From last night there are pics and more pics. Jeff needs a bigger memory stick for his camera though... :) I love Saturdays - nothing to do but just sit around. Slightly annoying there's still finals next week, and next Saturday I actually have to go do something, but after that Saturdays should be even more enjoyable... I actually did go do something today. I needed a way to switch component/HD RGB video signals, and realised since most stuff has HD-15 connectors anyways, I can probably use this old KVM which I got for free from work a few years back when the mouse ports stopped working. The only problem was I didn't have a power supply for it. So off to RadioShack and I discovered they have a cool adaptor that's the same as a wall wart, but the thing is miniaturized and practically the size of a standard plug. 1300mA too, so no problem powering the KVM. Of course now I realised that I need a F/F HD-15 connector to finish hooking it up, and I'll still need to override the keyboard sense (probably easy) and get it switching by computer/IR control (slightly harder), but oh well - that should be fun. Topped off the day by watching Spider-Man (yes, the dash is part of the official title). Seems like other people had some rather unpleasant Computer Systems project to work on though. Makes me glad our Networking project was already due - one can't do anything once it's turned in except worry, and worrying about things one can't do anything about is totally pointless, thus the excellent day not caring about anything. Now if only I could do something about the humidity in here... :(

Today went good. Classes involved review for finals, but we also watched another professor fire a ping pong ball which traveled at over 500mph at our professor. Stuff like that makes that physics class worth it. Still cleaning up from the account stuff at work. It's a bit of a pain, but I guess I can't really blame it on anything else... After work I went to a barbeque that I wasn't officially invited to, but was told by the organizers I should show up anyways (end of year party for the ITS student workers). Since I was asked like 15 times in the past 2 days if I was going, I figured it was best to show up. Food was good, and it was basically time to just hang out and chat with everyone, so was pretty cool. There were a few cameras there, so it'll be interesting to see those. Also seems that a bunch of people are gonna show up at my place for a party next week, so that should be fun. The basement is still clean from the party my sister had, so should be more things to do. I finally got sick of the light on the white ceiling so around my screen, so covered a decent size area of my ceiling with black cloth. The light is pretty much just the screen when the room lights are off now, which is cool - it makes the images bright and sharp with fewer distractions. Anyways, I'm rather glad to have everything but studying be done. Time for pre-study activities...

There's something very annoying about roaming profiles. This little thing where if you use a profile for a non-existant SID with a valid user explorer crashes. When you accidentally deleted and had to recreate 776 accounts and all those users have to reset their profile it's a bit of a pain. The promising utility to fix the issue didn't do much good either. I did eventually poke more and get the group policies up and running for more users though. Login and logout times appear to be much better under the new system. Maybe I'll add all the ITS workers if these go well. Lunch today was Chipotle, which always makes the day. After work I did my part of the networking project, which ended up being the server side of the order handling code. I also ended up playing around with DAAP and my DAAP to HTTP proxy. Now I have a few thousand songs in my playlist, and the system transparently handles servers being down, what passwords are needed, and tracking which songs are on which servers. I like having that much music on random - it's just cool to have no clue what the next song will be.

The day started off pretty decent. Tired, but making progress. In the afternoon I even figured out some stuff to do with profiles that'd help us out a lot. It involved moving people into groups, so I set up a script. Of course a copy and paste error cropped up, and my day took a downward turn. That copy and paste error deleted 700 students' accounts in about 2 seconds. Oops. With some quick perl scripting interfacing to an institutional database and some of our account system, I was able to recreate all the accounts within an hour or so though. Due to the fact I had run a password analysis a couple weeks ago I was even able to reset a bunch of passwords for people. The Help Desk didn't like me very much tonight though. But then it was off to a party at Dave's and the 10pm showing of the new Matrix movie. So got back from seeing Matrix Reloaded a little while ago. Definitely a cool movie. I like the comment about french. Now I'm really looking forward to the third one. At least it's 6 months and not 4 years, but they did do a "to be continued..." ending rather than a natural plot cut, which sorta sucks...

So, I thought I disliked Microsoft yesterday. Their implementation of AFP shares just sucks. Basically if there are problems, you have to rebuild the indexes, which normally takes a couple hours. For some reason this time they've been taking most of the day, and some shares are online only because I staggered them so it's working in stages rather than all at once. I also had to reinstall File Services for Macintosh to even get this far. Time to start looking into Samba and Netatalk some more I guess. Other than that finally finished up the book for AI. Interesting, but I started getting bored with it at the end. I'm either in the mood or not in the mood for reading. I mean I read both Two Towers and Return of the King over a weekend last fall, but tonight was annoyed with less than 80 pages. I guess extremes work. We're finally getting a good grasp on networking and it shouldn't be too bad to finish. That'll probably be mainly Thursday's project since tomorrow is Matrix Reloaded and the associated parties. Other than the fact I have a meeting at 9am, it should be a good day...

Well, the day started off well by getting to sleep in. Then on my way to work I find out that all the printing is down, due to a combination DOS attack, netatalk forking problem, and CUPS crashing. Oh well, the afternoon was good since I basically just chatted with people and read slashdot... I did a bunch of reading for AI, and ended up playing about 2 hours worth of chess (I discovered it's much more fun if you play for the game and not to win). Of course then I discovered how much fun AFP shares on a Win2000 server can be. And we'll leave that at that - I'm done working on servers for the night...

So I woke up, was so tired and half asleep so I could hardly walk straight, and had to navigate through a crowd of people I didn't know on my way up to the shower. Yea, they were still here at 10:15 this morning, and the house appears to still be in one piece. I was only woken up once, and that was my dad looking for the fart machine in my room. He neglected to notice the full giant glass of water next to my bed, so kicked it over - that's just about dry now... Anyways, we were all tired so didn't do anything until dinner for Mother's Day, except for relatives kept showing up. There wasn't any big thing going on, just different people stopping by all day, which sorta kept the weird party atmosphere alive for most of the day. We went and picked up Olive Garden for dinner since we didn't want to bother with a crowded restaurant (would you want to either if you had just had about 40 high schoolers in your house for an extended period of time?). This afternoon I was just laying on the couch playing with my dad's digital camera and took a whole ton of pictures. I decided that they need to have more consumer-level digital cameras with manual focus - it's too easy to completely confuse auto-focus if you want to do any type of effect. It didn't help that I didn't really want to learn the settings for manually setting the light level on that camera, and I was lazy so would have liked more zoom (it's 10x optical, which works pretty well for most things). I did get one picture which makes a decent background after a bit of touchup (Orig). I did all the work and my local copy are in lossless compression, which looks a bit better (it's not posted here for space reasons, if you want it just ask). It's still based off the original jpg though. I only took about a dozen shots of that one, so I wish I would have been shooting in tiff mode so it wouldn't have all the artifacts. Oh well, maybe if I don't get bored with that background and the weather is right again sometime. Movies of the day were Frequency, which is pretty good, and Redline (not in IMDB), which is pretty bad. The story sounded sorta interesting sci-fi, but by the end of the movie I still hadn't really figured out the point to the plot, and was wondering how they managed to keep it rated R... Anyways, finally getting around to checking the email and IMs for the day. I hardly touched the computer today if you sent me messages and wondered why I hadn't responded. It looks like Dave put up a bunch of pics. Well, the caffeine isn't having much effect anymore, and I have to get up in the morning...

Since mythtv really wanted a capture card, today I went out and bought a PVR-250 and spent a good chunk of the rest of the night getting it working. Turns out the windows drivers contain a firmware image, and burried in the documentation is instructions on how to extract them. It was bad enough I only discovered the problem when I got to the point of reading through the source code to figure out what was going on and what these two random files it wanted to open actually did. Anyways, that sorta works now, although I have a few bugs to work out still. I also helped my dad install a second drive and a video card in his machine. Then watched The Ring - that's just a weird movie. Tonight should be interesting, as there's a bit of a party which has been going strong for about 3 hours now that spans both upstairs and just outside my room (yea, there are a lot of people). People are still ariving, and it will be going all night, or at least until they fall asleep... I can hear them over my music too. Oh well, probably better than what some kids are doing for an after-prom party. I just hope I'll be able to stay awake tomorrow.

Today was pretty good, although pretty much everyone was ready for the weekend. We talked about breaking into stuff in networking, and about diffraction in physics. Yes, I actually payed attention in there today - that's partially due to my not having web pages since I managed to crash my laptop. Oh well, work was fun at first because the email server was effectively down to to problems reaching the domain controller (intermittent wireless outages again). This time I just fixed it by dropping some invalid static arp entries in and restarting exchange, which was very effective, although pretty much everyone agreed they would have never thought of that as a way to drop a firewall between the machines without using a firewall. Sometimes I must just think odd... :) Anyways, the reason for the packet loss was the rain in the trees again, which also meant our mini-golf trip was canceled. The tradeoff was Great China though, which wasn't so bad - gotta love crab rangoon. The DAAP proxy was very nice - a much larger selection of music, all streaming realtime to XMMS. Apparently my success convinced another person I work with to start making requests of iTunes clients to debug it. He also agreed it wasn't that complex. To top it all off I got home, built my PVR box, and watched music video DVDs while waiting for ISOs to download. RH9 is surprisingly easy to install, as was mythtv. It really wants a capture card though, so maybe tomorrow I'll go and find a PVR-250 or something. Hardware MPEG2 encoding would be nice. Oh well, apparently I have to help get stuff together tomorrow since my sister's having an all-night party with a bunch of people tomorrow night, which means I don't get to sleep in right. :( Hopefully it won't interfere with geeky shopping...

Well, I made it through the day. It was a coworker's birthday, so we went to Chipotle to celebrate. I got a lot of little miscellaneous things done at work, but not really any project type stuff. I hate that feeling like I haven't done anything. It doesn't help that I have this big personal project right now that sorta dwarfs the work projects. Physics homework was easy - about 5 minutes. At this point it's maybe one more homework, and then show up and get at least 58% of the final to keep an A. It'd almost be nice to have a bit of a challenge (although doing nothing can be nice too). As for the DAAP project, I now have a daap-proxy on one of my machines. It's nice to be able to just have iTunes shares loaded up in my xmms playlists and stream the songs transparently. I made progress on the rendezvous stuff too. Basically just sending and receiving the multicast packets - maybe this weekend I'll actually decide to try and decode some of them. It'd be cool do dynamically pull a browse list from the network through rendezvous. If I can decode the packets I'm thinking a rendezvous bridge between the main campus and ResNet networks would be cool too. We'll see on that one though.