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It’s been over two months since my last post. It’s hard to believe how fast time flies. So much has happened over the course of the last two months I feel it’s time for a bit of catch up. School hit a rock bottom this quarter. I only recently realized what was happening and began to question what I was doing. It’s going to be extremely difficult to pull off the grades I need this quarter to move on to several new classes, but I’m going to give it everything I’ve got to make it work. My first hint of what was going on occurred midway through this last quarter when I bombed my Statistics mid-term. I immediately dropped that course. As a result I will be taking classes this summer, on my own dime. This doesn’t put me in a very good financial position. It is imperative that I sort everything out this summer. According to my guidance counselor I’m currently a year and a quarter away from graduating at UCI. That means it will take a quarter longer than I had expected, and that’s assuming no more screw ups and all the classes I need are offered when I need them. So, the gloves are off. I have felt more myself in the last week or two than I have in I don’t even remember how long. It’s amazing what the mind can do. I have been more focused, and happier overall. All it took was hitting the reset button. I’ve started making head way on my personal projects as well as my business projects, and it feels good to be making progress on so many fronts at once. I don’t even remember the last time I was happy that I was busy.

So, heres how the projects stand. I began working on my car pc. I grabbed a low powered machine last weekend for about $250. I spent the last week and a half swapping distros and playing around with settings. I hit my lowest boot time with the Ubuntu Server editions at around 10-11 seconds. I most recently tried installing a full Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop and to my great surprise I’m getting a boot time of ~15seconds with only minor modifications. So, I have decided to continue using the Hardy Heron desktop as my base operating system. I also have worked on setting up this machine as an access point. I found the necessary code spread across the internet. I will post a step by step once I have completed the install on the new machine. With the access point I will be able to easily attach my iPhone to the car pc for syncing and other data transfers. Today I was working on pairing the iPhone over bluetooth to the Ubuntu Desktop. Lets just say I didn’t have complete success, but I learned a ton about bluetooth and in the end I did manager to pair the two devices although I am still unable to transfer audio between them. I can’t seem to figure out if its protocol or device class related. Perhaps I will learn more after Monday’s Apple conference. As for business related things, I have secured an office to work in over the summer. I’m hoping that by separating myself from home I will be able to focus more on my code. Well, that’s all for now. I will be posting various step by step processes that I used to get different parts of my car pc to where it is currently.

Well I have come up with a new challenge for myself. For those that don’t know I recently got a third monitor, YAY. So, my new goal. I want to run two separate instances of MythTV in two seperate X Servers off of the same box. I currently have my Vizio all setup with the proper resolution which was a chore unto itself and now I have decided to complicate things a little more. I want to run my third monitor off of both my Windows XP gaming rig and my MythTV box. So the VGA connector will hook to Windows XP and act as an extended monitor and the DVI will connect to my MythTV box and act as a secondary display. At first I tried to clone the monitor output which worked, but had the issue of video playback and cropping on the screen. So, I settled on another idea suggested on a few Wiki pages. I will run two independent X Servers, one on each monitor. That way I can get the perfect resolution running on both. Now, I just have to figure out how to make this work. Any and all input is welcome. The information I have so far was gathered from here: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Running_MythTV_Dual_Headed. I will keep you posted as to my progress.

I have been toiling over writing a small blurb about my feelings on the election for some time now. So, here are my two cents. First off I’m just going to throw out a few non political things that first attracted me to Obama as a candidate. The most important to me being his articulate and heart felt speeches. For those that have not seen an Obama speech it is something to behold. I urge you to watch any of them on YouTube. His positive nature and thick skin have made him an upstanding nominee. He has held his head high while the blows to him have sunk lower. I feel that Obama could be the Lincoln of our time. His witty actions show his high level of intelligence and ability to think critically and logically. This was most recently demonstrated when he posted his tax returns online. Thus leaving the ball in Hillary’s court. I want to be completely honest and state plainly that I hold no grudge or distaste for a female president. I have said all along to my friends and family that I fully support females running for the presidency. I just wish it wasn’t Hillary. Her actions have been unbecoming and disgraceful. Her unwillingness to bow out respectfully reflects poorly on herself. She has the air of winning no matter what the cost. For me that sounds like the wrong type of character trait for these times. During WWI or WWII this was the ideology that helped us pull through successfully. I see this trait under a different light at this time. I feel that Hillary uses this trait to cover her possible racism towards Obama. I feel she would rather see anyone in office rather than have a black man beat a white woman to the White House. She is clinging on for dear life. Just this morning I saw a news cast with Bill Cliniton talking about the election. If Hillary isn’t a big enough girl to talk on her own behalf then she doesn’t’ belong in the White House. Bill had his turn and he sorta screwed it up. Which is just another mark on her record as well. If Hillary couldn’t keep her husband under control when she lived in the White House before how is she going to keep the nation under control? Hillary continually strikes back at Obama over seemingly insignificant things. One of which is his apparent lack of experience. Some may view this the same way, but from all I’ve learned about our political system the only thing that experience brings is corruption. I feel that a strong willed person such as Obama can keep his head above all the lies and bribes of Washington, he’s done it so far with Hillary. So there you have it. Keep up the amazing work and don’t sink to their level Sen. Obama.

So, another large gap has managed to slip its way into my blog writing and so much has happened. I’m feeling far more settled into my new job. Waking up in the morning is a usual occurrence rather than a startling nightmare. I really like the people I work with and I’m learning a lot researching solutions and scripting things for the servers. Speaking of which I plan on doing a write up on creating ADM policy files for Server 2003 R2 SP2. I spent the better part of a day trying to get a simple script working with almost no luck. In the end I found some example code and all is working wonderfully now. Last quarter is completely over and I can’t believe it, but it appears as though I escaped unscathed by some miracle. Not my best quarter, but I’m not going to turn down 3 B’s. That was a very welcome discovery today. I’m looking forward to the fresh start at school next week. I will need to figure out my schedule a bit more and hammer out the details, but I should end up with the 4 classes I want. I’ve been working on several side jobs and hopefully I can keep everything tidily balanced and running smoothly. I have started to pickup my coding tasks and moving forward with those. Sadly I haven’t been able to work on my projects for quite some time. I’m probably going to wait until my financial situation levels out before pursuing any new projects. The timing of this new job worked out perfectly, I will have 3 weeks of work on my first paycheck and I’ve worked nearly full time for the last two weeks because of finals and spring break. So, even though I didn’t get much of a vacation I can hopefully get my finances back in line.

    So, today marks the beginning of the end of the quarter. Finals are next week, spring break the following, and just like that we launch into another 10 weeks of courses. I thought it would be good to reflect back on how much I’ve changed this quarter. I may not have done very well in my match class, but I think I learned a lot about myself instead. I finally got myself a stable job, which I’m so happy about. Having finished my first week at Arbitech I think it’s a great fit. I’m sure I’ll be forced to endure the new guy status for a while longer, but everyone is really cool. I happy to have made it through this last quarter solely on consulting income, but I’m looking forward to being able to buy some toys and tryout some projects far more. To my surprise I’m not having that much trouble waking up at 6 AM to be at work by 7:30AM. Anybody that knows me at all, knows I’m not a morning person. In a way this is something that has changed about me. I used to sleep through alarm clocks, earthquakes, the end of the world, you name it. Not so much anymore.

On my  way home today I started thinking about how society is rapidly changing because of computers. Now, before you stop reading, this isn’t another rant on how computers are special, and good, etc. I’m thinking more specifically of how we store information as human beings. With search capabilities growing more and more common, our endless exploration of folders has come to a close. The way we think about everything is changing. With Google, you no longer have to remember the name of a web page, but only three special words or so from a sentence, with iTunes you no longer need to remember the name of that band, but only that their album was Dead Parade something. We as people can remember more by remembering less and rely on computers to remember all of it. With the advent of search systems like Spotlight and Windows Live Search these ideas don’t limit themselves to online material. With Windows Vista and Mac OSX it is now more efficient to search for something than to take the time guessing even once where that file is or to even navigate directly to it. That is astounding considering so many advances have been made in user interface design. Consider Google’s home page, that is the definition of what a user interface is coming to. I wouldn’t doubt that someday Windows will be a search box centered on your screen. To launch a program or do anything with it you wouldn’t click you simply start typing what you want to do or what you want to work on and Windows will make it happen. With drive space expanding exponentially while changing form factors simultaneously it is becoming increasingly important to index all of our data and be able to look through it quickly and efficiently. I think this phenomenon is going to bring about some startling changes in the computer industry soon. Hardware assisted searching or hardware that is specifically designed to accelerate searching is going to become a key focus for manufacturers as well as coders alike.

I’ll post some more updates and thoughts later. For now I’m off to dinner.

No word from Arbitech as of yet. I’m beginning to wonder if they found something in my background check that I didn’t know was there :(. Not too much progress on any coding fronts. I did however play a bit with the new iPhone package manager named Cydia. I love that a fully open source port has made it to the iPhone at last. I can see running some port of Linux on the iPhone sometime in the future. I did get a little gaming in and forgot I had some old screenshots. So without further ado:

So, I run out to grab a sandwich from a local deli. I’m walking up to our front door and something hits me in the chest. Kind of like a rubber band. Then I hear beating wings. I jump to the side and look down at the wall and there is a big green grasshopper hanging on the wall. That thing scared me to death because it caught me off guard. I was looking in my brown paper bag at my sandwich, chips, and Snapple. Hate it when these kinds of things happen.

So, I have completed 1/3 of my iPhone video converter script. I tested out several shows this evening and I can safely say I think that part of this project is completed. I did run into a few minor issues while testing. When I first started playing video I got 80% of the way through the show and then my iPhone crashed. Each time I tried seeking to that point in the video file my iPhone would crash again and again. I decided it was time for an upgrade. So, first I tried restoring the phone from 1.1.3 to 1.1.3 and re-jailbreaking it. After my settings were all restored my mail application crashed. I tried a few things with no luck. Then I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to 1.1.4. Same problem. So, I ended up doing a full restore of 1.1.4 on my phone and rebuilding it from scratch. I can safely say this was a great choice. Since I hadn’t restored my phone since I bought it, I had miscellaneous folders from various applications and all sorts of upgrade leftovers from the 1.0.0 through 1.1.3. I now have a clean, streamlined, well running 1.1.4 iPhone that can do cell triangulation. I setup my Apache server again without any trouble, copied over my show and everything worked like a charm. Apple definitely did some bug fixes and possibly a small overclock on the front side bus again like they did in 1.1.1. The phone is more responsive and video is much smoother.  Overall I’m very pleased with this phase of the project. I’m very much looking forward to the release of the SDK on March 6. Hopefully these extra few days allowed Apple the time needed to make the SDK that much better. I think my next task will be to script the automatic conversion of selected videos after they download. I’ll have to go through some code and figure out the best plan of attack for this. I will post my findings.

Wow, I’ve been incredibly busy over the last five days. This morning I looked at my blog page and nearly fell out of my chair when I realized it’s been five days since my last post. This weekend I went to Los Angeles with my friends Izzie and Larry to help them setup some new servers at a data center. It took longer than expected, but it was a great experience being back in a data center. This place was still very small, only a handful of racks were even occupied by one server. After getting everything setup we went to Fat Burger and met up with my partner in crime James. Sunday I stayed at home and did some chores. I had school yesterday and here we are today. I have made some progress with my video converter. The script is pretty much done. The only thing left is the fine tuning of my video conversion line. I ended up going with PHP as my script language. I’m more familiar with it and in the end it just was easier. I have my aspect ratios dynamically being calculated and the appropriate dimensions being used. I will try and get this script finished today. I really want this project squared away. It would get me about 1/3 of the way done with the project as a whole. Still left is a script to take the converted videos and push them to my iPhone and a script to queue up my TV show downloads. I got my Apache server on my iPhone all setup and pointed to the /var partition so that I’m using part of the 7GB partition on my phone to store the videos rather than part of the 300MB system partition. This was a fun chore as I had to SSH into the phone and chmod the httpd.conf file so I could alter it. Once I did that, made my changes, and restarted Apache all was working perfectly. Well, I have a rough draft for  paper due in about 2 hours that I haven’t written. I’ll try and post an update before I go to bed tonight. Unfortunately with so many projects in school and out I’m not sure what I will get accomplished.

So, I managed to stay awake thus far

I found an awesome way to install ffmpeg for universal video conversions. Most sites try to get you to recompile and jump through a bunch of hoops to get things like AAC audio codecs, and other such things working. By using the Medibuntu repositories I was able to simply type sudo apt-get install ffmpeg and everything just worked. Best way I have every seen to install ffmpeg with full codec support. I had previously installed libfaac and several other libraries. The full list of what I had installed is:

sudo apt-get install liblame-dev libfaad2-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev

	liba52-0.7.4 liba52-0.7.4-dev libx264-dev

The repository information for Medibuntu is available here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#head-7486ed038a9becc1dff10a24cc07a38a00d70e9f

Hope this helps someone out in the future. My plan is to script auto conversions of my TV shows each night so that I can stream them to my iPhone at school. I’ll let you know how it works. I just streamed one I had previously converted and it looks great.