tbradshaw.net

Slashdot delivered amazing news like none other today when they linked to a recently announced…

Wow, I can’t tell you how excited I am to hear about this.  There is an interview over at IGN with John Tam that is definitely worth a read, but here are the highlights that make Guitar Hero II the hottest game ever for me:

• Uses the same guitar(s)
• 55+ new songs
• 40 new songs from big labels.  (With bigger bands now that Guitar Hero is huge.)
• Co-operative multiplayer where there are two (one for each player) tracks for each song. Players select which instrument they want to play, either paired as Lead and Rhythm or Lead and Bass.
• Practice mode.  Even loop a part of a song to practice just that part.
• New characters, venues, guitars.

This is just going to be too awesome!

Sweet action. I just submitted my first (barely) significant patch to an open source project. The patch for Banshee should take care of bug 333893, adding “fuzzy” searching and the ‘-’ (NOT) operator to the search widget thingie.

It’s funny, but I’m a little bit nervous about submitting the patch. While my code is typically quite good, I’m sure that’s at least partially due to the “big fish, little pond” situation here at K-State. So I can’t help but be nervous if my patch will be good enough for the project, and if not I hope that someone will help me get it up to an acceptable quality.

Anyway, this is a big deal for me and I’m pretty happy about it.

For the longest time I’ve been pining for iTunes on Linux.  The reason?  I’ve been fighting linux media players time and time again to just be stable with my large music collection, while iTunes takes it without so much as a studder.

The music players that I’ve messed with the most are Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Muine, soI figured I would give a small review of them while I’m whining, and to be fair, I’m not reviewing them on two fronts.  First as a user, and now as a young developer looking to get involved.

The first was Muine.  After moving from XMMS and XMMS-like programs I hit the ground running with Muine due to it’s simple smooth interface.  I loved the “add album to playlist” feature and was lulled into a happy place by the auto-downloading of album art making that particular window as exciting as a shelf full of “real” CD’s (without the RIAA guilt).  Unfortunately that feature which had lulled me into happiness stopped working when some business with the Amazon developer key thingie got in the way of downloading album covers.  What at first looking like a really busy project that was going to be making my dreams come true in short order, turned out to go a bit stale almost right away.  I was saddened.

After a while I started to long for the library functionality that I enjoyed on my PowerBook.  This was entirely thanks to a recent set of downloads that brought me the collection of Billboard Top 100 songs from 1950 something until 2004.  Suddenly my signal to noise ratio when looking for something to listen to shot through the roof and I needed help finding my songs.  So I decided to give Rhythmbox a shot.  This is the “default” gnome go at an iTunes clone, and it has a lot of things going for it.  The Artist-Album browser at the top fo the window is devine and the over all experience seemed to be snappy.  That is… when it doesn’t crash.  What turned out to be a long standing theme with any media player I use in linux, is frequent crashes when trying to import my library.  For whatever reason there isn’t an open source music player/organizer on the planet that can load 15,000+ songs without crashing.

For a while I could build the library in short bursts with the Rhythmbox in the “stable” branch and then when completed go back to the “~x86″ branch for the increased functionality.  But there were a number of “small” behavioral things that were driving me nuts.  Two examples:

1. I’m feeling a little “80’s” today, so I flip to the “Billboard Top 100 of 1984″ in the browse album and see what there is to see.  Oh yeah!  Right there at number 44 is Huey Lewis & The News singing “The Heart of Rock & Roll”.  That was a good year for Huey if I remember, so I click on Huey Lewis & The News in the browse artist selection box to “drill down” and get the Huey Lewis hits from 1984.  But I can’t… because for some reason selecting something in the browse artist selection box “resets” the browse album selection box to “all” instead of keeping the setting.  Weird.
2. Most importantly, when adding new songs to the library, no progress meter is shown.  When a media player has a strong propensity to crash when loading songs… it really stinks to have no idea when/where/why it crashed.
3. This application is coded in GObject C… and I’m just not sure that I want to learn GObject C.  From a guy that adores Python, C feels like digging the chunnel with a spoon instead of a tunnel boring machine.

So I kept looking and came across Banshee.  First points for Banshee, it looks good.  Really good, sharp and clean with a more modern feel.  It wows me out of the gates with a slick progress meter for importing songs and the ability to asynchronously add songs to the queue to be imported at will.  Super work.   It still has it’s warts, however… it’s written in C# on Mono, which is something that I want to learn anyway… hmmm.  Anyway, the big bugs:

1. When importing new music, CPU usage shoots up to like 100% and lags anything that tries to say otherwise.  Totally impolite, like totally.
2. Still crashes frequently when importing music.
3. Filling my window with songs takes long time.  Say I’m on a playlist and then move back to the unfiltered main window… I can expect several seconds of hardcore “omg run!” from Banshee as it fills the window.
4. Typing “1984″ in the search box will get me the Billboard Top 100 of 1984, but typing “1984 huey” won’t give me anything.

The verdict?  I really need to stop being the needy quiet guy and start being a needy contributer.  I’ve joined the Banshee mailing list and I’m going to lurk for a little while and start to soak up the atmosphere.  Hopefully I can also get in contact with a Banshee developer with some experience for a touch of mentoring to get me started.  We shall see, I don’t know if anything will come of this.  But I do know that the best way to make sure the features that I care about most get attention is to be willing to put some of the work in myself, and I think I’m willing to do that.

Wow! I don’t know what exactly happened, but this morning my doorbell rang and I just had this feeling that my monitors were in. Sure enough, when I get to the front door Alex is signing for my two brand new Dell 1907FP monitors.

The impressive part? The scheduled delivery was anytime between the 14th and the 18th. Turns out that DHL doesn’t mind going just a litte bit faster than scheduled, and I think that’s awesome. This seems worth remembering, since I didn’t even pay for accellerated shipping or anything, I took the free 3-5 day shipping offer that was available to university students through Dell.

The monitors are hella sweet. I was nervous about them being a little different than the monitors that I have at work (which are 1901FPs) but it turns out that these monitors are better in pretty much every single way.

I’m a happy camper.

Quite often when talking with students (and even occationally faculty) regarding Python, a common notion expressed is how different Python is from Java and how “blah-blah-blah” is “harder” to do in Python.  Of course, by “harder” they mean “not exactly the same”, but whatever.

Well I keep stumbling upon this gem of a piece about the differences between Python and Java and I can’t help but think this is an omen that I need to share this information more.  So here it is, go read Python Is Not Java by Phillip J. Eby.

Soon after returning from Boston, Anthony sent me an email to ask if I would be interested in helping out with a scholarship drive for Leary. The plan is to get an endowment together so that there can be a Michael T. Leary scholarship at Providence College for students intending to pursue a degree in Computer Science.

I think his classmate Carl Cicchetti said it best when he wrote to me:

Thanks Travis. I look forward to working with you on this. Mike [might] not have liked the attention, but he deserves it.

More information can be found on www.mikeleary.com where I helped draft up a simple page to gather information about the scholarship online to those that are interested. If you’re a friend of Leary’s, consider helping out to the effort. I realize that this seems like an inherently local thing to the New England area, and to a certain degree it is, but it is a great effort to further the memory of Leary and your help means a lot to Leary’s family and friends.

Hopefully we’ll have more information soon on how to handle online donations towards the endowment.

I made another order for my computer and completely forgot to mention it when I mentioned buying new monitors, though admittedly this purchase is a lot less impressive (and a lot less expensive).

It seems that Microsoft has finally heard my plight regarding the lack of new natural keyboards and has released a brand new “split” keyboard design. And since I had already blew like $600 on new monitors, spotting $50 bucks for a new keyboard seemed pretty reasonable. It looks something like this:

Sorry for the crappy picture, that’s the best I could scrape up from the website and I don’t feel like taking a picture. I’ve only been using it for a little bit, so I’ll save the review type materials for after I’ve been using it for a little while.

Tonight I decided to scrap my Gentoo installation and give Ubuntu a shot. The reasons for moving away from Gentoo? Well, not much really. My Gentoo installation was getting a little nasty from me building all kinds of not-ready-for-packaging-yet type software and I just wanted something clean.

I’m not unhappy with Gentoo in any way, but I had heard so much about Ubuntu that my curiousity was just getting the best of me. I decided that it couldn’t really hurt, so I gave it a go. So far I’ve been very pleased, though in all fairness I’ve only been at it for a few hours now.

I’m excited to see what interesting tid-bits of knowledge the next few weeks will bring with a new distribution on my PC. I imagine that it will be all of the little things that will make the experience interesting. You know, like a Royale with Cheese.

Yeah, again… already.

The thing is that my constraints have drastically changed now that I added the projects.tbradshaw.net domain covered in wiki for handling my personal projects.  I no longer need to have a template that I can use for both Wordpress and everything else that’s going to be on my website.  I’m at the point now where “everything” on www.tbradshaw.net is exact a blog and a gallery (and the gallery is a little bit in limbo anyway).

So now I’m thinking that I want something a little more clean… and a little more Web 2.0 in feeling.  I really like the larger fonts and clean designs of some of the new web 2.0 stuff and I think I would be more at home with something along those lines instead of the “smaller text” style that I’m using now.

I don’t know exactly when I’ll have time to do that, but I have a feeling that I’ll make time one way or another.

It’s been a long time that I’ve been wrestling with my currently monitors.  My left monitor has been fritzing out to purple for quite some time and my right monitor has this tendency to just start violently shaking all the time.

I’ve been avoiding the problem partially through practice.  If I bend the end of the monitor cable just right I can get the color to stay, and the violent shaking (and sometimes screaming) are infrequent.  But today was the last straw.

My left monitor shot to purple at the slightest accidental tap of my desk, and when I tried to twist the monitor cable just so… the red channel snapped leaving me with a very sickly green monitor.  Coupled with my tax return and several elements of back pay, it was time to make things happen.

So I caved in and purchased a couple new monitors.  I don’t know if this really should be at the top of my purchasing priority list, but I know that it’s going to be a severe increase in my quality of life when I get rid of these frequent monitor induced headaches and extra frustration.

Hopefully in a week or two I’ll be the proud owner of two of these bad boys:

This monitor is about as close as I could find to the monitors that I have at work that were still pretty heavily discounted for university students.  The deal was sweet, less than $600 dollars for the pair of them.  When I first started looking at buying monitors, I thought that I was going to end up paying over $600 each for a decent set of Dell flat panels.

I’ll certainly be giving a quick review (or at least a brief celebration) when they come in.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged, but I’m going to try and get back into the habit, and I’m starting with an “easy” one.

Initial Anxiety

This spring break I found myself returning to Boston for another week of St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Most significantly, this is my first St. Patrick’s Day without my good friend Leary here to share it with. This was something that gave me quite a bit of anxiety for returning to Boston. I’ve made a number of great friends during my visits to Leary’s place, but always had Leary around to hang out with while here.

My initial solution to this was to invite my roommate Dave to come with me. This was an easy fix, because if my friends from Boston were busy, I could always just go do the “first time tourist” stuff with Dave. I was even looking forward to doing some of that stuff again, since I don’t think I’ve done anything touristy in Boston for at least a few years.

Unfortunately Dave couldn’t get his finances together enough to afford the trip, so I found myself departing for Boston by myself, just like all of the years before.

The 12 Hours to Cambridge

One major difference this year was my inability to drive myself to the airport. Earlier in the year my Dad’s truck was repossessed, and I have given him my Jeep. I was also leaving in the middle of the week so I could take advantage of the hugely discounted fares for a Thursday morning departure, which completely ruled out rides from my friends (which I have taken advantage of on numerous occasions in the past.)

Some looking around found an airport shuttle that traveled along I-70 stopping in key towns on the way. Unfortunately the shuttle that left in time for me to make my flight departured 2:30am on Thursday morning. However, it was only $54 (one way) and it got me to the airport with plenty of time to spare. With the layover in Chicago it was 2:30pm (Eastern) before I landed in Boston.

A Touch of Homesick

Arriving in Boston was the beginning of a easy trip, with Patrick serving as an amazing host. We relaxed the first couple days enjoying drinks and getting ready for St. Patrick’s night.

It was on St. Patrick’s night that I found myself a little homesick. The vast majority of my friends in Cambridge that were around for St. Patrick’s day were working at The People’s Republik (my favorite bar in Cambridge, and the bar that is directly next door to Leary’s place.) This made the actual night of St. Patrick’s quite tame in comparison to previous years. Rather than drinking with Leary and enjoying the characters that frequent the “Peeps”, I found myself instead calmly enjoying drinks on a spot of the bar that I could see the TV and chatting it up with the girls now and then that would start conversation. Patrick offered a bit of a pub crawl for a bit with Neal and another friend, but I was feeling pretty mellow, so I passed.

It wasn’t a bad time by any stretch, but I couldn’t help but think of my friends back in Kansas and the roaring good time that was probably erupting in Aggieville. I made several text messages back to Lindsay for small chat, shot a few messages out to random Bunker friends, and even gave Lauren a call to say, “Happy Birthday”. I was nervous that the rest of the trip might be characterized by this mellow malaise. I was wrong however, it just turns out that I missed Leary a ton.

Things Lighten Up

Fortunately, the mellow nature faded as I help broom up the Peeps a little after the bar closed and then headed over to Robert’s house (the owner of the Peeps) to drink with Patrick, Robert’s son, a few Irish guys, and a few girls. It was a pretty funny time, with ridiculous statements from the visiting Irish and Patrick robbing the cradle as high points.

A Trip of Concerts

Things really started to get fun when Dani organized a group outing to see Chris’s band Campaign for Real Time play at a BC club. Dani, Ian, and I took a cab over to the venue with Nils and Jenn joining up later. C4[RT] played a good set that was fun and engaging, and I had a great time chatting with Ian and Dani before the show started. By the end of the night when we headed back to the Peep’s, there wasn’t any doubt that this was going to be a great trip.

Museum of Science

The one real “tourist-y” thing that I did this year was take a trip to the Museum of Science on the Charles River. They had a cool exhibit on Star Wars set up and Patrick had a friend that worked at the Museum that got us in at a highly discounted rate. Not only that, but she gave us a quick behind-the-scenes look at the live animals that the Museum has on site. A very fun trip.

Great People and Great Times

As per usual, my trip to Boston was much more about the great people that frequent the People’s Republik than it was about any particular place or activity. Every day and (long) night was measured not in hours, but in greetings from old friends I hadn’t seen in a year–but got to know even better–and new friends that I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. From long stints at the People’s talking baseball, to chatting antipasto over a couple episodes of The Sopranos, to visiting the basement venue at The Middle East and catching The English Beat, each experience radiated with the unique character that only the friends I’ve met in Cambridge can supply. It’s a strange microcosm of close nit community in a city so vast it’s hard to imagine anything but strangers. It’s no surprise to me why Leary made these people his home and I count myself lucky that I’m a very small part of that group.

An Amazing Host

While all of the cast of characters in Boston/Cambridge I consider friends, the sole reason that returning to Cambridge–even without Leary–is so appealing is Patrick. One of Leary’s closest friends, Patrick and I have a lot in common (especially for a Boston Irish kid and a Kansas boy) and get along great. He extended his home and his hospitality to me all week and really made me feel welcome the entire time. Definitely “good peeps”.

Something to Come Back To

Without Leary, several times this year I’ve wrestled with the idea of ending my annual trips to Cambridge. I just wasn’t sure if I would still have a good time, if the bonds between Leary’s friends and I would still be as strong, if I would still be as welcome in that well knit community as I was before. Before I left for Boston I wondered if this would be my last trip.

After staying with Patrick and revisiting all of my friends in Cambridge, I now find myself with the opposite curiosity. I wonder if I could make it out more than once a year to visit everyone. It’s certainly enough fun to make it worth all the trouble in the world.