Nayruden's /dev/random

Long time no post! Since my last post, it seemed I was lucky if I had enough time to breathe, let alone write a blog entry. But now I’m in Korea and should start having some more time on my hands.

I closed up shop with Rockwell Collins in Iowa, it was a summer well spent. I even got to shake hands with the CEO on the last day! That was pretty neat.

My flight to Korea had a connection in San Fransisco. Unfortunately, my Delta flight to SFO was an hour and a half late to the gate because they couldn’t get an open gate to dock with. It was a terrible feeling, sitting in the plane knowing that if I could get out of the plane and simply walk to the international terminal, I could make it on time. Instead, I missed the flight out and got delayed an entire day at SFO. They wouldn’t even pay for food or a hotel. Argh.

Korea’s pretty fascinating. They have a lot higher quality roads here than in the US. The town I’m nearby is huge in US standards, but small in Asian standards. I’ve been into town a couple times to go shopping or play games; I like visiting just to see how friendly and honest the people there are. Korea definitely has some big advantages compared to the states.

Everyone kept telling me that I’d hate the food here, and while I didn’t love it at first, I’ve found that I really like it now. It’s got a lot of flavor and it’s really healthy for you too. The kimchi is usually the spiciest thing they give you, but as long as you mix it with some rice it’s okay.

In other news, the website is back up after what’s probably been at least a month. Sorry about that. I’ll try posting some pictures from Korea soon as well.

Work has been interesting. We’ve been trying to make an editor to visualize some massive data lying around in databases. Our solution to this problem until yesterday afternoon was to use GMF, but for the past two weeks we’ve been bogged down with the seemingly simple but important task of how to place a label.

So yesterday afternoon, with a mere month left before we have to present our project to the CEO of Rockwell Collins, we decided to scrap the GMF idea and go with yEd. This may sound like a risky business move at first… but by 10 AM this morning we had replicated all functionality we had with GMF plus a little bit more. Wow! It’s another open vs closed source argument, but in this case closed source is not only champion, but king.

Speaking of work, I got asked to participate in a mock interview today. My technical lead has been disappointed with their interviewees not being able to answer their questions recently, so they wanted to interview me and my fellow interns to try and set a baseline expectation. First they asked us to explain a UML diagram. It was a simple diagram but using some conventions that you never really see in the real world which could trip you up. Then they had us write the code for that UML diagram. Next, we wrote an implementation of a doubly-linked list. I got nervous here and did rather poorly (lots of bugs), but my lead was happy and said I still did better than the others they had do it. Finally they had us identify some obfuscated C++ code. It was a template that could be used to turn any class into a singleton simply by inheriting the template. It was pretty cool, but you definitely have to be up to date on your C++.

On a completely different topic, I bought a MacBook Pro a few days ago. I want to continue to reserve judgement for a while longer, but so far two things have me really ticked.

First, the dock: While it’s ‘nicer’ than a taskbar it’s essentially useless if you’re a developer who likes to have a lot of windows open all at the same time. The dock will only take you to the most recently used window of an application. If you want the other windows you need to cmd-tab (hard with lots of windows) or use Expose (easier than cmd-tab but still more annoying than windows taskbar).

The second thing that annoys me to no end is the inability to create a file from finder. Maybe they did this because they didn’t want to be like Windows and have a big box of different types of files you can create, but Mac should at least let me create an empty plain text file!

On the positive side, I’m enjoying how nearly everything you need to do (except for creating a file) takes less mouse/keyboard navigation than on Windows. Big timesaver there! Also I’ve become a big fan of the multi touch trackpad. I’m finding that between the two finger scroll and the two finger right click, I have no need for an external mouse at all.

Still thinking about what to do for my hosting. Don’t think I’ll keep my current one while in Korea, but I also hate to lose ‘em (I’d never get something this nice at this price ever again).

EDIT: Slashdot had an article relevant to my interview discussion. Thought you might be interested.

I’m starting to get myself mentally prepared for spending four months living in another country. It’s quite frightening! I have no idea how many of the comforts that are just common place to me here in the US will not be there in Korea. I will only be able to take two small suitcases with me, so I’m beginning to make lists of what I absolutely need during my stay. Also, I got to see a picture of one of the typical dorm rooms in Handong. All the rooms sleep four people.

Yes, this room sleeps four. And yes, that is a clothes line you see in the back. Apparently they don’t use dryers in Korea. Also I hear the mattresses are very slim and hard. Still, part of the reason why I want to go to Handong in the first place is to get out of my comfort zone, so I chalk this up as a win.

In other news, I’m living in a disaster area. No, really! Cedar Rapids, IA has been declared to be a federal disaster area. Lovely, isn’t it? The downtown is pretty much gone from flooding. Here’s some pictures for your enjoyment. Click a picture to see my commentary.

<lost the pictures due to technical issues, will try to put them back up at some point>

I’m thinking about switching my hosting services around. The host I have right now is *okay*, but not great. They no longer respond to anything but reset tickets. They never answer the phone and never reply to emails. Given that it’s a small company, I worry that they’ll go under any day now…

Anyways, I took a look at what kind of things I run on my server on a daily basis in order to compare alternatives. I’m paying $55/mo right now for a full dedicated on a gigabit link, 160 GB HDD, 2 TB bandwidth, P4 3.0 Ghz, 2 GB RAM. I use the server for the following:

• Garrysmod server
• Natural Selection server (probably not going to bother setting up another)
• TeamSpeak (doesn’t see much use though)
• Subversion repositories
• LAMP
• SSH server for secure proxies
• I want to have an online backup

Alternative option #1 — Specialized hosting:

• Go with DreamHost at $11/mo to take care of LAMP and SVN. Since it has SSH access, I assume it could do a SOCKS proxy, but I’d have to check on this. DreamHost, with 4 TB of traffic and 500 GB of storage, would make a good online backup.
• I probably wouldn’t bother with a garrysmod server until I got back from Korea, but once I did I could go with a service like this one. Considering that they’re advertising ULX (my software!), I might even be able to get them to give me a discounted or free server. Assuming I couldn’t get a discount through them, it would be about $24/mo for 8 public slots.
• The site above also has a somewhat good-looking teamspeak service, but otherwise I could go with this sort of service for $2.50/mo (5 slots, but that would probably be enough anyways).

So, ignoring setup fees (which you can usually talk them out of anyways) and the dumb discounts for contracts (Advertising $6/mo with a 10 year contract? Bad DreamHost!), this comes to a total of $37.50/mo. Which is still a whole lot better than what I’m paying now and I’d get better quality of service this way. Still, it’s a lot more inflexible.

Alternative option #2: VPS

• Go with a VPS host like this one. This would host a TeamSpeak server, possibly a Natural Selection server, Subversion, LAMP, and SSH. $15/mo for ~300 MB RAM, 13 GB storage, and 500 GB bandwidth. No mention of CPU time though which is disconcerting.
• The lack of storage above means I’d have to go with something like Amazing S3 for backups. I figure S3 would cost me about $5/mo.
• I’ll use the $24/mo figure above for a Garrysmod server.

Ignoring setup fees, this comes to $44/mo. About $7/mo more than the first option, but gives me more power at the cost of having to manage everything myself. Plus the VPS kinda sucks to be honest. Touch choice!

I’m currently at an internship, living away from home, and enjoying it! It’s an interesting experience to be completely self-supported for a change. There’s no going back now, so I better enjoy it.

Unfortunately, I’m back in Windows right now. For whatever reason, I felt that I wasn’t able to do the work I needed to do in Linux. Probably my fault, I know. I wasn’t a big fan of KDE4 in Kubuntu 8.04. Just felt incomplete. Last, Linux desperately needs good Windows Mobile support; I tried using the app that’s available (forget what it was called now), and it was extremely difficult to setup and not very easy to use.

I’m in the market for a laptop right now, I’ll need to get a fairly powerful one to replace my desktop while I’m in Korea next semester. People keep recommending that I get a MacBook Pro, but it would pain me to buy the hardware from Apple that I can buy from Dell for $600 less. Even if you claim that the $600 gets “the best OS out there”, $600 is a whole lot of money for an OS.

I stumbled across ASciencePad today. Amazing application! I’ll definitely want to use it from school.

As far as my car in my last post, I got the window and the taillight fixed. The rest of the damage will just have to stay. I’ll be in Tornado alley in three years anyways for the foreseeable future, so probably best I don’t have a perfect car to get ruined there.

I was minding my own business, studying in my dorm room when it suddenly decided to rain pool-ball sized hail. My car was out in the parking lot of course, suffering the thrashing from the hail. My car survived the battle, but suffers from a broken rear windshield, a broken taillight, and sizable dents.

Pictures of the battlefield:

Here’s an interesting tidbit for linux developers: If you want documentation to most C++ functions, run the following command.

Now, try running “info printf” or “info pthread_create” in your console. Pretty neat!

I’m finally able to use Kubuntu for an extended time! I told myself that I’d stay for as long as I could if linux started supporting my dual screen display (I spent hours previously with little to no luck on getting dual screen to work) and supported GMod above 800×600 resolution. It now does both! I have now used Kubuntu without booting into Windows once for 10 days. In order to share my joy with whoever may read this blog entry, I’ll share some tips I learned along my travels.

1. Always use envy to install your drivers. For whatever reason, the default restricted installer doesn’t install a very good driver.
2. Use “sudo apt-get build-dep wine” to get the dependencies for building wine. I like to compile wine from scratch, so this has come in handy.
3. Use “uname -a” to get your current kernel version
4. Did you display configuration go bonkers and now you can’t do anything? Use “dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg” to reset the config.
5. Do you get a black screen on startup? Install package “startupmanager”, run it under sudo, change the resolution to something lower. You probably also want to enable text display in there,  comes in handy.

Last, not included on the list because it’s pretty random, you can output to sound using /dev/dsp. Ex, file > /dev/dsp will “play” a file through your soundcard. Pointless but cool.

Ever feel like you’re being crushed by everything that needs to be done? I procrastinate, my tasks stack up, I procrastinate even more because just thinking about everything I should be doing makes me nauseous. In the end, I get things done only moments before they’re due and with half the effort I was hoping to put into them. It’s as if I make time my personal idol, craving more of it but always burning it away faster than I can receive it; “I don’t have enough time,” becomes not only a top excuse but a way of life, eating away my identity more and more.

If only I had more time.

I got home for the holidays last Friday (Dec 15th). I decided to force myself to use Kubuntu 7.10 on my laptop, since I have time now to overcome any problems it throws at me. So far I’ve been pretty successful, the only thing I haven’t been able to get working is compiz/emerald, but that wouldn’t work on my desktop either so I’ve just given up now.

Samba threw me into a loop for a while, I was trying to setup shares similar to windows, read-only and no password required. I thought I had it setup great, but it kept giving me “path cannot be found” when accessing the share from another machine. I eventually found the samba logs, saw that it said access was denied. I played around with permissions for a while, never getting the user “nobody” to be able to read from that folder. Finally I realized the external hard drive the folder was on was mounted with umask=007, meaning that other users and groups could never have permission to read from it. I removed the umask, set the permissions on the folder, and now it works great. This might be one of those things that I want to punch myself in the face for later down the road when I learn more about this type of stuff, but for now I’m the only user on this laptop so changing that can’t be too terrible.

The new website is coming along. I have a general design idea and I’m playing around with the CSS right now. I’m going with a dark theme, lighter text on a darker background. Not sure what I’ll do with the blog on there… guess I’ll find out when it’s done!

So I decide to redo this site… I’d like to see it become more like a collection of various helpful things than just this blog that no one cares about. It should also be something I can put on my resume that will empress employers. Below are the sites I’m using for inspiration:

Elijah Lofgren’s site

Atomicspark Online

I haven’t nailed down exactly all that I want out of the site… but it should at the very least be a hub to all my public online works. Of course, I can’t promise this won’t just become another project that gets buried, but hey, that’s life!

In other news, it’s four days until I get to go home to see my family, friends, and cats. It seems that the closer the day to return comes, the longer the days are. Blargh!