar" in my head. The instant I got there, we all sat down in the middle of a basketball court and like four different people all pulled out guitars, and everyone was having a great time. I thought, why not take it up myself?
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I've been told I'm insane.

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:22:39 -0400

Walking back to the dorm from a Learning Center shift the other day, I was chatting with one of the office staff who lived nearby about our respective majors. He was a double (CS/SE); I was a triple (CS/SE/MA). The difference between us, I discovered, was that he filed a plan of study and I had not.

Actually, the difference was that he knew that a plan of study had to be filed in order to have more than one major, and I did not. He also knew that this plan had to be filed by the end of your junior year. I was aware of none of this, and subsequently had a slight panic moment.
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In stitches

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:13:24 -0400

Our floor is a pretty boisterous one, and the guys who live here are prone to getting into certain predicaments that most dorms might not encounter. So when I hear someone running down the hall screaming "We have to go to the hospital!", I figured it was only a matter of time, really. But that shouldn't stop me from going to see what the fuss is about.
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Like exchange students, but awesomer

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:04:53 -0400

It all started three weeks ago.

A bunch of friends from Rose and I were all just hanging out in the Apartments, when for no particular reason I decided to suggest that one guy here (also named Tim) and Chris become friends on Facebook. I had my laptop with me, so I did, and the friendship established itself shortly thereafter. This was apparently all the prompting Chris needed to drive the five hours down from MSU to come visit Rose, putting into motion a massive chain of events that ended in nothing less than pure awesome.
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This just happened

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:10:30 -0400

Funniest 8am EVER.

I show up, and the first thing I see is the giant vat of coffee sitting on the end of one of the tables. This is not new; our prof is nice enough to buy us all coffee on various days, especially on Fridays. I'm actually like ten minutes early at this point, so I grab some coffee and sit down.

That's when I notice the other thing: nobody from my group is in class with me. I was only expecting one out of three in the first place: one of my group members had an appendectomy the other day, and another is at his sister's wedding, but there was supposed to be at least one other person there.

So I'm sitting there sipping my coffee when the prof finally decides to start class (five minutes late - we had about 50% attendance when the bell rang, so he held off a bit until a few more latecomers straggled in). He begins with announcements, and the following conversation took place:

Prof: "OK, so one of the feedbacks I got from you guys was to keep announcing when the homework was due. The next homework is due Sunday-"
Student (in the back): "Wait. Why is it due Sunday?"
Prof: "Do you ever pay attention?"
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Back to school

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:58:04 -0400

I celebrated a triumphant return to college a couple weeks ago, moving in the 30th and finding it very easy to get back into the swing of things. First thing I did? Help run a laptop orientation session for the freshman.

The way it works is as follows: every freshman is required to buy the same laptop. This makes support a lot easier for our tech department, and also means that the school can standardize on a set of software that everyone gets access to (and gets pretty deep discounts on at the same time, because of the volume of purchases made). However, the network services here are pretty intense - we run everything from an online learning management system (ANGEL, for those wondering, but it may shift to Blackboard in the not-so-distant future) to a couple different network file systems (AFS and DFS) to integrated Kerberos/LDAP authentication.

Technobabble over.

Anyway, the complete orientation takes about four hours, and includes just about everything a new student could possibly want to do with their laptop. I do mean everything - the session starts with a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation before it even gets to "plug in your laptop," and progresses through another ten slides before it gets to "press the power button to turn on your laptop." I did get to deal with some pretty interesting questions - one kid didn't receive exactly half his power cord, and another got two mice in his package. And I got paid for four hours' work. Not a bad deal.
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Big Cats, Part VI

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:01:34 -0400

Snow Leopard, the sixth iteration of Mac OS X, came out today. Being the good little Apple fanboys that we are, Chris and I decided to go get copies as soon as we could, which meant when the Apple Store opened at 9am this morning.

So we drove down to the store, getting there around 9:10 (Chris overslept slightly), and walking in to a very sparsely populated store with no visible employees, except for one sketchy guy who darted into the back as soon as we came in. The doors were unlocked, though, and there were several people inside who were just playing with laptops or waiting at the Genius Bar, and it was one of these people who eventually told us: the store doesn't open until 10.

I was mildly upset.
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Summer summary (summery?)

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:56:22 -0400

So wow. Summer's gone. I head back to school the morning of the 30th, then dive right in with freshman laptop orientation the 31st and a Learning Center tutor "retreat" (two-hour meeting) on the 2nd. Classes begin the 3rd.

In light of all that, I thought I'd take a moment and recap what my summer was like this year.
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Hello Germantown

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:30:46 -0400

Jessica and I, reunited after two months apart

Long-distance relationships are hard. So when Jessica and family offered to have me visit for a few days, I was only too happy to oblige.

I stayed in Germantown, TN for a total of four days and three nights. I took the Amtrak both ways, and got back home with just enough time to do laundry, repack, and head off to Pennsylvania for the family reunion. (More on that later).

I left home at around 4pm on Saturday, July 25, taking the Metra from Barrington into the city for a 9pm departure from Union Station. Apparently, due to the boat parade, it was the fourth-busiest day of the year for the Metra into the city, and everyone was drinking on the way. Through random happenstance, I wound up sitting next to a few soon-to-be-partiers that knew Aiello from the high school. They seemed reasonably surprised that he turned out to be a teacher - "the last thing," one of them declared, "that I thought he'd wind up being."

Once in the city, I stopped at Garrett Popcorn to pick up a two-gallon tub of delicious popcorn for Jessica's family, by way of a thank-you gift. Regrettably, the store in Ogilvie was closed on the weekends, so I wound up hauling a backpack and duffel bag eight blocks by foot across the city to get the popcorn, then carrying it all back ten blocks to the station. I was reasonably tired by the time I got there.

The train left Union Station pretty much on time, and but for a distinctly mean and unhelpful conductor, the ride was pretty standard. I wasn't able to buy business class like I was on the way up to MSU - this train, the City of New Orleans, had no business-class cars - but it was mostly empty, so I was able to stretch out across two seats. There was also an electrical outlet right next to me, so I could charge my phone and laptop and get a meager amount of work done on the train. I slept about half the 10.5-hour trip, and arrived about a half hour late in Memphis to Jessica and her father, who were awaiting me at the station.
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I'm a little embarrassed

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:44:43 -0400

I finally got around to updating that RAID array that I was talking about all the way back around Christmastime. If you don't feel like reading the entry: twelve drive bays, an eight-drive array totaling 1.5TB, and a new five-drive array totaling 3TB.

The media server before the array upgrade.

Now obviously thirteen drives can't fit in twelve bays. So the old array - the one with more drives but less space - had to go. Before I ripped it out, however, I thought I'd grab some pictures of what the inside of the case looked like. It was pretty bad: I hadn't been bothering with cable ties all that much, and I bought extra-long SATA cables to stretch the length of the case, so stuff was everywhere.

The old array in place.

(Very technical talk begins here.) The way the case was laid out, the cables quite literally had to go the entire diagonal length of the front panel. The motherboard was oriented such that the PCI slots, where I had the SATA cards driving the array, were in the upper right corner behind a fan, while the drive bays were in the bottom right through a separator panel or two. The PCI slot fan was also bulky enough to be pressing its grille up against the SATA cables as they came off the cards. I would have liked right-angle connectors, but those cables don't come long enough for this case.

Drives of the old array, pulled from the server.

Anyway, after snapping a couple shots I tore out the eight 250GB drives that composed the old array and stacked them neatly on top of the case, then moved all five 1TB drives around to be a bit neater in the case before wiring them back up again. This time I took care to tie up bundles of SATA cables out of the way, so it looks much better. But I was still left with several perfectly usable drives, and I'm not quite sure what to do with them yet. (If you need one, shoot me an email. We'll work something out.)

I have a new philosophy

nospam@example.com (Tim) — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:42:41 -0400

The best philosophies always come from little throwaway remarks at the end of conversations. (Wait, don't they? That's how it happens on TV...)

The conversation I was having today was in regards to Ubuntu, a popular, user-friendly Linux distribution. They released their latest revision (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) about a month ago, and a bunch of guys on the hall decided to install it and play around with it. Some were Linux novices; some had a good chunk of experience. Almost everyone, though, wound up installing it once, playing around with it, then (for reasons that vary widely) reinstalling it again.

These guys weren't unhappy with how Ubuntu was working on their laptops. Quite the opposite: they were pleasantly surprised at its speed, its reliability, its compatibility, and its usability. (Got any more -abilities? I'm sure they apply somehow.) They just needed a restart. One wanted to clean up his disk, which was still dual-hosting Windows and Ubuntu, and the repartitioning process required he reinstall. Another wanted to get the install procedure just right, and hadn't quite done it how he liked the first time.
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