Posted
Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:36:39 GMT
to Posted in Life, School
Picking up my mail today, there happened to be a big paper tube accompanying the regular catalogs/bills/junk. Even more curious, it was addressed to me. Odd…... I wasn’t expecting anything.
Inside was a letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, as well as a sheet of paper that had the words Sean Smith and Citizenship Award in big, fancy lettering.
While I can’t say this comes as a COMPLETE surprise, the timing was somewhat unexpected. I knew Mike had written up a nomination form (and Mike, reading this letter, you obviously put in a lot), and that Jon and Mark had signed it, but the e-mail that requests nominations each term also states that “Students who are nominated for an award will be contacted by the Scholarship Committee so they can provide a résumé, transcript and any other information which they think the Committee should consider in its decision.” Now, I haven’t heard anything about it since I was told by my nominators that I had been nominated, and in fact, have been asked by some of them if I have heard anything, cause they hadn’t when the summer term nominations request went out.
In the end, I am honored to have been considered, and selected for this award. I would like to thank all of those who helped make this possible, including my nominators, and all of those who actually came out to the events I arranged.
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Posted
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 20:19:29 GMT
to Posted in Life, Geek
Tags migration, wordpress
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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Posted
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:34:24 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Work
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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Posted
Wed, 10 Aug 2005 20:30:51 GMT
to Posted in Geek
Tags audioscrobbler, last.fm, music
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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Posted
Wed, 10 Aug 2005 17:13:18 GMT
to Posted in Geek
Tags fedora, linux, upgrade
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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Posted
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:14:21 GMT
to Posted in Life, Geek
Tags humor
So…..... you are down at the Busker’s festival and come across a Much Music area where they have XBoxs and laptops sitting out in the open. What’s a computer geek to do? Obviously check out the laptops to see how much access they left.
Which is, of course, full access. So you browse around the hard drive, and right in the root directory is a folder entitled Partition_Magic_8.0_with_Serial. If only they had had internet access and I could have taken a screenshot. Way to go with that warez Much Music. I was amused, very amused.
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Posted
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 08:46:34 GMT
to Posted in Life, Reviews, Entertainment
Tags buskers, review
Halifax International Buskerfest is once again in motion. Quite a few interesting shows were performed this year. On the first day I went down, I basically ended up watching a series of finales, so I really don’t know how good the entire acts were. As always, the waterfront areas were PACKED with people.
Read more...
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Posted
Sun, 03 Jul 2005 20:37:01 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Ideas
Tags humor
Due to past conversations and certain web comics I’ve been doing some thinking.
You see, technically, music devices are behind the times.
Me, I can plug a musical device directly into my implant. No headphone static, no background noise, just crisp, clear, musicy goodness.
The devices are small enough to fit behind the ear. Sure you might not get 8 gigs of space for music, but you should be able to get 512 MB at the very least.
Tranfers could be accomplished using bluetooth. Controls could be built into a watch, also using bluetooth.
All we need is a workaround of the surgery costs and we’re good to go!
Think of the marketing slogans!
“Listen to the voices in your head that much clearer!”
Hmmm…....... maybe not.
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Posted
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:42:39 GMT
to Posted in Geek
Tags ati, drivers, linux
The other day ATI released new linux drivers for their Radeon cards, complete with a new graphical installer. In the past, I have had nothing but gried with ATI drivers, never successfully getting 3D acceleration working. However, this time, once I went through the process and ran the configuration, when the display server restarted, and I loaded up Tuxracer (hey, everyone uses it as an indication on whether acceleration is working), what I got was smoothe graphics.
Now, if the same process that I used on my lab machine works on my home machine, I might not need to use Windows anymore.
On a side note, my Windows machine has been running for almost 2 months now with no major problems, but since Win2k support is being discontinued, I wonder how long that is going to last.
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Posted
Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:32:56 GMT
to Posted in Reviews
Tags networks, oreilly, review, security
Security Warrior labels itself as the “most comprehensive, up-to-date book covering the art of computer war�?. Having been on my To-Read list since it was initially released a year and a half ago, I was interested to see how accurate this claim remains.
Obviously, some topics you might expect to be covered in a comprehensive security handbook are missing. No where to be seen is discussion of vulnerabilities in MD5 and SHA, as these hadn’t been published yet. Also missing is any reference to the Linux 2.6 kernel, as the first version of that was released barely a month before the first publishing.
However, this items discussed in this book are general enough that they are still valid and highly valuable. Discussion is platform neutral where possible, with further discussion on platform dependencies where needed. There are some very nice examples and case studies, which make the book a more interesting read than strict discussion. The Advanced Defense subsection is spectacular and well deserving of the designation Advanced. A lot of the ideas there, while simple in nature, are things that I haven’t come across before, or even thought of, especially their discussion on intrusion detection and log aggregation.
Read more...
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