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Today marks the final fee deadline for class registration at UCI. I have enrolled in three classes and will be adding myself to the waiting list for a fourth. I’m going to be cutting it extremely close to complete in the next year. I have a gut feeling that I will have to fork over the money for one extra quarter to fit everything that I’m required to complete for my degree. I decided to see what the ratemyprofessor site had to say about my professors this quarter, just for kicks. I have been guessing in my head what my past teachers would have been rated as, but reading the ratings for my new teachers has me a bit worried. Every computer science teacher I read about on ratemyprofessor had the worst reputation. I think this is a paradoxical thing, where computer science people in general are not very social and so when they try to be by teaching they don’t come off as being all there. The other issue, is that most computer people that are truly passionate about what they do often speak very quickly when teaching about various subjects. I know I’m guilty of this, when someone asks me how do you do X? I will often run through it at a million miles an hour and be done explaining the idea in full detail by the time they get out their pad of paper, at which point I have to go through the whole shpiel again. The sad part is by the time you go through it a second time you are a bit flustered that the person didn’t listen the first time and leave out much of the “bonus” knowledge you were willing to share. I think the same is true for computer science teachers. I’ve had two really great teachers that I can recall, both were workers in the field and taught on the side.

The biggest bummer about UCI is that with their scheduling you don’t get to pick your teacher, there is usually a single section of each class available and you have to just roll the dice and see which teacher you get. Saddleback was much more open, they had easily 4-5 sections of each class with different teachers so that you could pick and choose who you wanted to take the class with.

There are several things I find lacking at UCI having been there for a full year now. The first is the number of languages taught to Computer Science students and the inflexibility of professors to allow students to use languages more suited to a given task. Everything has to be JAVA whether you like it or not. This is setting a lot of students up for failure. Java is not the only language in this world and for good reason, if we all had to write Java swing interfaces for every program I’d have shot myself a long time ago. I feel it’s a good language to branch out from because it’s cross platform compatible, but for so many of the projects given to students web languages are much more suited. Another big thing missing in the school is the business side of programming. There are no classes offered on how to start your own programming business or for that matter any independent study class for starting your own business. Something I would really like to see happen at the school would be to have each student pick a large scale project that they will work on for a full year during their upper devision classes that each class can take a little piece of and make that much better. Then when the year is up each student would have some large program that is something they wanted to work on, and can use in their portfolio or to sell. This way each student comes out with something to show for all their hard work, rather than 20 little programs that can sort a CSV file. It’ll be interesting to see what this next year at UCI holds for me.

I have always been a big movie buff, I memorize the lines of my favorite films, and relate them to life or try to live life through them. Recently life has slipped into the stereotypical shift of focus. For comparison today, we have “The Devil Wears Prada”. In the movie, Andy must choose between her relationship and her career.  As she begins to accel at one, the other must suffer. I always wondered why she couldn’t just be good at both, I have always been able to handle several things at once in my life why can’t she. I have now begun to see this delema in my own life. The bottom line comes down to time. It is not our unwillingness to succeed at multiple things, it is our time limitation. As I have begun to shift my focus towards my business and work, my education has slid rapidly down the hill. This never used to be a problem, and this is my cause for concern. I have always been able to juggle school and work without a problem. Why now, when the cost is so high must it become an issue. I have been working since I was 14 and attending school at the same time. Seven years of experience should make anybody good at something, but I fear I have only gotten worse. Is it that one consumes me more, that I’m more driven to succeed at one than the other? Am I giving 100%? In my head I want to blame someone else, and yet I can’t logically select any individual except myself. In order to confront this behavior I have decided to keep track of how much time I spend doing various things. Perhaps I can shed some light on what is utilizing the most time in my day. How did I come to this point? Everything I want to get done isn’t, and everything that needs to get done isn’t, and everthing I have to get done isn’t. What is???

So, before I go and get mutilated by this next final, I thought I would reveal a bit of what I learned about iPhone bluetooth pairing. It turns out that Apple was very generic in what they checked to classify a device as a headset or not. By using hciconfig and setting the class for your bluetooth dongle to 0×200400 you can successfully make your computer appear as a pairable device to your iPhone. It will even let you enter your PIN and the device will appear as paired on both devices when you are done. This is where I have left off for now. Should anyone make any further progress such as playing music from their iPhone through their computer speakers over bluetooth, please do share. Well, I’m off to my final. I’ll see you on the other side.

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.

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.

Well, I can’t believe another weekend has come and gone. This weekend felt particularly long, and yet this is only the case because I had so much to do. On Saturday I helped Izzie out at his data center. We racked up a new server. It was much quicker than last time, all went very smooth. Afterwards we played a few rounds of Red Alert 2. The rest of the time was spent working on Jame’s and my new venture.

I got a pretty nice looking proof of concept put together. Unfortunately we are able to come up with features far faster than I am able to code them. I’m proud to say that at least we have something to show. I still have much work to do. Currently the show piece is just static code. The next big phase of the project will be to drop in the database aspect to the whole thing. It’s all planned out in my head, but every time I think about it I realize how far I have to go. This next week at school should be rather eventful. Between several projects and possibly getting the Arbitech job I’m in for a treat.

I did get a small moment to test out the iPhone FTP daemon offered by the dev team. I must say that my tests show this to be the perfect method for transferring those large video files to my phone. I was originally going to SCP the files to the phone, but I quickly discovered the limitations of that protocol when I topped out at 300kb/s. FTP resulted in a significant gain, 6.5mb/s. Thanks go out to Izzie for this awesome recommendation. I still need to write the scripts. Perhaps if I get sick of writing PHP for work, I’ll switch gears and write PHP for my iPhone.

I remember when I first wanted to start learning database driven web page programming. I asked a friend about PHP. He immediately scolded me and told me to use ASP, I didn’t really pick up on it. Fortunately, ASP .NET was release around this time. So, I tried that out and learned to code in it using VB. That worked for quite some time. I wrote my first multi-user web application in ASP .NET while I worked at Coast IRB. I started running into PHP when I had to modify a few little projects for Coast that I hadn’t written. Then I started tinkering with open source projects which are pretty much entirely written in PHP. Now, here I am, and all I write now is PHP. I wouldn’t venture to say I’m a professional by any stretch of the imagination. I still consult online forums and code examples frequently, but I have learned a lot while working on my various projects. I can safely say I far prefer PHP to ASP .NET. Well, I better hit the sack. Gotta rest up for whatever tomorrow has in store for me.

Well, today was different to say the least. I started to pick out my classes for the next quarter this morning. I got a rough schedule put together before I headed out for school. I am lucky enough to have yet another quarter of driving to UCI everyday of the week. Once again I’m only able to take three classes and then everything else causes a conflict. It’s like UCI purposefully punishes transfer students and slows them down to make more money off of them. I was able to schedule in 18 units across 6 classes at Saddleback and IVC without any trouble. Whatever…so, I’m driving to UCI and I get a phone call from an unrecognized number. Normally I let them go to voicemail, but I had some time to kill and nothing going on for the day so I answered. It turned out to be Arbitech. I had interviewed for a part time position there about three weeks ago. I never heard back after the second interview and had by now presumed the position to be filled. I have my application in at Starbucks right now as my fall back. So, it turns out that Arbitech wants me back for a 3rd and final interview to meet the COO. I was a bit dazed over the whole thing figuring this job to be long gone. So, I’m set to go in tomorrow morning at 10am. I start pondering the schedule I created for the next quarter and it hits me that I have absolutely zero work time in this schedule. I have 7 separate classes in all for the next quarter. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do. UCI doesn’t offer any evening courses, and every class is offered once, twice if it’s a really popular class. I was quite upset about this and contacted the deans office to find out why a school that’s making a couple million every three months not to mention state funding can’t offer some of their courses in the evening or at least twice a day. I left a message. I went through the rest of my day, I eventually got a voice mail from the deans secretary stating that I probably wanted to talk to Student Affairs. I’m not sure what to do on that front for the moment. They’re not going to listen to me anyway. I had planned on discussing the problem of non-English speaking math teachers and UCI’s un-flexible schedule. I doubt anyone else has complained. Everyone on campus doesn’t question anything, they’re just there and accept it for what it is. It baffles my mind to see all these people so worried about getting straight A’s on their report cards so that their parents don’t  kill them. They don’t turn out to be human by the time they’re done. After class I was driving home, and completely forgot a job I had to do, my mind was just racing over all the different things that had happened. Needless to say that customer was a bit angry, I’ve rescheduled for tomorrow morning at 9AM, it better be quick. I’m not running late for that last interview. I don’t need their patronage if I get this job.

I have soooooo much stuff to do, and yet I can’t seem to muster an ounce of energy to do any of it. I need to code a prototype for tomorrow as a proof of concept and I can’t seem to focus my mind on anything. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve been like this for the last few days. I just don’t want to do anything. It’s horrible. I’m wasting a lot of time that I don’t have to waste. I could just sit here and write for hours about seemingly meaningless subjects. Why is it so hard to focus? Perhaps I will try rewarding myself for coding. As I make progress on my code I will write some more on my blog. We’ll see if that works.

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.

After going non stop all weekend and then school today, I’m starting to feel the effects. I’m exhausted. I did buy some toys today. I grabbed a power inverter for my car so that I can charge and use my laptop in my car. I also ran out and grabbed a USB Bluetooth dongle. My intention was to start work on my bluetooth cell phone proximity script. I got a nasty surprise when I found out that the iPhone is unable to pair with any devices that aren’t handsets. I have searched non-stop for several hours and can safely say that at this point in time, there is no fix. I discussed a few alternative options with my friend Izzie. I may try doing something similar with WiFi. My worry there is that WiFi connects and disconnects rather regulaly on the iPhone to conserver battery power and the last thing I want is my lights turning on and off while I’m at home because my phone is saving power. So, for now this project will have to be placed on hold. I also grabbed a book on my way home called “Linux Multimedia Hacks”. It’s really neat. I found several things that I plan on trying out. One thing I setup and am playing with at the moment is Festival the text-to-speech engine. I’m quite impressed with how versatile the engine is for it’s size. I’m playing with the idea of writing a script to read weather forecasts to me. We’ll see how it turns out.  Not sure how much I will get done tonight. I have a bunch of math problems to do, and a small computer job at 9:30AM tomorrow morning. I’ve gotta find some time to get caught up on sleep. I can’t believe I had a 3 day weekend and non of it was spent catching up on sleep. Luckily we only have 4 weekdays as a result and 1 is down with 3 left. Well, I better get going so that I can get some sleep tonight. Oh, before I forget, Monday I went to the Starbuck’s hiring fair. I was lucky enough to have someone interviewing me that recognized me from when I worked there. So, if all goes according to plan I should get a call in the next few days, and I’ll officially be a barista once again. I’m soooo looking forward to that regular paycheck. Goodnight.