Remember that trip I was thinking of taking down to Berkeley? Well, it happened! Got a flight down after work in the middle of the week (Wednesday) on Southwest, with a direct flight into Oakland (much nicer than those flights into Oakland via SFO & DEN...). I was late heading to the airport, and then the Max broke down en route, so I was worried about missing the flight and got chastised by the security checkpoint people for being in such a hurry (I mandate this was merely because of the contrast of my efficiency with the sloth immediately preceding me...). But I made it with plenty of time to spare. And the flight was only a quarter or third full, so I ended up with no one next to me (nice change of pace from most flights where I seem to be singled out by "larger" individuals as a good seatmate...). Anyway, landed a bit early and promptly found out Emil (the friend I was going down to visit & stay with) had only just left. And then he got lost because of GPS issues. So, I ended up hanging around curbside for an hour. There's not much to see at an airport at night. Eventually we met up & headed back to Berkeley. Only to end up on Treasure Island. Oops...silly GPS units...but I did get a good view of San Francisco at night, which was cool (sorry; no pics, we were in the car and couldn't really stop to get out the cameras). The next day was spent walking around the Berkeley campus. I liked how it was hilly and had vegetation. Purdue just seems kind of...flat...in comparison. I think Purdue had better architecture though, and more modern facilities. So maybe all that construction that my tuition paid for was worth it after all... 
: Tree on campus (near the Life Science's building) 
: Soda Hall, UC Berkeley campus The next day was supposed to be tourist day in San Francisco. Which started off really well; we got to San Francisco without getting lost again (hehe...). But the weather didn’t really cooperate & it rained. A lot. We still walked around Fisherman's Wharf, which was pretty deserted. On the bright side, parking was really easy! So after grabbing lunch & getting wet, we got back into the car to see the other attraction at the top of my list: the Golden Gate Bridge : 
: Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco By the time we got to the view point though, the weather had turned a bit worse. Winds came in and the rain started coming down harder. After grabbing a photo or two, I got the brilliant idea of heading over to the visitor center (50 feet away). Those 50 feet resulted in my rain jacket getting soaked through. The 50 feet back to the car meant that we were both totally soaked. At which point it seemed like a good idea to conclude the site seeing for the day and just head back. For dinner, I met up with a friend from high school (John) that works in the Valley. Which was a lot of fun (even if I don't feel like I helped the conversation much...:( ... meh). The last full day there consisted of a lot of driving. Headed over to South San Francisco to see where my parent's are going to be living now & hit up a couple of Filipino Bake Shops to get goodies for my coworkers.  Got to see the big "South San Francisco" sign, stopped at Red Ribbon & Goldilocks, and then headed out to the coast at Pacifica. Drove down route 1 to Half Moon Bay...the coast there is beautiful! 
: Montara Beach (?) On the way back we swung through Mountain View, Santa Clara, and San Jose. Honestly, that was probably the part of the trip I liked the least. Too many strip malls, suburbs, cars, & people. Which to be honest is kind of what I was expecting from California... Seeing all the tech companies there was sort of interesting, but didn't outweigh the dislike of the environment. On the plus side, I did find out that Skype video conferencing actually works really well over my WWAN connection from AT&T (you still need to come out & see it in person though, Matt!). So, California...liked San Francisco, liked Berkeley, liked the coast, but didn't really like Silicon Valley all that much (nor the East Bay Area much either...). I'll have to go back sometime & hope for better weather so I can actually do the touristy stuff. Maybe in April...got some time off there...might drive down this time though... (full picture album) Now playing: In-Flight Safety – The Coast is Clear – 07 Fear
Okay, better (although less productive) idea than messing around with URL normalization: why not read that Consider Phlebas book that's just laying around? It's actually the 3rd Iain M. Banks book I've read. Summary: I liked it. It came recommended via a couple of sources, and definitely had parallels to one of the web comics that I read (Schlock Mercenary). Actually, come to think of it, maybe I read that comic because it was recommended by the same people that recommended the book...meh, don't remember now...could be another occurrence of the echo chamber phenomena of the blogosphere. I think it ranks in between the other two books. I still like Use of Weapons the most...maybe in part because it was the first one I read? Maybe I just liked the way it ended, even if it was obvious to more astute readers. But both stories come out ahead of Matter. I can't really fault the writing of Matter at all; that was excellent, with good pacing of the main storyline, quite a bit of character development, and an interesting overarching plot that integrated the annoying primitive-royalty subplot well (in the end). But I didn't like the book. That subplot & all the characters involved in it were just too...annoying. There's a similar thing with movies that I've discussed with friends (specifically regarding whether rating of films on Netflix should be based on how much one liked it or how good it was). Maybe this is true of everything...something can be good; interesting; technically very well executed...but there's no lasting emotional connection, just a slightly bad aftertaste, a desire to move on to something better... Should have figured out how to have IIS redirect requests for things like 'CommentView,guid,8c43204e-2fae-4716-bfba-7c9d3225225d.aspx' to 'CommentView.aspx?guid=8c43204e-2fae-4716-bfba-7c9d3225225d' instead... Now playing: Basia Bulat – Heart of My Own – 07 If Only You
So it looks like I'm going to be down in the Bay Area February 25-28...not 100% definite yet, since I haven't booked the flights yet or anything, but that's the current thoughts. It'll be fun to see Emil & things when I'm not horribly sick & unable to talk (unlike Christmas back in Indiana...), plus I've never actually been to California (yes! really!), so being all touristy should be cool. Of course, I first have to get there. Which might be a bigger issue than originally thought. At least if I fly certain airlines. Here's how one un-named (although you might figure it out if you look closely at the picture...) airline wants to route me: 
Yes, 13 hours. Portland to Oakland. Soooo, why is that a potential issue? Why is it so utterly insane? Here, maybe a map will help the less geographically inclined: 
Black line is the first leg, blue one is the second leg, and burgundy one is the third (final) leg. Thanks, but I think I'd rather save the time & just hop off the plane in San Francisco and swim across the bay. Or, I don't know...maybe drive down that nice orange live labeled "5"... Now playing: Jeremy Fisher – Goodbye Blue Monday – 01 Scar That Never Heals
(sorry for the lyrics link...it's the best I could find while being lazy)
Waaaay back, right after graduating from high school, I went to Europe with my French class from high school. Unfortunately, I didn't have a digital camera yet at that point, so all the pictures had to be scanned. While digging around, I found the scans of those pictures, so after a bit of cleaning up, here they are! Now playing: The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights – 07 Only Good Days Caught on Camera
(okay, so that's not actually the song I'm listening too...actually, it's 11 I Hurt the Ones That Love Me, but the title of track 7 seemed more appropriate for a picture post)
(i.e., putting in all (2) the links took longer than I was planning...)
I wish there was a way in Windows Live Photos to let me get an RSS feed of the albums, not just the photos within an album... (they're in order of date taken, not necessarily date posted...yeah, I need to be better about posting things on time...) Now playing: You Say Party! We Say Die! – XXXX – 10 Heart of Gold
Happy New Year to everyone! Here's to next year!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! (pictures of food to come later...) Now playing: Pick a Piper - Rooms
Despite what some people might think, I'm not writing journal entries on Facebook. No, these are blog posts from my one, true web presence: www.ntldr.net (www.ntldr.com…ntldr.net…ntldr.com…whatever, they're all just host headers for a single IIS 7.5 site).
See, there's this nice little part of the web called RSS. It lets content be automatically published in a nifty machine-readable way. I even wrote about it years ago… Anyway, its relevance here is that there's a RSS feed published by www.ntldr.net that some other sites (such as Windows Live Profiles, and notably Facebook) are subscribed to. These two other sites are able to pick up a change I make to the site (add/change/delete blog posts) and inform their users. So everyone stays up to date and everything is happy-fun-unicorn-prancing-in-the-sun times.
Note that I called out 2 sites there. Never wrote anything about the Windows Live addition of syndication. Now, some might say that's because I don't have any Windows Live Network members (fine, I'll say what everyone is thinking "he doesn't have any Friends"), to which I'd reply "ha! But who's got the traffic analysis to show otherwise!". (note that this argument applies to Windows Live Friends; I don't have nearly the resources (or wherewithal!) to stalk everyone in real life…and no, I'm not looking for grants from Homeland Security to change that…) In truth, I just don't have a problem with the way Windows Live implemented the feature. But I do have a few issues & comments regarding how Facebook does it.
One issue is feed refresh speed. I made a post midafternoon Sunday. I log into Facebook to catch up on friends*, go to my profile for some reason (or maybe just look at the Facebook Feeds), and notice that it hasn't picked up the post made hours earlier. Now, this isn't really that big of a problem. I mean, how often do I really make posts? How critical is it that people get these & read it that second? It's not like I'm giving out stock tips or something here.
But Facebook has this weird insistence that the timestamps of the "journal" entries be different from the timestamps on the posted content. So in combination with slow refreshes of the feed, it's possible to get into situations where multiple posts are made, Facebook picks them all up at once, and then totally screws up the order of the posts. So much for being able to carefully lead readers through a series of posts! Just think how much fun it would be to read a mystery novel where the final chapter shows up before the mystery is even presented!** Even more annoying is that the order seems to depend on what view is presented. This happened to me later Sunday evening, after everything finally refreshed, with friends viewing the "oh noes! I goofed up!" post before reading the much more recent "praise of Hyper-V" post that reflected a much better personal mood.
Going in a slightly different direction, Facebook proxies every request to the host website from its users through itself. I can't really take issue with this behavior, because I think the original intent is to protect users from malicious content. Facebook pulls the entire feed content down and presents it as a user journal entry. So if I wanted to be malicious and put things like Web bugs, or perhaps a little bit of script to go do evil, nefarious acts, that trash could gain legitimacy and bypass restrictions because it's now on Facebook's site. Proxying also allows for another level of caching to occur (I suspect I may be seeing this behavior in my servers logs), thus improving performance and maybe letting the source site stay up if something becomes really, really popular (obviously good). However, as a site admin, I get kind of nervous about the blatant way this seems to be occurring, and the lack of control I seem to have over it. Plus, it wouldn't really be necessary if the design were tweaked a bit to not trick users into thinking everything was Facebook & originated on Facebook & that Facebook is the Real Internet.***
Tied to the content proxying is content reformatting. RSS feeds are XML; entries can contain XHTML and all its glorious formatting. As part of "journal-ifying", the original site's CSS and formatting are ignored, and the Facebook styles get applied. In most cases, this is fine, and works well to create a more seamless experience. But on a couple of my entries, the formatting has reacted strangely and the resulting Frankenstein looks horrible. Again, I much prefer the Windows Live route where users get just a headline & a brief snippet to catch their interest. Unfortunately, I doubt that model will ever be picked up by Facebook. They're too focused on keeping people on the site and making money off those people, even if they are misrepresenting the origins of the content that those people are coming to see. Now, I don't really have a problem with a company making money. I just don't like seeing ads next to things I've written. I don't run ads on www.ntldr.net, and I don't plan on ever doing so.
Umm…so…"boo! to these Facebook journal entries!" visit www.ntldr.net! ;-D (I'll conveniently ignore how many, many more people (and better targeted! these people might actually care about this stuff!) have probably read these posts now via Facebook than have ever visited my actual site…)
* this part's hypothetical; despite having an account there since the beginning of 2004, I'm still not really sure why people use Facebook
** not that I'm planning on featuring detective stories at any point, but it'd be nice to have the flexibility for me to make that choice
*** some exaggeration added for dramatic effect…please don't "eliminate" me if I've stumbled across the super-secret plans for world domination!
Now playing: Lifehouse – Who We Are – 02 First Time
Bunch of random thoughts here...kind of like a Link Post only much more commentary than usual, so... Hmm...maybe I should think about taking a vacation: RP among National Geographic’s 25 travel destinations. Sounds like it would be pretty & relaxing & nice. Or maybe not take a vacation; not sure what I'd do there (yes, there's a reason to go, but I've got this stupid hang-up around needing to be invited over first (and I'm fairly certain at this point that that wont happen)). Moving pictures of the typhoon disasters in RP (well, I found them moving at least; might be different if you're not sitting warm & dry in a recliner thousands of miles away...). I'd forgotten about how much I liked Wire in the Blood until both Emil mentioned it, and Leverage-writer-guy blogged about it on the same night. Although for some reason that just made me want to watch Spooks again instead... Interesting blog post about politics & economics. Not sure I fully agree with the post, but an interesting view nonetheless. Fascinating reading about the Olson time zone database. No, seriously! It's not that boring! Okay, so given my penchant for regional settings, date formats, & other miscellaneous bits, I might be a bit biased. Go check it out & find out for yourself. (aside: examples of my wierdness: 24 hour clocks, clocks set to UTC, ISO8601 formatting (yes, I may even have multiple editions of the standard!), usage of Celsius, changing of currency formatting so the currency symbol is after the #, usage of the space as a number group separator, etc.) Cool: instructions on how to get the Active Directory detection of TMG servers to work. Now I just need to upgrade Forefront TMG and implement this client feature... Haven't watched this video series yet, but it was referred to me as a good introduction to functional programming. Recommended UEFI-based Disk Partition Configurations: read that if setting up an EFI booting Windows system! It'll make things a lot easier. And a sign that I've been dealing WAY too much with thermal/power management: first reaction to this comic was total confusion – which plate? the one reinforcing the heatsink mount? there's no thermal sensor/thermocouple there is there? maybe it's referring to part of the chassis? but that doesn't get hot? and why would I be being warned anyway...shouldn’t everything just safely throttle down? Now playing: Joel Plaskett – Three (Disc 1) – 9 Run, Run, Run
Screwed up a couple things at work last week. Well, found out about the screw ups (yep, there's 2!) at least. The original decisions I made/that were made happened weeks & months ago. The first involved a big upgrade project that I feel like I somehow got to be essentially in charge of (regular readers might be able to figure out what product was involved by going back through previous posts...), and is really just the result of poor communication, although I'm not sure how much clearer things could be than having the scenario in the stupid subject line of the emails... Anyway, it feels kind of like the rug got pulled out from underneath me on this one, and I'm probably taking it a lot harder than I should, with no one really to blame (uh-huh...like that's going to last...the finger pointing has already started; just a matter of seeing how political it gets). The second screw up involved the same product, but a new installation this time. A new server had to be spec'd and built, and there's a hard deadline & tight timeline to get it done. This time my mistake was in specifying the wrong OS to be installed – amd64 instead of i386 like the product's documentation said. Double checked everything, saw the note about supported platforms in the docs, and then spec'd the amd64 version anyway. Not quite sure what I was thinking; maybe that any well-written app wont have a problem with 64-bit? maybe just thinking about the cost & upgradeability of the system instead of the specs? maybe just a total-brain-failure while reading? Not quite sure what's going to happen there... Huh...that went longer than I intended...guess I'm still fairly upset about it. [what, like writing a blog post trolling for sympathy wasn't already a good enough indication???] Now playing: Harry Chapin – Legends of the Lost & Found – 16 You Are the Only Song
A couple days ago someone mentioned Pidgin, so I thought "what the heck, I'll see what the commotion is about". And hey! It's come a long way since the Gaim days when I last used it! Support for Jingle and XMPP audio/video is very cool, and it really doesn't look & feel that bad (okay, other than the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons being backwards from the Windows norm on every dialog). Unfortunately I haven't been able to test the Jabber support, since it appears the entire amessage.de server that I used to use is just gone...so I tried using my old FBE28E45 AIM account & what the heck????!!!! it still works! I mean, it's been years since I used that account! (this is where someone is going to point out that I've actually been logged in this whole time (from some random transport server), and that this explains why I've been such a jerk and not responded to thousands of IM's over the years...) But yeah, not only did logging into the account still work, all my contacts were still there! A whole bunch of people were online that I haven't talked to since the beginning of college...plus all the defunct accounts from people that have moved on. So I think I'll keep Pidgin around for a bit & see if I can't "reconnect" with some people (translation: Pidgin is going to sit around and run in the background for a while, until I forget about, then get uninstalled once I rediscover that something's using a bunch of resources...hehe...). Update: hey, it turns out that amessage.de is still there...I'm just an idiot and 1) remembered to add the enabled AIM protocol to the TMG firewall access policy, but 2) forgot to define XMPP, add it to an access rule, and enable the rule. So I'm also reactivating NTSN@amessage.de! Yay! (although, ouch, it turns out people were trying to contact me on that account...sorry Taylor!) Now playing: Jim Croce – I Got a Name – 11 The Hard Way Every Time
So as a follow on to the Grand Coolie Dam trip back in June, my friends up in Seattle for the summer decided to head up no the North Cascades National Park area and see that. On the whole, the trip wasn’t a whole lot of fun (for a bunch of reasons); but the area was really pretty and get back there sometime. Maybe make it all the way through the park next time…maybe actually hike the trails a bit… Oh well; here’s pictures! 
Top of Baker Dam…it creates Baker Lake (to the right). To the left there’s a canyon/gorge that was fairly impressive…too bad none of the pictures turned out. 
We stopped at Lake Shannon too & I was able to get a picture of this old abandoned(?) building (house?). 
I like the curvature of Diablo Dam…makes it easier to get pictures of the dam face than the straight ones like the one at Baker Lake :). 
Decent capture of what North Cascades National Park is like (that’s a little bit of Diablo Lake in the bottom left). Now playing: Amy Millan – Masters of the Burial – 09 I Will Follow You into the Dark
Windows Live has this cool thing where it reminds you about your contact’s birthdays (the “Birthday Calendar” I think…). And yes, I’ve come to rely on this feature. Unfortunately, I can’t quite bring myself to trust the system completely, so whenever I get the alerts, I also get this nagging doubt that it’s not really that person’s birthday and that I’ve really just misentered their contact info… Wow Windows XP is showing it’s age…the RTM installation disc I have is reacting badly to the >127GB hard drive I’m trying to install on…(yes, I know the way to correct this is to use SP1…which is why I’m slipstreaming SP3 onto a new installation disc right now…) Hey! xcopy on Windows 7 seems to have a new option: /J (“Copies using unbuffered I/O. Recommended for very large files.”) Cool! Command just used to build the Windows XP with SP3 disc: oscdimg -n -b"amd64\boot\ETFSBOOT.COM" -lWXP_VOL_EN_SP3 -t04/14/2008,07:53:59 -g -h -maxsize:4096 "E:\CD Build\windows_xp_sp3" "E:\CD build\windows_xp_sp3.iso". I’m probably a short DVD burn away from finding out just how wrong that was…(much later)…hey, that actually worked! Oo…coool…Windows XP does have regional settings for Filipino…too bad the timezone stuff doesn’t have one (instead I end up guessing…”it’s close enough to Singapore, right?” note that this results in the timezone being "Malay Peninsula Standard Time") Who makes & sells a DVD drive that can’t play DVD’s?!?!?! I mean, I could sort of understand a bare OEM drive…but these are boxed retail drives from HP! Grrr… Now playing: (nothing but the sound of computer fans)
So back at the end of June I headed up to Seattle to hang out with my friends Emil & his girlfriend. First goal: stop by Leavenworth, see the faux-Bavarian-ness, and have Emil's girlfriend eat one of the pig legs (there’s an actual German-ish name for it that I can’t remember…) that had been recommended to her by her coworkers (co-interns?) at Microsoft. It was…larger…than anticipated. Leavenworth was fun in a ludicrously touristy way, complete with the crazy thick crowds. Second goal: get to Grand Coulee Dam and check out that engineering marvel. It’s definitely impressive! And the laser show at night was really cool. Third goal: stop at Lake Chelan and see that “gateway to the North Cascades”. That was less interesting for me, but it was still a nice chance to get out of the car for a bit. Yeah, there was lots of driving on this trip :). And all of this was just on the weekend! So after that weekend I had another 2 days up in Seattle, so I did touristy stuff around the city. Got to finally the Space Needle, the Experience Music Project (EMP), general downtown (was looking for the SafeCo office, but I couldn’t remember the address at all, so it ended up just being just wandering over dozens of blocks), and the wharf area. Also stopped by Pike Place Market, the University of Washington campus, Gasworks Park, and took the Ride-the-Ducks tour. So lots of stuff, and lots of fun! And lots of pictures :). But here are a select few; the full photo set can be found in the Seattle, WA Vacation (2009-06) album. 
US-2 on the way out to Grand Coulee Dam 
Grand Coulee Dam itself, as seen from the top of the extension added to accommodate the third powerhouse 
Marion Oliver McCaw Hall screen-thingys at Seattle Center 
Space Needle (and a little bit of the Experience Music Project (EMP)) 
Seattle waterfront, seen from a pier on the wharf 
Hill in Gasworks Park, Seattle, plus a bit of the tops of the remains of the gasworks Now playing: Learn Filipino – Book 1, Disc 1 – 12 Pronunciation-Malumay-03-82*
* Note on now playing: yes, I’m trying to multitask, and no, this probably isn’t a good idea…hehe…but it’s now abundantly clear that my mapping of sounds-to-language needs mountains of work…
So it's cooler here in Portland. Yay! Now, I know I should really follow up the previous link post with a picture post, but here's another link post anyway. And I could probably put more commentary here in the introduction, but meh? why bother? Now playing: Emm Gryner – The Original Leap Year – 04 Your Sort of Human Being
So it's kind of hot here in Portland now. Consequently, going outside would be…annoying (I don't care what people say about "dry heat", it's still hot)...which means it's another inside fun day. Unfortunately there's only so much movie/tv watching one can do before becoming bored, I (finally) finished rereading Cryptonomicon again and don't have any other books lined up yet, and I've spent my hour studying (and getting frustrated by) Tagalog, so onto website stuff. The easiest thing of which to do is write another post. So, here are the links: - Uber cool! (via Bink.nu)
- Having worked in a large organization, ostensibly on a 'large' project, news like this no longer surprises me.
- I like this comic, but have this sneeky suspicion that my liking of it would be misinterpreted if anyone I actually knew visited this site (other than the bots that I'm making friends with...hi search engines/hackers/spammers/content theives!)
Now playing: Josh Ritter – Golden Age of Radio [Bonus CD] – 01 Come and Find Me
Now playing: The Consumer Goods – The Terminator Rules
New! Improved! Now with inline hyperlinks!1 Extra special bonus feature: So I got the following email message from my mom last week: See your Mom on YouTube!! and was immediately filled with a weird curiosity and a sick terror wondering if this was somehow going to be one of those horribly embarrassing videos where people just do stupid things (& (usually) get hurt). Fortunately it was just moderately embarrassing and for work. :P So I'll share my link love (rofl! hahaha...like that's worth anything...I've seen how many pages down into the search results some visitors have had to go to finally stumble across this site!), and everyone can check it out: http://www.youtube.com/tcpllibrary Extra, extra special bonus feature: So, there's been a bit of speculation lately about why I blog (& why it's increased lately). The general consensus amongst other people seemed to be that it's because I'm lonely & am seeking attention. LOL! Duh, it's a blog. That's like saying the sky is blue because of light's refraction through the atmosphere. ...err... maybe not quite that metaphor. Whatever...was going more for the whole "that's the way it works because that's what it means to be that" thing... (actually, there was a bunch of additional context around the whole question that makes it interesting, but I'm trying to avoid the whole emo-teen-agnst-livejournal vibe because I'm a mature technology professional maintaining a professional Internet self-marketing presence (haha...okay, so really I'm just too lazy to create & install a black-text-on-black-background DasBlog theme :P)) 1 Rose Festival/Fleet Week 2009 pictures coming later this week...or next...hopefully I'll be more punctual with this year's photos than I've been in previous years. Now playing: Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains – Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains – 10 American Names
So, apparently there's some confusion about what the picture in the last post was. Something from someone about "dude, why’s there a picture of an airplane crashing into a white tower with a grey skeleton walking by." Ahem. IT'S A FREAKING WIND TURBINE! See! Here's what they look like when complete! :
 Here, maybe it'll help more if I show a bigger panorama (click for large size so the white things sticking up in the background are more visible):
 (ignore the car in the picture; it's not really relevant to the windmills/wind turbines (sorry, I still think of them as windmills & have finally gotten tired of correcting myself) that are under construction.) Also, I'd think that following the link to the XKCD comic would be a bit of a tip-off as to what the picture was off…never mind the direct reference to Don Quixote (the inference of which the comic leaves "as an exercise to the reader"). Whatever. :) Now playing: Maybe Smith – Animals & Architects – 02 Hearts Like Bears
Thank goodness Don Quixote was here! Knocked the top right off the fearsome turbine-alien. Now playing: Wintersleep – Welcome to the Night Sky – 04 Weighty Ghost
So, from April 5th through the 8th I was in San Antonio, Texas on business for the annual Ratabase conference. I’d been planning on live blogging it again like I did last year (actually, I was planning on doing it better than last year), but things didn’t quite work out that way. So, instead of the latest news on cool new things you can do with an insurance rating calculator (stop laughing!), I’ve got a cautionary tail about relying on new equipment, planning before doing things, and generally about how I do stupid stuff with technology. Now for a bit of background. Windows Vista & 7 have this cool feature called “BitLocker”. Basically, it encrypts your hard drive so that if the computer/drive is stolen, an attacker would have to go through the OS level security mechanisms (usernames/passwords/smartcards/ACL’s). The attacker wouldn’t be able to circumvent the OS mechanisms by, say, editing the password store to give change the passwords. Or they could go after the EFS keys and just decrypt files that you had encrypted explicitly so that other people wouldn’t be able to read them! One “mode” of Bitlocker relies on this cool hardware device called a TPM (trusted platform module). The TPM is involved in the key management/access process, and basically serves to ensure that the entire system, starting from the beginning of the boot process, is “trusted”. After all, you wouldn’t want some nefarious person coming in, booting to a different environment that can impersonate the BitLocker process, and then unlocking/decrypting the BitLocker volume and thus bypassing all the security it was supposed to offer. If the TPM/BitLocker (not sure which actually does the checks) detects that the system is under attack (for example, the order of the devices that the system boots from has changed), the system will require that a 56 digit recovery key be entered. Assuming you created a recovery key initially…but everyone does that & keeps that key safe, right? A week before I was to head to San Antonio, my new Tablet PC (a Lenovo X200T) arrived. Incidentally, it’s a very nice system…fast, light, long battery life, lots of accessories (I bought most of the options…X-Base so I have an optical drive, webcam, fingerprint reader, WiMAX, HSDPA/UMTS, GPS, etc.). And it has a TPM v1.2. Which was cool, because it meant I could use BitLocker! So I put Windows 7 (beta) on the system, enabled BitLocker, created the recovery key, and used the system successfully for a week. One time while rebooting the system I had to enter the recovery key, which I thought was kind of funny at the time, but didn’t really worry that much about it. So along came Sunday morning, it’s 5:00AM and I need to head out to the airport, so I hibernate my tablet and pull it out of the docking station (X Base). Figured I wouldn’t need the optical drive, and certainly wouldn’t need the extra weight. Thought about putting the recovery key on a flash drive or the external hard drive I was taking, but then thought “nah, I wouldn’t need that”. Besides, the key would be a lot more exposed to compromise if I had it with me and, say, my flash drive got lost/stolen. Remember how I said the boot order mattered to the TPM? And remember how 1) I installed the OS shortly before this (from a DVD), & 2) how I wasn’t taking the X-Base with the DVD drive with me? And how I ignored the fact that when I’d last attached the X-Base I had to enter the recovery key? And how I wasn’t taking the recovery key with me? (this is where it should become apparent to most people that I am, in fact, an idiot.) Of course I got all the way to the airport, through security, and was sitting at the gate with 30 minutes until boarding started when I went to use my tablet. And of course it saw that the DVD drive was no longer present and began going “oh noes! I’m under attack!”. Which then caused me to first realize exactly what mistakes I’d made, then freak out (it’s amazing what sorts of brief, complete clarity you can have when a situation goes to crap). Part of the freak out was calling up a trusted friend and giving him all the details of connecting back to my network via VPN (including user names and passwords). I figured “okay, get connected to the internal network, then the administrator account can be used to login to the online CA and security server to retrieve the recovery key”. Yes, it was a moment of weakness and complete stupidity. Fortunately, years ago when I got the VPN stuff working, I had the foresight to use L2TP and require certificates to connect in addition to passwords. So no VPN connection could be established, giving the passwords did absolutely no good (but no harm either), and the recovery key couldn’t be retrieved. Hurray for defense-in-depth. I was not totally without my tablet during the trip though. Remember how I brought an external hard drive with me? Well, that drive is the bootable one that I use to make OS recovery images. And I’d used it just a week before to backup the Lenovo factory default config. So I spent the flight down to Texas doing restores until I got the system working again. Here are some pictures from the trip (more (and higher res ones) can be found on my Windows Live Photos album for the trip): 
Westin La Cantera Resort gulf course outbuilding 
San Antonio, TX Riverwalk. There’s a boat ride around it that’s kind of cool too (+). Lots of people (-). On the whole, it was a cool area, and made for a good change of pace from the conference. 
The Alamo (of course!). Now playing: Greg Laswell – Three Flights From Alto Nido – 04 Comes & Goes (In Waves)
There have been entirely too few random bits posted here lately, so here's an IM conversation from yesterday... Jeffrey says (05:34):
you're up kind of late...
Jeffrey says (05:35):
unless your computers are LIEING
Matt says (13:31):
or up early
but more likely is that my computer is full of lies
Matt says (14:10):
but you
are idle
remember Jeffrey...
idle messenger clients are the Devil's beowulf cluster
Matt says (14:11):
Now the devil has a better SETI@home score than Jesus, are you happy now Jeffrey?
Now playing: Stars – In Our Bedroom After the War – 10 Bitches in Tokyo
"Insane Super Fast Tetris. Click HERE to watch." (well, obviously clicking there wont work, but that was the suggested "improvement" to this post) (clicking on the below links will work. unless the Internet is dead. again.)
Just video links, no actual content...
From Larry Osterman: http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/09/12/got-tetris.aspx
From Emil, via YouTube search reading the comments after showing him the previous vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CUoviec-uY
(I've now tasked Emil with following up on his search with a bit of real world research. Right now we're thinking mandatory freshman dorm project...)
Now playing – Amy Millan - Honey from the Tombs - Wayward and Parliament
There's just something incredibly beautiful about being in a high location and looking out over a city at night.
There's also something terribly beautiful about having a clear night and being in a location with no outside light bleeding in, and then looking up and seeing all the stars (& planets & satellites (& planes)).
I should get up to the roof of my apartment building more often.
Now playing: KT Tunstall – Eye To The Telescope – Suddenly I See
I got my first ever iPod today. It's a silver iPod Nano (but not one of the new ones released today). It was a raffle prize from work for participating in a health-&-wellness ("let's try and cut employee health insurance costs by making them actually, you know, healthy to begin with!) program.
So here are my first impressions.
Unboxing
To be honest, this wasn't that intuitively obvious. I've heard all this hype about how easy Apple products are to open up, etc, but this one you had to peel off invisible tape before the plastic shell would open up. Nicer than having to cut it up, but still confusing to me. After opening it up, everything was pretty simple. I can't really say it's any better than opening up anything else…you open box, you remove contents. That's the whole story.
The Device
I like the form factor. Nice and thin. Silver looks good, but I think I'd prefer black. Silver just strikes me as oh-so-2003ish (the only other silver devices I have are my TC1000 and various accessories I've purchased in silver to go with it). The screen seems a bit small, but this generation of the Nano doesn't support video, so that's not really a big deal. The display is more than adequate to display track information and provide basic navigation. To be honest, the UI looks really nice on the screen; probably a combination of a good display and a good UI.
Not so hot on the click wheel design. Okay, let's be honest: I hate the click wheel. Let me get this straight – I have to move my fingers around in circles to actually DO anything with this input method. Umm…why can't I just press something and be done with it. If you don't think you can scroll through lots of stuff, try using the HDD6330. You start an action, like scrolling through your songs, and it accelerates as you hold down. Although WMP Mobile doesn't have functionality like that on my HTC StarTrek…but then again, I don't really need that on a 2GB device (although there are 345 tracks on my SD card, I organize them by, I don't know "Artist" and "Album" and "Genre", so it's still easy to navigate). My other problem with the wheel is that it seems much less accurate to me than using a D-pad. Maybe I've just been trained too well to use D-pads for navigation (EVERYTHING I own other than this iPod uses directional pads: phone, MP3 player, remotes, headunit in my car…).
Haven't taken a look at the headphones, and probably wont, since I really like the ones I have now. Also, I really miss the AC power adapter. It effectively means I can't use listen to these in bed, because I'll have to worry about accidentally falling asleep and not pausing/turning off the device, then find out the next morning that I've now drained the battery and wont be able to use it that day. I guess a lot of other devices are going this route, and it's irritating.
Connecting
The cable is nice – integrated clip to keep it from getting messy. Otherwise, it's USB, just plug it in, even shows up as a generic mass storage device. Nice. So does my phone. And my flash drives. And my MTP MP3 player. I can't really give props for doing the right thing when basically everything else I've worked with does the right thing (but oh the fun I'll have mocking the first device that DOESN'T behave properly!).
iTunes
Up until this point I'd say the iPod was okay. After trying to deal with iTunes for 2 days, I've started looking for an alternative sync program. If I can't find one I like, this device is going in the trash, because it'll be worthless. And yes, I know that's a very strong opinion about iTunes, but it has so many inconsistencies, problems, and is so resource intensive that I really don't see what alternative I have.
Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have a better feel for the iPod as a device, and I'll create an update with those my revised opinions then.
Now playing: Orbital – Live At Glastonbury 1994-2004 – Dr Who? (playing on the Zune software, not iTunes)
Okay, I can't resist...but just one spoiler for Harry Potter #7:
So, the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows leaked to the Internet on Tuesday. Some vile librarian/page/clerk/tech services person/CIA agent (not MI-5, the copy was definitely an Americanized one) just couldn't keep a secret. And for that I'm thankful!
So, on the whole was it good? Did Harry die? Was Voldemort defeated?
Well, you wont get spoilers from me. Even though I could give them, since I've finished the book…but I wont be that cruel. Although, I will say that a bunch of people are in for some surprises, based off the comments & predictions I've seen/heard elsewhere.
On the whole, yes, the book was good. The beginning started off fast, then slowed up for a while, until the second half where it really picked up again. The body count was somewhat high, and I'm sure some people will complain about that, but this IS the penultimate battle of a seven book series. I'm sure some people will be surprised by parts of the ending, but in hindsight everything has been setup over the course of the series. And I think the ending suited the novel.
So, very (very) brief review, and I'll recommend reading it. I know I'll be heading out to an actual bookstore tomorrow to get a legit copy…
Now playing: Emm Gryner – Summer of High Hopes – Almighty Love
So, incidentally, I moved across the country to Porland, Oregon.
I have a job (starting next Monday), I have an apartment, and the fact that this is readable indicates that I have a worknig Internet connection. So the only thing that's really left is for me to get a new cell phone out here.
<semi-rant>
Which leads me to the problem of finding a cellphone provider and plan that I can actually buy. It has to be GSM, so I can get my own phone later (and the ones I'm interested in are GSM only). Beyond that, I want 450 minutes, with unlimited nights/weekends. Nights are anything after business ours: 8-5, governed by the timezone that the phone is in. Free text messages, and an unlimited data plan are included. No fancy features or warranties are to be included. And they'll clearly include in these prices all the taxes, surcharges, etc. that they have to pay to the government, not tack those on extra at the end.
And I'd really like to be able to only have to pay something REASONABLE for all that.
</semi-rant>
Test Post for persistence.
The site may FINALLY be back up and running properly.
This downtime has been a prime example of why tools should make you read the documentation, then quiz you on it before letting you do potentially stupid things.
And you should always have up-to-date backups created using a backup program for *that app*. Even if it should be "good enough" that you have a complete image of the system.
Read it and weep! #1 for "The Best Weather" in Channel9! W00T!
Plus, I managed to get back to being a Left-Leaning College State by banning business. And I've given up trying to get the tax rate under control…excellence in two out of three categories will have to be enough. 100% Income Tax, here we come!
Gah! I've become Inoffensive! That's the LAST time I vote to lower taxes.
(yeah, it's not just a web site anymore, it's a fictional country! Supplying all this site's political power since December 2006. Check it out at www.nationstates.net/ntldr.)
See, the inoffensive thing came up because I had been ranked as a "Left-wing College State" (rather appropriately, I might add, considering I'm a student at Purdue University!) for over a month, and then it changed just because I thought trying to cut a 60% tax rate would be a good idea…
Well, it's finally "really" snowed here in West Lafayette. Yes, the snow actually stuck to the ground this time, unlike when it snowed back in the fall where the flakes melted before reaching the ground. And yes, the roads were slick last night when not everything had been salted, plowed, & melted. So naturally I used my excuse of having to mail stuff to go out and drive in it in my car. It's really not that bad; just accept that you don't have complete control and keep your head about you, and it's not that big of a problem. In fact, I think it's actually fun.
But I don't imagine that the people in this video think snow is that fun. But I did enjoy it.
(video seen at http://kindel.com/blogs/charlie/2007/01/16/3741.aspx)
So this site has been down for…a while. The hard drive in my old domain controller died, taking all security settings with it. Which, because of the restricted system policy that I got from the MS lockdown recommendations, meant I couldn't login or use the other servers in my old domain. At all.
Not to mention the fact that the database for ntldr.net was on that dead DC, which meant that ntldr.net was dead. In any case, I was stuck in a situation where I couldn't turn off the ISA box, because it wouldn't come back up without the DC. Oh, and I couldn't log into my 64-bit desktop either. And the Exchange server was unusable. Hmm…and now that I think about it, my old TC1000 probably can't do much either. But I use that so infrequently that I haven't even thought about it until now…
So, with that nasty situation set up, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to work. On other things. Like the CS307: Software Engineering project that sucked up tons of time. And the CS490T Robot stuff. And the Technical Writing papers that kept coming up from nowhere, only to disappear and never be heard from again just as fast. And the usual drone of probability, counting, and graphs that make up Discrete Mathematics. Not to mention the interviews, CERIAS work that I finally had to get around to, and the dealing with SSCI no longer being SSCI but instead becoming part of Aptuit.
However, despite working on all that stuff, I was able to do a preliminary damage assessment and begin trying to repair things. I have a SharePoint backup of ntldr.net, and just need to figure out/find time to restore it somewhere and get the data out (I've already got a tool that I wrote a while ago that will do that data extraction for me, as long as I can get everything back in SQL Server). I also had my daily backups of Exchange intact. Unfortunately I can't figure out how the fuck to actually get data OUT of those backups, and apparently there are a whole bunch of rules for how you can do disaster recovery with Exchange, and you apparently only get one chance per forest to get it right, and I screwed it all up. Yes, I know this would have been a wonderful opportunity to get reacquainted with PSS. I just don't care enough, especially since I got email working a bit ago using Windows Live Domains.
I also got ISA back up and running (finally), which explains why the site is back up and visible to everyone again. Surprisingly, I remembered the firewall rules better than I remembered things like server & organization names, so it was really pretty painless.
Emil's new phone just ate my first ever moblog post.
:(
But the HP iPaq Mobile Messenger hw6945 ROCKS. At least on first impression. Definitely a cool device though...maybe a good birthday present ;)
First snow fall of the 2006-2007 winter has begun.
This is the 7th major version of ntldr.net. But, it's also the Beta, which is why it's at www.ntldr.com instead of www.ntldr.net. Basically, it's just Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Beta 2 Technical Refresh with the Blog site template and the Lacquer theme. Oh, and it now has (most of) the blog content from the Ntldr.net site.
Currently missing are: comments and any non-blog content (pictures, documents, etc.).
Pictures will probably be getting their own subsite, with a nifty tab letting people navigate to it. Comments probably won't get migrated. Not entirely sure on that part yet. Right now, anonymous commenting is allowed, but I'm going to be looking at using the fancy authentication provider support of WSS3 to see if I can't make that a register user thing.
Unfortunately, more changes to the site will probably have to wait until Thursday, since I've wasted too much time working on it already when I should have been trying to get some of the class work I have due done in advance of the (soft) deadlines.
Oh, and being able to use Word to make this blog entry ROCKS.
This post has no content. It is a meta post.
I was trolling through my logs for June, and found that my Urge posts were the most frequent way users found my site via searching. One of those queries was "HDD6330/17 Problems", which I just happened to try out in Google. AND MY SITE WAS #4. But the snippet sounds kindof negative. So, I LOVE MY PHILIPS GOGEAR HDD6330/17.
Okay, so I lied about the "no content" part a bit. Well, here comes that part:
Rollup of posts people were actually looking for:
Oh and to the individual searching for "liz hamill music blog", I'm sorry, but I HAVE NO IDEA WHY YOU GOT TO MY SITE.
Same apologies go to the "ntldr" people. If it's any consolation, my official advice on the matter is 1) search MS support (support.microsoft.com), 2) upgrade to Vista so you can worry about 'bootmgr' instead of 'ntldr'.
I offer no apologies to the "metasyntax.net" owner who was searching for his site from his computer at home. (but then again, I think he actually found what was being looked for)
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Beta 2 has been released, so there's a very good possibility that I'll try and install that on my web server and completely blow away this site in the process.
You have been forewarned. If anyone actually cares, that is (the BIOS adventure mentioned previously has me feeling rather apathetic right now).
Okay, so I've been using WMP11 Beta/Urge for about 24 hours now. And I've noticed a few things that damper my enthusiasm of yesterday a bit. On the whole though, I still really like WMP11 and Urge.
Performance is also somewhat of a problem. When doing some things in the UI, like selecting "Open File Location", it takes much longer than I'd expect. In some cases, nothing happens. There really isn't any consistency to this, other than its worse shortly after WMP is started. Probably just perf tuning that'll happen by the RTM build.
Then we get to the device issues I've had...oh boy are there a bunch of them!
For some reason, sync'ing just one copy protected file at a time works. If you try to do more than one, just the first works. If, after sync'ing that one file, an attempt to sync another file is made while in the Sync view (i.e., if you told it to sync multiple items in one batch, or told it to sync one item, then tried to sync another) all subsequent sync attempts fail until WMP is exited and restarted. This is EXTREMELY ANNOYING. I have found a workaround though: if I sync ONE file, then exit the Sync view by openning the Library tab, then browse through the library to find the next song to sync, and THEN open Sync view back up and tell it to sync just ONE file, it works without having to restart WMP every time. The worst part is that you can download whole albums with Urge...and then spend the next 15 minutes having to individually sync every single song.
Oh, and once songs are sync'd to my Philips HDD6330/17 and I unplug it and go to listen to all that music I just transferred, it's discovered that Picture support doesn't work. So I don't have any album art on my device. It's a little thing, but you get used to having it there. Just makes the whole experience more colorful...and better.
For some songs, it turned out not having the associated album art was the least of the problems. I rip CD's using WMA Lossless. So every one of those CD's that I decide to transfer to my HDD6330 has to be transcoded down to a 320Kbps standard WMA file. Some of those transcodes seem to have gotten screwed up. I don't know if it picked the wrong frequency, or the timing of things is just off, but a few of the songs that I transferred sound ATROCIOUS.
At least those bad files attempted to play. Songs that I had downloaded from Urge and then transferred to my HDD6330 last night, but that I didn't try and listen to until this afternoon, didn't play at all. My poor HDD6330 just sits there like it's going to play them, but locks up for 10s or so before giving up and booting you back to the Music menu.
Ah the fun of Beta Software!
WMP11 BETA & Urge did what I spent 2 weeks trying to get Yahoo to do. They actually synchronized subscription content to my Philips HDD6330/17. And Yahoo had it's own rich client, complete with fancy support for synching with Apple's IPod.
Right now I'm just sitting here grinning...Yahoo was a horrible experience, and I fully expected this little experiment to fail. But you know what? Urge didn't even require that I enter all my billing information to get the "free" "trial" period. Double plus bonus points to Viacom for CLUEFULNESS and producing a product that ACTUAL WORKS.
WMP11 Beta on XP seems to be working better for me than it does on Vista. Interestingly enough, the Vista builds I've got right now have a newer version: 11.0.5381 vs. 11.0.5358. I have to agree with Paul Thurrott that it actually looks better on XP than on Vista. The glass effects aren't bad... it's just that the solid black works better. And solid black is MUCH better than the battleship grey that replaces all the glass when running in Aero Basic like my TC4200 has to. Type ahead search is cool...background file add to library is cool (nice riff on Media Center there)...album cover art for browsing in library is cool (again, nice riff on MCE). Sync'ing in general has a better experience than WMP10. Although I was distracted by all the new UI elements and things, so I missed the "Start Sync" button for a while and almost got frustrated (hint: draw a π/2 line, like in a Functional Iteration root find, then reflect over that from where the "Start Sync" button was in WMP10, and you'll see the new button). Almost, but not quite. Seeing the new Device libary view made up for it.
Hehe...I'm just happy everything is working correctly right now. Need to look at how Urge handles my many computer's scenario, but if everything works out and the service works as well in a week or so as it does now, Urge definitely has my $150 yearly subscription fee.
Time to vent a bit...
Internet connection: ever since I added Vista build 5381 to the network, I've been losing my internet connection periodically. For some reason, ISA 2004's Firewall Service just crashes on the ISA Server. Or it hangs. Or all network communication through that server just seems to stop. It's wierd, because I can't put the blame just on Vista, since it sometimes happens when my Tablet isn't even connected to the network. Of course, it may just have happened when I LAST had it connected to the network, and I just don't notice it for a bit. Regardless, I just can't seem to track down a reason for this problem to happen. So, naturally, I'm getting driven crazy trying to figure out wtf is happening.
New Server: I got a new server from SSCI. So technically, it's really a 6 year old server that's been thrown out. I seem to have overlooked that little detail when I decided "hey! discarded server! cool!". See, at SSCI we, the IT department, generally only throw things out after they're deemed completely worthless and unusable. Actually, the server isn't that bad, except for being really loud (and it's in my bedroom, so that's even worse), and not getting along with KVM's. That last bit is particularily annoying, since it ALSO doesn't like some keyboards. Namely all the ones I have. Except my OpenVMS LK461. Ahhh...nothing like having to press "CTRL+ALT+REMOVE" (with CTRL being where CAPS LOCK is and REMOVE being only kinda close to where DEL should be) to login...
New jobs: I've decided to adopt a policy of not complaining about my job(s). SSCI isn't that bad, except for dealing with DOS & Networking for too many hours (don't ask...let's just say I now understand how the guys at Beckman-Coulter can party all the time like they talked about in CS 491). CERIAS, on the other hand, well, that's the reason I'm adopting the new policy ;).
Happy Mother's Day!
(okay, so that didn't have much to do with Mother's day, but hey, I hope you had a good day Mom!)
I actually got an email from someone that wanted to buy my domain name, which I thought at the time might've happened because the short domain names were running out. Actually, it looks like someone else just had as little inventiveness as me.
Yes people, it is a new post! That means that 1) I'm still alive, and 2) you can stop complaining about how it's been over a month since I last wrote a post. I mean, it's nice to know I've got a dedicated following, but now everyone's getting demanding, which is the exact opposite of how I thought it was supposed to work: I get the following, and the following does stoff for me. Anyway, some random issues from the last month:
CS 354 project: after working for two days straight, I only managed to get 84/100 points on the test cases (bad). But I did show that I can live off of just donuts & diet coke for a day (good).
Origami: Brilliant idea!! Oh, wait...I've already got TWO Tablet PC's. Disappointed on the battery life and intro platforms (Sonoma instead of Lakehurst generation, so no Vista Aero). Price is another problem, especially now that rumors are starting to circulate. But....I can't help but still want one.
Spring Break! It rocked! I got to have sooo much fun going to warm, sunny places with lots of scantily clad co-eds.
Err...
Umm...
Nevermind...SSCI hasn't dramatically changed hiring practices, product lines, and location. But I did get to have fun working a lot & spending hours chasing down email problems with the email admin at another company REPEATEDLY, which all turned out to be someone having left out a "g" in a really long domain name...and then getting what seems like half the company to enter that incorrect address into thoir private address books...and all those people deciding that their private address books were correct and the Corporate Contacts Email Address Book had been corrected incorrectly.
The big problem with Spring Break was power. The Wednesday in the middle saw power outages and surges throughout the day. And it turns out all my UPS' failed during it, and that my big SU2200 running the servers has dead batteries. And the motherboard in my desktop system died. So, a lot of damage from stupid power problems. Isn't electricity supposed to be reliable or something?
Since break, it's been mostly a blur, which is pretty much how it's going to be until the end of classes in 4 weeks.
(oh, and for those that don't understand the title, it's a play off the MsgPlus command to request presence info (/ping); just my way of saying "I'm still here...sometimes!")
Well, since the first blog entry about donuts happened to be the single most visited page (by external users that weren't me) for the months of December AND January, I thought this topic needed a follow up.
Besides, it's always nice to find out you're not alone when it comes to opinions on a topic:
(and no, this post really doesn't have any content. but that's what the "Personal" category is for. and yes, I think a visit to the grocery store is soon to be coming...)
If anyone wants a Windows Live! Messenger invite, I've got a bunch to give away. Just email me at stultsj@ntldr.net from the email account on the Passport that you want to WL!M enable.
If you don't know what WL!M is, it's basically the next version of MSN Messenger. If you don't know what MSN Messenger is, umm...do a search or something?
Update (2006-0213): okay, so half that stuff doesn't seem to be working properly...grrrrr...I'll look into it and update this post when everything is behaving properly.
A couple of changes have been made to this site design...not really sure whether I'll keep them. Mostly just playing around right now.
Summary of changes:
- Added RSS <link/> element to /default.aspx. Need to add one to /announcements.aspx too.
- Put some content on the Extranet page. You can grab the root certificate if you feel like trusting me to issue digital certs...
- Removed "ntldr.net: the site" banner (it annoyed me today...no real other reason).
- Changed underlying SharePoint theme from "vNext" to "Glass", since having big black boxes/bars didn't look so good to me (and I never got around to fixing things up to look nice with "vNext").
Sidenote: I know that /default.aspx doesn't render properly in IE7. I have no idea WHY right now, and it probably isn't just IE7 that has problems (although IE6 seems to work correctly).
Anyway, any thoughts on it?
Note: I cannot be bribed with donuts.* Oh...but...mmmm....donuts......
* This post subject to change provided a sufficient quantity of donuts is provided. All rights reserved. Void where prohibited. Copywrite [by] Me. <Insert additionaly legalese as sufficient to make people not read this part>
In Indiana, if you got an operator's permit (driver's license) before you turned 21, it expires on your 21st birthday. That means it needs to be renewed.
Now, the official website ( http://www.in.gov/bmv/driverlicense/) says a license can be renewed in the 6 month period before it expires. When I went to the BMV 4 days before my birthday, I was informed (after having to wait a while) that that is not really correct when the expiration is the 21st birthday. Yes, you can renew before it, BUT 1) it wont have the drinking age info updated, 2) you have to retake the test.
Oh, and you can renew during the 6 month period after the license expires. However, it'll cost you. How much is indeterminate, since I didn't have to take that path, and I don't trust the pricing info on the official web site (it was not correct for the my license renewal at least).
So, basically, wait until the day the license expires to renew, and make sure you get it done on that day!
The universe seems to have been trying to make up for me not celebrating my birthday...
Econ effectively ended today. Yay! No more boring lectures! Boo! No more hours of fun with Monad & RSS Bandit.
The LAST Compilers project is DONE. Didn't do too bad on it either...only 13 hours for me on this one. Did the JUMP and CJUMP stuff without testing it as I went along, and got them both correct in an hour and a half! We also broke the code they supplied to us...hint to other CS352 students: see what happens when you have to push a few thousand arguments onto the stack :). Oh, and then see what happens when you have to deal with a few hundred thousand :D. The best part of that test case was that we managed to extract useful info about some things we were doing wrong, and managed to fix them.
And then the best part of the day: I got more donuts given to me! Some girl (FLL TA?) came into the lab where I was working on the project, set down a dozen pumpkin donuts, and said we (there were two other guys in the Unix lab at that point who were studying math and not even using the computers...) could have them because they were left over from some <event x> that I didn't quite catch. No one else wanted them, so when I was the last one leaving the lab...well, technically you aren't allowed to have food in a lab anyway, so it was NECESSARY that I remove them.
So yes, a donut-ilicious day!
Yay! Yesterday (/today for you people west of Newfoundland) I turned 21!
So, my day started with me coming back from working on Project 5 for Compilers. Didn't go well...had a bunch of trouble working on it...basically, I wasn't in the right mindset, so didn't get much done. But then I played with Pandora ( www.pandora.com) and did referer analysis on the server logs from the past year, both of which were fun. And caused me to stay up waaay later than I probably should have.
This morning started off great when my Mom delivered doughnuts to me for breakfast, which was completely unexpected. And really cool! Unexpectedly getting doughnuts 20 minutes after waking up is a great way to start a day. I highly recommend it. In fact, if I was a business major, and these were the heady days of the dot-com boom...oh never mind, that's a business plan for fools & idiots.
So I went to compiler's PSO and got stuff done actually! Yay! Sleep works wonders for code generation...
Lunch was great, since there were doughnuts left over from breakfast, and doughnuts make everything better (yay!) (...so sue me...I live a spartan culinary lifestyle, and getting sugary pastries that magically have the center missing is treat).
Astronomy was fun: we got to hear all about how flying things in space could destroy us at any moment! The Horror! Of course, the poll at the end about whether we were more or less concerned about being wiped out by a NEO collision, and seeing how many people were LESS concerned, is what made the lecture really worthwhile.
Compilers afterwards was, well, compilers. No references to Vaxen this time  . But there were a bunch of funny stories before class started about subverting D&D campaigns...
The worst part of today was the DMV, since it took forever...and forever...and forever (where {forever : 30 minutes}, and <union character that I can't seem to insert right now> forever = 1.25 hours.).
But afterwards work was reinitiated on the Compilers project, and the BINOPS were finished. Now just to do Jumps.
Which leaves me here now, playing with Pandora again. Which is really making me wish I had an audio subscription to one of those services. And had a MP3 player that supported PlayForSure(tm)(c)(r)(sm)(.)* Audio Subscription (like the Philips HDD6330). Oh well, there's always Christmas now...:P
Okay, this is worth a link...(some of the comments aren't half bad too):
Brought back some memories of similar writing assignments... Oh, and I agree that the last item is the best.
Yay! I walked out of my apartment this morning, heading the 3/4 mile over to my MA353 lecture, and it was snowing!
First snow of the season!
Of course, the happiness about it has been wearing off after walking back from Physics 008 around 1:00...
So the midterm was a late one. Over in The Hall Of Music (long walk from present residency). And its fairly cold out.
So I took the midterm. It went badly. But it was finished.
Then I left the exam. And it started to rain, not heavily, but lightly — just lightly enough so that a poor CS/Math student would notice it after a bad midterm.
So now I'm sitting here and eating saltine crackers while playing mind-games and thinking it's really chocolate cake.
Hmm...haven't posted in a while. Meh...been busy. Anyway, I was sending an email to Taylor ( http://mysite.verizon.net/taylor_venable/) and realized that other people might want to know how I'm doing. So I've taken excerpts from that message and am including them below. Disclaimer: I tried to clean up most of the wierd references that no one else would get/clarify some things, but there may be a few spots where I forgot to...so just post a comment if you have any questions.
I sat down and picked courses for next semester early this morning (like 1 AM), and there just wasn't room for Algorithms, so I get to put that off another semester. Yay! Anyway, it looks like I'll be taking Operating Systems, with <sarcasm>My Favorite CS Professor</sarcasm>, Numerical Methods (CS 314 - requirement for Math major), Information Systems (CS 348- hopefully it'll be a fun course), Introduction to Logic (MA 385, another Math major requirement), and Multimedia Writing (ENGL 419...yay for PowerPoints, Web Pages, and Videos). I didn't actually want to take ENGL 419, but I sent in my FUTURE to my advisor with 421 (Technical Writing), and she replied back this morning that I had waited too long (again) to sign up for classes, so she was putting me in 419 (okay, so it wasn't quite worded that way). Oh well...at least it'll be something different.
Last week sucked...Compilers homework due, then cramming like crazy during the weekend for the Compilers Exam, then ECE homework, then ECE prelab (which I screwed up, and so had to waste an hour figuring out how to fix...oh, and the TA showed up 45 minutes late to lab, so that cut down on the available time anyway), then a Math assignment that I was up all night working on and only got half the problems on.
This week is going to suck, since I've got an Econ exam, then ECE homework due, then ECE prelab, then Math Exam, then Math homework, then ECE exam (next Monday). I'm REALLY beginning to hate how the Linear Algebra II Prof thinks it's a GREAT idea to have these huge homework assignments due 10 hours after we have our exams.
So yeah...right now I'm in the middle of MidTerms, round 2. Fortunately, it's not going to be nearly as frustrating as MidTerms, round 3, which happens the week after Thanksgiving. I have no idea why everyone seems to have gotten the idea that 3 exams are better than 2, but that "we shouldn't disrupt the previous schedules we had for exams, so let's put the extra exam right before Finals". But that's the way things worked out.
Anyway there are some bright spots. CS 397 was cool today; rather informal, loosely directed conversation that resulted in the professor sending some interesting links for us to read through (I'm passing them on at the end of the paragraph). I definitely like Prof. Hosking, and think he does a good job of both 397 and Compilers. Work was fun this weekend; got to patch a bunch of servers, work with a blazingly fast new one, and changed configuration so that I don't need to constantly worry about the Exchange DB growing too large and bringing everything down with it. http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.htmlhttp://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html
On the whole, last week pretty much sucked. Too much work, too little sleep, too many things just going wrong.
Anyway, this weekend is looking better. Didn't get as much sleep Friday night as I should have (especially considering that I'd only gotten 5 hours in the last 2 days....), but I managed to get halfway through Firefly. I then finished up the other half Saturday. Definitely a fan now, and sad that it was cancelled. Kind of reminds me of Farscape, but without the aliens. The best description I've heard of it is a "sci-fi western", which definitely makes it a unique series. I went and saw Serenity last night (it's Firefly on the big screen), and liked it a lot. It was diffferent than the series, with more action, big explosions, more unexpected events (:(), and on the whole it worked well.
Anyway, I went to see it by myself, which wasn't that bad last night. But then this morning I woke up and was feeling lonely, so I did what anyone who's feeling lonely does...Server maintenance! umm....errr...okay, so maybe not everyone does that...let's try again: Log analysis! errr...okay, so that second try at something that people do when feeling lonely didn't work out so well...how about Write a Blog Post! Yay! That one fits!
I did do server maintenance (hence the site being down for a bit this morning), and log parsing. (Now would be a good time to stop reading if you're squeemish about the fact that I can look at the log files on my server...and then post about it)
So, here's a big "Hi!" to people outside my network who have visited my site in the last month (excluding search engines/bots, and in order of most hits per client ip):
- Taylor
- Liz (you can tell who uses RSS maybe?)
- Me (Remus Sun system)
- Some person in Tarkington
- Emil
- Me (Borg Sun system)
- Mom & Dad
- unknown IP
- unknown IP
- Annie
- Blake
- some client in Physics 44
- Me (Purdue Wireless)
- unknown IP
- some guy in Cary Quad
- some person on HomeChoice in the UK
- some person on Telestra
- some person on Concentric.net
- bunch of unknown IP's
- some person on Palestine OnLine
- unknown IP
- some person or people (there's A LOT of IP's from this one) using Time Warner Cable
- some person at Pfizer (you're probably looking for my Dad, not me...he does chemical stuff, I'm a student/IT guy)
- a bunch of unknown IP's
- some person on Charter Cable
- some person on DXI Networks
- bunch of unknown IP's (again)
- some one from Sympatico.ca (is that part of MSN now?)
- and finally, a bunch of unknown IP's
hmm...now that's got me wondering...how many of those hits were actually with my site as an intended destination?
Okay, so ECE homework is a lot more frustrating than it should be. So now for a quick break, with my quote of the day!
"Go XML! It's the glue that binds the universe together...forget that gravity crap." — me
This weekend I got drafted into cat sitting for my parents. It hasn't been that bad so far (tomorrow's the last day), except for their constant need for attention. I thought cat's were supposed to be nice, independent creatures that could occupy themselves...
Things I got done:
- Took recycling to recycling center
- Cat sitting
- Watched a bunch of movies
- Slept a lot
- Unified Solaris-Windows Server authentication and authorization infrastructure working!
- Exchange DB at work offline defragged to bring it back to safe levels (15.8 GB -> 13.7) (for the time being...Please hurry with SP2, MS!)
- Cleaned my brother's computer of virii & boot problems
Things I didn't get done:
- Finish the reply to Taylor's next-to-last email (sorry...I'm working on it!)
- Finish the reply to Taylor's last email (no, I haven't forgotten about you...I've just been backlogged with tons of crap)
- Get to the grocery store to get bread, milk, & soda...grrr
- Complete the ECE 270 homework
Oh well...there's always next weekend...and beginning of this week (maybe).
A caveat with Search: when going to an area of the site where search is accessible, the search on that page is restricted to the list its in.
I.E., if you're in /blog/, only my posts from the blog will be returned (no comments).
Now that I've remembered this little limitation, I'll bump getting a new interface with search integrated up in priority.
Oh yeah, and btw, the site's back up. Go Verizon for FINALLY getting this working (only took 6 weeks...).
Right now I don't have any major plans for site renovation...maybe adding spell checking to my workflow for blog postings...eventually I'll try and get a "Summary of my Summer" post written up and posted.
First of all, I'm doing better sickness-wise. Not quite back up to 100%, but that's more due to allergies hitting now.
The Solaris Experiment has been going well. I've gotten to the point where I understand a lot of what's going on, which will make things easier in the future. Plus, I got it to interop with my Windows network! Yay! Go Samba, OpenLDAP, MIT Kerberos, OpenSSL, and all the other components that I had to download and build to get that to work.
The rest of this post is going to be cross-posted from the Site News section, which I know no one reads.
There are three weeks left in the semester, including finals week and dead week. So in three weeks I move out of the dorm and back home, taking all my servers, workstations, and networking gear with me. At home, there is Cable internet.
However, the TOS don't allow servers to be run on that connection. So to continue running everything I'd need to get a second high speed internet connection, primarily an ADSL line from Verizon. In August, the lease on my apartment starts and I'll be moving all the gear over there, and of course getting a DSL connection.
Getting a connection for just 3 months is kind of a hassle. So I don't think I will. Which means this site is going to go down for that time. Sorry about the downtime, and if anyone out there has any suggestions, feel free to post a comment about it on the Blog tab.
Yay! I've been turned into an advanced nanotechnology production facility! Currently on being produced is... an illness!
Being sick sucks. Even the attempts at positive spin on it suck.
Note: don't offer to help people solve computer problems without demanding health insurance and a full benefits package, effective immediately upon commencement of solving. That way, you wont be suckered into working on a computer with sick people all around. Or if you do, at least you'll get some sort of kickback out of it.
Quote:
Person 1: It's not that I hate all religions, I just hate your religion.
Person 2: So what' religions don't you hate?
Person 1: Atheism.
For those of you that don't follow the blogsphere closely, here's a few links to other blog postings I found interesting yesterday (and that others might find even remotely interesting).
Adventures in product testing: Candles that catch fire
Incidentally, for those of you that remember the Windows 95 Power Toys and Kernel Toys, well, Raymond Chen (author of that blog) wrote those. He's also one of the reasons I don't think I could ever get a job at MS...the people there are just waaaaay too smart.
La Vida Robot
(Chris Sells is also notable for entirely different reasons, but mostly for just being "a character". Or something. Just subscribe to both blogs. If you're looking to subscribe to blogs that is.)
My commentary has now ruined what was meant to be a short, pointful post.
Muhahahahahah....
My evil-half-thought-out-plan of not adding anyone to my Face Book Friends thingy unless they discover me first (via whatever means) is progressing well...in a week I've accumulated 4 friends!
Now, I'm beginning to think this is a stupid plan, but for the sake of I'm too lazy to change it right now because I have lots of other stuff to do, I'm not going to change it.
In any case, so far people have found out about it via this blog and word-of-mouth (I'm guessing). So let's start a second phase of this experiment: if you have IE (ya ya, I KNOW I need to get comments fixed for non-IE browsers, I just don't know how to fix it), reply with a comment to this post (click view comments at the bottom of the default postview, which takes you to the individual post view, where you click the big "Post comment" button) saying how you found out about my Face Book entry. I'm also going to add on the rule that only people who have added me to their friends should reply (although I probably wont filter the responses anyway).
I just finished up Spring Break last week, and it more or less sucked. I was sick for half of it. Right before, there was a big CS project due that I completely bombed. Yay...now I get to take C S 251 again! (at least probably...although that Improbabilty Drive that should be appearing any yesterday now may/may not change that).
I also got a good bit of rest and relaxation, which is always good. And I got to see a FIRST ( www.usfirst.org, www.boilerinvasion.org) Regional competition. Kind of sad to see the lack of actual practical applicability from my high school (let's just say they didn't do so well in the competition). Better luck next year 461!
Anyway, I'm now actively pursueing Method 1, including acquisition of the probability manipulation device. I mean, the movie is coming out soon, so there must have been a prop, and it's pretty improbable that a prop would actually be a working Improbability Drive system...and it'd be even more improbable if it just happened to pop into my hands yesterday all of a sudden...
So now all I have to do is sit back and wait. Muhahahahaha...
My parent's went to Spain last Saturday, and just got back tonight. They took my camera, so there are lots of pictures :). I've uploaded them all to a new folder here
Enjoy!
Editted 2005-02-28 05:44Z:
Hmm...after looking at them, I think somebody had fun with the camera in Movie mode. Or didn't realize that's what mode the camera was in. Anyways, it's nice to know that that feature actually works, since I never use it.
I goofed up the blog post order two weeks ago when I went back and added categories to everything. In a few weeks, as I make more posts, that should go away.
I spent a lot of time working on the site this weekend. Probably far too much. But, COMMENTS WORK! (with the caveats listed in the Site News tab). Anyway, it might be a bit until I get the new right colum stuff written up and added to the site, so to access the RSS feeds right now you have to go to http://www.ntldr.net/RssFeeds/. I'd put them all in this post, but the editor I hav working right now is stupid and wont let me paste (!?) anything into it. So I may end up writing up a Blogger API wrapper for the SharePoint Web Services soon.
At home we have four cats, including "the two kittens". If this (see bottom link) happens to me when I'm home for spring break / the summer, I think I'm going to move out to a cardboard box in the backyard with suitably long extension cord and network cable connections running back into the house ("the two kittens" are indoors only).
Updated 2004-01-12 20:40: I got the image to work via db hacking.
The link isn't coming out nicely AT ALL. phooey.
Anyway, text version:
My Nerd Score:
96 <hand graphic>
Nerd King God
What's yours?
click here to find out
Overall, you scored as follows:-
4% scored higher,
0% scored the same, and
96% scored lower.
What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:
All hail the monsterous nerd. You are by far the KING NERD GOD!!!
<frownyFace>
I dropped my HP TC1000 yesterday. It was going into the slip case, and while zipping it up it just kind of slipped out.
Ouch.
Shortly after the beginning the lengthy drop from an altitude of 2 feet, it impacted the ground. Impacts with computers are bad.
The actual collision occurred along the bottom edge of the unit, where the speakers are located. Now, I find speakers builtin to notebooks to be extremely annoying (although people are getting better about knowing how to toggle MUTE on the volume controls), but dropping a whole Tablet along the speaker edge in retribution doesn't seem very...effective.
ANYWAY, there wasn't much damage (too bad speakers...<cackle>I'll get you next time my pretties!</cackle>). The batter latch gave out and the battery popped out, and the casing on it is pretty much toast now.
Did I mention that I dropped my primary battery during Winter Break and chipped parts of that casing off? Well, I did, so it was the backup battery that got hosed. So now I'm stuck with a primary battery that's back in the unit, being held in with tape.
Despite my extra warranty coverage, batteries aren't covered for anything beyond the first year. Last I checked, a new battery was hundreds of dollars. This sucks.
So ya...things haven't been going so well with the Tablet PC for me lately.
</frownyFace>
I had this lengthy, detailed blog post written. Then I clicked "Save and Close", and encountered a Security Timeout. GAH!
Note: this post is primarily intended for my parents, who keep asking me about it, but may be of brief informational use to those who keep asking we for it out of curiosity's sake.
Anyway, here's my list of desired birthday presents:
- CD: Dido, Life for Rent
- CD: Swankz & Verbrilli, Lifesavers
- DVD: The Bourne Identity
- DVD: The Bourne Supremacy
- Microsoft Optical Mouse by Stark (orange)
- Cheap 802.11g router from Thanksgiving sales
If that's too unclear, drop me a line and I'll provide URI's.
Well, it's been a couple of days since the last post. I'm striving for 1 post/day, but that hasn't been going too well. Too much work all the time. Plus, I'm still trying to figure out what to blog about. I read mostly technical blogs, so I tend to associate "blog" with technical stuff. Unfortunately, I don't have that much technical stuff to talk about. Any thoughts on what to write about? (ha! now I'll find out if my email server is really working, since the only way to send comments is to email me!). In general, I'm somewhat qualified to talk about IT stuff, CS at Purdue University, and misc. windows-centric user type stuff.
Okay, the post at the end of this deserves a link (hyperlinks not supported here?). Anyway, this way I've actually posted content after having been WAY too busy for the last two weeks.
A couple of people (well, one) have asked me for my feed list. Say without further delay, I've attached my OMPL file. Enjoy!
Import Note: 2006-10-03:
It appears that the attachment has been lost during the migration. Which pretty much renders this post useless. Meh.
This is the first real post. Current status of site:
- Announcements aren't working for some unknown reason
- Basic Authentication isn't working (for some unknown reason)
- MCE isn't downloading guide information anymore (tangentially related - it still involves network connectivity)
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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
my employer's view in any way.
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2010
Jeffrey Stults, Jr.
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