So I guess now that people are reading this blog I should probably start posting a bit more often. I refuse to acknowledge any obligation to update this site for the sake of my own sanity. Unless people want to pay me or give me course credit for blogging, this site must remain a secondary priority to just about everything else. With that said, I'm in a fairly good mood today and have a bit of time to kill so here's a post...

I spent the weekend back home in Corning hanging out mostly with wedge and squirrel (handles used to protect the guilty). We found a few long forgotten closets in the basement of the nursing building at CCC and took a look around. After a few minutes of digging we found that it was mostly motor control hardware that looked fairly robot specific. Interesting, but not exactly worth spending hours dissecting. We spent the rest of the afternoon touring around Corning and I had an opportunity to introduce wedge to Soulfull Cup, an excellent coffee shop on Market Street in Corning.

Some sleep and a few phone calls later, I met up with the group at CCC once again to etch a PCB that squirrel had been working on. We were trying to use some blank PCBs that were about six years old with a shelf life of only a year. We were hoping that this was more of a guideline than a rule but it seems that that was not the case, we couldn't get the acid to eat through the last few layers left on the board. We spent a bit more time digging through rooms and closets to find an analog HeathKit computer and an Emma II. The HeathKit was pretty beat up and stripped down so it won't be very useful for much other than parts, but the Emma II is essentially an Apple II clone built as a trainer board. We snagged the Emma II and I managed to grab a CueCat for myself that had been buried under a pile of Symbol scanners than had been donated to CCC for no apparent reason.

I spent a good part of Saturday night reading up on the CueCat and it's hacking potential to find that the hacks are pretty much limited to disabling it's obfuscation of the codes and removing the serial number. I'm not too worried about either at this point because Digital:Convergence doesn't exist any more and the obfuscation can be taken care of with software (a Base-64 decode and an XOR against the letter 'C' does the trick).

Saturday evening was spent in the good ol' CCC Distributed Lab, also known as Joe's lab at the BDC. I tore apart the remains of the last cluster to figure out what had been causing kernel panics at the end of the summer. It turned out that the chipset drivers in the 2.6 kernel are fairly unstable and managed to crash the Debian netinst disc fairly reliably. I solved this by installing a 2.4 kernel. 2.6 is too much work to maintain anyway ;)

At the close of the weekend, I had a three node Pentium III Coppermine cluster with an AMD64 head node, all running Debian testing with the beginnings of a distributed John the Ripper setup. squirrel has a password hash from a box he had run seven years ago and he wants to know what password he was using at that time. Not to mention the coolness factor of being able to say that you have access to a password cracking cluster that's just l33t :p

You may have noticed yet another section on the sidebar of this page that tells you where I am right now. Believe it or not, I live in the physical world where internet access is practically ubiquitous. That being said, I'm trying to solve the problem of people always asking where I've been or what I've been up to. This probably wouldn't be nearly as much of a concern if I kept an away message up on AIM but that's a fairly clunky solution because I cannot update it from anywhere. We'll see how this system goes but it seems to be working fairly well at the moment.

If you've been following this blog, you know that I've applied for the ANSA program here at RIT in a near futile attempt to escape the Computer Science program. There is news to report in this area... As of last Wednesday (though it was not known to myself until today) I am officially an ANSA student thanks to Al Biles and various other IT/NSSA staff and faculty. This means that I no longer have to worry about not getting the degree I want if my grades suck this quarter. I don't expect my grades to suck, but it's nice to know that my future isn't resting so heavily on uncorrectable mistakes. I can always retake the classes to fix the GPA or just balance them out with a higher average overall.

I've started to get back into Magic: The Gathering a bit now that there are actually people around that like to play, namely Larp, Bedlam, and Crunchy. Why do my friends have such cool names? I digress... I'm not particularly good at the game, but it's fun and is fairly social as long as you don't get overly involved/addicted to it. As with anything else, Magic is good in moderation. Playing this game has also gotten me thinking that it would be cool to do a co-op with Wizards of the Coast. It would be cool to admin an MMORPG cluster and work with the code running on it.

Today is Halloween, the day on which everybody says they're going to dress up but rarely do after the age of twelve. The exception, of course, is costume parties. I'm not big on large parties so I'll sit this one out. I'll probably end up shooing people away from my dorm room door when they come begging for candy as if they can't put it on a meal option like a normal person. Sheesh.

Last night was highly entertaining. So much to say, such a little textarea to fit it inside. At about 6:00pm I wandered over to Matt's room and hung out for a while looking at pictures of SGI boxes and fighting with a junky Compaq box that refuses to boot because it doesn't see the keyboard. My guess is that it's a bad keyboard controller or the fuse of the PS/2 port is blown. Either way, it needs to be taken apart and because it's a Compaq box, taking it apart is akin to rocket science. They never understood the concept of user servicable parts.

Around 6:30 I headed over to the Field House to see Jon Stewart. I figured that being there 30 minutes before the doors were supposed to open would give me a relatively good spot in line. Apparently, I was kidding myself. By the time I got there, the line was already about a quarter mile long, winding back and forth across the various sidewalks and lawns usually reserved for off-roading the golf carts (you know who you are). To set the scene, the sun had just set on an overcast fall day, still leaving enough light to see around in a world saturated in gray. The temparature was in the upper 30s to low 40s, sending a chill of the winter to come across my face. The ever-present RIT breeze didn't help.

So I stood in line waiting for the doors to open with a couple of guys that were into Macs and Gaming so there was plenty of conversation to be had. Most of it centered around the Xbox360 and which launch titles will be most visible. Once the doors opened, we shuffled about a hundred feet down the line before chaos took it's rightful place and among the frosty crowd. A large group of people cut fairly far into the line, leading the people behind them to believe that the line had moved or changed direction or something, completely leaving my part of the line standing out in the cold, literally.

At that point, all semblance of a line disappeared and it just turned into a mostly non-violent shoving competition to get to the door first. I did what I could and managed to get through just about the time that the auditorium reached 50% capacity so I had a fairly good choice of seats. I went with one of the bleachers near the back, about halfway up. From my experience during the last comedian's act, I knew that this wasn't such a bad vantage point.

Another forty minutes later, Jon Stewart took the stage and started in asking "America's Youth" if we were hopeful. A resounding NO, answered that question and seemed to throw him off a bit. As with any entertainer, he was enjoying the closed captioning too much, and used the audience's laughs to determine when the captioning was screwed up. Apparently the person typing the captioning didn't know how to spell "Escher" as Jon was referring to the camera catching a glimpse of the screen behind him, creating a tunnel effect.

Lots of Jewish jokes, lots of Christian jokes, a fanatically religious guard, and some cheap shots later, the show was over. Rather disappointing that he only went for an hour, but a good show nonetheless. He mentioned a video that they pass around the office about a guy screwing a pinata in a back room caught on security tape. The image of Jon Stewart motioning as if fucking a pinata is an image that is going to stick with me for a while.

After the show was over, another mad rush for the doors ensued and I somehow managed to run into Larp outside. Given a few more seconds of looking around, I found the rest of the group and managed to discern that they were going to be heading back to Colony. I joined up with them and we began the "walk of shame" from the dorms/campus to Colony Manor that freshman use to go to the widely acclaimed "college parties". As this was not far from the truth, I didn't mind it too much. The temparature had dropped another five degrees or so by then, so I put on my sweatshirt and warmed up pretty quickly. I'm not sure why I've had a higher tolerance to the cold than other people, but I think it might be because I'm just a bit more used to it being from Corning. It's certainly a lot closer to Rochester's climate than say, Florida.

So we got to Colony and I just hung out as I had a few weeks ago. I still abstained from drinking. I'm not really sure why I don't drink. It's not because it's illegal, that doesn't really bother me that much. Maybe I don't drink just because it doesn't smell good to me. I never really liked the smell of beer or wine, and straight alcohol never smells nice. I'm sure I'll go drinking eventually, but at this point, it's plenty entertaining to just watch everybody else when they're drunk. Most of the group is still coherent at that point, but not quite "all there". Hilarity ensues.

Around 1:30am I decided that I was ready to go home and get some sleep but I ended up walking over to building 70 with Sean and Matt to work on the ITSO server because it didn't come back up after Sean had rebooted it from Colony. Apparently it had come back up, but didn't receive an IP address for one reason or another. The remaining work to be done on the server is to figure out why gettext isn't working right. I got a little cocky at Colony and said that I could have the box up in under an hour. I probably shouldn't have said that because I think it offended Sean a bit with the amount of work he had put into getting that box up and running again. I didn't realize that they were trying to do so much custom stuff.

While we were hanging out there, I shared the list of ANAC numbers to that we could find the new phone number in the ITSO office, which led to a discussion about one of the many illegitimate boxes sitting there that had a bunch of phone cards in it. The plans are to get Asterisk running on it so that we can play with some VoIP stuff. I'd love to have access to something like that so that I can use my PocketPC as a phone if I'm in range of wifi. That's a project that I might like to get involved in if it ever goes anywhere... Have to remember that this is ITSO we're talking about. Nothing gets done unless Jackie does it.

Speaking of Jackie, yesterday was her birthday! She turned 17 (I think). Happy birthday Jackie. And here I am thinking I'm young to be in college... She's got me beat by a little more than a year.

Ok, so I slept until noon today, and came over to building 70 to maybe meet up with Sean and the others to do something later. Apparently Sunday is more of a work day than play and Jym isn't going bowling. Oh well. I'm perfectly happy getting my CS2 homework done and blogging my fingers off! As I write this, I am sitting in one of the many lounges on the IT floor of building 70 listening to some music and semi-eavesdropping on the conversations around me. Nothing too interesting.

The music I'm listening to is from last.fm. I've played with their services for a while but never really used their software for fear of spyware. I decided to give it a shot because I'm getting a little tired of the iPod and have found that it's awesome. Their OSX player is nice and simple, looks good, and has free music. You can configure it lots of different ways, but I've got it setup so that it's just playing music similar to Enigma. I felt that that was the right type of music for the mood I'm in. It works great! I just typed in Enigma and I've got a nearly infinite variety of similar music. I'd imagine that it's based on their MusicBrainz/AudioScrobbler stuff where they keep track of what you listen to and calculate your "Neighbors" that listen to the same music you do. I'll definitely keep using this thing, it's nice when you want to get out of your library for a while, but don't want to just listen to a random internet radio station.

Well... That brings me to now. I've done my CS2 homework, still have to do last week's lab, and need to write a paper for Writing class. Not to mention the six arguments for Ethics class that need to appear out of nowhere in the next few weeks. Needless to say, blogging is a good excuse to avoid these things. It's really amazing me just how fast these quarters are, and how much I've learned in the space of the five weeks I've been here. The best part is that the work is just challenging enough to keep me interested, but not to the point where I feel incredibly overworked. I just hope that when I take a full 17 credits next quarter, I'll feel the same.

My only worry at this point is that the math is going to kill me. I'm already starting two classes behind where I should be, and have four Calculus classes to to after I get up to speed. For this reason, I'm considering switching to an IT major. My worry is that an IT degree won't go nearly as far as a CS degree and I'll regret it later. On the other hand, just about all of my friends are IT majors, and it seems like IT people are generally more upbeat, relaxed, and social than CS people. I'm not going to begin to try to understand why this is, but am seriously considering the consequences of the various actions I could take at this point. I'm pretty sure I can deal with the content of the CS courses, but really don't want to be here for too many years.

Bedlam and the rest keep telling me to stick with it, because everybody goes into IT because "CS is too hard". I haven't been here long enough to observe this specific phoenomenon, but still have mixed feelings as to how I want to deal with this situation. I've been told that switching from CS to IT is not easy because the courses are very different, but I figure that I can either test out of the trivial stuff, like Intro to Multimedia, or just load it up with the classes that follow it because it doesn't really matter too much as a prerequisite to me. I think that before I can decide anything, I need to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. Do I want to write games? Do I want to admin clusters? Do I want to throw it all away and go into an Art major? The thought has crossed my mind. Film/Video/Animation sounds like a lot of fun, though I think they want you to have some existing talent before you start with that sort of thing. I'm hoping that taking a trip home next weekend will help me clear my head and figure some of these things out before it's too late to change my major.

Well, I think I've done my share of story-telling, ranting, and contemplation for one day. Peace.

Last night I was on the ITSO Tech show on RIT's radio station, WITR 89.7 for the first time and had a lot of fun. We really just geeked out for a couple hours and contemplated how corporate giants are going to react to each other in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. It wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected to come up with two hours of decent conversation, leaving me thinking that I might want to start my own podcast. Not that anything is happening soon, but sometime down the road, I might go on the indie media trip. Granted, we didn't have to deal with any of the technical requirements of the show other than speaking directly into the mic, but I don't think podcasting will be much different. Hey, if Paris Hilton can do a podcast, I can do a podcast.

If you haven't been checking my site every time you turn on your computer (not that you should), I've been working on slowly adding more stuff to the bar on the right side of the page. The most recent addition has been a list of books I'm currently reading, images provided by Amazon. It's based on yet another table in my database, giving me the flexibility to add and remove books on a whim. I'm also keeping track of books that I've already read so that I'll be able to create a full bookshelf page eventually. Who knows? Maybe I'll even set it up so that I know who I've loaned books to.

Keeping in tune with my "free stuff" based life of mooching, I noticed that WITR keeps a box of free CDs outside the door that they can't or won't play for whatever reason. I grabbed one by a band called Aryastone because the cover looked cool. The music really isn't that bad... It's got a bit of a Phil Collins sound to it with hints of a boy band and a heavy Jazz influence. I also like how it has a sticker on it that lists the best tracks on the CD so that the radio station knows what to play.

While I'm on the topic of free stuff, I'm getting pretty close to a Beanie with Mountain Dew caps. In case you're not following, Pepsi is giving away an Xbox360 every 10 minutes until it comes out. Every Pepsi cap has a code on it that you enter on their website and you get "mostly" free stuff. Now, this is great if you already drink a lot of soda anyway, but if you're really trying to get cheap stuff, you had better try for that sport jacket at goodwill because 600 Mountain Dews are a lot more expensive. So it's not really free, but because I'm already buying the Mountain Dew, it's an added bonus. If I win an Xbox360 I might just break even, but that's a long shot.

Last night I went and saw Serenity with the ITSO group and my opinion is that within the Sci-Fi genre, it's the best movie that i've seen since Star Trek: First Contact. Derek doesn't agree, but he doesn't count because he hasn't seen Star Wars. If you haven't seen Serenity, go see it now; and buy me a ticket to see it again. Seriously, it's awesome even if you haven't seen the show. You know you'll want to see the show once you've seen the movie though.

Fanboyishness aside, we had a good time playing musical chairs at Friendly's after the movie and picking on Andy, even though he kicked me in the shin. I'll get you next time gadge... err... Andy!

I spent the afternoon with Matt from Corning touring around RIT and the Rochester area. We saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, courteousy of professor Tymann and I had some awesome German Chocolate Cake at Phillips European. Apparently it's too expensive for a college student to eat a meal there, but dessert is ok.

Matt also agreed to give me an SGI O2. For the uninitiated, SGI is Silicon Graphics Inc. They make big graphics crunching boxes. In the '80s and early '90s they were doing things that are just now hitting the consumer market. For instance, the processor in the Sony PSP was designed by SGI about ten years ago. Until recently, most of Hollywood's CG was done on SGI hardware however recently they've fallen out of their former glory and are a dying breed. The good news is that I'm getting an Octane2 yay!

Hmm... Homework due Monday... Tomorrow is Sunday... That gives me a whole day to do my homework! The logic of a chronic procrastinator strikes again! It appears that I'm starting to spell five letter words incorrectly so I believe it is time to get some sleep. Peace.