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Monday will mark the beginning of the Winter 2009 school year at UCI. I have signed up to take 20 units across 5 different classes. 2 project courses, and 3 upper division major courses. I’m looking forward to the new quarter which hasn’t happened since my first quarter at UCI. I really enjoyed my Computer Vision and Imaging course last quarter and hence am taking the first time offered project course in the same area. I will also be taking a project course in computer networking. I’ve been told I’m insane for attempting two project courses at the same time, perhaps I am since I don’t even know what one entails. I’m sure I will find out rather quickly how managable this will be. The other three courses are: Digital Log Design, Intro to Databases, and Artificial Intelligence. I’m not sure what Digital Log Design entails, but I’m definitely looking forward to the other two courses, both of which I have been waiting to take since I started at UCI.

Lots of things and nothing have all happened since I last wrote up here. I’ve just continued working on a consulting basis. I survived all of my finals at the end of last quarter. Christmas brought a few neat toys to me, including a WD Velociraptor HDD which will be the first of 4 I hope to procure over the next year to build my VM array in my new server. I decided on the WD Velociraptor for many reasons, I was originally planning on running 146GB 15k RPM SAS drives. The drives would make a phenominal VM server, but after doing some research online I discovered that the ammount of power consumed by the drives vs. the performance gain over the Velociraptors was minimal. The SAS drives consumed almost 3x the amount of power at peak usage as the Velociraptor did with decent gains. The Velociraptors are also cheaper and easier to obtain brand new. I did run into one issue that will be resolved shortly while mounting the Velociraptors in my chassis. The Velociraptors sit on a giant heat sink dubbed the “IcePak” by WD. The actual drive itself is only a 2.5″ hard drive mounted on this giant heatsink. WD center mounted the 2.5″ drive to evenly dicipate heat which makes sense. The issue you run into is that hot swap chassis and bays place the SATA power and data connectors in the bottom right corner where SAS and standard SATA drives have them. So, to make my setup work I will have to do some small case modding. I was lucky enough in that I have a 4U rackmount chassis, with 20 hot swap bays, 4 across and 5 rows. So, I simply removed the circuit board from the back of the hotswap bays for the top row, and will pass through standard cables to these drives. I won’t get the pretty lights for power and activity, but I will get to use these energy efficient and fast drives. I also started experimenting with a USB TV tuner that I would like to use on my MythBackend VM. Unfortunately I ran into compatibility problems while trying to configure it. Hopefully the Linux community will have something out soon to remedy the issue.

The other day I started working more with the sound card and VMs on my server. I discovered something rather important with Server 2008. You can rather easily install a sound card on the server, the trick here is not to do it while remoted in :). I learned this the hard way after several hours of frustrating restarts. Turns out that when you RDP to Server 2008 the sound devices are disabled and appear as though they are not functioning. So, you have to install a sound card while on the physical machine and not remotely connected. Lesson learned. At the moment I’m setting up a mic to pass through to one of my VMs to experiment with voice commands. My goal is to be able to turn off my lights for the night without having to touch anything. Presently my bluetooth proximity script is working flawlessly. I leave my room and my lights go out, I enter and my lights come on. I still need to add some code to handle day light conditions, most likely using a sunset time calculation. That way if it is after sunset the script will run, otherwise it won’t. We’ll see how that works soon. I’m having trouble getting that data easily using a bash script. I may attempt to port my little scripts into Perl which I’m growing rather fond of after several WWW::Mechanize scripts to pull down various pieces of information from the net. More to come soon I hope :).