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Summerfest

Depending on how long you’ve known me (or whether or not you know me at all, I suppose), you may recall that I have a tradition of heading out to Wisconsin every summer, around the 4th of July, to visit a friend and business partner (Keefe) and see some concerts at Summerfest. I believe this was my fifth summer to head out there, and I hope to go back again next year. I left Minneapolis with a friend from school (Matt) around 4 PM on Friday, June 30 after having to get up at 0630 to make it out to Eagan for an 0830, 2.5-hour series of interviews with four different people, and we were lucky enough to hit absolutely awful traffic between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. When all was said and done, I think we made it past Saint Paul about 90 minutes after leaving Minneapolis … a trip that should take only about 15-20. Despite that somewhat sub-optimal start, we made pretty good time the rest of the way, and I think we made it to Milwaukee around 2230 (10:30 PM, for those of you unfamiliar with 24-hour time formats).

Although a few good bands were playing Summerfest that evening, the headliners usually start at 2200, so Keefe and I decided that less than an hour of a concert probably wasn’t worth $15 each, and walked around an office building in downtown Milwaukee for a while instead. The Wells Building, as I believe it was called, used to house the Techware Labs server, so Keefe had a key for after-hours entry. Among other things, we were able to get out onto the roof, which presented a good opportunity to take a few pictures, only a couple of which turned out well. (Sadly, I didn’t make any other good use of my camera during the trip, though maybe I’ll grab a few other pictures that Keefe took and put ’em up later.) I generally enjoy going onto roofs of tall buildings, so that was a pretty decent way to pass the time for free, in lieu of half of a $15 concert. Later, Keefe’s girlfriend (Jenny) ended up calling from Summerfest for us to pick her up, which is no small feat, to navigate dozens of half-blocked one-way roads with thousands of people roaming around to find their cars. Among other things, we passed the same intersection no fewer than four times, and unnecessarily (unintentionally) drove ourselves to the back of a huge line of cars trying to exit a major parking lot. We never did end up finding Jenny near Summerfest, and instead ended up picking her up from a bar about 15 minutes away from downtown Milwaukee. It was somewhat unclear how she got there.

I don’t really remember everything I did for the rest of the week (until leaving the evening of Sunday, July 09), nor do I believe it would necessarily interest anyone to read it (much less me to write it), so I’ll just try to cover a few highlights.

• The Sunday before the 4th, Keefe and I headed over to John Chaillet‘s house for a huge barbecue/grill/cookout extravaganza. I guess that many hours were spent preparing food before the hours of cooking could even commence, including making a few dozen hamburger patties with onions and peppers mixed into the meat. Needless to say, it was quite delicious. It was also cool to meet havoc (John) and chillywilly of irc.havoc.org #havoc in person, with whom I’ve been conversing on the internet for nearly half a decade. I played volleyball there, too, probably for the first time since 10th grade gym class. I dominated everyone :P.
• Monday, Keefe and I went to a client’s business to install a wireless internet subscriber module and wire it up to their network. This was a somewhat daunting task, as the antenna needed to be on top of the 2-story office building (with only ladder access to the roof), then have the cabling run to two wiring closets on the two floors, and then to nearly the opposite end of the building to reach the client’s router. It took several hours, involved a lot of time on ladders and awkward places in ceilings, etc, but we got the job done, and now Keefe gets to make some more money. I’m still unemployed :P.
• On Tuesday, I spent the day with Adrianne (my girlfriend) at Summerfest, and saw Punchline, Lucky Boys Confusion, and Bowling for Soup. Despite the fact that the bands weren’t necessarily a perfect match for my main musical tastes, the shows were very fun, the bands had good stage presence and high energy, and that was reflected by the atmosphere in the audience. It was also really nice to get to see Adrianne for the first time in a week, though it’s been almost another week again, which may not sound bad, but it feels like a long time (I guess that’s a good thing, hey?). We later met up with Matt at a coffee shop, and again the next day for lunch at the SafeHouse, which was a decently cool experience in and of itself.
• I had a job interview with Google (over the phone) on Thursday afternoon. It was somewhat brief, but they had already emailed me and I completed ~4 pages of problems/programs/etc. they had sent me the preceding week. The position is located in Mountain View, CA at their headquarters, so if they offered that to me and I took it, that would mean moving out to California.
• Keefe, Jenny and I went down to Summerfest on Friday and saw about half a dozen songs from Yellowcard, a little Cheap Trick, Train and Big Wu, and maybe another half dozen songs from Styx.
• We went to Jenny’s birthday party on Saturday, and then Keefe and I departed for Summerfest, only for his alternator (presumably) to fail along the way. We barely made it off the freeway, and with a little help of my pushing, we got Keefe’s truck onto a side street. After about a $150 tow back to Hartford, and much disappointment about not getting to see Panic! At the Disco (and my added disappointment for missing my friend Brian (of Savin Hill fame) and 30 Seconds to Mars), we headed to a local bar. Having turned 21 only the month before, this was my first time in a bar, and the Mike’s Ice Hard Lemonade I consumed was only the third alcoholic beverage of my life. I’m not an individual of particularly large build, and have no prior tolerance built, so the single bottle containing ~5.2% alcohol did affect me somewhat, but having no desire to actually get drunk, insistently refused Keefe’s attempts to buy me more drinks. Sorry Keefe, you don’t get any embarrassing stories to tell about me doing stupid drunk stuff. (No one shall have such an opportunity so far as I’m concerned.)
• I headed back home with Matt on Sunday evening. Aside from the massive storms around Milwaukee around the time of departure (of which I saw only a few minutes of a torrential downpour and a few pieces of hail slightly larger than peas), the trip went quite smoothly, and I think we got back to Minneapolis in about five hours (not counting the one stop we made).

Music

Among other things, one aspect of this yearly trip I make that sticks in my mind is the music I hear while out there. I don’t necessarily even mean the concerts I hear at Summerfest (although yes, those are typically very good), but rather just the music I hear on the radio while riding around rural Wisconsin. While this experience probably doesn’t translate well for others, I almost never listen to the radio throughout the rest of the year, so when I’m out in Wisconsin with Keefe for a week, and we do a fair amount of driving, I’m exposed to exponentially more radio than I am otherwise. Over the course of the week, there are, of course, various songs that receive a considerable amount of air-time, consequently impressing themselves in my memory in association with that week. While some years/songs leave a stronger impression than others, I figured that since I went to the effort of making a Music category for my posts, I might as well include some mention of some of these songs. If you’re not a radio-hermit like myself, have some other decent exposure to new music, or have convinced yourself that you’re too cool to like popular music, then the following brief list will be of no interest to you. It will basically just be a snapshot of some songs off the top-40 list for July 2006, but it might be fun [for myself?] to look back at this in a few years to remember what was happenin’ back then … er … now.

So, without further adieu, the list of songs (in no particular order) that I will henceforth associate with my trip to Wisconsin, 2006:

• Red Hot Chili Peppers – Dani California. I actually started listening to this a few weeks before heading out there, having already picked up the album at Keefe’s recommendation, but I enjoy the song, and it got its share of radio play. There are some sections of the song reminiscent of Tom Petty – Mary Jane’s Last Dance, which I also like.
• Angels And Airwaves – The Adventure. Apparently this band features the vocalist from Blink 182 (easily identifiable, to me, anyhow). It’s not the highest on my list of songs, but it’s worth remembering anyway.
• Raconteurs – Steady, As She Goes. I’ll admit this song is fairly repetitive, but that probably makes it all the more catchy (kind of like another song we know). I may have heard it once prior to the trip, but I probably heard it at least half a dozen times over the course of the week, and it stuck.
• Fall Out Boy – Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down. This song will mainly stick in my head as a result of Keefe’s repeated attempts to sing the song as performed by someone with a severe speech impediment. Apparently there’s some parody on the internet to that effect, which I haven’t seen, but shall forever remember regardless. Thanks.
• Gnarls Barkley – Crazy. No, this isn’t like Britney Spears – Crazy (though I haven’t seen the video for this one yet, so you never know…). It has a little bit of an oldies feel to the vocal style, which I think maybe gives this song a unique appeal to a wider age range than most of these other songs. Also, with the name Gnarls, how can you go wrong?
• Panic! At The Disco – I Write Sins Not Tragedies. I’d never even heard of this band, much less this song, prior to heading out to WI, but I liked it enough to want to see them in concert by Friday. I’m particularly conflicted about liking this, though, as they’re listed under the emo genre, which I tend to despise on principle. Also, the radio edit of the song censors god out of the refrain’s phrase shutting the god damn door, which is where I originally heard the song. I actually kind of like the sense of syncopation / off-beat emphasis the gap in the lyrics provides, but will manage somehow with the studio/uncensored version. This will probably stick in my memory more than the rest.
• She Wants Revenge – These Things. The vocals in this song remind me somewhat of Depeche Mode, but to be honest, this song will just stick in my head because I heard the line from the song She’s in the bathroom; she pleasures herself. What more can I say?
• All American Rejects – Move Along

Top 32 Songs @ 102.1 FM Milwaukee – July 2006 »

1	Dani California	Red Hot Chili Peppers	lyrics
2	The Adventure	Angels And Airwaves	lyrics
3	Steady, As She Goes	Raconteurs	lyrics
4	Miss Murder	AFI	lyrics
5	Move Along	All American Rejects	lyrics
6	Animal I’ve Become	3 Days Grace	lyrics
7	Life Wasted	Pearl Jam	lyrics
8	Paralyzed	Rock Kills Kid	lyrics
9	Wings Of A Butterfly	Him	lyrics
10	These Things	She Wants Revenge	lyrics
11	Make Damn Sure	Taking Back Sunday	lyrics
12	Crazy	Gnarls Barkley	lyrics
13	I Dare You	Shinedown	lyrics
14	Vicarious	Tool	lyrics
15	I Write Sins Not Tragedies	Panic! At The Disco	lyrics
16	Don’t Wait	Dashboard Confessional	lyrics
17	Ready To Fall	Rise Against	lyrics
18	Rough Landing Holly	Yellowcard	lyrics
19	Woman	Wolfmother	lyrics
20	What If We Could	Blue October	lyrics
21	The Press Corpse	Anti-Flag	lyrics
22	Hands Open	Snow Patrol	lyrics
23	If You Talk Too Much	People In Planes	lyrics
24	Cubicle	Rinocerose
25	Out Here All Night	Damone	lyrics
26	Is It Any Wonder?	Keane	lyrics
27	Welcome Home	Coheed And Cambria	lyrics
28	The Gift	Seether	lyrics
29	How To Save A Life	Fray	lyrics
30	Oh Yeah	Subways	lyrics
31	Hard To Beat	Hard-Fi	lyrics
32	Youth	Matisyahu	lyrics
NEW	I Will Follow You Into The Dark	Death Cab For Cutie	lyrics
NEW	Rooftops	Lost Prophets	lyrics

Updates

If you’re really masochistic and check my blog every few days hoping for an update, you may have already noticed a few subtle changes to the right navigation bar on here. I hope that’s not the case, though, so I get to entertain you with a brief walk-through of these changes, and how they relate to my recent life.

The first, and most obvious change, is the addition of a little blurb about myself near the top right. Although I still did kind of like the setup over at p14nd4.blogspot.com a bit better, there isn’t a good interface in WordPress (the software that powers my blog) to show this information, so it’s just kind of hacked in there at the moment. I think I’ve heard of a plugin to do something similar, but again, sort of a hack anyway. Most of you probably already know the info I took about a minute to put up there, but I might be getting a few otherwise unfamiliar visitors in here soon (more on that later, if I have time), so I thought it might be nice. Yes? No? Feel free to comment.

Moving down the list, there’s a new section heading … Pages, which contains a new … er … page, Projects. As the page itself also explains, I wanted somewhere to put some of the things I’ve worked on over the past year (at least, I think that’s as far back as any of the projects go so far). I hope to expand this a bit at some point to possibly include some other projects that, while less interesting for the general reader, could be immensely helpful to a few select googlers in the future. Admittedly, this section is virtually useless right now to anyone who isn’t at least slightly interested in computer science / programming. Sorry.

Continuing on, I’ve added one more link to My Stuff: TheLittleMan.net. A very select few of you may remember back to late 1999 when Chris Bates registered this domain for his freelance web design service, which I joined for a period as well. More importantly, though, this was the home of what immediately became my primary email address, so when Chris dropped his web design service and didn’t care to keep the domain name, I quickly offered to pick it up. Since about 2003(?), I’ve owned the domain for the sole purpose of keeping my email address, which I host on my own server, but had no web page there. I finally decided to change that late one night this spring, by making it a nice-looking portal of sorts, and a good place to hold my résumé. In addition to a .doc and .pdf copy of the résumé, I coded up an xhtml+css version, was actually pretty fun to make, too. I doubt many of you are as into xhtml/css/standards as I am, but I’m pretty proud of the results of both of these pages. Particularly with the résumé, I organized pretty much everything just as unordered lists (<ul>), and did fun formatting with css — this is my understanding of how xhtml and css are supposed to be used … organize content using the semantic meaning of various elements/hierarchy, and do all display/rendering configuration only through css. P.S. using a <ul> for an inline, comma-separated list is awesome :). (And yes, I know I’m a dork.)

Last on the list (literally and figuratively) is a new option to choose between different site themes. To be honest, I mainly added this because the syntax highlighting on some terms in the projects section isn’t optimized for a black background. The Classic theme seems to be the best for reading the code, but you’re now welcome to use whatever theme you’d like — for the entire site. (It remembers your setting in a cookie.)

My Life

As you should know by now (having read my info at the top right), I have graduated. <Monty Python>yay…</Monty Python> I ended up really surprising myself by having the best grades of all of college during my last, and most intensive semester (I’m rather proud of myself … please excuse me while I commence a little bragging). I was taking 20 credits (6 classes) of all upper division computer science (well, and inet, which is part of the computer science and engineering associate program), including a graduate-level course in Data Mining (csci5523 … the co-professors of which also happened to be co-authors of the textbook) and three different internet / networking / programming courses, and I pulled off a 3.75, which put me on the Dean’s List =D. (I also took engc3029w during May term … a three week, three-credit course that met four days a week for about four hours … and got a very solid A in there.) It was a good way to go out.

Since then (well, and somewhat before that), it has been my sole purpose in life to find a real job. Of all the programming I’ve done, I think I’ve decided that I like network/socket/client-server programming best, and my language of choice is C. If I were to use those two criteria to limit my job search, though, my options would be pretty severely limited, but a man can dream… I’ve probably sent out nearly a dozen résumés and cover letters so far, including my Opera application (eeeee!), and while I’d love to take a break and just wait for a dozen high-paying job offers to come rolling in, I’m not sure that’s the most appropriate course of action. (My lack of income is starting to hurt, as my [newish] bike was recently stolen, my desktop computer died and needs some replacement parts, I had a dentist appointment without dental insurance, and I still have to pay rent through the rest of my lease (July 31) … not to mention a new apartment after this lease expires.) Regardless, I’m confident that something will pan out … even if it means taking some underpaid support position for which I’m well qualified, but doesn’t utilize my expensive education. Bottom line, though, I can’t move back to my parents’ house once my lease is up … so it’s anything vs. joining the ranks of the homeless =P.

Anyway, that about wraps up what’s been going on with my blog and the last month or two of my life, and I have to shower and be ready to go about five minutes ago, so for all of you anxious blog-checking fans out there … until next time, enjoy.

I’m not going to claim to have great musical taste, or very much exposure to new music, or exposure to many bands outside of mainstream music (so all you zomg indie music! freaks can just stop reading now :-P), but I’m going to try something new in my blog, and it relates to music. It’s possible this is even more for my own benefit than yours (so I can go read my blog in a few years to remember what I was listening to back then), but I’m going to try to post [a list of] some music that I’m digging at the moment. I’d really love to post mp3s of some of this music too, since I think that’s really what music is really about, but the RIAA disagrees, and since they have more money than me, they’re obviously right (who am I to argue?). (Actually, I love arguing, but I don’t have the time or money to get into a [legal] argument with the RIAA at the moment, so I’ll play the safe side and stick with links to the artists’ sites, some of which post the songs or samples.) It should also be noted that I’m not necessarily posting these in any particular order of how much I like them, or how similar they are to the song above or below it in the list, or how likely you are to enjoy the songs … they’re just in whatever order I think of them.

Before you start tearing into me for things like <whiny voice>But p111144nnnd4, you’re such a hypocrite for liking the band ‘blah,’ since you said you didn’t like ‘blah’ type of music!</whiny> or I can’t believe you like such crappy music like the band ‘blah,’ please, just bite your tongue, and lie to me if necessary, and tell me how impressed you are that I took the time to type these all up. I really don’t care if you don’t like any or all of these bands. I’m not going to get into big discussions about the quality or merit of their music, or the people themselves (believe me, I don’t know about any of the actual band members or artists, I’ve just heard their music). These are some of the things I like, and you don’t have to like them, but I wanted to give you a `base reading’ of some stuff I’m into.

Anyway, now that I’ve wasted most of my time with the preparation, the rest of this seems rather insubstantial in comparison :-/. I think I probably could have come up with more good music for these `songs I think are cool right now’ section if I hadn’t just wasted so much time with the first half of this post. Sorry. Hopefully I’ll remember this, and edit it as other songs occur to me.

• Howie Day – [Stop All the World Now #03] Collide [4:09]
  • Beginning with warm, clean acoustic guitar occasionally accented by light violin accompaniment, the song is soon joined by Howie’s mid-range vocals marked by a very slight/soft rasp (drawn out ‘h’ kind of) kind of characteristic of a ‘west coast’ voice, despite Day hailing from Maine. (I’d actually be kind of interested to hear an acoustic-only version of this song continuing in the style of the intro. That said…) The rest of the backup enters including a simple electric bass line, simple closed hi-hat/snare/bass, smooth mid-range violin moving harmony (and perhaps other elements of the 25-piece orchestra I’ve neglected to pinpoint), and admittedly kind of obnoxious ‘do-do-do-do’ backup vocals during the chorus, around 0:41. While the verses of the song (per normal) feature less intrusive background music, there are moments (such as the transition from a verse to the chorus) with either backup or over-dubbed vocal harmonizing as well as what I think is either harp or maybe steel guitar (1:57 and 2:00 respectively, for example). While the ‘do-do-do-do’ vocal background, a few of the prominent violin phrases, and some of the lyrics do give the song a little bit of a pop/big-studio feel, it remains a very catchy song featuring sections of simple acoustic guitar, full orchestral backing, and offers a sound that a variety of individuals should be able to appreciate.
• Brent Palmer – [Stabilize #02] Asleep In The Back [3:36]
  • This song also begins with an acoustic guitar intro, though with a slightly ‘rougher’ feel than `Collide,’ with clearly audible fret/chord transition slides on the strings. While I think there’s also a single continuous soft cello note accompanying the first few measures, it does carry a more prominent harmony throughout several other stanzas of the song. That said, these are the only two instruments featured in this song. Brent’s voice is very smooth, and is accented by what is either stereo microphones during recording, re-voicing over the track a second time with very good precision but dividing between left and right channels, or maybe just using a single mono voice channel, but just marginally time-skewing them between the left and right channels for a unique effect. The stereo mixing of this track is particularly good for both the instruments and vocals, in my opinion, adding credit to the song (do yourself a favor and listen on speakers first, then headphones, if you have the means). Overall, I feel this is a very simple, but elegant song that has the potential to appeal to anyone from teens to their parents. Plus, Palmer was kind enough to post the mp3 on his site, so you really have no excuse not to give it a try.
• Pink Floyd performed by The London Philharmonic Orchestra – [Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd #06] Money [6:46]
  • As you might have guessed by the name, this album consists of several Pink Floyd ‘hits’ being performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I’m amazed that someone came up with the idea, and took the time to so wonderfully translate these Floyd songs into full orchestral scores. The detail is really quite amazing. As a[n ex-]percussionist, I really appreciate the prominent bells and xylophone featured during the first half of the song, too. Don’t take my short description of this song to mean anything other than it’s 3 AM and I want to go to bed, so I’m cutting this short.

After leaving my front page (visually) the same for about two years now (you can check it out for yourself at archive.org), I recently felt somewhat compelled (obligated) to actually do something useful after receiving repeated praises from Josh about my site (though, to be honest, I’m not sure what makes my site particularly any better than his … whatever). The idea actually struck me around 4:30 AM, right after I had lain down for bed; I knew that if I didn’t get up immediately to get the idea down on paper, it would be forever forgotten by the time I awoke. While that same situation plagues me with relative frequency, I almost never actually get up to ensure the idea’s survival.

I missed my first (11:15 AM) class the next morning, but was on time to my 12:45 lecture, where I quickly went to work coding up the idea. The idea is by no means particularly complex, just efficient and elegant. With about six lines of xhtml constituting five objects, and maybe three css id’s, the layout worked perfectly in Opera and Firefox (both boasting W3C standards compliance), and the code was fully compliant to the xhtml 1.0 strict standard. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer was another story. (Duh.) Here was the original xhtml code:

<div id="title">
<h1>p14nd4.com</h1>
<a href="/resources/" title="resources">/resources</a>
<a href="/gallery2/" title="gallery">/gallery</a>
<a href="/blog/" title="blog">/blog</a>
</div>

And the CSS basically consisted of:

div#title { position: absolute; top: 40px; left: 40px; color/border stuff; }
div#title a { display: block; position: relative; bottom: 7px; right: 0px; float: right; margin-right: 15px; color/border stuff; }
div#title a:hover { color stuff; }

Internet Explorer didn’t render the <div id="title"> the correct height, aligned the h1 to the top instead of middle, and didn’t have the links in the correct place. I was able to fix the link placement with moderate ease, by enclosing them all inside another nested <div>, which had position: absolute; right: 0px; bottom: -9px; and then just did float: right; margin-right: 15px; for the <a> tags. I believe this fixed the main div’s vertical size rendering issue as well, in IE. Getting the <h1> to vertical-align: middle; within the main div was another story, though. I probably worked on that issue alone for another hour or more. I tried various combinations of nested elements and other css attributes without success, until I tried nesting the h1 inside a div, with a border enabled. I stumbled across this solution because I start putting borders on all my objects to debug where certain boxes are ending, beginning, hitting each other, etc. Regardless, I figured that just another nested div was the solution, so I immediately went to remove the testing borders, so the site would be suitable for public display (having half a dozen dashed red borders running through the header wasn’t particularly attractive). To my great confusion and horror, though, the h1 regressed to vertical-align: top after removing the borders. Sure enough, adding the border back onto the div re-fixed its alignment. I tried just setting a top border, so there wouldn’t be much visual evidence of this hack, but IE wouldn’t behave with just a top border; it needed all four. Eventually I conceded that it just wasn’t going to look quite right in IE, and moved on for the evening.

Today I finally got around to moving the new header to the main page, but again grew displeased with how it looked in IE. Another idea struck me, though, which managed to elude me yesterday evening. If you were to look at the code, you would again see an additional div containing only the <h1> element, with a style="border: 1px solid black; … which would normally result in an ugly visible border along the bottom of the header… I remedied this situation by overriding the border shorthand property immediately after declaring it, and eliminating the left, right, and bottom borders. In full, the code for that div tag reads as <div style="border: 1px solid black; border-bottom: 0; border-right: 0; border-left: 0;">. Don’t ask me why this happens to fix IE’s rendering, but I’ll live with it, I suppose.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!

Ok. Breathe. I’m cool now. If you haven’t figured it out by now, this post is basically going to be a rant about all the wonderful free services my university (and presumably many other universities … I can’t confirm that) is proud to offer its students. The most recent of these gracious gifts bestowed upon the student body by the ever-wise governing bodies was a school-wide subscription (partnership) with Ruckus (press release), a legal/licensed p2p download program. Normally this appears to cost $5.99 (USD) per month for an individual subscription to the service (a decent portion of which theoretically pays for the licensing agreements of the intellectual property (music, movies, etc.) available on the network for the given month), so using the press release’s figure, the starting bid for this service would be $305,490 per month, or $2,749,410 per academic year (9 months?). While I don’t doubt that a lower rate is offered to universities, since obviously not every student will use the service, I have no difficulty believing that the powers that be were willing to spend $2 million per year of my money for this. Mind you, this partnership comes alongside an announcement from the university’s Office of IT (OIT) that during the past year illegal music downloads appeared to decline at the University for the first time (Office of the General Counsel – Annual Report 2005 (pdf)). Would someone care to explain the logic behind spending two million dollars on a service that statistics indicate is of declining necessity?

The obvious counter-argument against this specific instance is: But p14nd4, you argue that it’s costing two million dollars, but that’s split up between 51,000 students! It only really costs you $39! Ignoring the larger picture for a moment, while perhaps this single instance is true, that’s still $39 that I would not have otherwise spent on Ruckus, and would very much enjoyed spending on four trips to Perkins, or nine orders of pizza, or 218 cans of Mountain Dew, or a birthday present for someone. I pay the university for an education, not for a download service. While the university may have saved a few dollars off the subscription fees that a handful of students would have paid on their own, it is not their place to do so, and simultaneously force the rest of us into paying for a service we don’t desire.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end with this $39 loss. You have no idea how glad I would be, if $39 was all I lost to paying for ridiculous services through the university. My previous favorite instance of this was the university’s announcement that it has reached an arrangement with Microsoft to offer Windows XP Professional (Upgrade) and Microsoft Office 2003 Professional for free to all students. That’s 51,000 Windows licenses, and 51,000 Office 2003 Professional licenses… Again, I don’t have specifics on how much money the university gave Microsoft for this free service,, but Windows XP Professional OEM sells for $139.95 on Newegg.com, and Office 2k3 Pro runs at $314.95. I’m sure the University paid less than these figures, but since they’re all we have for estimates, that figure (a ceiling, if you will) would run $7,137,450 for Windows, and $16,062,450, for a total of $23,199,900 spent by the university in order to offer this free service.

Anyway, I’m cutting this post short, in favor of getting some work done. If I get ambitious (annoyed) again, I hope to complete this post with some addition related areas I feel deserve some mention. These other topics I hope to cover in a later edit include:

1. Run-away / use-it-or-lose-it budgets
2. Get an auditor, dammit!
3. Eliminate half of the student employment positions
4. Bottom line: spend on my education (not elite research facilities, not stadiums, not $400 office chairs, not thousands of dollars towards rebranding a building)

As part of my home network, I have been using an HP Vectra VL5/166 Series 5 DT Pentium 166 MHz computer as my NAT router for several years now. I used IPCop (Linux-based) since its 1.3 release, followed by 1.4 for quite a while, and then decided I should give m0n0wall (BSD-based) a try, starting at the 1.2b9 release. m0n0wall was originally designed to run on embedded / SBC systems, especially Soekris boards, which boot off a CF card. It was later [easily] adapted to run on generic PCs, though there’s no real method provided to install it, other than performing a ~5 MiB disk image copy to the hard drive. I tried this (using Knoppix textmode, wget the image, then dd), but was plagued by a Read error after loading the BIOS. I worked on trying to fix this for quite a while, to no avail. Eventually I conceded defeat and just used the m0n0wall LiveCD to boot the system, and stored the configuration on a floppy disk. I later experimented with pfSense very briefly, which is a modification of m0n0wall with a somewhat different target audience and different goals in mind. Of particular interest to me was the fact that after booting from the LiveCD, it provides an actual [optional] installer, which I hoped would avoid the problems I ran into with m0n0wall. Long story short, after about 6 attempted installs, it still didn’t work, so once again, I conceded defeat, and kept on truckin’ with the m0n0wall LiveCD.

Fast forward about five months…

m0n0wall (1.2b9, LiveCD + floppy for config) was very stable … no lockups or reboots (planned or unplanned) for the whole time. One night, I decided to reboot all my computers including the m0n0wall router. Anyway, after it booted back up, it was acting strange … and then started telling me errors like no XML object found, etc. I pulled out the floppy disk, and checked it in my desktop, which spent about 10 minutes trying to read the ~12 KiB file, and later chkdisk confirmed that there were 512 bytes in bad sectors. Crap. Rather than just rebuilding my configuration, though, I decided to go all out and try the new pfSense Beta (finally out of alpha), which put me back in the situation of fixing the Read error once the system actually hit the BSD bootloader.

Read error THIS, bitches!

I googled briefly, and came across a page Why does FreeBSD’s boot loader display Read error and stop after the BIOS screen? Well, that seemed to capture the essense of my problem fairly well, so I gave it a go. There was some confusion to this issue, though, as my BIOS initially reported the disk was 16,383 cylinders, whereas the BSD bootloader installer [correctly] recognized that it was 39,703 cylinders. I tried various combinations of either using the BIOS’s wrong value in the bootloader installer, or entering the right value in the bios and bootloader, or entering a third value in both (somewhere between what the BIOS thought and what the hard drive thought); none of these approaches worked. I also tried most of these combinations without the default ‘packet mode’ selected when installing the bootloader; again, no success. I even tried partitioning the disk into ~1 GiB partitions, in case the issue was with using a partition sized greater than a 32bit address; still no luck. Eventually, I pulled out my trusty Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), and started going through the boot loaders provided on there. I didn’t make it through the whole list, because when I got to GAG, I was easily able to go into setup -> add operating system -> select FreeBSD from the list and name it/pick an icon, then configure Boot timer to ~2 seconds (so that it will boot without my interaction, since the router is almost always headless / keyboardless), and pick the OS that I just added as the default choice. Lastly, selecting Save in Hard disk immediately installed the bootloader to the drive, and I was able to boot like a charm! It’s frustrating how quickly and easily GAG worked after I spent hours trying more complicated solutions…

Anyway, I’m glad it works. I’ve mostly reconfigured my router with pfSense installed to the hard drive now, and it seems to be working fairly well. I haven’t checked out the Beta1 known bugs yet, but the first bug I’ve observed seems too obvious to even imagine someone hasn’t posted. I guess the pfSense logo is set as a background image (css, presumably … I haven’t actually looked at the code), so they use a transparent image statically placed above it for the actual linking (to the main page). For me, this image (http://arvin.local:446/themes/pfsense/images/transparent.gif) is missing (404 – Not Found) in each of the three themes provided with pfSense, so I get a nice little rectangle with the word Transparent (the alt text) above the pfSense logo. Aside from that, everything else has been sweet like candy. There’s rumor that I can even get more info than just traffic stats from SNMP (for use on my cacti box), but I haven’t looked into that very much yet. Anyway, I hope this can help someone else with a similar problem to mine. I don’t just write these technical posts because I like to regale myself with stories of grueling troubleshooting and frustration ;). Good luck, and have fun.

Well, my final full semester has started, which includes a fairly grueling schedule totaling 20 credits of 4000-5000 level csci courses. Crazy? Yes. Am I going to do well in all my classes? No. Am I going to take a year or two off my life through sleep deprivation? Probably. Regardless, I’m taking some classes that are finally of potential interest to me. The University of Minnesota B.S. Computer Science program requires that students declare an upper division emphasis, which I kind of made up on a whim the night I realized I had to register for my classes. If you clicked the link above, you know that three of my classes are network and/or internet programming (which happens to probably be my area of most interest), so my emphasis was named something along the lines of Internet/Information Services.

Anyway, the two network programming courses I’m in have just released their [first] big programming assignments for the semester, both of which are kind of interesting, and I dare say I might even be excited to work on them. If you counted, you’ll notice that still leaves me with four other classes about which I have not expressed any excitement. Three of those aren’t bad per se, just not necessarily exciting to me. The fourth is Data Mining. My feelings on that class can be easily summarized as follows:

:-(

…But I digress. Getting back to my main motivation for this post, which was to talk about these two programming assignments.

Csci4211 – Introduction to Computer Networks

The full assignment is defined here, if you’re eager enough to actually read about it yourself. The assignment is titled Peer-to-Peer (P2P) File Sharing System with Messaging, which is fairly self explanatory. To understate the situation, it’s not going to wipe out Kazaa or BitTorrent any time soon, as it will be written for a command-line/console interface (no GUI), and (based on my brief scan of the assignment) can only actually exchange files between directly connected nodes (there’s no central server).

Inet4021 – Network Programming

Dammit. I hibernated my computer and lost the paragraph I’d already written about this assignment. Surely this time around will be less exciting than the first; I apologize. That said, I’ll proceed. The assignment is only available in .doc format here, which you probalby don’t want to go to the trouble of downloading and opening, so I’ll summarize. The assignment is boringly titled Lab #3, which isn’t of much use to you, but the primary objective is: Based on RFC 1945, you will need to write an HTTP client that meets the 1.0 specification. For the less technically oriented individuals out there, an HTTP client is more commonly known as a web browser (such as Internet Explorer). This ain’t yo’ momma’s web browser, though… Don’t expect pretty graphics, flash animations, or anything fun like that … a closer comparison would be wget, though this is even less advanced than that. I think a more fitting description would be a URL document grabber. It’s approximately equivilent to going to Start -> Run -> cmd, and typing:

telnet www.umn.edu 80
GET / HTTP/1.0

[Press enter twice]

This returns the following, which is approximately what I understand this program is supposed to output:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:23:25 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.2.12 mod_ssl/2.8.23 OpenSSL/0.9.7g
Location: http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/index.php
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC -//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN>
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>302 Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Found</H1>
The document has moved <A HREF=http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/index.php>here</A>.<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.umn.edu Port 80</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>

To continue my line of reference from aboive, this client certainly isn’t going to blow Internet Explorer out of the water. Considering my dream job (take that very lightly) is working for Opera Software ASA, this project is of particular interest to me. I actually kind of wish it was a more extensive project (though, don’t quote me on that in three weeks when it’s due, and I haven’t started yet).

A wordy title, to be sure, but I figured I would post my "news" here, after struggling with this for so long. If you’ve read my previous post(s), you’ll know that I’ve experienced tremendous difficulty and aggravation with my 3Com OfficeConnect Wireless 11g Access Point (3CRWE454G72). The most recent round of fun I had with this AP was after buying my IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T41 2373-5U2 (pics), which includes an installed mPCI Intel 802.11b (2100 3B "Intel Pro Wireless LAN 2100 3b Mini PCI") wireless client adapter. Of course I eagerly set up the laptop and try to connect to the network/internet through my AP. Apparently 3Com thinks that’s a silly idea, and gave me a big NOYUO (well, not quite, but I pretty much couldn’t get the laptop to associate with the access point, pick up an IP via DHCP, or any of that fun stuff). After only a few months earlier going through a similar experience with my Fujitsu LifeBook P-1035 (Prism II) and the same access point, only to later find out that 3Com acknowledged this was a problem with their firmware (in the sense that they fixed it, and listed it as such in the changelog), I didn’t put too much more effort into what I assumed was a lost cause (since I can’t fix the proprietary 3Com firmware, and they were already tired of me whining about a handful of problems from before their previous firmware fix).

It wasn’t until today … a couple months after buying this laptop, that I stumbled across this enlightening article on Intel’s site, noting that "PSP (Power Save Polling) Causes Connection Issues With Some Access Points." Durrr… After seeing the title, I was already fairly sure what the solution was, but I read through the article anyway, which notes:

If the wireless access point / wireless gateway does not properly support the PSP feature, intermittent loss of wireless connection, inability to initiate a wireless connection, or poor wireless connection data performance could result. The symptoms may be more pronounced when on battery power.
…
Contact the access point vendor for an updated software which corrects the problem. [Heh, yeah, I won’t hold my breath.]

As a temporary workaround, manually set the adapter to CAM (continually aware mode), which disables the PSP capability. To do this, in either Intel® PROSet for Wireless Software or the Network Control Panel Applet (NCPA), in the power management section, uncheck the DEFAULT / AUTO selection and set the slider for HIGHEST / MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE.

Battery life be damned, I guess, if I need to use my laptop with my own access point. I suppose it’s better that it worked out this way … that I could connect to every other AP I’ve ever tried, except the one I own, rather than only being able to connect to mine, and no one else’s (for instance, in class, at the coffee shop, at a friend’s place, etc.). I’ll probably send 3Com another email, and link them to the Intel page noted above, but if they haven’t fixed it already, it seems somewhat improbable that one email is going to weigh very heavily on their minds. That said, I am surprised that such a conflict has not arisen more frequently. The ThinkPad line seems moderately popular, as does the Intel 2100 mPCI card. I’m not sure why I would be the first person with this particular combination of hardware (and IBM does set the power save level to medium by default (this is where I experienced problems)), nor does it seem like 3Com would neglect to test such a popular card (from my observations, anyhow) with their hardware. I’m sure the reasons behind this will remain a mystery to me, but there something worth pondering. I hope this can help at least someone else out there on THE INTERNET! from some of the frustration that I’ve experienced. Enjoy. G’night.

Edit: [2006-02-06T03:28-0600]
Perhaps my jubilation was premature. Although I successfully used my wireless network for several hours the night this was posted, I was right back where I started, when I tried using my laptop a couple nights ago. I connected up to the AP right after starting up my laptop, signed onto my captive portal, and WiFi was working … then about ten minutes later, there was approximately no connectivity (no pinging the AP, or the device behind it … nothing even appearing in the ARP cache. I’ll keep this updated if I find out anything else useful.

Yes, yes, I know I haven’t posted in quite a long time. I’ve been busy (well, on and off) since my last post, with work, moving, work, getting started in all my classes, doing all the work in my classes, and preparing for finals in my classes (in approximately that order). I ended up taking:

• CSci 3081 – Program Design and Development
• CSci 4041 – Algorithms & Data Structures
• CSci 4061 – Intro to Operating Systems, and
• FScN 1112 – Principles of Nutrition

Overall, the schedule was pretty nice (first class was 6:30 PM Monday, 11:15 AM Tuesday and Thursday, 4:40 PM Wednesday, and 12:20 PM Friday), but when everything lined up, the three csci’s were hell. There were definitely weeks during which I only got to sleep about three times… :-/ But I have survived. That said, I have an algorithms final at 8 AM on Monday, operating systems final at 6:30 PM Monday, and program design final at 4 PM Tuesday. Needless to say, I’m not particularly excited about any of them, but I’m probably the best prepared for operating systems (OS), and least prepared for algorithms.

Despite being somewhat confident about OS, I still ended up getting rather screwed over by my lab partner (who I had never met prior to randomly selecting him as a partner for this class), to the degree of directly losing at least 8% of my final grade because of him (and I directly gave him at least 12% of his final grade), so I’m going into the final (worth 30%) with a very low B. I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself in algorithms, for doing rather poorly on the only midterm and a few homework assignments, which also puts me at a low B going into the final (worth 35%). Lastly, I’m doing the best in program design, with much thanks due to my lab partner. The last project and paper were worth 20% combined, and those aren’t graded yet, but I’m guessing I’ll be going into the final with a high B or low A. My nutrition course was an online course consisting of weekly papers and online quizzes, which I elected to take pass/fail (at least, I certainly hope so); I have about 77% going into the final, which is worth 25%. I think I only need to get about 50% on the final to pass, so that’s not weighing too heavily on my mind (now watch me fail :-( . . . ).

Among other things, I also have a new photo Gallery set up, which is part of my entirely new really awesome server (hosted by xlhost), which I have lovingly named ‘vaughn’ as part of my new computer naming scheme of Alias characters (firewall arvin, laptop dixon, server vaughn . . . more to come). Just tonight, actually, I finally got around to migrating my blog over to the new server, but I have to figure out how to get my old gallery URLs to work with Gallery2, so that everything out the on the internet linking to /gallery/ doesn’t break now that things are in /gallery2/. There’s hypothetically a way to make that work using mod_rewrite, but it didn’t work the first time I tried it, so I’ll have to sit down some time and get that figured out, so I can finally move the www.p14nd4.com address over to the new server (rather than just vaughn.p14nd4.com).

Speaking of new computer things (read: `While I’m on a particularly nerdy rant…’), I also got a new laptop. It’s a factory refurbished IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T41 2373-5U2 (specs) (photos). To make a long story short, I had to give my old tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P-1035 back to my employer, which put me on a frantic ~month-long search for a nice, but relatively inexpensive laptop. I’ve been in love with the T-series of IBM ThinkPads for quite a while, so when I finally found this for $820 on eBay, I was thrilled. Having a fast, nice laptop with an incredible 1400×1050 14.1" LCD is really an unbelievable experience, coming from over two and a half years on the tiny, slow (though admittedly free) Lifebook. It has also been a pleasure to dual boot Ubuntu Linux (my first genuine prolonged experience with Linux as a desktop environment, as compared to the past few years of just using it as a server) and Windows XP Professional with 100% legitimate software (so far, at least). Additionally, since my laptop is no longer owned by alwaysBEthere, I’ve moved from using the screen name aBtL David to omega drh2 while on the laptop (so feel free to watch for me there). A few minor frustrations have come with the laptop, though:

• Money — or more accurately, the lack thereof, after spending nearly a grand on this small piece of plastic and silicon
• WiFi — it came with integrated WiFi (from the Centrino chipset, ipw2100), which:
  1. Disconnected every 5-45 seconds from a friend’s AP if I was using a lot of bandwidth
  2. Won’t connect to my 3com OfficeConnect Wireless 11g AP (3CRWE454G72), though it seems like this may be yet another problem with this AP
• LCD:
  1. As you can see in the last few photos, there’s some weird aura/halo sort of persistent image visible around the edge of the LCD, but only from an angle to the right.
  2. I have difficulty reproducing this, but I’ve also observed occasional image persistence issues, where an image will still be visible briefly after it has disappeared (for instance, the IBM logo on boot-up, or a menu after it disappears).
  3. Lastly, the image will occasionally flicker (cut out) while adjusting the screen angle (closing or opening it more).

  I think I’ve seen a post about the second problem before, but I’ve been unable to track down any information about these issues during my ~15 minutes of googling. If you can come up with any information about any of these things, I’d be greatly appreciative.

Now that it’s 7:16 AM, I’m going to try to cram my remaining thoughts into a paragraph or so, rather than dragging this out for another page. As many of you are aware, we recently got about 10" of snow, and I’m rather confident it’s here to stay this time. I love the snow (mostly), and recently remembered that I’m a downhill skier, so I should really try to get out soon. Though, unfortunately skiing may rank below finals, as well as Christmas shopping. I still have to find gifts for my father, brother, and girlfriend (Adrianne) (since she didn’t seem as excited as I thought she’d be at the prospect of a heated bra; damn). In addition to having moved to my $70/month server (up from $0) having purchased the $820 laptop, and paying for school, housing, and food, my funds are particularly low because I’ve been putting in roughly 0 hours at alwaysBEthere. I’ve been toying with the idea of looking for a job on campus, but a combination of factors (leading the pack is ‘laziness’) has prevented me from landing a position just yet. When I’m not working on things for school, I’ve kept my spare time occupied with Adrianne or one of my many TV shows:

• X-Files — finished all 9 seasons and the movie
• Arrested Development — Got hooked compliments of Sweeney, and have watched the first two seasons, and the third as it airs
• Firefly — Another show compliments of Sweeney, though admittedly only 15ish episodes and a movie
• Battlestar Galactica — Yet another Sweeney drop-off, I’ve now watched the miniseries, first season, and the episodes of season two that have aired so far
• The Pretender — I watched the first two seasons of this show, and have been on the lookout for seasons three and four
• Alias — Season five has begun, and I’ve been watching those as they air . . . I hate to say it, but I’m somewhat disappointed by this season
• Smallville — Season five has begun, and I’ve been watching those too. I’m actually rather pleased with most of this season, though.
• Scrubs — I re-watched the first four seasons of this show, and anxiously await its return in January
• Lost — Season two has begun, and I’ve been watching the episodes as they air. This season has not maintained my interest as well as season one, but I’m optimistic.
• Dark Angel — I just started watching this (two episodes in), and hope to finish its two-season run before Christmas

Lastly, I feel that I should mention that my ex-roommate Brad (2) has finally given in to the pressure/fad/plague of blogging, and started up c0ldfuse.blogspot.com. Read with caution.

P.S. Reading is for wimps.

I have a new blog (old blog was here, btw), now hosted on my own server. I set it up as a "fun project" while I was at work last week. I know it’s been a while since I updated, but as you’re probably aware, I’m fairly lazy, coupled with the fact that I’m also quite busy between getting up for work around 7 AM M-F, biking ~30 minutes downtown since my work moved to the Warehouse District in Downtown Minneapolis.

[Aside] I’m generally displeased with the move for a number of reasons.

• My commute changed from a bike ride of about seven minutes to about 30 (this is particularly bad when it’s ~90° F outside).
• I lost my private office, and now am not only out among annoying people, but my back is about 5′ from my boss’s office door.
• I lost my free underground parking (there’s no parking by the building, actually; several people are probably paying a couple hundred dollars per month to buy a spot … great plan whoever decided to move here).
• I lost my 24/7 building access. (While this hasn’t been a problem yet, I’ve definitely made midnight stops at the office to fix things multiple times in the past, so thils will suck.)
• Three people bring their dogs in to work on a regular basis. One of them urinates, poops, vomits, and has diarrhea on the carpet on a regular basis, and no one seems to scold the dog in any way. On the contrary, they just take the dog for a walk after it messes up the carpet. Apparently they didn’t bother to pay attention to basic conditioning techniques in intro psych :'(. It’s incredibly frustrating (and disgusting). P.S. I’m allergic to dogs.
• The server room at the new office is tiny, has very little power, no ventilation or lighting, and overall sucks compared to its counterpart at the old office.
• Someone stole my LCD (flat panel) during the move. Now I’m stuck on a crappy CRT (regular monitor) at 1024×768. It hurts my head.
• I think the closest Chipotle is slightly farther away than the previous location

On the other hand, there have been a few mild benefits.

• My mid-day commute T-Th to and from class has been cut from ~35 minutes each way to ~15 minutes.
• My commute from work to Adrianne‘s house is down from ~35 minutes to ~15.

But yeah, overall, not tremendously pleased with the move. [/Aside]

My class ends this coming week, so I have a final on Thursday. Right now I’m on track for a B, with which I would be completely satisfied. For better or for worse, the final is worth 37% of my grade, so if nothing else, there’s some pressure on my performance for it.

Anyway, I really meant to make this a really short entry. And while by my standards this still is unbelievably short, I need to edit and publish a ~6-page article for my web site before I go to bed. I kind of, uh, haven’t started that yet, and wrote this instead of working on that. Getting up at 7 AM sucks, mmkay? Particularly after staying up until ~2 AM on a regular basis. Oh, I get to move into Riverbend (2) in two weeks, which is pretty cool. It’s in the middle of campus, has a kitchen, my own private bedroom, air conditioning, etc. It should be pretty alright.

Bah, I’m getting more distracted. Make sure to check out my photos from my trip to Alaska, if you haven’t done so already. I’ll see y’all later.