RIP Waffle

So I was using my laptop this week when it randomly died. Just out right shut off. It’s done this for a while, over a year. I’ve learned not to disturb it, but something must have pushed it over the edge. I tried for a long time that night to try and breathe new life back into it, but eventually I had to call it quits. Sometimes it would make it past the BIOS screen, but sometimes not. Consistently though it would shut itself off pretty quickly.

Lets be honest here, the laptop is 4 years old, and has been pretty roughly used. It’s come with me every day to class, and has travelled back and forth from Ottawa and school, as my parents said, it owes me nothing. While it’d be nice to get it working again (not hopeful), it’s likely time for it to move on. I had hoped it was going to last 5 years, but 4 years isn’t bad.

I unplugged it and took out the battery and let it sit over night, but still no dice. I started searching for a new laptop quickly that suited my needs. For a long time I’ve been forced to deal with a crappy resolution – 1280×800 – which is pretty crappy for writing code. One of the requisites for a laptop is to have a NVidia graphics card and a high resolution display. After searching I eventually found a match, the Asus G51JX-A1, packed with everything that I was looking for. I’ll let you click the link for the specs, but in short it comes packed with a 1080p display, 15.6″, Intel i7, and 6GB of ram. It also seems to run Linux and OSX very well (in fact, it had the HIGHEST score Geekbench in late June of all the OSX machines. I’m a bit dubious of this, but it’s interesting.

I must say that I was infact looking at the MacBook Pro 17″ with i7, but the price was out of my budget at $2700. It’s also a dual core (vs the Asus quad core) and comes with less memory. The Asus checked out after shipping at a cool $2100.

I ordered it today, so I’m going to assume it’s going to ship Tuesday (as monday is a holiday in Canada), and arrive Wednesday. For the meantime, I’m using my roommate’s MacBook Pro. They’re pretty solid machines and I want one, just out of my price range. I’ll write another article soon as I’m up and running.

PS: Waffle incase you’re wondering is my laptop’s hostname.

Here’s some more waffle related posts:

• Random Freezups
• Struggle for More Pixels
• Ubuntu?
• Wrapping up Vista
• Continued Vista Testing
• Vista

Edit: Wow grammar fail.

New Toy!

My new Arduino Mega

Long time no see folks! I got a new toy this week, an Arduino Mega. Cute lil thing isn’t it? So what is it? The Arduino is a completely open source 8bit RISC controller and board package. Part of the Arduino package is it’s fairly easy to learn library. Since it’s in C++, it’s very easy (for me) to rapidly design little hardware projects. I’ve planned that my first project will be a fan controller for my hard drives. I have two external hard drives and at times, they get a little warm, so I want to write some code for this that communicates with my laptop over USB (serial interface) as to when to turn on the drive fan or not, with manual override of course.

But this is only the surface of what you could do. There are add-ons for the Arduino by a variety of different manufacturers for wifi, ethernet, GPS, bluetooth and even GSM. While the build in Arduino functions have lots of advanced things to play with, you get full control over the processor with the avr-libc library (such as sleep modes). I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of projects I can come up with. Currently, I have two LEDs hooked up via a breadboard that fade back and forth (it has both analog in and out, via PWM) every 30 seconds, or manually if you send it the correct command over serial.

Who Turned Off the Pump?

Every weekend, my friends and I go to a pub called “The Lieutenants Pump” for bunch at about noon. Last week we got this letter:

Dear Valued Patron,

I regret to inform you that the Lieutenant’s Pump has been assessed a two day Liquor license suspension by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. The Commision found us guilty of being over capacity by five people on the patio during last years Stanley Cup Finals.

On the night of the infraction, we did everything in our power to control the patio but did not foresee people jumping the fence. We had staff supervising the patio and when people hopped the fence they were immediately escorted off.

We were not aware at the time that this would be considered insufficient by the Commission. Somehow, the Commission expected us to prevent the fence jumping. Short of barbed wire and electrification I’m not sure how this could have been accomplished. None the less, in its wisdom the Commission has concluded that the suspension is warranted as a general deterrent to other operators and as a specific deterrent to us letting it happen again.

The Lieutenant’s Pump will be closed October 11, 12 and 13 which is Thanksgiving weekend including Monday.

I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this closure will cause. Any concerns about this situation should be directed to:

Ted Meekin
Minister of Government and Consumer Services
4320 – 99 Wellesely St. E.
4^th Fl. Whitney Block
Toronto M7A 1W3

416 – 327 – 6611
TmcMeekin.MPP@Liberal.OLA.ORG

“See You At the Pump”
<SIGNATURE>
John Couse
Owner

Location Makes a Big Difference

Back home, they’re having a pretty big snowstorm. In contrast, we’re having a light snow. It seems every second day here we have about 2cm of snow. It all adds up in the end, and there’s quite a bit of snow lying around just chillin’. I’m starting to wonder if central Canada in general just gets most of their snow in small snow falls like we’ve been having, or large storms like back home? I miss the old Nor’ Easters that usually blow through. Today, my university is closed because it’s snowing really hard.

Back Home Right Now:

Downtown Ottawa Right Now:

EDIT:Live From Home:

Edit2:Live from here

Psssh Yeah Right

I read this post on slashdot the other day. He raises some interesting points, but I think he’s misguided:

Let me start by saying that I am a very strong Republican conservative, and I normally hate labor unions, especially since most of them don’t do much but collect money from workers and use it to buy politicians. That said, in this instance I absolutely think those workers should immediately unionize and walk off the job. IT workers are already treated as slaves just about everywhere, and it’s about time they got paid for their overtime AND STILL recieved a salary commensurate with the difficulty of their jobs and the level of their education.

Furthermore, this move by IBM is complete garbage. Google spends a heck of a lot more money on its employees than this, and it doesn’t have any trouble with the “competitive pressures” cited by IBM. The reason it doesn’t have any trouble is twofold:

1. By treating its employees fairly, it attracts much of the best IT talent around, and this talent in turn is very productive. Their employees probably produce more per hour than the employees most anywhere else through raw skill alone.
2. The really big reason Google doesn’t have these competitive pressures forcing them to pay their workers nothing is because Google has good management and actually produces worthwhile, marketable products. When is the last time IBM produced something good that people wanted to buy? PCs? Gone… IBM completely lost out in that market. Operating Systems? OS/2 is dead. Lotus Notes/other office software? Horribly ugly, clunky, and not even close to as good as Microsoft products. IDEs? They have some, but they are horribly overpriced things like Rational Apex (an ADA IDE) that cost 30,000 dollars a license and are vastly inferior to Microsoft’s Visual Studio. And while IBM helped birth Eclipse and still funds it to some degree, that is an OSS IDE, and a lot of it (plus a lot of the add-ons) were built by volunteers.
   Honestly, the only things they seem to produce anymore are a few supercomputers (and the market for those is clearly limited), some mainframes (again, limited and shrinking market), and some stupid “software development processes” like the Rational Unified Process (RUP). (News Flash for IBM: a process isn’t a product. I can go out and make my own process that suits my work (which is what most people do), or use one of many free and well known process like Agile or UP). IBM also produces a lot of marketing speak and vague references to “services” that they can offer to companies (not sure what those actually are or why I would want them), they produce a lot of commercials about servers spiraling out of control, and they spend a lot of time on clearly stupid strategies like building a corporate office in Second Life and having a director of Internet and Virtual Worlds.
   With all that sort of vaporware and garbage products, it’s no wonder that they are facing big competitive price pressures. They deserve the problems they are having. But the regular employees shouldn’t be the ones penalized. The problems (and pay cuts) should be directly placed in the laps of their management, especially their top executives. IBM has repeatedly had the chance to conquer the world, and they blow it on stupid ideas every time.

I think IBM’s participation in the Open Source market is commendable. They put an entire team into it, and lots of funding (in terms out man-hours). Plus it’s the base for lots of things, like Jazz, which is a really exciting product (having used it for a week or two so far). But more about Jazz later.

Welcome to WordPress 2.3.2

I just finished upgrading my wordpress. It went really smoothly. I was actually surprized, because usually php scripts aren’t so upgradeable. I’m not sure of the new features, but I do really want to change the blog header. I’ll see if I have anything.

Please Don’t Stop the Music

Ok, so corny title. So while planning out the future apartment Jason and I are going to share this January in Ottawa, I was curious how we’d play music. There’s a couple ways to do this. We’ll have 3 computers, each with their own seperate library.

1. Dump all the files together in one location. Requires lots of space, and moving around.
2. Set up iTunes on each computer, and use that. Still requires somebody to get up to change the song.
3. Come up with another solution.

If you know me, you know which decision I went for. I’m deciding to write an app that’ll run on all 3 computers, providing files from each computer to it’s peers, and allowing each computer to play music.

Here’s the catch though: I want to be able to remotely control each computer’s speakers and playlist. I want to say, start playing some music on the big rig, and control it from different computers. I also want to be able to listen to any song on the network on my computer, and Jason to be able to do the same using another computer. Currently, I don’t know of such a “distributed music system”, but if you know of one, hook me up.

Oh, I run linux, and Jason’s 2 computers run OSX (I think one’s PPC, and the other’s an Intel).

Amarok Hates me

Well, I’ve historically (tried) to use Amarok for my music playing needs in Ubuntu. Sometimes, for no reason, when I’m interacting with the UI, it just crashes, and pops up a kMail e-mail asking me to send the developers an e-mail. I just tried it 3 times, and all the 3 times didn’t get through 2 songs without it crashing. I even upgraded from 1.4.5 to 1.4.7, changed my package manager to let me use “unsupported” updates, etc. Read on to see the backtrackes.
Continue reading Amarok Hates me…

Real ID, RFID.

After watching the video, where they talk about the (American) gov’t watching everything you do, to me, it sounds more and more like communism, in that everything, the (American) gov’t can control everything that the people do. Definitely not a good thing. First net neutrality, Real ID, RFID tags, and more. They’re using the media (CNN, FOX) like the old soviet propaganda machine.

IDE!

Ok, well most of you know I work in Eclipse at work for several, highly specialized reasons. Outside of work, I will not touch Eclipse with a ten foot pole for coding in C. Why? CDT sucks. In Linux, I use a terminal and gEdit, and in Windows I use MSVC.

At work, me working on a project involves editing the files, and then going to the target platform and compiling there (running make). This is hardly “integrated”. I can’t even debug (very easily). Trust me, it’s a lot easier to stick my home projects on gdb than it is to stick the vm on gdb (not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it’s so large).

Anyways, I haven’t written anything in a while, and I felt like a rant. Enjoy!