Category: Hardware

It’s official: I’m registered for classes at the University of Michigan and I move into the dorms August 31^st. Although I’m excited to learn more, go onto another stage of life, and experience what college has to offer, this summer has been excellent, and if I could repeat it or just sections of it I gladly would. I’m rather scared to move on; I think I will be able to handle the independence, though it will surely take time to get used to it. Most of all, I feel going off to college will mean saying goodbye – the phone just isn’t the same as being in the same room.

My cat died – our guess is either a seizure or a stroke. It was very sudden, and marks my second pet to die unexpectedly and swiftly. I’m glad that at least she didn’t suffer long. In a few hours my knowledge went from “your cat is sick and at the vet” to “your cat is dead.” I was shocked. By this point I’m okay, though.

As a graduation present, I built a $1,500 desktop and upgraded to a widescreen LCD.

Phenom II x 4 @ 3.4GHz

8GB DDR3 RAM

1.5 TB HDD

ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5

It runs incredibly smoothly. The bottleneck is of course the hard drive. I’d have gone for an SSD if they were reasonably priced, but that day has yet to come.

I’m enjoying my internship at IDV. I’ve gotten to look at both the sysadmin and developer side of things. There’s quite a learning curve to coming up to speed with a new codebase, but I got it. Coding requires long bouts of focus, while sysadminning can be more intense, but frequently stopped by waiting for the computer to complete some semiautomated process. I’ve also done more work on Cavez of Phear.

My social life is shifting away from these precious tubes of ours in many ways. Being within walking distance of places I would actually want to go really helps. I find it far more fulfilling to talk face-to-face with people, and the Internet, Reddit in particular, seems to just fill that void with funny captioned pictures and the occasional interesting article. I’ve been keeping a journal of sorts and that’s proven enjoyable. The freedom that the summer and my parents give me is fantastic.

I have an internship at IDV and it’s interesting. I am happy to report that when actually coding, such as in C#, much less so in configuration files, programming techniques are generally applicable. It’s nice after floundering around to have little sections of activity where I actually feel like I know what’s going on.

As a graduation present I’m putting together a monster gaming rig. I was very happy to be notified that this would happen. Once I get the parts and snapped together ordered I’ll put together a writeup on the build.  I’m looking forward to it.

The first draft of this is dated October 18th, so many things in it are now dated, but here goes.

I’ve been thoroughly shaken by an essay question on a college application. Not that it’s a difficult question or anything.

Tell us about a time you used your creativity.

It should be easy enough. The problem is I’m having trouble thinking of recent uses of my creativity. I haven’t made any new Flash movies since 8th grade, although perhaps that’s for the better. They’re becoming increasingly embarrassing now. I made some comics Freshman and Junior year, but thaose were both for literature projects. I started making a 3D maze the last time I went to Camp CAEN, but that was the summer before last, and I stopped after I ran into an issue with sound under Linux in Zenilib. Writing about it makes me want to try picking it up again, but finding the time to do so will be difficult. It seems I have somewhat inadvertently found ways of being unproductive that are not obviously so, such as browsing Reddit instead of playing TF2. That’s not to say I’m not working hard, which I am.

My Dad’s Rosewill fan failed suddenly by making horrible grinding noises. Although PCI slot fans seem like a good idea, they might be too much trouble to be worth it. I’ll probably stay away from PCI slot fans for the time being.

Because I’ve had so much homework, namely in Precalculus, schoolwork has displaced my life somewhat. Synthetic division is nice because of the very predictable amount of space it takes up, and it’s oddly fun to multiply together factors to get a polynomial with the desired zeros. It’s making the math work to make something, rather than the other way around. It’s also strangely entertaining to factor in my head.

Thanks to this page I was able to figure out an otherwise extremely cryptic error in my crontab. It was in the line for server backups to the alarm upstairs. It’s not offsite, but at least it’s not in the same room. I also got GZIP compression working, with the assistance of these pages. To boil it down, the magic line is ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

I recently downloaded Cavez of Phear and it was fun. However, the lack of save functionality made it frustrating, as I had to continually replay levels after dying. As it is open source, and I had compiled it, (requires libncurses-dev) I decided to crack open the code and give it a go. With the very low number of comments it is somewhat difficult to read. It seems that once it loads in a level file made of of low-level, unprintable ASCII, it replaces special objects with the stone character, and makes entries in another array. I have yet to figure out why it needs another array for this. I’m also currently mystified as to why the save function (I didn’t write it, it works in the editor,) produces complete gibberish even right after I load the map and haven’t moved. It still does this when I undo the replacement of special items. I’ll probably have to rip chunks out of the program until it’s more evident. I really should try gdb. Maybe I should start a Git repo to make all this easier to manage, as although my memory is fuzzy on the matter I think I had parts of this working better before.

Despite my problems figuring this out, it is meaningful for me because although I’ve long known philosophically and logically that open source is far better for innovation and rapid development, I’ve never been able to directly participate in helping that process. (I’ve donated to and reported bugs for Wine, but that’s about it.) Even though it is a very simple contribution, it’s something that with a closed-source product would take emailing the developer or doing some strange dark arts with DLLs. With open source, I am able to open up the code and start to add a new feature. This is amazing.

I got my plate of food together and left it in the kitchen. Asking my sister to guard it against cats, I took my salad and milk out to the table. I returned for my plate, and noticed the empty one intended for Sarah sitting on the counter as Sarah held a full plate. I asked her if the plate was mine. No, she mumbled around the ham.

Matt called me over and asked if I wanted his old machine. He said it had stability problems. I’m now agreeing with that, as when I tried to connect to it just now to check the specs, it was unreachable. What I can remember is Athlon 39(?)00+ 3700+ at 2.4 GHz with 512MB RAM. It seemed stable at first… Maybe I should check the BIOS settings again, as I seem to recall it complaining about failed overclock upon POST.