Crazy Or Genius?: Category Life

What's Hot - my.dsu.ca

Sean — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:17:00 +0200

I heard a rumor that my.dsu.ca had been featured in this year’s Maclean’s Guide To Canadian Universities. Deciding to check this out, I came across the following in the “Campus Confidential: Straight from the Students” section of the Dalhousie University Entry:

What’s Hot

...Student union website my.dsu.ca for news and information about local events and campus societies. ...

It’s nice to know that something I have put a great deal of time into was worth mentioning by students to MacLean’s.

Finally Giving In

Sean — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:03:00 +0100

Over the last few years I have been asked to present something at various local conferences (mostly just CEOS). This has always ended up with me saying, “sorry, I don’t have the time”. Recently, I have come to the realization that I am likely going to always be “busy” with various other things. So I made a decision.

More recently, I have been asked to give a talk at DevEast. Rather than my traditional “sorry I don’t have time”, I decided to give in and accept. I am now going to be giving a talk about Ruby on Rails that will encompass a lot of the basics, as well as sharing some of my own experiences with it over the last year.

Win, lose, or draw, at least in a few days I will be able to say I’ve tried.

The Start Of A New Term

Sean — Mon, 15 May 2006 23:29:31 +0200

So I have been busy lately. That period of time between the end of one term and the start of the next always seems to be the busiest. Finishing up leftover items from the previous term, whether they be papers, projects, or just exams. The learning curve of any new things you have taken on. Any extra curves life throws your way…..

So yeah, I have a new job. Right now I consider myself somewhat ‘freelance’. Not on a strict contract. Not on a LONG contract. Doing some work for a small company downtown doing some work in….... Visual Studio. Geoff Johnston has already said it best with his comment of “I never would have expected to see Sean Smith working in a Microsoft shop”. I can’t even say I am working in .NET, as the code we inherited from another development team (who were fired when we were hired) is written mostly in VB6.

I am learning a lot, while paying the bills, which is a plus at least. Some quick lessons:

VB6 doesn’t really like circular references of objects
Software written without specifications means a lot of things get done, but are either done poorly, or not completed
The Windows APIs are varied in their complexity and in what they can do. For example, I switched several major code blocks to WMI calls already…... except for a few functions which require older calls that were NOT updated to WMI for some reason….... (I never stated I liked writing in VB)
VB6 to .NET does not painlessly migrate (and in fact I haven’t really had a chance to try beyond see 50 critical errors in one module…...). I don’t consider this a bad thing, with some of the VB6 code I have seen so far.

It might not be the best job I have ever had at the moment, but it is somewhat interesting and we shall see how she goes.

Murphy's Law And A Comedy Of Errors

Sean — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 11:12:28 +0200

So….... on Thursday I received an e-mail from the audiologist in Ontario saying that she did have a loaner unit in that she could send out post haste. All the delivery people needed was a number which they could reach me at….... Yeah, I thought that was funny too. I sent my number, along with a comment that I thought it would be funny if they tried to call. But at least if there was a delivery they should leave one of those delivery notices at my apartment, right?

After work the other day, I came home and found my answering machine light blinking. A message, and I had a sneaking suspicion that it was the delivery people, despite a lack of written notice. But how to check if I could not hear? Ah, sweet irony. Thankfully a friend of mine was willing and able to dial in and retrieve my messages remotely and after a few tries was able to decipher ‘Purolater on Young has your package’. A quick check, and it was discovered that they closed at 6:00. It was 5:25. A well placed call for a cab from my friend, and scooping up all my laundry money, I was on my way. Arrived at quarter to 6, went in and….... they couldn’t find the package. What I was able to make out was that one of the drivers actually had it, but they would send it out again on Monday and even be sure to knock on my door! (Needless to say, I told them to just KEEP it at the pick up point, and I would be by on Monday to pick it up).

At least I should have my hearing back on Monday. Now if only this infernal ringing in my head would stop…..

Audiological Apparatus Optional

Sean — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:18:44 +0200

So this morning my implant just refused to work.

‘Bullshit!’ I can immediatly here some of you saying, ‘You can’t pull that one over us again’. And hey, since ssmith/?p=79”>one of the greatest pranks I have ever performed, I don’t blame anyone who has those thoughts.

It’s the same fact that this is pretty much the one year anniversary of said prank which makes this situation that more ironic, cause this is the real deal. No jokes, no pranks, no gotchas, I am once more thrust down the rabbit hole and coming out into the world of the audiologically challenged. <!~~-more~~-> It all started when I tried to turn it on this morning and the indicator light kept flashing. ‘Odd,’ I thought to myself, ‘I hope nothing is wrong. Nah, my batteries probably didn’t get charged properly’. Popped into a drugstore on my way to work and picked up fresh batteries. Still nothing but the light flashing over…. and over…. and over…...

This was followed by the following thoughts:

1) 2) Ok, who am I going to get to call my mom, who can call the hospital, which can get me a replacement….. 3) Oh crap, I did a joke about this a year ago…...... that’s going to turn around and bite me in the ass to be sure. 4) Huh, this is going to mess up my ‘hang out and chat with certain friends before they vacate this province’ plans that I had this week. 5) Speaking of plans and past jokes, isn’t Kathryn’s birthday this weekend? Ah, no…...... (But hey! Maybe we can label this as traditional?)

To make a long story short, I got my boss to call my mom, eventually filled out an insurance claim, and MIGHT have a temporary unit shipped out to me tomorrow. Which means with any luck I could be hearing again by Friday evening. Note: If I had a little luck, my implant would not have suddenly ‘died’. Therefore, I don’t expect anything until next week.

I still hope to most of what I would have done if I could currently hear, its just going to be a trifle harder now.This is once again an amazing start to my summer.

Roombanomics 101

Sean — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:37:24 +0200

Back when Oliver and I submitted the Roomba to MakeZine, I noticed that Make was accepting proposals for projects to present at Maker Faire. And by accepting, I mean ‘oh, proposal deadline is in 3 hours. Maybe we should send something off quickly?’. So we did, and we waited expectantly for the March 21st approval date. Said date came and went without any word, so we thought that nothing had come as a result.

Until Oliver got an e-mail today asking for a picture that they could put on this site. So we were apparently accepted and have a table there. And there are less than 2 weeks to said event. And we are just finding out now, due to the original e-mail disappearing somewhere somehow.

So…... we’re actually going to see if we can make it down. We just need to put together enough funds to travel there, find a place to stay, put together an actual presentation…......... sounds possible considering we should probably get back to them in 48-72 hours, right?

Ah…... end of term can never be simple, can it?

Discover The Unexpected

Sean — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:35:44 +0200

A while ago, I was contacted to participate in a new advertising campaign for Dal. They were apparently looking for ‘cool students doing cool things’ and one of my professors apparently recommended me from among students in our faculty. Go figure. At the time, I thought to myself ‘Sure, why not?’. I thought that it would be something like a little blurb and a photo in some advertising pamphlet, maybe even my picture on a fridge magnet that I could send home.

Instead…...... I ended up Discovering the Unexpected.

I have to admit that the photo shoot and the video was fun, even if the entire thing went farther than initially expected. Talking to some of the other students involved with this, they all had the original ‘I thought it was just going to be a picture and some text’ expectations that I had, and are all a little overwhelmed by what it became in the end. Especially since the other day we found out that some of this stuff might be in movie theatres this summer…........

My first thought was ‘Dear God, I have to move out of this province now’.

TurnItIn.com - Setting A Few Things Straight

Sean — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:44:00 +0200

Over the last 2 days, my previous TurnItIn.com entry has gotten two comments that are somewhat worrisome. One asks for more details on one of the methods listed (I am assuming he is talking about one of Mike’s). The other is more blatant:


i need, help..?
how do i make a paper turned into turnitin.com 
come out to 0 plagiarized

Taking a quick look over my log files, I also turned up the following items in my Search Terms summary list (followed by the position this blog comes up in Google): “Please note that I do not endorse plagiarism or cheating in any way, shape, or form” turnitin (56) turnitin.com + tricks around it (1) trick turnitin.com (2) how to beat turnitin.com (6) beating turnitin.com (1) ways around turnitin.com (1)

Update: I forgot about domain specific search, and apparently some of the turnitin queries are for Dal specific domain searches. You can quickly see what happens here.

Please note that I do not endorse plagiarism or cheating in any way, shape, or form. Cheating and plagiarism is a serious offence. Any articles concerning TurnItIn.com are exploratory exercises regarding its effectiveness. I do not advocate the practical usage of any ways in which to defeat the system. In the case of the previous article, the intent was to point out deficiencies in the TurnItIn.com system, which do NOT catch plagiarism, thus failing any professor that uses it as an indicator of potential plagiarism.

E stands for Elite

Sean — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:03:49 +0100

So the DSU’s annual Student Appreciation Night was last Saturday. This is a time that the DSU uses to acknowledge the contributions of the students and societies which it is composed of. Part of the night is composed of awards, including best A, B, C, D and E level societies, best new society, and others.

Last year, I had the distinction of accepting the A-level Society of the Year Award along with other members of the Computer Science Society, as well as watching Mike Smit win the Lilly Ju Lifetime Achievement Award, for his many contributions over the years.

This year was different. No A-level Society of the Year for the CS Society. Instead, I ended up accepting the E-level Society of the year Award with members of the Dal-ACM. I also got to see Ann win whatever Ann won (sorry Ann, until they name it the Ann Elizabeth Beringer award, I am probably not going to remember the name off the top of my head). Note: I have since discovered that it was the Level Chan Award for a student who takes initiative in student advocacy).

Awards asside, the night was fun as always and I am glad that the DSU takes the time to run them every year.

Because Screwing Up Only One Server At A Time Is Child's Play........

Sean — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:51:00 +0100

So the Dal-ACM hosted another Installfest on Saturday. Rather than be a simple spectator of cool stuff and mooching off the nice spread of snacks, I decided to be an actual PARTICIPANT this time.

So, the Dal-ACM has this ‘development server’ (of the desktop machine variety) called mblast. In times past (2 Installfests ago) Gentoo was installed on it for some reason. Every time this was upgraded, something broke. More importantly, since almost everyone could sudo su - for root, packages were installed and upgraded with impunity, resulting in things breaking often. Funnily enough, the DSU opt-out site was run from this machine, and someone actually upgraded it while the opt-out period was running.

So, flash forward back to the present. Since the Dal-ACM aquired slammer, more people have shifted their user accounts to that machine, leaving mblast somewhat underused with the exception of some of my own work. I figured, since with the exception of a few Ruby On Rails Cookbook tutorial instances, I was the only person using the machine, I could wipe it and play with a few things I have been thinking about for a while (and yes, I asked to make sure there was nothing critical and performed a backup anyway).

So, what did I end up doing? I decided to try my hand at virtualization. Set up Debian Stable as a host machine, installed Xen, set up a host server from disk, and started that up…....... two machines running on one machine’s hardware. It was pretty sweet to get running. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as reading those lines. I somehow screwed up a minimal Debian install, had problems with mblast’s hardware, some misinterpretation of the hardware, and oh yeah, the pain in the ass of backing up everyone’s data before wiping that sucker the first time.

In the end it was done, it was cool, and as soon as I figure out how to install other operating systems besides Debian (since I used debootstrap for that) and to have the virtual hosts actually accessible to the internet, I will be able to set up any operating system (well, linux or bsd really, unsure about Solaris) for people, and then they can screw it up to their heart’s content without affecting someone else’s work (assuming that work is on a different virtual server). Yeah, learning all that is what reading week will be partially for.

The other cool thing at Installfest was Roomba hacking. Several people in the CSB, including my friend Oliver, bought a Roomba (a programmable robot vacuum cleaner) a wireless router, and other items. Their goal is to power the router from the Roomba, install linux (WRT Firmware) on the routers, and then be able to control the Roombas remotely via wireless. Add in some USB ports on the router and you can do a lot of things with that.

At the installfest, most of the time was spent deconstructing the Roombas without breaking them. Towards the end, they actually experimented with powering the router from the Roomba. One problem: the router partly starts up and then…. dies. The Roomba is currently blamed, the theory being that, while the specs say 2 amps of current can be drawn from the Roomba, there is probably some regulator somewhere that doesn’t allow more than a percentage of that out of the power interface they are using. A set back to be sure, and I am looking forward to seeing how they solve it, and having those Roombas running around the CS building.