Kyle Smith

I transferred my domain + web site to a new hosting provider last night. It looks like the DNS changes are starting to be picked up now, but you may still have difficulty accessing this site or sending email to my domain email account. If all else fails, use my Clarkson address.

Didn’t play 40 hands, but did go to Mike & Matt’s for beer + food. Acquired potentially useful photos of Doug “resting” (read: passed out) on the floor behind the couch. If he ever runs for political office, I own him. Well, maybe with some extra Photoshop work to add a dead hooker or two.

Went and saw Shrek 2 yesterday people multiple people said it was good. Aside from the hordes of noisy children that kept shifting seats just asking to be smacked, they were right.

Managed to get MythTV almost working properly today. Finally have picture + sound when watching live TV, but the color is washed out. XawTV also appears washed out. Not sure why. Mike suggested using Zapping, but one of its dependencies won’t compile.

Alvis: Believer, you have forgotten the true meaning of Alvis Day. Neither is it ham, nor pomp. Nay, the true meaning of Alvis day is drinking. Drinking and revenge.

“Whenever I drive by fast food restaurants with my kid, I’m going to punch him in the face.” — Morgan Spurlock (paraphrased)

Pretty boring day at work today. Eli continued to work on a small GRAM client test as well as looking at querying the IGT index service while I continued to develop the rest of the “Bender” architecture. Ended up going to lunch with Buzzco, Cheesefry, Jason Prime, Doug and Eli at Sugar ‘N’ Spice. Tonight Doug, Ray, Tim (not this Tim) and I grilled a bunch of stuff before Doug, Tim and I went to see Super Size Me at Upstate Films. Definitely worth seeing if you can find a place that’s showing it. I have a feeling I’ll be driving to Rheinbeck to UF several more times this summer.

On the schedule for this weekend: grilling and 40 hands. Saw one of Eli’s favorite brands of beer at Halftime tonight as well.

Brief summary: New 550W Enermax power supply works like a champ, loving my new Samsung A680 cell phone, Rhythmbox 0.8.4 + CVS GStreamer now let me play unprotected AAC files (now I just need to decrypt the latest batch of tracks).

Today: In a fleeting moment of boredom, I did in fact fill out an online quiz (I feel so dirty now). Seems kinda accurate though (screw using the lame image):

“Your Results: Seattle. Your dark exterior masks a caffeine driven activism. You’ll take up a cause and you’ll get ugly to advance it.”

Successfully made a Long Island iced tea that was so strong I could only get down about 2 oz worth of it before giving up. I need something to cut it with. Or make it a tiny midget-sized drink. But now that I have an assortment of hard liquors on hand, the sky is the limit. Mind erasers anyone? Vodka collins? Sweaty Mexicans?* 4 Horsemen? Gin & tonic? Rum & coke? Anything is possible!

Oh, and tire pressure sensors suck. Friggin’ chiming every time I start the car because the sensor won’t reset itself like it’s supposed to.

One last thing… it’s interesting to find out who you know. I was reading some grid stuff yesterday (papers, release notes, etc.) and saw a particular name that stood out. I started to wonder if it was a girl I had met at IBM in Raleigh last year and after a quick googlesearch it turns out it was. Not only had something she wrote while interning at ANL been rolled into this product, but she also went to University of Chicago and had Ian “I am the fucking grid master” Foster as her undergraduate advisor. Talked to a mutual friend today and it turns out she also married one of the authors of the Java CoG. Apparently grid people like to stick together.

*Need to buy some tabasco sauce first.

R. Lee Ermey: You love the middle ages, don’t you?!
Peter: Sir, yes, sir!
RLE: The concept of a geocentric universe gets you sexually excited, doesn’t it?!
P: Sir, yes, sir!
RLE: You want to make 16th century mathematician Johannes Kepler your bitch, don’t you?!
P: Sir, yes, sir!

Well, I would post a picture of my current setup, but I apparently the batteries for my camera are in one of four boxes of crap I haven’t unpacked yet. The following will require some imagination on the part of you, the reader. Just picture a 5 foot long, 3 foot deep gray desk with an HP LaserJet 1200 printer at the left end, as well as my Philips noise-cancelling headphones and an assortment of cables, a 17″ black Sony LCD and Logitech iTouch keyboard (plus Microsoft Intellimouse) in the middle, and a gigantic pile of crap on the right side (including a spindle of CD-Rs, a pile of CD-RWs, the remote for my 27″ Sony Wega TV, a Toshiba DVD player remote, and the remote for my air conditioner). Oh, and my Monarch desktop under the left end on the floor (Athlon XP 2000+, 768 MB RAM, 200 GB storage, CD-RW drive, Radeon 9200, TV Wonder VE) with my 80 GB LaCie FireWire drive sitting on top of it.

(23:12:54) Eli Dow <auto -REPLY> : What do you get the man with a new car, who is buying a new laptop, and wants a new ipod? A SWIFT FUCKING KICK IN THE JUNK Yeah Boys and Girls, Gen B. Fignuts is the man

For the record, I’m *not* buying a new laptop… now that I have a new car.

Cheesefry: interesting idea you have.

A slightly more advanced example would be to categorize the Unix tools, both in terms of their function as well as their capabilities and then build “puzzle pieces” to represent them. Consider the case where a tool produce output on stdout or stderr or where it can’t read from stdin. In these cases you wouldn’t want to have those be in the middle of a chain of commands. Of course, those two cases are rather trivial, so I don’t know if it makes sense to add in all that logic just for those two cases. There must be other examples where it makes sense though.

Who knows, maybe if I get tired of doing IBM stuff today I’ll whip up a prototype in C#.

Arrived home today around 9:30 PM after driving back from Ithaca, where I visited Cornell. Shortly thereafter I found myself in a bad mood. I don’t think my parents understand why I tend to end up angry once I get home. The primary reason is that my room is totally packed full of stuff I’ve never had the time to sort, put away properly, or throw away. And they always seem to stash some random crap of theirs in my room when I’m away so when I come home and bring all of my shit with me, I ends up filling all of the floor space.

I currently have no space on my oversized desk because of all the papers and other odds + ends covering it. My bookshelf is piled high with old books that I don’t really want and a good portion of my DVD collection because it no longer fits solely on the shelves on my TV stand so I’m quite sure that the rest of the weekend will be spent attempting cleaning up the disaster.

However, the thought of having to do this again in August when I return from Poughkeespie, December during winter break, and again next April/May haunts me. I really want an apartment someplace so I won’t have to keep moving shit back and forth. But then again, I don’t really want to maintain an apartment in Potsdam over the summer, and I’m averse to paying for things, so it raises an interesting quandary.

I can’t wait until several years from now when hopefully I’ll be able to have an apartment in a reasonably-sized city with decent public transportation, so I can just dump my crap in it, park my car in a garage somewhere (hopefully I don’t need to buy a parking spot somewhere), and take the subway or cabs from place to place. I don’t even want a huge fancy apartment. Just a 1 bedroom deal with a kitchen and a shared living/dining room (a bathroom would be nice too). Oh, and space for a desk so I can actually get work done whilest at home. That is all.

The new cable modem here at home is actually working quite well. As it is still relatively new in this part of town, and I haven’t seen any ads promoting it (I used to nag Adelphia once a month, which is why I knew about it). It’s getting pretty close to 1.5 Mbps, although downloading anything from the COSI mirror totally sucks (we’re talking 10 KB/s). Guess it’s time to find a local mirror for F/OSS stuff.

Oh yeah… Did I mention that Cornell’s student population is 48% women?

Managed to finish the CS344 assignment over the weekend and then started on the current opsys MPI assignment. That’s mostly done now, just need to fix a small communications bug — the frickin’ MPI_Bcast() function *blocks* until every other process acknowledges the communication, which doesn’t work so well when some of the other processes are blocking at the barrier I have at the end of the program. I also managed to finish the Linear Algebra project yesterday with Justin and most of the homework tonight. Now I just need to write a pair of papers (one for TC210 and one for EE561) and finish implementing the database project for IS415.

Found something interesting tonight when poking around at SCO’s press releases. I noticed last month when I was preparing for my presentation that SCO likes use this tagline at the beginning of their releases: “The SCO Group, Inc., the owner of the UNIX operating system, …”

Tonight I discovered that until mid-December 2003 they only used that line for Linux or lawsuit related releases. For everything else, they seem to prefer: “The SCO Group, Inc., a leading provider of UNIX-based solutions, …”

And if you go way back, say to early 2003 (before the IBM lawsuit), they used this: “The SCO Group, a leading provider of Linux and UNIX business software solutions, …”

Why is that interesting? Well, they currently structure their releases to use presupposition — they put a statement in at the beginning of the sentence that people tend to ignore. The idea is often used when arguing something because people will put the point they don’t want to argue first and then put a “controversial” statement afterwards that people latch on to and argue about (and thus, silently acknowledge the statement at the beginning).

For example: “Donnie Chevetty, a devourer of babies, announced today that he will begin cracking down on individuals who he discovers do not wash their hands after using the restroom.” People tend to latch on to the latter part (cracking down on dirty people) and by not addressing the point about him eating babies, silently agree with it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, has been the language lesson for Monday, April 19th. I’m hoping I never find myself so intrigued by a press release ever again.

I noticed this morning that someone actually came across my post about running the GNOME 2.6 beta and decided I’d fully explain why I don’t like spatial Nautilus.

My primary beef? My original 15″ PowerBook can only do 1152×768 and spatial Nautilus quickly fills the entire screen if I’m navigating deep enough into the filesystem hierarchy. Plus, there are times when I know exactly where I want to go and don’t want to leave all those open windows in my wake. I know there’s a menu item / accelerator to close all the parent windows, but that gets annoying. I’m not entirely sure if there’s some fancy key/click combination that will do what I want (much like classic Mac OS’s option + click). The other thing I don’t like is that when Nautilus is in spatial mode you can’t have a toolbar. I *really* like having Back/Forward/Up/Reload buttons. It means when I’m navigating with my mouse I don’t need to stop and use the keyboard.

Let me be honest. I’m not entirely happy with browser Nautilus either. I always disable the sidebar because I think it’s a horrible waste of space. I also hate that you cannot customize the size of the toolbar buttons. I’d like them to be about 50% of their current sizes.

What is my ideal file navigator? Easy: Mac OS X. Panther, specifically. I like the small, customizable toolbar. The bookmarks are okay, but only if you resize it to make it smaller or disable them altogether. I like the Back/Forward buttons. I also like that you can customize whether it opens folders in new windows or in the current window. I also love spring-loaded folders — it is unfortunate that due to Apple’s patent the feature cannot be added to Nautilus.

Update: there is in fact a way to open a folder and immediately close it’s parent. Just use the 3rd mouse button (which means use both L+R mouse buttons simultaneously for those of you with 3-button mouse emulation on, as I have). Using the emulated 3rd button sucks though, IMO.