re-ubuntu

Posted on April 27, 2009

I could not resist the shininess of 9.04. I have once again installed ubuntu on my laptop.

Screenshot below.

Spring Cleaning

Posted on April 15, 2009

It’s that time of year again. Windows has had yet another year to wreck havoc on my hard drive and it’s time to clean it up. I have thought about the time I’ve spent playing video games this year and it is less than 100 hours. This brings me to my next issue. WHY AM I USING WINDOWS?

One of my main reasons for moving back to Windows was gaming, but I seem to have become too busy for gaming. Perhaps I am not too busy, I just choose to read and program instead of game. I play the occasional 2D pygame or flash game, and xbox 360 games, but I just don’t really use my PC for gaming anymore.

Which brings me to YET another point. Why do I have this 600W monster of a PC if I don’t game?  I am considering selling my current rig to (up + down)grade (in the regular expression sense) to a new PC. Newer, faster, more energy efficient 64 bit processors have been developed since I built this machine in 2006 and I think I need (for my power bill’s sake) to downgrade power supplies.

On yet another note, I have been toying around with Fedora 11 lately. I think I am going to migrate towards using it as my OS of choice. If I decide to build the new machine I will definately pick linux compatible hardware.

Also, after the inital awe, Windows 7 isn’t all that great. I will write more on that later.

Long month.

Posted on March 4, 2009

It’s been a long month. I’ve moved, had about five tests, and numerous car troubles.

So apparently I missed the one year birthday for this blog. Oh well, I really haven’t had time to think about anything other than school lately.

I have been programming a lot recently, but mostly just school work. I don’t really have a lot of free time for hobby programming anymore. It’s sad.

I’m currently thinking about building a home entertainment pc. Something that I can stream media to and from and easily access it from my living room. I’ll probably go with a cheaper Intel Atom CPU and a cheap motherboard. My main goal is to keep power consumption low since it will be always on.

First Impressions: Windows 7 Beta build 7000

Posted on January 27, 2009

Yesterday I downloaded the beta (build 7000) of Windows 7 64bit version. I installed it on my laptop (replacing Ubuntu 8.10) and I must say I am very pleased. Windows Vista CRAWLED on my hp dv6910us, ubuntu saw some speed increases but decreased functionality, Windows 7 is both speedy and functional.

I have never used the 64bit versions of XP or Vista but I must say Windows 7 is by far the fastest operating system I have ever used. Even while on battery it launches applications speedily and doesn’t seem to use as much memory as Vista. The new UI is far more complete for lack of a better word. I have yet to see any old XP style UI’s appear and the new taskbar serves its purpose quite well.

I have yet to find any real disappointment. All the vista 64bit drivers for my notebook worked, I did have to run the audio driver in Vista compatibility mode but it functions perfectly fine.

I am very satisfied with Windows 7. I am a bit saddened by the fact there will be different versions of Windows 7 as there were with Vista (ultimate, etc) but it is a MUCH better product than Vista.

Some say it will be a Desktop Linux killer. I disagree. For those who have time to tinker Linux is a great toy and a rewarding experience. The people who use and maintain Linux distros do it out of love. No Microsoft product can destroy that. But Windows 7 could turn some borderline people like myself around.

linux and laptops

Posted on January 24, 2009

A few months back I bought a HP Pavilion dv6910us. I tweaked the hell out of Vista (just to get it working decently) and then about a month later the hard drive crashed (I’m assuming head crash because the magnetic disks were ruined). So after minimal hassle dealing with HP’s India based support (email seems to be more efficient) I got a replacement drive. The only issue was that they will not reload the recovery partition on replacement drives because they expect you to go through the four hour process of making backup CDs when you first purchase your laptop. Good thinking HP that’s exactly what I want to do with my brand new laptop, spend three hours cleaning off the crapware you preload with vista, spend two hours tweaking vista, then FOUR hours making backup CDs.

So I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.10 on the laptop since the HDD failure. I have minimal issues with it, other than the fact the suspend/resume will not work unless I disable one core of the processor. Also there are lots of little issues that bug me like the internal mics not working, and limited webcam functionality.

But in all honest, ubuntu without all hardware functionality runs better than Vista did on the same system, even after I spent hours tweaking it. To be fair I did spend a fair amoutn of time getting Ubuntu to operate on the machine, but at least it operates well afterwards.

With that being said, until all the suspend/resume features are restored I think I am going to install the Windows 7 Beta on it. Or perhaps go back to Vista (fresh install) haven’t decided yet.

TCP/IP and more Automata

Posted on January 9, 2009

I am retaking Automata and Theoretical Computer Science this time with a different professor who seems to be easier to understand. I hope my first impression is correct. I’m not trying to say my last professor was bad, he was just on a different level than most undergraduates. He seemed more fitting for a graduate level class. I guess I’ll find out how easy to understand this new professor is once we get into the difficult stuff.

I am taking a class on internet communications (in reverse order since I took Network Security last Summer) it is with the same professor as the Network Security class. He has been one of my favorite professors in the Computer Science department so far. I feel like this class will be quite interesting.

I am looking forward to some of the programming assignments in CS303, but I’m sure I will be singing a different tune when I wait until the night before to complete the code.

I have an interview tomorrow for a job with a company I hope to work for once I graduate. I hope I get the job because it will be easier to get hired on after I graduate if I already have a presence. Plus this job will look good on my resume and hopefully help out in future career opportunities.

Valkyrie and Class

Posted on January 7, 2009

So I went and saw Valkyrie with Melissa the other day. It was quite possibly the most depressing movie I have ever seen. Girls often watch very depressing and sad movies about love and cheating and what not. But it is rare for guys to watch ultimately depressing movies. Most “guy movies” consist of a lot of action and followed by a moment of weakness or death, finishing with a lot of action and a bad ass good (or bad) guy winning. Valkyrie was JUST DEPRESSING. Maybe it was because I already knew the outcome of the story. And the fact the average age at the theater I was at was probably 45. Then again I did go to the 7PM showing…

Classes have unfortunately begun again. This semester I am taking:

CS303 -  Algorithms and Data Structures
CS350 - Automata Theory
CS334 - TCP/IP and Network Connectivity
HY101 - Western Civ I (look i spaced out my core classes so I wouldn’t go insane)

Had CS303 today and it’s back to Java programming. I haven’t touched Java in a year, so hopefully I’m not too rusty… but man do I hate Java.. He gave us a little pop quiz where we had to write a sorting algorithm from our memory. I thought of quicksort, but couldn’t remember it precisely, thought of heap sort, couldn’t remember it precisely, thought of bubble sort, I know that one don’t I? Nope, apparently my memory isn’t so good after a year. But who’s is? I haven’t touched Java or sorting in a year, why should I memorize something I never use?

Onward.

<2009>

Posted on January 1, 2009

Happy New Year! I look forward to this year. It’s hopefully my last full year in college and going to be by far one of my busiest. Hopefully I can accomplish all my goals, get a part time job or do some research, and towards the end of the year take the GRE and plan for grad school. 2008 had its ups and downs. I hesitate to say it has been the worst year of college thus far because it had its incredibly good parts. Either way I want to be more goal driven in 2009 and get some coding projects underway that I can actually finish.

Here’s to a good year without all the problems of 2008.

An idea.

Posted on December 29, 2008

I had an idea a few months ago while I sat in philosophy class. I wondered what made a human creative? Einstein said that being creative was simply hiding your sources of inspiration. That made me think of computers (as most things tentatively do) why can’t computers be creative.

Using Einstein’s idea that creativity is a small amount of original idea and a large amount of “borrowed” inspiration it makes it easy for a computer to be creative. So I decided I would eventually (when I had free time) devote my time to researching and maybe even developing a scheme to accomplish computer creativity.

I have found very little research or implementation online about “original” computer paintings in the sense that I want to accomplish, but with taht being said I still have no idea where to begin. My plan so far is as follows:

1. Have the program analyze a large number of images of similar spec.
2. Have the program recognize patterns and colors in the images.
3. Feed the program a “rule” file to make sure the computer stays within certain boundaries for its painting.
4. The program then would “paint” a picture pixel by pixel based on its analysis results and the rules given by the user.

This seems rather easy but regardless of my limited experimentation in python, it seems to be rather computationally intense. I have since moved on to writing some similar code in C to see if it improves performance. My problem with this is I am unfamiliar with dealing with jpeg or even bitmaps in C. I will have to read more, also it would help if I could find a library that already had some imaging components (maybe even pattern recognition) then I could focus more of my time on the output of the program and the scripting of the rule sets.

onward.

Assembly and Architecture

Posted on December 27, 2008

I passed all my classes this semester (excluding the automata class which I dropped).

One thing this semester has taught me is that I need to develop better study habits. When I read books for pleasure I tentaively learn a lot more. I am reading a book on python development currently and I can’t seem to put it down. But when I am forced to read in school it seems I lack any real ambition. I’m not sure if this is because I learn at a faster or slower pace than the class teaches at, or if perhaps my learning patterns are just different.

Over the Summer when I took the C++ class I was always reading and staying up to date on what I needed to know for the class. I think the lowest test grade I made was a 92. But it was because the class was structured more like I imagine a computer science class to be structured.

Most classes force us to buy books and then the instructor uses his own notes and only references the book. I hate that. If you are going to make me spend $100 on a book USE IT! I seem to learn a lot better from detailed instructions compared to arbitrary information that you decided to write on the board that day.

Next semester I am taking three computer science courses. I’m going to have to buckle down and make all As.

In my freetime I’ve been programming a little and playing Fallout 3. I was fairly deep into Fable 2 when my xbox360 decided to red ring of death on me. I need to send it off for repair but I haven’t had the ambition to do so yet.

Fallout 3 isby far the best game I think I’ve ever played. I’ve also been playing around with OpenSim (opensimulator project) it uses modified Linden Lab’s Second Life viewer to access osgrid and other open source grids. You can attach your own sim servers. I’ve had some fun with it but really haven’t figured out what I want to do with it yet. I’m hosting my server off a fairly limited vps, but it seems to run decently. I was hosting it on my home PC at one point which was a bit of a hassle but it improved the speed of the sim, mainly because my machine is a beast compared to that VPS.

After my assembly class I’ve considered getting back into robotics a bit.  I feel since I have a much better grasp on aseembly programming and a larger vocabulary when it comes to processors that I will be able to accomplish more.

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