Kyle Smith

Finally got to play with my new 20 GB iPod yesterday. I really like it. It’s significantly smaller and lighter than my original 5 GB model and the earbud headphones that came with it sound better than my old ones.

Today I went searching for Bill Hicks’ Arizona Bay at music stores in the area. Best Buy didn’t have much of a comedy section, but a lone copy of it awaited me at Borders, which I quickly snapped up. The CD has already been ripped and transferred to my iPod for listening.

Not much else went on today. Spent the evening reading stuff online and then finished a book of PKD short stories. Hopefully I’ll find some time this week to finish reading Smart Mobs, At Home in the Universe, and perhaps Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I suppose I should also continue to study for the GREs, as I’m scheduled to take the general test on Thursday. The only thing I’m concerned about is the analytical writing portion of the test which I think will pose a challenge because I’m not particularly fond of writing serious essays.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad birthday. Got to have dinner my parents, my aunt & uncle, and one of my brothers and his wife. I picked up a couple of new books [1, 2, 3] with a gift certificate that my parents gave me to Borders. And as a present to myself I ordered a new 20 GB iPod on Thursday. According to the tracking page it should be arriving home tomorrow.

On the way back to Pok this afternoon there was another massive storm just as I was crossing the Massachusetts-New York border. I’m starting to consider not driving that route again if I’m always going to get drowned by a storm every time. Apparently there were a few turkeys that appreciated the rain though, as they were lounging around on the grass near the Taconic. They were so close to the road that I could have doored one and had a decent dinner.

Pictures are here

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Random links that have been sitting around for a couple of days now:

http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/apple-parody-fuse-ads-018249.php
http://www.invadecanada.us

Speaking of rabid beaver… Eli and I saw several deer last night when we were driving back to work from dinner in addition to a gigantic FBM (fur-bearing mammal) nosing around some of the older buildings on the site.

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As Eli and I have mentioned previously, Randy was planning to and in fact did grace us with his presence here in Pok this weekend. Friday night we went to the trusty Eveready Diner in Hyde Park, then visited Mecca (Halftime, fool) and proceeded to drink hard liquor and watch Equilibrium.

Yesterday we went to Dragon Buffet for lunch and later in the afternoon before we started grilling and drinking, Randy and I went to see The Bourne Supremacy. Spoiler: (highlight to view) [I was a little disappointed with it because as far as I remember, Marie doesn't die in any of the books and Abbott was an ally of Bourne]. Makes me wonder where the heck they’re going to go from here. Of course, I have not actually read all of the series, just skipped around as I found them in book stores. Also found out that the Target opened on Tuesday so Randy and I toured it. Ended up buying volumes 1 thru 3 of Futurama on DVD.

Today after Randy left I went to work for a few hours but eventually developed a headache and ran into some issues with the Struts config for Project Bender that I need to iron out. Not entirely sure if Tomcat is caching an old version or not.

Btw, the other day Eli alluded to a fortune he received at Dragon Buffet. I’ve posted a blurry photo of the three fortunes here. The top two were Randy and Eli’s.

The rest of today’s post will be an assortment of complains about Rhythmbox, a neat project I’d like to see someone undertake.

Potential Project Idea
An Epiphany extension to allow semi-permanent highlighting of text and objects much like Adobe Acrobat allows. This includes attaching sticky notes in an HTML page.

Figgy’s List of Rhythmbox Peeves

1. Shuffling a playlist doesn’t show a preview of what’s to come (it just bounces around the list).
2. If a volume with music is unavailable, kiss that goodbye from your library (this includes playlist contents).
3. The combination of RB 0.8.x, GStreamer 0.8.x and libid3tag doesn’t support reading ID3 tags from AAC files.
4. Individual playlists cannot be sorted differently
5. The RB database doesn’t appear to be updated if the ID3 tags for a music file changes.
6. RB doesn’t support editing ID3 tags, yet the UI suggests that it can.
7. RB doesn’t remember which tab you last viewed when showing the properties for a sound file (i.e. Basic vs. Details)
8. Allows duplicate tracks to appear in the library, no easy way to delete items in the filesystem from the app itself (means deleting from library then removing from filesystem separately).
9. No consolidtation and sorting of the library.
10. No ability to import individual files, just directories.
11. Non-music files such as .DS_Store files from Mac OS X show up in the library.

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Back to work today. Needed to make up for the three days that I took off so Eli and I worked a few extra hours. Ended up hitting up the Dragon Buffet for dinner where I received the following fortune:

Find release from your cares, have a good time.

Later after some more work we went to see I, Robot. There were a few annoying things, like them not explaining the relationship between Calvin and Lanning, but overall I thought it was very good.

Quote for today: “Think of me as Chomsky with dick jokes.” — Bill Hicks

Update: At last! The great applet/notification area discussion of 2004 has concluded on #usability. Let all rejoice in the streets!

Nothing much happened today. Wrote a crapload of code at work, made dinner for myself (penne with chicken, green pepper, and onion in a tomato-based sauce as well as a salad), started mucking around with Xen in preparation for a directed study this fall, looking at Linux network drivers to see about adding in some intelligence so that when connecting two machines with a regular Cat5 cable it will automatically switch the signals (a la Mac OS X), and also started poking at a GTK/GNOME-ified screen lock app ’cause I’m getting really tired of xlockmore (and I really hate xscreensaver). Did a mockup in C# using Glade, just need to tweak the layout and then maybe I’ll try writing some stuff in C.

Ray’s take on missing roommates: “I’m glad he’s not around. Means he doesn’t eat my food.”

Went and saw Anchorman yesterday. It was pretty hilarious at times, and the cameos/bit parts by Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Tim Robbins, and Vince Vaughn were pretty cool. Definitely worth seeing if you like comedies or Will Ferrell.

Spent some time at work today, but didn’t get a whole lot done so I went to Barnes & Noble and picked up Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams as well as Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code because the reviews I’ve heard from people. Started in on Tea Time while my laundry was going, and I think I’ll probably stay up until who-knows-when finishing it.

Went with roommate number 7 to see King Arthur. While it certainly doesn’t follow the myths, if you forget them for the two hours while you’re watching the movie, I think you’ll find that it’s an okay film. Otherwise you’ll continually be shocked at how Antoine Fuqua changed things. It was cool to see Clive Owen, as the last thing I saw him in was Guy Ritchie’s Star short for BMW.

If you do go see Arthur, hopefully you like Ioan Gruffudd (Lancelot), as he and Michael Chiklis will be in the Fantastic Four movie that’s coming out next year as Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and Ben Grimm (The Thing). Those of you that watch The Shield should know Chiklis, as he plays Vic Mackie. I, unfortunately, did not get to see the last half of The Shield’s season, as stupid fucking Marist doesn’t carry FX. That also means I don’t get to watch another cool FX show, Nip/Tuck.

#7 was also watching my Underworld extended cut DVD earlier today. I managed to catch the last half of it, since I hadn’t watched that version of it before (even though I own it). Can’t wait until the sequel comes out. Between Underworld and Van Helsing, I’m becoming a fan of Kate Beckinsale.

PS: Oh, and for a horrifying picture of me taken today, click here.

PPS: Sorry for all the links, I can’t help myself.

Interesting weekend so far. I went to Mike’s July 4th party yesterday and I have to say pants off to Mike and his neighbors. They seemed to be fully prepared in terms of food, music, and alcohol (a keg and jello shots were available for consumption). I haven’t actually been to Mike’s house before, as it’s a good thirty to forty minutes away, but it’s pretty decent — his son Christian will probably love all the nooks and crannies in the house to play in, plus they have a pretty decent back yard. Cara showed up later in the afternoon, but I was already buzzed and about ready to leave (the parting jello shot hit me when I was in the car). A couple of pictures may be forthcoming (I don’t get a signal on my phone while at home, so I’ll have to upload them when I’m out and about).

Was going to go see Fahrenheit 9/11 last night at the Nugget, but the line was already out the door, so I ended up going to see The Terminal instead. I think the Indian guy playing Gupta stole the movie.

While out driving around a short while ago I realized that I’d really like a “smart” radio that monitors the signal quality for a particular station and switches to another frequency for the station, if available. The reason this came up is that the relatively new alterna-rock station around here, WMXR/WVRR 93.9 (they have no cool name that I know of), has a tower somewhere to the west of my house that reaches about 5 miles past my house to the east. They also have their signal being repeated on a different frequency, 94.3 or something, to the east in NH. What this means is that when I drive downtown or across the river to Lebanon or Hanover, I need to change the station part way there. If radio stations can already broadcast metadata like their designations or taglines in the radio signal, why can’t they also embed the frequencies that they’re repeated on? Then if the radio detects a poor signal (e.g. static) when listening to 93.9, it can automatically switch to 94.3 if the signal quality is better.

A potential edge case for this is if stations broadcast every frequency they’re available on, that information may not be valid in some geographies. For example, if 93.9 really only comes in well in VT and 94.3 works in NH, if all the towers broadcast both of those frequencies in the signal instead of just the frequencies for the zones that are adjacent to the tower, what happens if 94.3 is actually a shitty pop station that broadcasts boy bands in parts of western VT? That can get annoying. The only solution that comes to mind that would solve this is if the radio were also smart enough to verify the metadata for potential alternates. e.g. “Is the alternate frequency for 99 Rock also broadcasting that it is 99 Rock? If not, don’t switch.” (broadcasting FCC designations wouldn’t work because typically the alternate frequencies have different designations, it would have to be something like the station name).

Managed to get the color fixed in MythTV. I first tried enabling automatic gain control (chroma agc) with v4lctl as someone mentioned here. That definitely fixed the color, but the quality was still pretty bad. I continued looking into it and discovered that the channels were off by one, a sure sign that I was using the wrong card for the tuner module. dmesg revealed that it was treating my TV Wonder VE as having a Temic PAL chip instead of the Philips one, even though I was passing the correct option to the module when loading it. Turns out the solution was to switch the order of the options directives in /etc/modules.d/aliases. That way when it loaded the bttv module and tried to set it as a Temic, it would ignore it.

Also got the sound capture sort of working. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the line in muted properly. I can’t directly mute that channel in alsamixer, but if I switch the line capture channel to muted I get nothing anywhere. If I don’t mute it there, I get to listen to the audio even when I’m not watching TV. I did a little bit of reading but didn’t find anything that solved my problem outright. Still need some ALSA tweaking anyway as it really doesn’t seem to be using my 5.1 speakers properly (I’m getting sound from all 5 speakers and the sub, but it’s crappy quality because it’s just copying the signal).

Went to work for almost four hours today to get some Struts work done. I installed WSAD5 because I remembered seeing last spring that it had decent Struts support. Lo and behold, the various wizards and graphical tools will do just about everything for you. It was rather disheartening when I returned to the apartment and wanted to do some Struts stuff for COSI and then realized I’d have to to it all by hand. Purchasing WSAD5 came to mind, but that thought was quickly dismissed when I discovered that it goes for $4,000 for a single developer license.

In other news, I got bored and started snapping pictures as I was driving around, as you can see in the picture above.

Went to lunch yesterday at Cafe Pazzo, an Italian place that just opened on IBM Road, with Jason, Eli, and Optimus. According to Ray it’s owned by the same guy that owns Umberto’s on 9 South. The pizza was pretty good and their cheesecake kicked ass. Went and saw The Ladykillers last night at the second-run theater. I mainly went to see Tom Hanks, since his character seemed pretty interesting, but the ending was definitely good.

Since the prices were so cheap ($3.50 in the evening, $2.75 for matinees), I decided to go see another movie today. Ended up seeing Man on Fire today. I thought it was very good, although they skimped on the background of Denzel Washington’s character a bit. What they did say about it seemed to demean his character a bit by making him seem like a plain-jane cold-blooded assassin. They also never specifically stated what cause his breakdown, so we’ll have to assume it was something bad like killing innocent people or children.

Went for a walk tonight while my laundry was going. Ended up going around the hospital nearby and then down the hill.