• School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they'll be delicious and meaty
  • CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
  • CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
  • ...actually, I'm also taking spanish!
• "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I'm really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I'll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I'll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
• BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
• Peter Michaux's Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he's blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I'm following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
• The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.

So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn't be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!

Also, if I haven't mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It's fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast's I've ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.

But now I'm stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I'm actually quite excited to try out.

Finally, I'm reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.

The other thing is my CS 416 (distributed computing) term project. It's kind of neat, Douglas Hofstadter would approve. It's a P2P website: a website with a java applet that is a webserver, that can server the whole web site to other browsers, and it also servers it self to itself, and by using AJAX, the website can talk to "itself", or more specifically, the server, which can also talk via AJAX to other servers. So not only does the website server itself and talk to itself, it forms a network of all the websites. I'll probably put it online when it's a bit more finished.

So yeah. I'm doing ok with keeping on top of my classes, but it pretty much takes all my free time that went to coding this summer. I'll be back eventually ;)

I hosted my server on a small business line with Telus. A little over 2 weeks ago my house fell off the internet. I called them and they said my modem must be old and broken so they'd send me a new one in 5 business days tops.

I waited the 5 days and called on the last after not receiving a new modem and they said it'd only be a day or two more tops. I called a few days later after still receiving no modem and now having been offline for a week and a half and they double checked and it turns out my new modem order hadn't even yet been processed! Even after a reminder call. Unbelievable. So I canceled my (lack of) service with them and registered with the other head of our local two headed ISP monopoly, Shaw. They had me online with in 4 days, and I just got my static IPs today. So mindstab.net is back online, as am I. Lets see how this goes.

Well I just found my solution. Miro! Miro is a video player, RSS aggregator, video downloader, and bittorrent client all wrapped up in one interesting package. It has these things called "channels" that basically I think correspond to video RSS feeds and it'll download new content for you to watch etc etc. But what delighted me was that I could add a TED feed and then have all the videos right there and set it off to download some (oldest first) and watch them, all trivially. So now I'm rapidly starting to work my way though the TED talks in earnest. Thank you Miro.

If you use Linux, there's a good chance Miro will be in your software repository and the TED feed is below:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video

• Book: Curious George Goes to the Hospital - H. A. Rey
• Book: Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind - Suzanne Fisher Staples
• DVD: Elmo's World: Pets
• Video Game: Viva Pinata (XBox 360)

And the grand total came to $53 which is about what I was aiming for. I think this is my 3rd or 4th year now donating. I really like this charity because it tries to give you the opportunity to donate to somewhere close to home and picking off an amazon wishlist lets you feel a little move involved with your donation and it feel a bit more tangible even if I'll never see it. Plus I know that lots of kids will get direct benefit and enjoyment from my donation. It feels good. I feel good. :)

If you have any change to spare, you might think about donating :). Happy Holidays.

Anyways, because I'm such a public fellow, it should be pretty easy to follow my progress. You can get up to the minute updates when I can make them directly from my twitter account at twitter.com/dan_ballard. Usually within half an hour twitter updates will then show up here on the site, plus I'll probably make the occasional update directly to the site when internet is available. So if you want all my travel stories etc, you can subscribe to the site RSS feed. If you're on LJ, of course all of this will still be pushed there, so fear not, you get the full Dan vacation experience.

For those of you who could care less about my travel exploits and are just interested in my Linux exploits or what not, I've first requested Planet Larry change my feed to a Linux only one for the duration of the trip and you can do the same. Try subscribing to mindstab.net/wordpress/archives/tag/linux/feed to get only Linux stuff.

Ok, wish me luck, my flight is at 7am Wednesday morning.

They gave me the CD that came with the box and I loaded it up and first things first, no harddrive detected. Yep, that's right, no harddrive. To be fair, XP is old, it's from 2001, and pretty much all computers come with SATA harddrives now, which didn't even exist in 2001, so it's not entirely fair to expect XP to support them. This is one of the downsides of only doing releases every 6 years. Being not terribly invested in this "install XP" project I tossed my hands up and said it's a no go and offered Linux as an alternative. My Dad was definitely interested in Linux but wasn't sure it would be all there for his business software, so I said, "no fear, let's just do a trial run, and if it doesn't work, no worries, you can, you know, always buy Vista". The thought of having to spend money to make a computer that did work, work again, for no good reason vs. the low commitment of a trail run sold him on the project.

So I burned a copy of Hardy Heron, the newest Version of Ubuntu, released just last month. It loaded up and recognized all the hardware and installed, no trouble. I'm old fashioned so I opted for a separate root and home partition, but other than that, a vanilla install. Then we booted up and everything just worked out of the box. Even the printer. So I loaded all their data on from one of my boxs from whence it had been backuped to and let them at it (after a few tweaks, like my mom's desktop).

The results?

Mom loved it. For her, it turns out the killer feature was desktop icon stretching. She really liked the larger icons. And of course, no difficulty using it for her normal uses which are nearly entirely Internet look ups. The other big hit was Eye of Gnome, the photo viewer. Last year we had about 1600 of my mom's parents family slides turned into digital photos (at no small cost) and the stock Gnome photo viewer is perfect and intuitive enough for her to use and enjoy (the newly added left right buttons to scroll a directory are crucial here, so good work guys).

My moved out sister dropped by and gave it a try, and she too was sold. For her, the large stock puzzle/games selection was the seller. It worked just fine for her net usage, but the large selection of games got her attention and kept it just on introduction for over half an hour and she only explored a few of the games in that time. She'll be back. She also was amused by compiz eye candy.

As for my Dad? Sadly neither of his business apps worked under Wine. Maximizer 8 failed to install (a little sad since it's reasonably popular and not so new) and D--------, which is from what I can gather an in house piece of software from his company, also failed to install. A few tales from his trials installing it under Windows were horrific thought, like for the first time install you are required to turn off the firewall. 0_o In house software can be scary and shoddy stuff.

So Linux failed to satisfy everyone of my family's needs, so back to Windows. I was disappointed but resigned. And then came mom to the rescue. She chimed in she didn't want to go back. She liked her new Ubuntu desktop! So that was all I needed to float the idea of dual-boot. And thankfully we had two partitions already. Dad was sold too. He does want to learn more about Linux and so looked forward to the opportunity, but also needs his business software.

So I popped in a Gentoo LiveCD, because there really is no better system recovery and maintenance CD than a Gentoo LiveCD. I copied the Ubuntu root over to the second partition, moved /home and edited fstab and grub/menu.lst and reinstalled grub (from within the Ubuntu chroot because the one thing that particular LiveCD was 'missing' was Grub) and then changed the partition type of the first partition from Linux to NTFS and volia, we were ready to go.

Then back to Ubuntu because the Gnome Device Manager is actually full of awesome and gave me all the hardware information I needed so that I could get the appropriate drivers for Windows (remember when it was the reverse and it was crucial to go into Windows System Manager to get all the hardware info so Linux could install?). Then off to the net to find the Sata drivers, and then I tossed those onto a floppy disk and tried the XP install again. Sure enough, after loading the drivers from the disk, XP install found the harddrive and was happy enough to install onto the partition I had marked for it.

Then it booted into Windows XP SP1 glory. Which was surprisingly not glorious because it had no drivers so we had a 640x480 low colour screen with no sound. And no programs. Dad and I spent the rest of that day and the next few after that running Windows Update and downloading and installing drivers and programs manually from the net. The Windows Update website actually pretty much continually stalled out and failed when it came time to get service pack 2 which was disconcerting but by then the update manager had been installed and it was able to get and install SP2 for us. Shortly after which my dad horrifyingly noticed the Windows booting bug was back! We were horrified. All this work and no fix? Was it hardware failure? But Ubuntu was still booting fine. So we kept at it and apparently now with SP3 installed it's gone back to booting normally.

So yes, that means Microsoft in one of their post SP2 updates introduced some bug that rendered our computer nearly unbootable, which drove us to Linux which was brain dead easy to install. And then when we discovered Linux didn't quite fulfill all our needs, they made the migration back to XP as painful and full of near hopeless despair as possible.

So thank you Microsoft for driving my family to try Linux because they've found they like it, and thank you after that for highlighting exactly why we don't want to be hooked on Windows. It's been educational for my family, and now ever computer in my house has Linux installed on it and my family is interested in learning about it! And I owe it all to Microsoft.

(It should be pointed out that my dad's work still has a ban on IE7 and Vista because it doesn't work with their software yet which is a mark against both Microsoft and Vista, and my dad's company's computer department because, lets face it, it is the future and it has been out for over a year. But this did mean Vista really wasn't a viable option on the fact that it would have cost us more money and it wouldn't have accomplished the one goal we needed it for, which was running my dad's business software. XP was our only option.)