snicknet.net

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, the job at Arbitech is looking like a go. After they check and ensure I’m not a psycho bent on IT Armageddon through a background check I should receive an offer sometime next week. So, I’m on hold for a few days on the job front. As for coding I have some big milestones to hit this weekend. I plan on spacing everything out so I don’t go completely insane. I’ll throw in some light gaming between crazy coding, we’ll see how that pans out tomorrow. As for coding drive, I found some today :). I must forewarn my readers, I’m a big movie guy and as corny as it sounds I like reciting lines, playing soundtracks, and viewing my life as if I were in a movie on occasion (Mind you I have absolutely no desire to actually be in one). Consider yourselves warned. My dream car for as long as I can remember has been an Aston Martin, any flavor would do, because to me they’re all drop dead gorgeous. So, my vision: “I’m driving an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, manual of course, while blaring a compilation CD of the most popular James Bond intros. Cruisin up the coast.” So, there you have it, coding fuel. Go ahead, laugh, jeer. Say what you want, but it’s my vision, so no copying it. Plus should my vision become a reality I have all the right to laugh at everyone I see while attempting this life fulfilling moment. Alright people, lets hear about those crazy things that fuel our day to day lives.

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.

Well, not to much happened today overall, but I’ll catch you up on the little things. First, I called up Starbucks to see how the applications were moving along. They’re still going through the stack from Monday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that phone call. Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll hear something. Next up, a client of mine who is an avid VW fan like myself informed me that there is a beautiful Audi A6 S-series at our local VW dealership. I drooled on the pictures for a bit. I was seriously considering until I saw it was automatic. After slapping myself back to reality I realized that for a much smaller cost I could mod the Jetta further and escape starting another car loan. I think I will keep with this plan. Every once in a while temptation springs up and I want to get a new car so bad. Luckily it usually turns out to be a passing thing. If all goes well with Starbucks hopefully I’ll be posting some Jetta mods in a few months. I have started brainstorming my plan of attack for this new business venture with James. I still have a lot of research to do and hopefully this weekend I’ll get some time to do a bit. On my wireless video syncing front I did further testing today. I tried a bunch of scripts that are currently available for converting video for viewing on the iPhone and iPod Videos. None were super advanced and resulted in either poor quality video or unplayable formats. I have decided to pursue writing my very own script to do the conversion processes using ffmpeg. This will be my first major shell script so I’m guessing it’ll take a few tries. I got part of the script squared away this evening when I came across a post describing how to parse out values from the command line. Credit goes to prowla for this line found here. Using prowla’s command as a basis I have come up with a line to get the values needed to calculate proper aspect ratios:

tcprobe -d 0 -i filename | grep “frame size” | sed ’s/^*-g //’ | awk ‘{print $1}’

This returns just the frame size of the video that you input. From there I will parse the height and width and perform the division to figure out the appropriate conversion size and to add the proper amount of padding to the top and bottom of the frame. I’m going to try and make a bit more progress on this tonight. Once this is complete and I can properly calculate the values I will write a basic ffmpeg command to convert a video. I have settled on using MPEG4 compression, or lack there of, for compressing my videos. I have not had a single successful conversion with H264 that was playable on the iPhone, until I figure out the B frame settings and all of that I will stick with the easy solution. Once the videos are converted I will write a script to SSH them into my phone each morning at 1AM or something around then. If I can accomplish this I will be only a stone throw away from having a fully wireless media flow with my iPhone.

Me and two of my friends have been helping my boss do a major network migration this weekend. We started Saturday morning and finished last night. I’ll be going in tomorrow morning when everyone is back to help out with any minor issues. I’m really excited. This was a great income boost. While working I started drawing out my dream data flow for media between my devices. I’ll upload a picture later, but the idea is that TV, music, and movies will be connected to all my machines and will be wherever I want them when I want them. So, auto syncing of the latest shows to my iPhone and in time a machine in my car. I started work on this last night by constructing a little computer to work on downloading torrents. I will be using TED to fetch the torrent files for the various shows I want. Then I will use some kind of cron job to add the torrents to TorrentFlux. I have chosen TorrentFlux because of it’s web interface. This way I can queue up my own torrent as well. Ideally this will become my download server after I develop some kind of Rapidshare downloading site. Well I’m off to get some oil for the Jetta and grab an application for Starbucks. I’ll be going to the hiring fair today. I’m hoping I can get a job.

Well, today was good. Finished a presentation in English so I’m off the hook for Tuesday. Nothing major going on. Cruising home and within a mile of being home I look down at my tach and BLINK a yellow light clicks on. Yes the CEL was my Valentine’s day present. Turned out it was another P0420 code - CAT under performing. Thankfully I was smogged last year so in June I should be home free. Since I installed my big bore turbo inlet I periodically am visited by this CEL. Good news on an entrepreneurial front. I found out that a niche I thought might exist is looking more and more likely to be a great business opportunity. I will keep you posted of my progress on that and my other projects as we venture along.

Well, I have exaughsted Craigslist, Monster, and any other job finding tools I could get my hands on. I think I’m going to settle on interviewing for a Barista position at Starbucks. I was trying to avoid returning, but I feel that after reasoning it all out it will fit my schedule the best. I loved working there before, and the only reason I left was because my previous job was booming. Sadly they moved their base of operations to Colorado to cut costs. Hopefully having worked at Starbucks before will give me an edge over the other applicants. I remember almost all of the drinks, plus having my discount again would mean I could have hot chocolate more often :). They have hiring fairs once a week now it sounds like. I will have to wait for a week from Monday because the time coincides with my Math class. Normally I’d just skip the class, but this Monday is midterms so that doesn’t seem like a great idea. I’m hoping I’ll get this one. It would really cheer me up. The ticket last night was a big blow, and not being able to buy new toys and experiment with programs has slowly eaten away at me. I used to be a very happy person, and yet for the last year or so that happieness has been drying up. Perhaps going back to my roots of Barista-dum will re-ignite that happieness within me.

On another good note Israel helped me with my PHP script not turning on my lights last night. The culprit turned out to be permissions based as I had expected. It turned out I forgot to add rights for the www-data user to the /dev/ttyS0 serial port device. That is working perfectly now and today I hope to write a small iPhone interface to control both my fan and my lamp. I’ll post screen shots of my progress later today.

So, my brain download idea seemed to have taken quite a load off of me. I was feeling great through my last class of the day. The little bit of work I thought I’d have to do was done already. Dinner plans were set with the family. Great, now it’s time to cruise home. Naturally I take the tollroad because Friday night traffic on the 5 is a nightmare. Pass through the toll station heading south. Over the hill and BAM!! Red and blue lights. Yep, ticket number two. It would appear my carefree nature after my brain download had made me a bit too carefree. I continued home at a perfect 65MPH and began to reflect on the loss of precious income. I suppose this is just lifes’ way of saying you don’t got it all figured out yet. I’m estimating my ticket to be in the $150-160 range. Tack on another $100 for traffic school so I don’t get raped on my insurance next year, and say bye bye to my server upgrade. I think I’m gonna have to step up this job search and possibly lower my standards :(. Ideally, I’d want a computer based job. In this case I might have to settle for simply a desk job. Oh well, I can always code at home. To express my depression have a look at Steve…I kinda feel like him. To cheer myself and those of you who feel depressed (either for me or because you have had a similar experience) having read this, I’ve included a music video of KT Tunstall - Suddenly I See. Lets hear about your bad endings to great days.

I decided to try something new today. For some unknown reason to me I was cursed/blessed with the ability to keep a million ideas, problems, and thoughts floating around my head at any given time. So, I plan to on occasion download this mess into my blog in an attempt to clear my mind. I’ll consider this my first blog experiment. So, here it goes.

First off, to all those who wore yellow today in support of the PirateBay, job well done (Yay, for me).

Next, I inherited a plant from an old co-worker today. It is in a sad state of affair having not been tended to for several weeks. I have decided to name him Steve in honor of ‘Over the Hedge’. So, big thanks to Mr. Dustin Ditto!! I will post pictures of Steve and keep you updated on his status.

Secondly, my thoughts on an artcle I read earlier today regarding RSS feeds. The article brought to my attention the pros and cons of RSS feeds. First, the pros: they make it easy to stay up to date on many different subjects and sites in one location. Prior to RSS email lists were the primary means of staying up to date on web site updates. One problem many sites could run into down the road should RSS take off for all users would be ad revenue. Currently, people using RSS feeds are those that are unlikely to click on an ad. Should all users switch to RSS feeds, sites that are uterly dependent on ad revenue to exist would be unable to sustain themselves. This could cause many free sites to rely more heavily on donations and/or switch to paid sites. It appears that a technology to improve life could actually disrupt a delicate balance that exists between ads and site owners.

Well that should help me clear out a bit from my head. I won’t be thinking completely clearly until after midterms next week.

On to my job search status. I have my resume out to a few places. I haven’t received any feedback as of yet. A few weeks ago I had an interview at an Irvine based company called Arbitech. I had a second interview and haven’t heard from them since. I take thy to mean ‘No’. I find it impersonal and unprofessional that so many businesses don’t call you to at least thank you for your time. Especially after having a second interview. I find that more and more companies are doing this. You’d think that with all of our methods of communication people could let you know something as simple as, “Thank you for your time but, the position has been filled.” Oh well. Maybe something else will come up.

On to a project update. Last night I was trying desperatley to get a PHP script to run a shell script. I have yet to accomplish this. My goal is to create a page that I can use to control the lights in my room using my Insteon devices. I had a system like this running at my friends house a few weeks ago. You can check it out at www.ilopez.com. I’ll get that working in time. Probably a permissions issue.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll post again later tonight if I have any breakthroughs on my project fronts.