Older blog entries for Lolindrath (starting at number 22)

I've been reading alot lately. Currently I'm reading A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin. I'm halfway through, not moving quite as fast as I liked to but it's good. I borrowed the 5th Harry Potter book off a friend, that's next in the queue. I also picked up to books from the Redwall Series. It's a great set of books, I read them when I was younger and there still good to read now. The new ones I picked up are Taggerung and Lord Brocktree. I also picked up Code Reading. It had a really good review in DDJ so I figured I'd check it out. I should've gotten it from Bookpool.com, only $35 there instead of $50. I also picked up another book I heard about on NPR. It's called The Years of Rice and Salt. It's alternative fiction which is definitely not my usual genre but it should prove interesting.

I'm having computer problems... I was going to fork my home machine into WinXp and Red Hat Linux but that plan has gone down the crapper pretty fast. I finally got my parts from Tiger Direct after four calls and being backordered for two weeks. I plugged everything in and nothing comes up on video. I try another video card, still nothing. I start ripping components out, just trying to get a system beep. I've got nothing, hopefully I guy here at work will have a spare board or CPU I might be able to try, otherwise I'm down a linux machine. I think I'm going to throw the drive back in my Dell for now so I can at least work on Suroden until that guy comes back from vacation.

Life

Life's good so far. It's pretty hard to come home and code after I've been coding all day but I'm getting used to it. I take frequent breaks and read A Clash Of Kings. The semester will be starting up soon, I'm taking one online class, World Politics, it will hopefully be easy and a good weekend activity.

Yes, assemble the firing squad, I reinvented the wheel. I needed a really simple blog tool that basically just displayed what I put in the database. I was being lazy about keeping up with my internship journal I have to do and I needed something I could update anywhere instead of using a stupid Word document. So...I stole the database schema from this article and used the templating system from this article and a premade webpage from www.oswd.org to create a five minute blog.

I'm doing a six month internship at Mine Safety Appliances (www.msanet.com). It's been interesting so far. Their system is built on Haht's Ecommerce system (www.haht.com). Part of this experience is living in Pittsburgh by myself which is pretty fun.

Play

I've been working on alot of projects but mostly in C# and PHP. I'll hopefully get some time soon to release a quick C# program I made that's pretty useful.

I'm also building another computer. I'm forking my current computer so I'll have my WinXP machine (Cerberus) and my new RH9 machine (Lamia) side by side which should make development a bit more speedy. Lamia will be an AMD XP 2.0ghz, I'll put the complete stats up on my website eventually.

Life

I'm engaged, I asked the lucky lady back in April. Wedding plans are moving along but it's still up in the air whether it will be late next summer or the year after.

I haven't been home a full weekend in almost two months! This weekend is my cousins wedding (I have 13 aunts and uncles on one side and 6 on the other so this is a common occurrence), the following weekend is a friend's wedding, the weekend after that is helping my fiance (I really like the sound of that) move in at college and the weekend after that is a Dr.'s appointment about my knee.

That reminds me, I failed to mention that I tore my ACL in January and had surgery on it in May. Physical therapy is going well, I can definitely see it working. I lost about 50% of my strength within the three weeks I was off my feet. I've got about another month before I get my brace and I can start sports again.

This is my last day. I'm clearing up some loose ends and cleaning out my cube. There tearing down the building I'm in therefore it's a good idea to pack. I'll be back for Thanksgiving, we should be moved by Christmas.

School

I have tonight and all tomorrow to pack to go back to school. I'm going to leave bring and early on Saturday and hopefully get there by noon. I'm taking alot fewer books this time. Before I brought pretty much my whole collection of computer science books but I can pretty much whittle it down to Perl: the complete reference, Java 2: the complete reference, the c++ programming language and maybe the second volume of knuth's life work.

Concert

I saw Cake, Flaming Lips, De La Soul, Modest Mouse and the Hacknsaw bros. last night. It was a very cool concert, standing the whole time wasn't too good on the ol' feet but they have time to rest before I have to walk all over campus.

Real Work

I'm getting some really simple projects to do now that time is winding down. Two and a half days of work to do. Then I'm back to college.

Fun Work

I got a project from The Software Dev. Center of IUP(www.sdc.iup.edu) to create a system to keep track of all the talks the departments in natural sciences and mathmatics are having. I have only a week to implement it and only about five hours at nights to work on it, it'll be a crunch but most of the features will be in on time. It's in Perl which makes it pretty fun. I'm templating the whole thing so someone else can play with the HTML. Each department can upload their own template also.

Life

Life isn't too bad. I'm going to see Cake in concert in Cleveland on Wednesday. I move back to college on Saturday and I start classes Monday. My last day of work will be Thursday. I got a Soundblaster Live! card so now my computer is fully functional in both WinXP and Redhat 7.3.

High Level/Functional Design

It doesn't work for me, especially when I'm at home. The TV always ends up getting turned on or more doodles start appearing than words. I've been reading alot of JoelOnSoftware.com lately and I wanted to write some specs. I'm working on a Perl program to keep track of all the talks scheduled for my University so people can view them on a webpage or a department can include the listing in their page or a user could sign up for an email list. I gave up, I figure getting more code out is more important than a document. I did outline the tasks rather nicely. I'm the only person working on the project so it isn't a big deal.

COBOL

Perl is very different from COBOL, which is what I do during the day. COBOL only has a handful of verbs. It's been around long enough that all bugs have been flushed out of the system so nothing unexpected happens. It has mature tools, good editors(once you get used to them), good debugging packages and good analysis of crashes even if it's not in the debugger. But all of the programs I write are the same, you can't do anything progressive with it. Object Oriented COBOL is out but I doubt many people use it in production. COBOL code is only being maintained, the bare minimum new programs are being written. Everyone is working on their J2EE web interfaces to the legacy systems sitting underneath it. I think it's a good idea, it's alot cheaper and it pleases the users if the interface is designed well enough.

Life

Back to college in 8 days.

Audio

I have two audio cards I'm trying to get working under Red hat Linux 7.3, kernel 2.4.18-5. One is integrated into my motherboard(Dell Dimension 4500), it's an Analog Devices ADI1981A. Redhat detects it as an i810 intel integrated audio but it keeps saying that no device was found and the primary codec isn't ready. The other is an SIIG Soundwave Pro PCI with an Avance ALS4000 Chipset. Redhat didn't like this one initally. I got the development version of ALSA, configured, compiled, installed, rebooted Redhat. Kudzu came up and said it wanted to remove the integrated card since I had disabled it in the bios and then wanted to install the snd-als4000 module. I said ok. Dependency problems so I ran depmod -ae, then it loaded but said no device. I tried a good ol' mpg123 white stripes - fell in love with a girl.mp3 and I got a nice little kernel panic. Hard reboot(ext3 is so nice), no luck resolving the no device found thing. Under Windows XP the integrated ship shows up as a SoundMAX on IRQ 17, linux shows it on IRQ 3. XP show's some SM Bus device on IRQ3(I think it's something to do with my bios). Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated(lolindrath at hotmail dot com). My last dell just worked, this one is making me work my butt off.

I don't think we have any business in Iraq whatsoever. I think it's just Bush making sure his investments in the oil business don't go bust. The USA doesn't produce enough oil to support itself so if the Middle East cut off our oil supply everyone would start riding bikes because the price of gas would be astronomical.

Life

Women, Ugh. My dad and I put four new windows in our house and resided the dormer. We put a new window in it that had more glass area but less frame so the old siding was too short. I got my tv-out to work under win xp and redhat. My onboard audio won't work under linux and neither will the spare sound card I had sitting around(SIIG Soundwave PCI Pro ALS4000 chipset). I checked out The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture project. I compiled the modules but I can't seem to get them to actually work. I've never been much of a kernel tinkerer, I really don't even like compiling my own modules.

Mozilla

I found a wierd bug involving the back button not keeping the correct history when in frames. I got the nightly build and the problem still persists. I'm going to search Bugzilla on my lunch break and figure out if it's been addressed yet. If not I'll make up some example pages to submit.

At first COBOL's restriction of certain types of statments having to be in certain columns was a pain. It's second nature now and it does insure that people will at least indent a paragraph.

Life

My girlfriend was up for three days before she went to Newfoundland for a geology field camp. My new computer came Friday and I spent from Saturday around noon until last night around midnight fighting with it. First I found out that my 80 gig western digital didn't like being a slave so it had to go first. Then I found out that dell hadn't loaded Windows XP on the hard drive that came in the machine. There were a bunch of wierd sized partitions left from their testing, I had to use linux fdisk to delete them. I got XP installed, fought with Grub for a bit to get it to boot. It was working nicely. Then I fought with the network card for a bit under linux, got it working. I got the linux kernel module for my Nvidia card working and then got a bunch of updates from redhat. The module doesn't work under the newest kernel from redhat for 7.3 so if I want to use the newest kernel I'll have to recompile it. Guess I have a fun night tonight. First I have to pack up all the boxes and get them into the basement.

My best friends mom's computer also crapped out over the weekend. She spent fifty bucks getting another year warranty so she could talk to the tech support people. They said her windows installation was bad, I think it's conflicting hardware. They recently got a cable modem which means they had a network card installed. They had no previous problems until now. I'd say blame it on the cable company and get a new computer out of the deal. I'm going over there tonight to work on it.