A License To Bitch

Posted Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:16:23 GMT to Posted in , , , Tags , ,

As already mentioned I have been working on a project called TigerEvents, which powers the my.dsu.ca website.

This project, written entirely in Ruby On Rails, took 4 part time students 2 months to code a working, publicably usable beta. Pretty sweet, since some of us had other, paying, supposedly full time jobs on the go as well, and all of us had other responsibilities.

The my.dsu.ca website has gotten 102430 requests since Aug 25. Not bad I suppose, but I think we can do better than that.

The main problems? I know it, you know, it’s the visual layout. Sure it sucks. A layout like this is when a graphical artist that is supposed to do work totally flakes out and techies are left in charge. Also high up on that list is usability. Some things work well, some things…...... not so well (hey, it’s beta). So how do we fix this? Well…..... I am hoping that you, the public, the intended audience, the actual, non-involved USERS could give me a hand here. Let me know what you like, let me know what you don’t like, let me know what YOU would like to see.

Go ahead, chew me out, rip it to shreds, praise it, stomp it, love it, hate it. Just give me something I can use.

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The Term Has Definitely Begun

Posted Tue, 27 Sep 2005 12:07:09 GMT to Posted in ,

So now we are definatly into the start of term. First batches of assignments done, or near completion, schedules laid out, various meeting held, summer projects finished, and most importantly, the first Geek Beer has been held.

For what was the first geek beer, there was a pretty decent crowd. Lots of new faces, lots of old ones. Lots of good music (and not so good music). Plenty of entertaining acts (those that left before 10 missed out). Hell! I even made a profit at the bar!

The last part is fairly important right now. Last week, I found out that I have a massive bar bill from over the summer to pay off because a) for some reason the bar bills were not being payed and b) they somehow lost money at every single geek beer, and didn’t correct that in any way.

But I am sure I will be able to come up with something. If things work out like I expect them to, there will be Geek Beer all term still, and a kick ass Snowball too. All my other plans however…....... yeah, let’s scrap all those other things I was looking forward to doing. Ah well, you can’t have it all.

Maybe next year I should become VP External, so all I have to do is go to DSU meetings and everyone else’s social events.

But come to Geek Beer. The more people that are there having a good time, the more worthwhile all these ‘technical difficulties’ that I have to deal with become. Besides, it’s Geek Beer, do you really even need an excuse for cheap alcohol?

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Scientific Linux - Distro Updates Done Right?

Posted Wed, 24 Aug 2005 07:10:42 GMT to Posted in , Tags , ,

For my trip to New Jersey, my boss dropped off an old Dell Inspiron 2500 and a set of Scientific Linux 4.0 CDs. Since I didn’t have any other install CDs except Fedora Core 3, I figured I would give this new distro a try. The first thing I noticed is that it appears to be based on Fedora (a deeper inspection seems to indicate it is actually based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The second thing I noticed is that it had zero problems installing on this laptop. Some small problems have been encountered, such as not initially being able to set resolution to 1024×768 (fixed by changing the default monitor to a Dell 1024×768 Laptop Display Panel), not being able to put the laptop into hibernate or standby, and the media buttons not working (though do any of those special buttons work properly out of the box on any distro?). So far so good.

Going to their site, I noticed that Scientific Linux 4.1 has been released. Also, they have instructions (though kinda out of date) of how to upgrade from one minor revision to another. This I must try. Step 1) Set up proxy access at work. Step 2) Realize that the proxy is screwing up the compressed yum metadata files. Step 3) Hey, it’s a laptop, I can take it home. Step 4) Start updating.

Final verdict: After rebooting, I have an updated system behaving as expected! A big difference over my botched Fedora upgrades. If only more distros had such a well defined, documented, and tested transition between minor revisions, instead of primarily through downloading the latest 4 (and becoming 5) CDs, I am sure a lot of users would be happy.

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They Sure Don't Make Them Like They Used To

Posted Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:32:27 GMT to Posted in

Here’s an e-mail I got in my work inbox today:

Laptop users: Recent Dell machines are showing a trend towards disk failure. Make backups to cd-rom ! (and I don’t often use exclamation marks)

Since I am taking one of the Dell laptops to New Jersey with me, I thought I would follow up on this. Apparently 2 out of the 5 Dell laptops here have died. But I shouldn’t need to worry about mine (and Inspiron 2500), as it is a fairly old one and it is only the NEW drives that are having problems.

I was about to say “You would think that it would be the OLDER hardware that would fail” but then I thought about it for a minute. How many people out there have old hardware that runs fine? I mean, right now my firewall is running on an old(ish) computer running linux using a fairly old 4 GB hard drive. Granted, I am not going to be running anything critical on it, but it does get the job done. In comparison, any large hard drive I get these days is going to be from Seagate, due to their awesome 5 year warranty and the fact that drives I have gotten from Maxtor and Western Digital haven’t lasted even 3 years (but haven’t died when they were my own property thankfully). The network admin here agrees, apparently only getting Seagate drives cause everything else is junk and the 5 year warranty is a very nice bonus.

Also, back in Ontario, the home workstation for my mom is still a Pentium 90 (unless my mom actually went and bought a new computer for herself, which I doubt) which still runs fairly well (you know, for a Pentium 90).

So what is wrong with hardware these days? Are companies banking on the consumer to keep up with the ‘latest and greatest’ in hardware? Or are the latest hard drive enabled devices (MP3 Players, Game Consoles, etc) causing companies to push faster speeds and greater capacities in order to land cushy mass production contracts? With news items such as Spyware Removal: Drop PC In Dumpster showing the intelligence of the general consumer indicates a little of the former. Recent rumors of Samsung attempting to sell Apple on the idea of flash memory for iPods seems to indicate a little of the latter.

In the end, if you haven’t figured it out by now, shop smart, don’t shop Dell.

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Google Code Jam: Aftermath

Posted Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:44:01 GMT to Posted in , Tags ,

So today I participated in Google Code Jam ‘05 qualification round. Despite my being a 4th year CS student, this is actually the first code competition I have ever been able to participate, mostly due to work. The questions reminded me of Sedgwick’s homework assignments. The exception being that you only have 1 hour to complete both questions, and points are awarded based on time as well as completeness.

Question 1: 185.63/250 Question 2: 319.50/750 Total: 505.13/1000

My points for the second round would have been much better if I hadn’t of miscounted while iterating through a vector. Miscounting errors have always been a problem for me, and something I have to watch out for in the future.

Ah well. I mostly wanted to see how I would fare (and the answer there is better than a lot of people). Even if I had scored high enough to qualify, I will be in New Jersey when the real first round would occur, making it impossible to actually participate.

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For Better Or For Worse

Posted Sun, 21 Aug 2005 22:56:09 GMT to Posted in Tags ,

If you hadn’t heard by now, Novell is releasing ‘public betas’ of the SUSE linux distribution (openSUSE). This is a similar to Red Hat’s Fedora program.

How is this different from Fedora? From the FAQ:

The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates—through an open and transparent development process—a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux. (SUSE Linux is consistently cited as the best-engineered Linux and the most usable Linux.) To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.

I haven’t tried out this new version of SuSE (I used to use 9.2), but from looking at the package list and reading some commentary, I am somewhat leary. Some of the packages seem to be bleeding edge builds (including Samba, Xen, Openoffice, GCC) and it looks like they are going to use openSUSE as a testbed for items to include in their corporate distribution. Just like Red Hat. Granted, Ubuntu has become successful being based off of Debian Unstable, but….....

Regardless, I plan to give it a spin as soon as 10.0B3 comes out (which, if it comes out as soon as Beta 2 did, should be shortly after I get back from New Jersey) and see how that goes. My past experience with SUSE was not bad by a long shot. Here’s hoping that SUSE doesn’t drop the ball.

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Transition

Posted Thu, 11 Aug 2005 20:19:29 GMT to Posted in , Tags ,

So I decided to move from my old Livejournal to Wordpress.

Why? I feel limited by LJ’s options, I want the ability to script my own content as necessary. I want better options for visual presentation. I want more control. Wordpress wasn’t actually my first choice. Since I have been doing a bunch of Ruby programming as of late, I really wanted to give Typo, the Ruby on Rails blog software, a go. However, I also need a somewhat stable place to keep this thing, and torch is probably a teensy bit more stable than some of the other systems I have access to. As it doesn’t have Ruby or the Rails framework, PHP and Wordpress it was. (Since there are tools to convert straight from Wordpress to Typo, switching is still an easy option in the future).

The other reason is that I am becoming more focused and mature. No more of those drunken rants. No more angsty posts. No more barely understandable rambling. As I am changing, so is this blog.

Of course, this apparently messed up Planet CS when I started putting in backdated entries. Which is slightly odd since I would expect the aggregator to follow the PubDate tag correctly. Maybe it is just a caching thing and will fix itself in the next iteration.

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Ask A Question, Get A Response

Posted Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:34:24 GMT to Posted in ,

Today, I had three questions for my boss:

1) I am moving into a new place around the first of September. Do you mind if I come in late a day or two as a result?

Answer: That’s not a problem. Just remind me when so I know where you are.

2) Google Code Jam is coming up. I would like the chance to participate, but the qualification round is on Monday the 22nd…........

Before I was able to finish, the response was: That’s cool, you can take the day off.

I wasn’t even able to ask the third question before my boss asked his own. “I was wondering if you wanted to continue working part time for Satlantic”. I told him that weekdays would be a problem, in between my full time classes, and society work. This is apparently not a concern of his. He is content having me put in whatever time I have and see fit. I think this is quite awesome, and told him that as soon as he clears the financial details with the budget, get back to me and we can work out details.

Question 3? It was supposed to be ‘What are the odds of me working part time for Satlantic in the Winter’.

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Holy Audioscrobbler Batman!

Posted Wed, 10 Aug 2005 20:30:51 GMT to Posted in Tags , ,

I have been a user of Audioscrobbler for almost a year now. For those not in the know, Audioscrobbler is a site which your audio player submits track info to, and keeps track of things such as weekly top artists, weekly top tracks, as well as all time totals. Not stopping there, it created a community, giving you listings of similar music correlated from other users with similar listening tastes, as well as top charts by country, etc, etc. It had a sister site, called last.fm, which allowed you to listen to your own private radio based on your regular listening patterns.

Today, when I went to look at my profile, I noticed that it has a sleek new look and is now integrated completely with last.fm. For all those who haven’t tried it, I seriously recommend that you try it out. There are plugins for a lot of popular media players.

Last.fm discover it again for the first time.

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Fedora: A Mixed Blessing

Posted Wed, 10 Aug 2005 17:13:18 GMT to Posted in Tags , ,

Over the summer, I have been using 2 operating systems on a regular basis: Windows 2000, which has been running on my home machine for 3.5 years now, and Fedora, which is running on both my work machine and my campus machine. At the start of the summer they were both running Fedora Core 3. I had no problems with these set ups, as I didn’t need them to play media like movies or mp3s. These were development desktop systems and they worked well. The only big addition to my work machine was the inclusion of apt, because yum doesn’t want to work through the http proxy here for some reason (and yes, I did make sure to set it up so that it should).

Read more...

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