tbradshaw.net

First, an advertisement:

LAN Party, October 28th, 7:30pm till Whenever, Nichols 122

Once again I’ve been asked to run a semester LAN party for the department chapter of ACM.

This is always an interesting task for me for a few reasons. First, I don’t really game anymore so I feel a little “out of touch” at LAN parties. Second, I have no affiliation at all with ACM. Third, it’s always so amazingly unorganized, heh heh.

Today I had my first real meeting regarding the LAN party (yeah… it’s tomorrow), and it went really well. Present for the meeting were Ryan Summerskill (ACM President), Jeremy Mason (VP), Adam Jundt (Sec), Ryan Feldkamp (Co-Treas), and Roland Craddolph (Co-Tres), or pretty much every one of the officers from ACM and myself.

The plans so far were pretty much non-existent and Ryan let me know in no uncertain terms that the last one was a big cluster and that it was all me. He gets massive points for being blunt and to the point, and that enabled us to get right to business.

The primary challenges in this situation are unknowns due to lack of planning, but nothing that I don’t think is handleable. The two big questions marks are number of people coming and power distribution and layout. There wasn’t anything cohesive put together for a website, and therefore there wasn’t any preregistration of any kind. (In fact, it appears that all of their limited marketing has an URL for the original site that I made about a year ago. ouch!) We’re also not entirely sure where the power distribution break points are in the building for spreading our load.

However, the last two LAN parties that took place the head count was pretty consistent at around 40, so we expect a similar turnout. We also have all noticed some first hand interest in the LAN spreading by word of mouth, so the turn out shouldn’t be any less than expected. On the power distribution issue, it seems that the easy work around is to use extension cords to spread out physically as much as possible… and that appears to work for the most part.

Then we divided up the tasks remaining, especially server preconfiguration, and prepared to make things happen.

As a result, I’m actually kind of looking forward to the LAN party. I think that it’s going to be better than it was last time I showed up, and I had a pretty damn good time then too.

So if you’re in Manhattan and don’t have something to do on a homecoming Friday night (yeah, I know, everyone’s busy), come by and hangout with me.

So I’ve been debating for quite some time about installing Windows so that I could give some games a shot. (Specifically World of Warcraft, Black and White 2, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)

I’ve left space on my hard drive, but one thing has always held me back. After purchasing this computer and entering the “modern era” of hardware, I’ve been enjoying my configuration and never looking back. There were a few growing pains when I first got my new setup, but Linux has always been right on top of all the latest hardware changes.

And this is the part that kills me. I’ve got a couple nice SATA hard drives. One fast one that I use for my boot drive, and a large slower one that I use for storage. However, Windows XP has no support for SATA drives during installation. They do have an option to load drivers during the installation, but of course with a catch. They have to be on a floppy. I haven’t had a floppy drive in years and I have no intention of putting one in.

So it’s an interesting situation, Windows XP, the supposed pinnacle of typical computing, the “works with all hardware” operating system, can’t even install on hardware from the last several years while I can burn any Linux distribution’s LiveCD and be running in 5 minutes or less.

I thought that I might have work around, though, when I noticed the release of the Beta 2 version of “Longhorn”, now called Windows Vista. I figured, “Hell, this operating system isn’t even going to be released until next year. It has to have SATA support in the installation.”

I figured wrong. I was stunned to find out that not even an attempt was made at supporting SATA during the installation of Windows Vista. However, one serious improvement was made: now instead of requiring a floppy drive (a technology that is overdue to be taken behind the shed and shot) they allow the drivers to be located on a CD-ROM or USB Flash Drive.

“Hey, that’s not too shabby,” I thought.

Then things start to get screwed up as only Microsoft can do it. After copying the drivers over to JD’s thumb drive and clicking the “Load Drivers…” button, I was confused by the lack of interaction. Turns out I’m not privileged enough to actually browse for the driver, it has to just search on it’s own. (The auto-search for drivers has always sucked, and I’ve never used it… why make it mandatory?)

A little reading on some online forums reveals that no searching is done past the root folder of all attached drives. Hmph. Fine. So I copy the specific drive files to the root of the thumb drive. Still nothing. So I crawl under my desk to see what’s going on… and I don’t even see any activity lights on the USB flash drive except for the initial insertion. Fine… so the thumb drive driver thing doesn’t actually work.

So next I burn a CD with the same files on it (driver in the root!) and sure enough this time Windows Vista reads the .inf file and gives me some options for loading a driver. And I do. But it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, Vista still doesn’t see my hard drives.

It was at this point that I gave up. I don’t want to play games bad enough to deal with Microsoft’s stupidity in the installation process. I’ll go back to my Gentoo installation and GNOME environment where things just work. Or at least if they don’t work, there’s a decent reason why.

It’s a good thing that Microsoft has swindled Windows into the “default install” position on almost every OEM computer on the planet, because if end consumers bought a new computer and had to install Vista on it, they would most certainly fail. And I would be happy to hand them an Ubuntu installation CD.

Following yesterday’s progress on the print app, I started today with some stat generation for analysis. The data is parsed very simply by just iterating over the entire log and dynamically storing values (and incrementing them as necessary) in a couple python dictionaries.

The collection of stats is definitely O(n), but I have no doubt that the memory consumption of this thing is hella wasteful. (For one thing, all statistics are generated from scratch on each execution of the script, and no state at all carries between executions.) Ah well, get things working first, right? Then optimize?

However, when the “neat” part that I was looking forward to, creating the graphs for quick-reads and really easy analysis, things turned much less “neat”. It turns out that the libraries available for chart generation leave quite a bit to be desired. I looked at three libraries, PyX, PyChart, and PyGDChart2. Each has it’s own issues.

My first swing at chart generation was PyX. Everything was going pretty smooth until it came to actually providing the data for the library to generate it’s charts from. It became immediately apparent that this library was created for a very specific purpose, and that purpose was reading in text files of data collected from some sort of scientific or academic environment. Just passing in a native Python structure and making some pretty graphics out of it was not on the “trivial to accomplish” list. I ditched this one before I spat out my first pixel.

So my second swing at making things happen in a simple and relatively sane manner was PyChart. Things were much nicer this time around, even getting to the point that I was spitting out a PNG image for perusing. Then PyChart fell apart on me in a couple ways. First, it was clear that creating a series of images was not in the dice. Instead, each execution of a script that uses PyChart is pretty much expected to generate a single chart. Well, at least generate a single chart or learn a lot more about the API than what should be necessary (in my opinion) to create a elementary bar chart.

The final failure of the night was looking at PyGDChart2. This definitely looked like the package with the most potential, with an API that made the most sense for doing something as trivial as chart generation. (I say “trivial” for chart generation not because the entire process is trivial, but the expected interface is so trivial. Very basic amount of inputs necessary.) Alas, PyGDChart2 (or it’s predecessor PyGDChart) were not available as ebuilds anywhere I could find, nor was the C library, gdchart, that the Python library wrapped.

All in all, I’m pretty certain that PyGDChart2 is the library that I want to be using. This just means that I’m going to have to figure out some way to politely package up the necessary C library and the Python library without tainting the nicely managed environment that I’m developing in.

In short, I’ve got the stats that I want, but the chart generation is surprisingly “dumb” so far. If anything, I think this provides a good “breaking” point for the script. Rather than one script that will read in all of the data, generate the stats, and then generate some images, I think that a single script should handle all of the stat generation and nothing else, so I can optimize it a bit and store intermediate values in the database. This should free up the architecture of the graph generation scripting in case I have to cave to some inane library requirement like “different script for every graph”.

For a while now the print system here has needed some TLC on the customer service side of things. The PCounter system that we purchased is really slick and takes care of the very hard part of the problem (counting pages). Unfortunately the accountant’s inability to use the administration program makes the entire package fall short.

In that vein, we’re committed to providing a custom application that will take the data from PCounter and display it just how our accountant wants it. This also has the nice side effect of enabling us to provide a nice way for us to view logs for trends and users to view print quota-like information.

The gist of this process is that PCounter is going to do the “hard” part by counting the pages and then we’re (I’m) going to do the rest. After a few more tickets recently came in asking for printing related information, it seemed that this project might be a little more important than originally expected.

So in a fit of productivity I’ve built a project page for this effort and built the initial data importer. Right now it’s very basic and very inefficient… but works great. It simply checks a time stamp in the db, parses the entire PCounter log, tosses out the rows that are old, shoves any new ones in the db, and updates the time stamp. (The db is something that I had already designed and implemented in previous work on this problem.)

First I think I’m going to work on the sys admin use case and get some nice trend analysis graphs, because that should tackle a few faculty heated tickets that are sitting in my to-do list. After that I figure the accountant use case should get some love.

Anyway, it’s definitely a good evening’s work.

I’ve long been curious about Ruby on Rails style development, and specifically web based frameworks like it that are for Python instead.

I’ve always been a little hesitant to use “pre-made” frameworks for web development, due to a lack of experience with web frameworks and probably just as much because of a lack of understanding. However the initial work on the Bunker Management System has amounted to little more than creating a very basic web framework and it just reeks of “re-inventing the wheel”… a practice that I’ve come to loathe.

So I’ve done more reading on the subject and I think that the Bunker Management Software is an ideal candidate for using something like Django. This will pretty much nullify any of they work done so far… but that’s okay. By removing the necessity to create a framework to host the real “guts” of the application, time can instead be spent on really designing the application, ala getting some good use cases and a better object model in place.

In conclusion, I think it’s going to be something very good for the project to move to Django. First to free Dan and I from re-inventing the wheel with yet another web framework, and also because it can shift the focus to better software design. If this works out very well, it might even be a candidate for future QuakeCon Volunteer System development.

Before departing from Swainie’s house, I made sure to spend a little bit of time on the ‘net downloading drivers for the on-board sound card for the computer in the Mobile Bunker.

Much to my pleasure I was able to get fully actualize the epiphany that I had just before leaving for the show. On the way home we had a fully operational Mobile Bunker complete with DVD theater setup (we watched Old School and Nine Inch Nails’ And All That Could Have Been concert DVD), video games (the passengers played You Don’t Know Jack Vol 3), and music (iTunes rocking out with visualizations and a gracious donation of audio bits from JD’s iPod).

The ride home was otherwise pretty tame. We didn’t have any side adventures–since everything was working–and I didn’t speed nearly as much since we didn’t need to be anywhere in a big hurry. After arriving in Kansas City we took our first stop. Thankfully I got in a (relatively) quick shower and a change of clothes before we headed over to Kari’s house. It’s always a pleasure to see the Plumbs, even if it was a little too briefly.

Stopping at Kari’s house (JD’s fiancee) was a real treat. She cooked us up a fantastic enchilada dinner and we were joined by Kippy for what was one of the best “family meals” we’ve had in a long time.

After departing Kari’s… stuffed… we headed back home to The Bunker. In whole the first official Bunker Road trip was better that I could have imagined. While the ride home was a slightly less joyous than the ride there, it was still full of remarkably good spirits–excellent even–for four guys that hadn’t left more than 20 feet from each other in four days.

No doubt about it, we will have to do something like this again. It was so fun it’s hard to imagine a better little vacation.

The morning after the concert started simply. We all grabbed a little snack from Swanie’s house and started on our journey past Richwoods to Mr. Swanson’s land.

The land is a beautiful piece of hills, densely wooded, and starting to change colors in the autumn season. A few comfortable, small structures are on the land, like a one room cabin with glass walls for enjoying the scenery.

The structure that we used the most, however, was the shade structure built for slinging clay pigeons over a nice clearing created into a shooting range. There was a nice “falling plates” setup (which, for those like me that are completely new to this kind of thing, are metal disks standing vertically on a hinge that when shot fall over) and a trunk left to mount a stand for cans.

One thing is for sure, when the Swanson’s go shooting they don’t mess around. There was an arsenal of proportions I’ve never seen. Dave described the arsenal better than I could. (I know almost nothing about guns.):

Among the arsenal were about 8 shotguns, around 10 handguns including a .357 magnum revolver, an AK-47, a fully automatic 9mm, an AR-15 sniper rifle, and a .338 single-shot rifle that fired shells about 3 inches long.

I’ve never really been a “gun” guy, but I have to say that I had a fantastic time. Out of the four “types” of shooting that we did (pistols at targets, shotguns at clay pigeons, machines guns in the general direction of targets, and sniper rifles at long range targets) I have to say that I enjoyed the pistols and rifles the best. Shot gun shooting was fun, and shooting an AK-47 was a freaking trip, but I much preferred the accuracy aiming with the pistols and rifles.

I was also very pleasantly surprised to find out that I’m a great shot! I was shooting almost 80% with Alex’s HK .45 pistol (probably about 20 yards at 6 inch targets and 30 yards at cans) and shot a good majority of the 30 rounds from the AR-15 into 6 inch targets at about 210 yards. I even hit a few cans with the AK!

I was very pleased with my performance, the first time I had really shot a weapon since the hunter’s safety courses that my Grandpa Honeyman had taken me on. Not only was I happy with my marksmanship, I was also very pleased at the amount of safety precautions that I had remembered from the course. Little things like always handing someone a gun with the action open, leaving the gun always pointed at the sky or ground but never near anyone, knowing exactly what’s behind your target before shooting, and countless other little “tips” that I was probably only 13 when I learned the first time. Go go gadget memory!

After it was all over we went back to Swanie’s house to a home cooked lasagna. This is the part where I spent a moment glowing in appreciation at the amazing hospitality of the Swanson family. Eric “Swanie” Swanson’s parents were above and beyond some of the kindest and most generous hosts I’ve had the pleasure of staying with. When we arrived there were three air mattresses fully inflated, bedding, and couches. We were fed every meal, cooked personally by Mr. or Mrs. Swanson. We fired off I don’t know how much money in ammunition. And we were even giving some of the other finer “highlights” of his property. And while my gratitude goes primarily to the Swansons, even Swanie’s friends were very gracious with their ammo, clay, and beer.

Overall, the stay at Swainie’s house was amazing. We were almost sad to leave, especially after that great breakfast on Sunday.

After completing the first leg of our journey and arriving at the Savvis Center in St. Louis, there was no time to spare. We immediately hopped out of the Mobile Bunker, shut of the power inverter, and headed inside to find the will-call line so that we could get our tickets that Alex had pre-bought.

The first thing that I immediately noticed is that all four of us were in a great mood and really excited about the show. It’s not often that a group of four guys can cram into one vehicle for over six hours and come out chipper as a night at the bars. My roommates kick ass.

The next thing we noticed as we started to make our way up to the Savvis Center was what a nice venue that it was. This wasn’t some run down old convention center, but a really high class, modern facility. Checking the place out as we walked up from our $10 parking spot just across the street served only to raise our spirits that this was going to be an amazing show.

We had a little discussion laughing about how the “freaks” were going to be out for this show (Reznor has always had a talent for attracting all the little goth kiddies and counter culture peeps) and while Alex and I were traveling over to the bathrooms Dave and JD started playing “spot the freaks” with the audience. The rules were simple, the first person to spot a “freak” just points at them and says, “Point!”

As Alex and I returned from the men’s room we all went inside to section 103 where our seats were located and started our way up to Row HH. Autolux was already playing and the Savvis Center was pretty close to pitch black after transitioning from the well lighted vendor area just outside the arena. We did our best to find our seats and check out the last two songs from Autolux. They were really interesting and I wish that we would have made it there earlier to listen to more of their music.

After Autolux finished with their set and the lights came back up, we had a great time playing “spot the freak” and just making instant-humor as we always do. Hilarious highlights include commentary over the $8 beers and $7.50 mixed drinks, the freaks of all kinds, and cotton candy vendors. Yeah, that’s right… cotton candy vendors at a Nine Inch Nails concert!

Not long after Autolux was finished and we had inadvertently made friends with most of the concert goers around us do to our humorous comments, an usher came to check our tickets. We had accidental gone to the wrong row. So we scooted back two rows and resumed our freak gandering.

Next up in the show was Queens of the Stone Age. JD and I had talked about QotSA and both agreed that while we didn’t consider the music some of our favorite, it was pretty good and were looking forward to the show. QotSA didn’t disappoint and I was very pleased at the quality of show that they put on. I loved their live sound, even more than a number of their studio tracks, and was very pleased by the amount of improvisation and dynamic experience.

It was at this point in the show that I had an interesting “Boston” feeling. One of the reasons that Leary and I were good friends was a common love for NIN-like music. He was also the one that introduced me to Queens of the Stone Age. During “Taketh Way” (or whatever that song is called) I couldn’t help but thing that Leary would love this concert. It was an interesting moment.

QotSA finished very strongly with an encore that got everyone excited and ready for NIN to take the stage.

The preparations for NIN began with a lowering of a scrim material that surrounded the stage completely. Lots of movement behind the scrim was plainly visible in the light as they moved things around and then began filling the enclosed stage with smoke from several smoke machines.

As the arena began to darken the energy from the crowd was palpable, and by the time that Pinion began playing to segue into the performance every person was on their feet in anticipation.

My first glimpse of a band member was of Aaron North as he nonchalantly walked across stage with his guitar. It was almost eerie how much he looked like a young Trent Reznor from a distance. His posture and gait strongly reminded me of Trent Reznor’s live performance of March of the Pigs used in the video. Of course, that could be strongly influenced by the fact that we were standing in row HH of the Savvis Center. (It was a great view, but not exactly close.)

After focusing on Aaron it was a few moments before I caught a glimpse of Trent Reznor standing in the center of the stage holding a microphone on a microphone stand. The smoke was almost completely obfuscating, however, and nothing detailed could be made out other than his lack of hair.

But when Pinion finished and the show began with “Love Is Not Enough” from With Teeth it was intriguingly played from inside the “smoke box”.

It’s at this point that I could really go into a detailed description of every song that NIN played during the night, but I think that would be just a little bit too much so I think I’ll just mention some highlights of the show:

• Performer highlights:
  • Trent has a shaved head.
  • Trent apparently has been to the gym a lot because he’s looking ripped.
  • Aaron North is brutal, swinging his guitar like he’s palming a ball and wielding a weapon at the same time.
  • Alex Carapetis took over for Jerome Dillion after his health condition appears to have worsened.
  • Trent has gotten political. He used to be quite apolitical (perhaps apathetic as well), but his video footage featured a number of strongly politically loaded images. (Excellent!)
  • He also appears to be in better spirits and/or good humored. He was sick almost the entire Fragility tour, rarely uttering a word other than the lyrics. This show he was quite vocal with “thank you”s and even cracked a joke before resuming “Starfuckers”. (”I guess we’re in the middle of a song here…”)
• Set list highlights:
  • “Closer” and “March of the Pigs” played very early in the set.
  • The middle of “Closer” was very modified making for an incredibly unique experience.
  • “Burn” (!) was on the set list, a track originally scored for the Natural Born Killers soundtrack.
  • “Reptile” from The Downward Spiral was a very unique pick for the set list, seemed to take the place of Piggy from the Fragility v2.0 tour.
  • “Eraser” (!) was played to begin the video sequence.
  • “Hurt” was certainly a “Quiet” version with the majority of the song played solo by TR on the keyboard.
  • “Gave Up” and “Wish” from Broken were present and accounted for to beat the hell out of the audience.
  • “Starfuckers” from The Fragile was used as an introduction and thank you segment after the audience was told (when interrupted from chanting “Don’t you!” repetitively like in the Fragility v2.0 tour) that “We don’t do that anymore. That’s so five years ago.”
• Production highlights:
  • The three giant screens this year were replaced with a “digital noise” irregularly shaped hanging and protruding screens.
  • Video projectors were used heavily for a rear screen behind the stage and also onto the full stage scrim for a massive video presentation.
  • Vertical “light bars” were behind the stage for rear-lighting the rear projection screen and later for digital eq-like effects. (Amazingly effective during “Burn”)
  • The overhead lighting rig would lower very close to the stage and provide a more intimate almost “warehouse lighting” effect on the stage.
  • The video segments of the show were amazingly orchestrated.

I could really rave about this concert until the Internet ran out of bits… but it’s sufficient to say that this was the single most phenomenal event I’ve ever witnessed, and I’m so happy that I attended. I only wish I had enough money to attend another show.

After the show was over, we went down towards the floor to meet with JD’s sister Katie, Laura, and company. We then moseyed over to Katie and posse’s hotel room for some festivities before leaving for Swanie’s house where we were staying.

The first Bunker road trip is shaping up to be a blast. It started with a very hectic schedule starting at around 9:00am on Friday morning. I was tasked with getting the Mobile Bunker (my Jeep) ready for a cross country road trip. My Jeep was in pretty bad shape. After getting a second round of tickets from the registration/tag problems with the car, I had sat it parked for a while. However, when I parked it I forgot to turn off the inverter that provides the AC power for the onboard computer. It took about three days, but the drained the battery complete dead. However, since I didn’t really plan on driving it any time in the near future, I just let it sit for a few weeks on a dead battery. The vehicle also hadn’t been cleaned out since my one man road trip to QuakeCon in Grapevine, Texas and was jsut covered in garbage and sunflower seeds.

The recent epiphany lead to a frenzied pace at trying to get the Mobile Bunker running again and in tip top shape in preparation for the first round of sound. The frenzied pace didn’t help delay the onset of adversity. Getting the Jeep running at full steam with enough power to run the onboard computer was a serious challenge. In the end we ended up switching batteries with Dave’s computer to ensure a fully charged battery and some maverick electrical engineering got us fully operational and on our way.

As a precaution to getting pulled over yet again for my super illegal Jeep, I swapped license plates with Dave so that I had a valid license plate that wasn’t expired. I also put in the spare tire, packed extra tools and supplies, and shop vac’d the entire Jeep clean. Never can be too prepared.

After getting on our way we began the process of installing the new software onto the onboard computer. (Of course this is all stuff that should be done well in advance of a road trip to allow time for testing, but that wouldn’t be very Bunker league, now would it?) An installation of iTunes got music jukeboxing ready and JD’s firewire enabled iPod provided 10 gigs of tunes to start the collection. An installation of PowerDVD followed to get the DVD playing capabilities up to speed.

It was when JD was installing PowerDVD that we ran into our second big technical difficulty (after the problems getting it working). JD was zooming through the installation of PowerDVD and not bothering to actually read any of the dialog boxes when he clicked “Okay” one too many times. I happened to catch the dialog out of the corner of my eye as it said: “PowerDVD is going to adjust your screen resolution to 800×600 for optimum viewing something or other.” I see JD mindlessly moving to the “OK” button as I yell, “NO NO, DON’T CLICK THAT!”

But it was too late. JD was already saying, “Whaaaat?” while clicking the button and watched as the screen promptly turned black and displayed “Invalid Mode”. So our first unexpected challenge was trying to get the resolution to the onboard computer turned back down to an acceptable range without being able to see anything. We called to enlist Dan to help, though it turned out that entering a special boot mode provided a temporary (if annoying) solution.

As the setup became more complex, however, it was apparent that we didn’t have everything that we needed. I had forgotten the USB cable for the USB hub making the arrangement for devices a little bit more difficult. (Since the form factor is so small for the computer in the Jeep, pretty much all components are external and USB.) But most importantly I forgot the AC adapter for the external sound card. With that AC adapter, it wasn’t readily apparent if I could get sound working for the trip.

So we decided that we would try to get an AC adapter while we were on the way. This lead us to a very interesting adventure through Kansas City to a Target and later to a Curcuit City for two apparently perfect AC adapters that didn’t work. Bummer.

We’ve got backup plans though, so hopefully we can get everything working on the way back. For the rest of the trip however, high speed driving was the name of the game as we needed to be at the Savvis Center as soon as we could before the concert began without us. We made great time and arrive at the Savis Center in downtown St. Louis just in time to walk right into the concert…

For months now I’ve been lamenting that I need another amp in order to bring my Jeep modification project to full fruition. The problem set was clear, the stock amplifier isn’t going to work when I move the sound system to a completely computer based sound system. It’s just not “standard” enough.

So this morning I’m starting to clean out the Mobile Bunker, and it dawns on me! I can set up the Mobile Bunker fully, then just put one of those headphone jack to tape deck adapters between the computer and the stereo! It won’t be in surround sound, it will only be stereo, but holy crap… that’s all it takes!

So my morning just got a lot busier.

Tomorrow morning we leave for the first Bunker Roadtrip!

We’re going to be departing in The Mobile Bunker (my Jeep) for St. Louis to attend a concert at the Savis Center with Nine Inch Nails headlining, opened by Queens of the Stone Age and Autolux.

We really procrastinated buying the tickets for the show because we were waiting for a time when we could get all of the necessary funds into the same bank account to cover the transaction. Turns out Alex could have done it all along and he bought them today. It was too late, however. The floor tickets were sold out since the last time we checked (only about 16 hours previous). Huge disappointment.

However, it’s still going to be an amazing show and should be quite the crazy trip. We’re going to be leaving tomorrow morning, seeing the show, then staying at Swany’s parent’s place in St. Louis. The next day we’re going to a field to shoot automatic weapons and a huge bowling ball cannon. (Yeah, apparently it’s that crazy.) Then we’ll be heading back either Saturday night or Sunday.

I’m completely broke off of my ass, so to say that money is tight is a huge understatement. But Elgn and I swore we would travel to the ends of the earth to see Nine Inch Nails next time they went on tour. He saw them on their club tour that I couldn’t afford. I won’t miss this show and be a completely failure at life.

So we’re going for it. Four fifths of the Bunker. Road trip.

I’ve been moving forwarding with the web development on many fronts, lately. The most recent work has been at getting my CIS department website going again. I’ve really been looking forward to getting the project pages set up for the host management application that I’m writing and most recently for the rewiring Nichols Hall project.

The shell for the pages is done, really it just needs a good bit of style sheet tweaking (of course, all of my web development right now still needs style sheet tweaking, especially archive pages.) The next bit will be getting the blog portions of the project pages going so that it will be easy to update with content. I’ve been researching that process a little bit tonight (while bored to death in Biology 198) and the data is already being exported, now I just need to look for a good way to scoop up the RSS feeds and make them into nice include files.

It’s finally coming. The apocalypse for the network of the Computing and Information Sciences department is coming.

For almost a decade it has been apparent to the student administrators and the systems team manager that the decisions that went into the creation and management of our physical network were going to melt down in a big way. I’ve only been working here for approaching three years and I’ve constantly been frightened of the potential results.

However, it’s not really the shoddy workmanship that is going to sink our department’s network. Its’ the shoddy design. Our “topology” is loosely a giant star, but could more accurately be described as an art-less rendition of Flying Spaghetti Monster. What this means is that most/all of the “segments” of our network aren’t segments at all. There is no modularization, there is no organization. This means that there is no analysis, there is no troubleshooting, there is no systematic diagnosis.

Quite simply, when we have a network problem… we are completely helpless.

We’ve been finding work-arounds to try and pretend that our network isn’t the root source of all problems, but the issue is that every time we work around something that isn’t the network… the only remaining problem is the network.

Well the other foot is dropping, the serious complaints and lost productivity is rising at an alarming rate. Unsolvable network issues used to only show up every few months, maybe every few weeks. Over the last two months and more urgently over the last three weeks the number of email reports of devastatingly poor network access from people in our department have just shot through the roof.

What is the straw that’s breaking the camels back? The switches. Our physical wiring has always been poor, but at least it’s only been about 25% to 50% poor. But now the switches are out of control and failing in a huge way. And when the switches go, it’s more like 75% to 80% poor.

The sad thing is that–in order to not seem alarmist–the systems team has been moving slowly but firmly towards a new network that would solve all of these issues. We’ve tried not to offend anyone, we’ve tried not to step on toes, we’ve tried to stay “politically savvy”. It appears that we’re too slow. Now that it’s urgent, it doesn’t seem like the massive amounts of money necessary to do a total and “correct” fix isn’t going to be there. It’s going to get a little better when the outdoor temperatures stabilize, but with no solution in sight… it’s got no where to go from here… but down.

I was once again reminded of a constant source of confusion for me in some work email. A ticket was created that simply asked for Java. In general this is a very reasonable request, only we (the Systems Team) were sort of confused.

“Java” (I guess) could be interpreted into a lot of things. It’s an island of Indonesia, a slang word for coffee, a town in the republic of Georgia, a town in New York state and South Dakota, or even Pithecanthropus erectus.

In the context of computer science, however, it’s a technology developed by Sun Microsystems for machine independent software, the main parts of which are the Java programming language and the Java “platform” (which contains the Java virtual machine that actually runs the code).

So why does this make for a strange request? Well… because Java is available 100% for free on the web at the very well known (and relatively self-defining) website http://java.sun.com. So… if they aren’t just asking for something that they can obviously do themselves (surely they wouldn’t… they plan on developing in Java, after all)… it begs the question, “What the heck are they asking for?”

Along that vein, Sterling sent off an email to ask what it was exactly that the student was asking for. A professor shot back a clarifying response on behalf of the student that stated simply that “they [were] more comfortable with Visual Studio.”

Whoa… that’s another loop. Generally Visual Studio (a development environment by Microsoft) would be a very different sort of request. It’s not often used for Java development (at least not in our department) and for that matter the Java stuff has been strongly deprecated for Microsoft’s .NET initiative.

My guess? I’m guessing that the student wants Visual J++ installed on something so that (he|she) (I don’t remember) can develop Java in the development environment that (he|she) is already familiar with.

The weird part? Why are we guessing? It’s a pretty simple request, a request for tools. Indeed, it should be a request for tools from a developer that should know what their tools are called. If we were a support staff for an auto shop and a mechanic requested a Chevy diagnostic machine and it turns out they really need a complete socket set… one would really question why they were working on cars anyway.

One clear possibility would be a language barrier. We do have a significant number of students that have a different primary language. However, the technical jargon and brand names don’t change from language to language… and I wouldn’t expect that there would be anything other than a direct translation.

So my only conclusion is some degree of ignorance. Maybe there’s something to be said of having vocabulary exams in our CS/IS coursework.

</rant>

My girlfriend Lindsay’s sorority took Fall break as opportunity for a “senior sneak”. Originally intended for a journey to New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina changed their plans and they ended up heading to Boston, instead.

I’m a huge fan of Boston, especially the Cambridge area. I fell in love with the area visiting my friend Leary every year for St. Patrick’s Day and was more than happy to find/share directions and site recommendations for Lindsay and her group. I was pleasantly surprised when Lindsay returned on Tuesday night with a gift for me from her trip.

Yup, that’s right. It’s a Thomas Jefferson action figure! As if that wasn’t cool enough, he comes with a little Declaration of Independence action accessory and is fully posable. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take him out of the box yet, so I haven’t really seen the posability in action.

She mentioned that it was tough thinking of a gift to get a guy that’s already been to Boston many times. I’d say she did a great job.

As is probably apparent (at least if you’re not reading this through an RSS aggregator), I’ve taken the last several hours to give an attempt at shoving the new design into a WordPress theme.

The beauty here is only skin deep, however, as really only this front page looks right. A quick visit to any archive page (including any/every permalink) results in one big ball of ugliness. But in time, those will be sculpted into shape as well.

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been needing to do a little growing online beyond just the blog. So I’ve been developing a new site design with the intention of replacing the theme here on the front page and also using that theme for more statically developed pages.

It’s been an interesting process, but I think I’m going to be quite happy with the mix of managed and unmanaged content that I’m creating. To kick it off, I’m “going live” with my new Projects section. The section is just beginning, with the project list partially complete and one project actually fleshed out with content.

So it’s a bit bare bones, and the new design isn’t nearly completed yet. But I’ve learned long ago when it comes to personal projects of mine… if I wait until it’s completely finished before I start using it, I’ll be waiting a long time to use it. This is along with the classic wisdom: something is better than nothing.