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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.

It finally came through!!! I’m officially employed part time by Arbitech. I begin Monday morning at 9:00am. I’m extremely excited. I can hardly wait to get started, so that I can further a bunch of my projects. I have some new things I want for the Jetta specifically a front upper tie bar and a lower sway bar. I checked out the Neuspeed products and think I’m going to settle on those. This will also enable me to buy some more home automation devices. I have been enjoying my current setup. Along with a new job the iPhone SDK was released today. I was amazed at the progress Apple has made on the iPhone. The SDK is by far the nicest looking development toolkit I have ever seen. All of this came tumbling down when I finally saw that Apple is releasing the SDK for Mac OSX only. No Windows, no Linux, no good. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do about this. A Mac Mini maybe my ultimate response since they’re the cheapest solution. Those that have known me for any length of time know my opposition of all things Mac. The iPhone was my first step outside that box, and now it may force me to take another step. I have NOT given into the Mac force. I’m simply using the only tool I can to do something I have been wanting to for the last 12 months. For now I have many other things to focus on, and I won’t be able to do too much with my iPhone. Finally, the cherry on top of my day. For those that like peanut butter, you know who you are, without hesitation I offer up the Fat Burger Peanut Butter shake. This was the greatest shake I have ever had!!!

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.

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.