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So, apparently I’ve been pretty busy because I would swear I wrote my last post only a week or so ago. Seeing as that’s not the case I now realize how incredably busy I have been. The countdown to graduation continues. I learned that I did just fine on my C++ project and am about to start ramping up for the next. This week I have the first of 3 midterms for the quarter. Luckily they all landed on separate days so I don’t have to pull any insane studying nights, but I do have a fair bit of studying to do. For all the projects I have been working on for my classes I have not been paying much attention to the base material. All my project grades are turning out great, but the midterms count for everything so I will have some work to do. The first is for Compilers & Interpreters on Thursday, followed by Algorithms on Friday, and finally Computer Architecture on next Tuesday.

I have been working much more over the last week, and loving it, but at the same time I have to pinch myself not to fall into that routine since school is not quite over. What can I say I love what I do, and when faced with school or working I love working. I settled on working for IMARC over Arbitech in the last couple of days. I decided that based on the type of work I’d be doing for IMARC that it would end up being a better fit for me at this time. Arbitech was very kind and has actually offered me a consulting job for a project they need some work done on. I think that will be great and I will definitely learn a fair deal more in completing that. As for IMARC I have written some pretty awesome processing and parsing scripts recently for taking client files and doing all the necessary pre-processing that employees are currently doing. I’m hoping to have these done in the next week or so following midterms. I’m hoping they will have as big an impact as I think they will.

On a smaller note my birthday came and went exactly a week ago. It was a wonderful day, all my old friends contacted me through Facebook including my cousins. I had a lovely dinner followed with some amazing music at the performing arts center. This year promises to be quite eventful. All seems to be going according to plan which means I should be moved out and in a condo in roughly six months. I’ve also started looking at possibly getting a new car around the same time. I’m not entirely settled on what I will get, but have commenced drooling on everything I come across.

Several new projects have come to light, and I will hopefully be starting on them in the coming months. I have not forgotten my home automation projects, but will definitely not have much time to work on them in the next month or so. A new distraction that is starting to consume more and more of my time is my Kindle once again. I had taken a few weeks off, but I’m way back into the reading groove. I have over a dozen books ready to be sampled on my Kindle and am looking forward to completing the Farseer line of books by Robin Hobb. Well, got some homework to finish and some more reading to to. More to come.

I just completed, for the most part, my first C++ project for a project course I’m currently taking. After being forced to work with C++ all day I can safely say I have a renewed respect for everything Java does for me. I will say that the speed bump from compiled code is definitely noticable. Without the overhead of the JVM things really do run insanely fast on modern computers. Hopefully I’ll come out of this project OK, and just take it in as a learning experience for the remaining 2 projects in that class. I’m a little worried because there only being 3 projects total for the entire quarter, but if everyone does poorly then we all get curved together. We’ll see what happens.

One thing I did get out the project was that make files are not as magical or complex as they once seemed. At their simplist form they’re really just sh scripts running gcc, g++, or whatever compiler you tell them to use. Their ability to scale to performing incrediably complex or rather boring compilations is quite a feat. Well, I’m going to grab some sleep. Still plenty more work to do tomorrow. No freedom until Thursday evening.

I thought for fun I’d add a little countdown clock to graduation since it’s my sole motivation for getting through the rest of this quarter. I just finished one of five projects/homework assignments that are due in the next couple of days. I’m well on my way to completing a second. Tomorrow I will have to step it up and get a few done if I am to keep up. Hopefully after this burst I will be able to catch my breath. That’s all for now, more exciting things come soon.

I learned yesterday that I had been mis-informed as to how many courses remained before I could graduate. It turns out that I need one more project course. I was lucky, I guess I’ll use that word, enough to have a course that fit my schedule. I am now once again taking 20 units over 5 classes, two of which are project courses. My nice 16 hour work week has now gone down to a tentative 8 hours at opposite ends of the week. So much for income this last quarter. The course I added was the database projects course. I figured having worked with databases for a while I could breeze through this class for the most part. What I hadn’t counted on was the enormity of these projects. As someone who has worked with databases these things are time consuming. The first part of the 5 part project is due next week, so I have already been cut short by a week. To add to the pressure I have 2 other large projects due next week along with 2 homework assignments. It’s not going to be a very good week. On another note this database course will be using PostgreSQL which I have not worked with before. What I have gathered so far is that it is a royal pain to setup. I tried using WAPP, which is a nice all in one package with Apache+PostgreSQL+PHP5. Everything installed great and worked with my DBMS, but as soon as I tried to connect to the PostgreSQL server with PHP I was quickly shot down with no error messages and no connectivity. So I resorted to return to Linux. I had originally tried using Linux, but had experienced some trouble and hence my switch to Windows. Well after fighting with Windows for a few hours I gave up on it and decided to switch back to Linux. Luckily by piecing together a few install tutorials I have come up with a quick how to of my own for installing PostgreSQL+PHP5+Apache2+PHPPgAdmin.

1. Start with a Ubuntu Server LAMP install, I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 fully updated.
2. Install PostgreSQL package, sudo apt-get install postgresql
3. Install the PHP5-PostgreSQL connector, sudo apt-get install php5-pgsql
4. Install PHPPgAdmin, sudo apt-get install phppgadmin
5. Create a symbolic link to the phppgadmin install for Apache2, ln -s /etc/phppgadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/phppgadmin
6. Change your postgres user’s passwords, both PostgreSQL Role Password and Ubuntu User Password,
   

   sudo su postgres -c psql template1
   template1=# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD ‘password’;
   template1=# \q
   exit (to drop back to your own shell prompt if necessary)
   sudo passwd -d postgres
   sudo su postgres -c passwd

7. Allow your postgres user access to login to PHPPgAdmin,
   

   sudo nano /etc/phppgadmin/config.inc.php
   Change this line from the default true to false:
   $conf['extra_login_security'] = false;

8. Finally allow your users to login to the PostgreSQL server,
   

   sudo nano /etc/postgresql/8.3/main/pg_hba.conf
   Change the fourth column which will read ident, sameuser, md5 or some combination of these to just say trust

Hopefully this will save someone out there some time. Now that I finally have everything working I can see how well PostgreSQL works. I must say MySQL is infinitely easier to setup thanks to these LAMP installs, but maybe it will payoff in the end.

I have started to use my iPhone for reading at school with the Amazon Kindle app, and I read my Kindle at home. This way I don’t have to bring another piece of electronic equipment that might get lost or stolen to school each day. I must say the page syncing and ability to read my current book on either device is amazing. I have just completed my second book and plowing right along in my third. Amazon has defintely got this e-reading thing down to perfection. Any of those out there that enjoy reading, this combo of iPhone and Kindle is the most amazing thing ever to happen to books. I think we will begin to see many more ebooks emerging far more quickly than print books in the future. This is already starting to happen with limited edition or multipart book releases where the parts are released for the Kindle every month or few weeks while the whole book might not be published for several months. So bravo to Amazon for creating something so amazing.

Having used my Core2Duo machine now for watching several films I can safely say this is a much better way to go. I haven’t gotten everything dialed in in terms of the install yet, but viewing wise it is simply amazing. No more dropped frames using only a 2.2GHz Core2Duo and integrated Intel graphics. I have the system running off of a compact flash card for heat and power reasons and that is working well also short of a small journaling issue that causes the system to keep pinging the compact flash card rather intensely. I will have to figure out what the exact problem is, probably will switch to a non-journaled filesystem with a fresh install. I also started thinking about possibly trying to get some Windows games running on that system, maybe a big race car game of some kind. I think I’d like to see that on a big TV.

School work is coming in quite quickly so far. I have several large things due in the next week. I will have to keep up on that to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. Overall I think I could learn a lot this quarter in terms of more about how things work in the computer. There are still a lot of things I want to learn that were never touched upon at school that really kinda disappoints me seeing how this is my last quarter and all. Everything that is taught relates so specifically to logic and basic algorithms. I feel like I could write you some advanced logic at a command line interface and that about sums up my college education. We never addressed GUI design or implementation, graphics using OpenGL or Direct3D, and no wireless communications. I look through for code examples on how to do these things and am dumbstruck at all these crazy objects and constants that go into setting up these lines of communications and really wish someone had a clear explanation of what is going on. We also never discussed media storage, retrieval, or usage. I don’t even know how to setup a Java app for playing an MP3. It seems quite strange that school would focus so much on the basics and leave us coming out into a media centric world with no knowledge on how those things work.

Well that’s enough ranting for one night. Still lots of things I want to do, but don’t know how. Quite the frustrating position to be in.