In other news, I’m giving up installing Windows on the external drive. I’ve passed the point where the expense of time and effort has bypassed the expected benefit. I can’t help but be annoyed–doing this with linux takes no effort–but I guess I can’t be too disappointed. Microsoft software is designed to make profits for Microsoft, not to benefit the user. It’s useless to be disappointed each time this manifests itself.

On the plus side, I have a reasonable hope that I’ll be able to send in the old motherboard (which I’ve determined was the point of failure) and have it replaced under warrantee. It’ll only cost $60, plus shipping both ways. Now, this “paying to have a defective product fixed under warrantee” bit pisses me off–but even though the expected cost after shipping is around $100, it’s still less than half the cost of just buying a new one.

On the minus side, I was playing with sound options on the Linux box because there was no software mixer. This meant that while I could play music (via XMMS), and I could watch videos (with MPlayer), if I wanted sound in my videos I had to shut down XMMS, spin around three times, and chant voodoo incantations in order to get it to release its lock on the sound card. When the video was done, I had to do the exact same process in perfect reverse to be able to play music again. Do you have any idea how hard it is to chant voodoo incantations backwards?

Given that this is a stupid state for things to be in, I was trying to work out some way to arrange for various sound-producing programs to acquire feeds into a mixer, instead of locking down the sound card. Unfortunately, my tweaks somehow meant that I could no longer log into my account. Don’t ask me how that happened (I was only playing around with a text configuration file in my home directory called something like .alsarc) because I don’t know. Normally, this would be no big deal: I’d log in as root, delete or move the configuration file I had modified, and then log in as myself again.

Only, you can’t log in as root on Ubuntu. Even if you’ve set a password, the security manager just doesn’t let you log in.

So I get to install a whole new operating system again. I think I’m going back to FreeBSD; at least I have manuals for that. Not everything is lost; I booted a Knoppix CD I happened to have lying around (they’re handy for emergencies) and managed to copy the contents of my home directory to the external hard drive, from which location I expect to be able to get to them later. Still, my computers have apparantly decided that this is the week to piss me off.

(I realize that I could just delete the offending file from within Knoppix and continue using Ubuntu, but I’ve become rather disenchanted with that distro after using it exclusively for the last few days. Its major downside is that, though many things Just Work, the way in which they work tends to suck.)

Five weeks ago: Final components arrive.

Four weeks ago: System is assembled, up, and running.

Ten minutes ago: while playing a game, the system spontaneously reboots–or attempts to. It hangs just after the IDE drive check, saying “Keyboard error or no keyboard present.” Further testing determines that using a known working keyboard (from my Linux machine) doesn’t fix the problem. Plugging the working keyboard into various different USB ports doesn’t fix the problem. Plugging the working keyboard into a PS/2 adaptor into the backward-compatability port doesen’t fix the problem.

On the positive side, there was no sound of electrical discharge, no smoke, and no obviously fried components anywhere in the machine.

On the negative side, I don’t even know how to begin troubleshooting this, so I appear to have a large, brand new, very expensive paperweight.

I’m beginning to entertain a theory that I somehow have the Touch of Death as applied to computers, or at least, ones on which I game.

20050721

Last night, my students took me out to eat for my welcome party. It was a traditional Japanese restaurant, so the table was about 30 cm off the floor, and we had padded mats to sit on. Unlike a Japanese restaurant in the west, there was no pit under the table to rest your legs in if they fall asleep, but it turned out alright. They encouraged me to relax and be comfortable, and it wasn’t actually all that difficult to accomplish.

They were very complimentary through the night. I’m not sure how much of it was ritual courtesy, but it was certainly very nice to hear that I’m stylish and that I’m good at using chopsticks. What was really unexpected was that they all seemed to agree that I looked like Tom Cruise. Of course, whether they intended it or not, there was a veiled warning behind their compliments: they were entirely uncomplimentary to the previous teacher. Obviously testing new vocabulary, they said he wasn’t fit to teach, and one woman present said she had lost her will to learn English because of him. As that’s not the kind of legacy I want to leave behind, it’s incentive to do my job properly.

The food also was generally Japanese, which meant that with certain exceptions, I had no idea what I was eating. Luckily, I had my students to help out; they were more than willing to debate over the translation until they could tell me with certainty what was squid and what was octopus, and other distinctions between things I would otherwise never have tried. Actually, the octopus was pretty good, once you got past the appearance: It’s served as slices of tentacle, complete with suckers. Nevertheless, I’d be willing to have it again; it’s got a different texture than squid; almost crunchy. It’s (at least prepared the way I had it) more like a vegetable than like seafood.

Actually, there were a large number of small dishes, most of which were delicious. The order of events was as follows: when we arrived, we were shown into a mid-sized room containing only the six mats and a long table. The room was nicely paneled in wood all around. As we entered the room, there was an area to remove our shoes before walking into the room proper. Once people decided what they wanted, someone would get up, go to the telephone by the door, and call in the order. Shortly thereafter, a waitress would knock, apologise for disturbing us, and walk in and serve the food requested. People would eat, then someone would think of something else they wanted (or need a refill of their drink) and the process would repeat.

Consequently, I had a little bit of sashimi (sushi without the rice and seaweed), a little bit of octopus, a rice ball, a little bit of pizza, some garlic steak with radish, some delicious salad with “rare ham” on top, some rice dish which they said was Korean and which apparantly involved, among other things, an egg, onions, and other vegetables; I had some lightly pickeled cucumber, and a bit of pickeled eggplant, and some of another vegetable which I couldn’t identify; they told me the name but I don’t remember it. Everybody ate little bits of everything, from plates smaller than the average tea saucer. The experience seems designed to encourage sampling. I did manage to avoid the squid, but by that point, it was almost as much because I was full as from any reluctance.

Japanese colleges are all strictly ranked, and highly competitive in the upper ranks. What I didn’t know was that there exists a directory of foreign colleges for Japanese people considering studying overseas, which ranks them on the Japanese system. Apparantly, one of my students looked up WPI, and it turns out to be in the top rank. This made me happy. This, combined with the fact that in the previous two generations in my family, there are two dentists, a programmer, and a lawyer, made them very impressed with me and my lineage. They told me that they would like it if I stayed in Japan for a long time, and that I should find a nice Japanese girl to go out with. I can only hope that they continue to like me for the remainder of the year.

Eventually, someone noticed that it was past midnight; we had been there for almost four hours by that point. I was startled by the bill; it would have been over $30 per person, but they wouldn’t let me chip in, saying that it was my party. Overall, it was a really nice experience, and I was really happy they would do this for me. There were times when there was a flurry of conversation in Japanese which went way over my head, but usually someone would notice and give me a synopsis in English. There were also times when they were talking in Japanese that I understood nearly everything. It was, if anything, an incentive for me to continue learning.

20050725

I am going to go insane.

I finished assembling the new computer today; it’s working nicely, thanks to a linux distribution called Ubuntu which has the first really user-friendly installer that I’ve seen on a linux to date. I popped the CD in, and an hour later, I had a nice GNOME desktop environment with a graphical login screen and everything. The only work I had to do during the install process was decide how I wanted to partition the drive, and tell it what language I wanted to use.

It’s going to get ripped out later, of course, and replaced with something a bit more heavy-duty. That’s a project for another time, though.

Anyhow, while I was assembling the Linux system, I wanted to give it the old drive from when I was seriously trying to dual-boot my Windows machine. I had formatted the smaller drive in the old machine to ReiserFS (as well as a boot and swap partition) and Windows could no longer see it. Actually, Windows continued to be unable to see it even after it was formatted to Fat32 again, which is why it was no loss moving it into the other machine.

After taking it out, I discovered that Grub has serious issues when you do something like remove a hard drive without telling it what’s up. Unfortunately for me, nothing I tried in attempting to update it as to the situation worked; it just sat there, politely working perfectly while the drive was plugged in, and refusing to let me boot anything when the drive was disconnected.

After a while, I got sick of this, so I decided that Windows surely could solve the problem by eradicating Grub. Unfortunately, normal system repair doesn’t do this, it just un-did the effects of SP2. I ended up reinstalling Windows, a process which took about 90 minutes longer than it should have, for no reason that I could discern. Perhaps it was decrypting everything on the disc on the fly, or something.

This solution worked, which had me really happy–for about five minutes. I knew that I would need to reinstall every application that touches the registry, but I figured that was a small price to pay; I wanted to do some housecleaning anyway. What I didn’t know was that apparantly the onboard audio controller on the motherboard doesn’t get automatically recognized by Windows; you need to install it separately. This wouldn’t be a problem but for the fact that I don’t have the motherboard’s driver CD, and I don’t have the internet. The result is that I don’t have sound.

In the absence of the internet, I’ve kept myself functioning by listening to music non-stop, and watching movies very often. It’s a good strategy to keep out boredom. Neither of those activities are worth much, though, when your computer refuses to produce any sound at all.

Even though this was highly annoying, I thought I had a way around it. Ubuntu came pre-installed with a ton of software, and sure enough, there was a “Music Player” installed that was such an obvious Itunes rip-off that I’m amazed they haven’t been sued out of existence. I burned a CD with enough good music to tide me over for a while, plugged it in, dragged it into the Music Player–and got an error message: “Music Player doesn’t have the plugin necessary to play MP3 files.”

That’s not the end of the story. Not all of my music is in MP3; some of it is, for one reason, saved as flac, as ogg, as aac. But no matter what I tried, I always got the exact same error: “Music Player doesn’t have the plugin necessary to play MP3 files.” I don’t know what’s up with Music Player and its crappy plugins. If I had the internet, I could probably get the plugin in 5 minutes. But I don’t have the internet.

Interestingly enough, NOTHING AT ALL works right now that I want to do. Music, games, movies, internet–these comprise my leisure activities indoors, and all of them are impossible. The last of them is prerequisite to the first three, and I have no idea if or when it’s going to come back. I can’t sign up for a new plan myself; the only way I’m going to be online before I get my alien card in another two months is if my landlord/franchise owner agrees to buy it in his name for this apartment, and just take the amount from my salary every month. Communicating this desire to him is complicated, as he speaks no english. I’ve tried the indirect route (otherwise known as the Japanese route); I’m going to ask tomorrow if my inquiries have been passed along.

It’s not quite true that I have nothing at all to do. I brought 10 of my favorite books to Japan with me. It was a difficult process, because I have quite a few more than 10 that I would have liked to bring. Eventually, I worked the number down to that many, because that was the number I could afford in space and weight in my duffels. However, there was one flaw with this strategy that didn’t occur to me until I was here: I’ve practically memorized all of them. They are my ten favorite books. It’s not much fun to read a book that you’ve memorized; there’s no point to it.

I will go insane. I know this, and there’s not much I can do about it. Except maybe go outside sometimes. Or something.

20050727

There’s a typhoon scheduled for tonight, but it seems oddly rainless. Nevertheless, the manager and boss all seemed deeply interested in its progress on TV, so it’s probably best to assume that it will eventually come…

I just had an interesting experience. Though I noticed that Ubuntu wasn’t explicit about setting up the root account as distinct from the normal user account, I wasn’t worried about it. I assumed that it was the same as my user password, because sudo worked with my user password. However, when I tried to su, I couldn’t seem to log in. Eventually it dawned on me that the root password was /not/ the same as my user password, and that Ubuntu had set it to something without telling me exactly what it was set to.

Luckily for me, sudo passwd root worked just fine. I think the idea the designers had was that anyone who both knew that root existed, and could think of that trick, was safe to grant root access to. Anyone else could just get by in blissful ignorance.

Speaking of passwords, I had encrypted all of my private journal entries using Windows’ encrypted file system feature some time ago, more because I was interested in it than out of any sense of security. This bit me in the ass: when I reinstalled Windows a few days ago, I lost the ability to decrypt those files. Six years of journals vanished without a trace just now, and no practical chance of recovering them.

I don’t particularly mind: I only ever write in journals; I almost never read them. Still, it’s kind of too bad; they were the sort of thing I thought posterity might be interested in; whatever spouse or kids I might have could probably get a kick out of them.

20050728

The date on the previous journal entry is misleading: it happened around 0130; conceptually two days ago, even though the actual date is yesterday’s.

The predicted typhoon never showed up. When I asked about it later, the secretary told me that it had passed quickly in the night. Whatever the cause, when I woke up yesterday, it was to weather more nearly perfect than I had yet experienced in Japan.

The sky, for the first time since I arrived, was not cloudy at all. Instead, it was a deep and radiant blue, with only a few wisps at the top of the atmosphere to mar it. The temperature was pleasantly cool in the shade, and very warm in the sun. The humidity was low enough, for the first time that I’ve been here, that I didn’t actually notice it. There was a strong breeze blowing steadily, which rolled the surface of the pond and the tops of the rice in the fields in similar and relaxing ways.

Today, the weather shows definite signs that it is moving toward the normal summer behavior. Though the sky is still mostly clear, clouds are moving in on every horizon. There is a breeze blowing fitfully, but it isn’t enough to distract you from the humidity, which has returned in full force.

If this is how typhoons go, I want more of them. I want them every week. Yesterday was my busiest classroom day of the week, and I want to spend more time outdoors in weather that actually deserves it.

Your Personal Statement should be a brief but carefully written essay regarding: 1) your reasons you want to do graduate work in this particular field, 2) your specific interests and experiences in this field, 3) any special skill or experiences that may relate to an assistantship, and 4) your career plans.
—–

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned during my time as an undergraduate student is that computer science is a continually evolving field. Specific languages and procedures that I use now might be rendered useless by new developments in theory or technique at any moment. Keeping abreast of current developments is a requirement just to survive in the job market.

However, I’d rather not just tread water, just keep afloat. I’d rather be part of the group pushing the envelope of what can be done with computers; I’d rather be writing the papers than reading them. Undergraduate studies are a step toward a career coding; they bring one up to speed with curent practice. Graduate studies are the next leap forward; they transform my role from that of a learner to that of an innovator.

WPI’s undergraduate computer science curriculum is project-based. Among other things, this means that before graduation, I complete two projects for class credit: the IQP is worth one class of credit, and the MQP is worth three. The former involved the development of a tool to aid people unfamiliar with computers with the process of setting up a complex database-backed web system. The latter, currently in progress, seeks to extend the Napkin Pluggable Look and Feel (napkinlaf.sourceforge.net) by creating a system which generates icons which look as if they had been hand-drawn, as the icons are called for.

The only common elements between those projects is that they both represented a significant amount of research, of delving into programming territory unfamiliar to me. I learned enough from the first project to qualify as a PHP/MySQL expert at the job I got subsequently; I expect to emerge from the MQP an authority on both Java PLAF technology and the specific graphical tricks involved in tricking people into thinking that a human drew something machine-generated. Some of my most interesting classes have been in AI and pattern recognition. I enjoy extending myself, branching into new areas and fields.

I don’t yet know what I will do after graduate school. I certainly wouldn’t mind doing pure research; holding a job learning things so new I’m the first person to get there could certainly be interesting. Alternately, I’ve had the idea for some time now that it might be fun developing intelligent opponents for computer games. For the moment, I intend to keep my options open.

One of the major reasons I look forward to graduate school is that I often read an article from one news source or another about a really interesting project being carried out by a team of graduate student researchers. Be it developing a control system for DARPA’s unmanned vehicle race, or a system which can beat most people at 20 questions, there are all sorts of interesting developments being made in the computing world today. Linus Torvalds was a graduate student when he wrote Linux. I want to make my mark too.

Any suggestions or comments are appreciated–I have a month before this is due…

On the minus side, I just spent several hours of coding to accomplish a small portion of what could probably have been done much better with about the same investment in time, spent configuring. On the silver-lining side, I now have a much better working notion of how PHP and MySQL actually work together, and the sorts of things they like and dislike.

Now, to sleep. My luck has been good recently; I’ll hope that my advisor isn’t too disappointed with last week’s progress. We meet in 7 hours, most of which time I will spend sleeping. However, this last week has been the first one so far in which my project partner and I haven’t met our weekly goals. Oh well. I suppose that just means that we’ll have to actually work in the coming weeks.

The first thing I noticed was that the ‘su’ command no longer worked. This command, for those of you unfamiliar with Linux, allows you to become ‘root’, i.e. the only person with the power to affect the computer in significant ways. This was bad, but not horrible, as I found that if I could bring up an actual login prompt, I could still log in as root. Still, it was a little unnerving, so I decided to shut everything down and reboot.

When the system came back up, I could not type. Rather, nothing that the keyboard was sending was being recognized by the computer. So I shut it down and waited a day.

Yesterday, I turned the computer on and tried again. Managed a normal login, started the graphical environment… and started testing. The first thing I noticed was that the ‘su’ command still didn’t work. The next things I noticed (as those were the next two things that I tried to run) were that the sound didn’t work, and that the internet didn’t work.

You’ll note that the parts that don’t work now are sound, networking, and easy access to any sort of superuser state. You’ll also note that without those, the only things a computer is good for is word processing, and that only if you have a printer directly attached to the thing, which I don’t.

The good news is that I think I know why my computer decided that it hated life: I had recently merged in a a large number of updates to various programs, many of which do critical things necessary for my computer’s operation. These represented the interesting parts of the continuation of the development of Open Source Software in general; they’re the newest versions of the programs I have since I last updated them all, six weeks ago. When the computer was done compiling and sorting everything out, it gave me a message saying, “the updates changed certain configuration files, listed here… please take a look at these and merge them manually with the originals, which I have saved here… or just run this utility, etc-update, which will do all that for you automatically.”

As I had never seen or heard of most of these configuration files, and I was sure that an automatic update utility wouldn’t destroy my system, I was happy enough to just let the automatic utility do its thing. I’m pretty sure that this is what caused my system’s demise.

Now, this would be fairly easy to repair, but for two things: the automatic updater deleted the original config files when it was done with them, in a move I can only assume was designed to save disk space; and nobody seemed to think it prudent to log the names of the files modified anywhere. I was delighted to find the log file /var/logs/emerge.log, only to be disgusted to note that it only logged the packages that I had merged, not any of the helpful, supplimentary text, such as the names of the config files that I should probably take a look at.

I’m trying to find a way to put the system back together, but it’s coming slowly. Which, as far as I can tell, is terrific.

The only language I’ve ever used in which the graphical element has been fairly unobtrusive and simple was PHP. I suspect that it’s because PHP was built from the ground up to take the input and output functionality of HTML and run with it, as it merges very well with HTML code and fits the general style, and has no other obvious input or output methods. This was a good choice, because HTML itself was designed to be a interface design specification language of a high degree of power and flexibility, yet simple enough to be hand-coded without significant trouble.

The reason I’m mentioning all of this is that I’ve started to look into the how and why of creating a graphical desktop application for Linux. I would be doing this for Windows, but I no longer use that operating system. This is all leading into the creation of the graphical SCP client eventually. Right now, I’ve created a rather useless hello world program which, nonetheless, runs on the KDE desktop. However, I was following a tutorial rather closely. Next on the menu: creating a program of my own design and specification (a simple digital clock which I can resize with the font size adjusting accordingly, perhaps with alarm and/or analogue mode).

Why do I program and learn during summer vacation, when I could be mindlessly bent on relaxation? I’ve relapsed into a seminocturnal sleeping schedule, and there are only so many novels I can read…

Later in the day (actually, only maybe an hour ago), I remembered that the school is shutting down FTP access on August 1, so I should probably go about getting a nice graphical SCP client that I can use. I started browsing around for one immediately. Only problem is, they don’t seem to make them, for Linux at least. I kept seeing descriptions of how WinSCP was cool, and how windows people had a few options in this line, and as soon as they got to the Linux section they started extolling hte benefits of command-line interfaces. This obvious lack is somewhat surprising. I’d be tempted to write one myself, but for the fact that I know basically nothing about networks, security, or graphics. Still, what’s summer for if not to learn all the stuff you were too busy to think about during school?

In other news, they say that Field Training is a bad place to try to take contact lenses; that you’ll never have enough time to worry about putting them in or taking them out. So I’m getting a new pair of glasses, to replace the pair I put away a few years ago when I realized that I look better without perpetual highway-patrollman-style goggles hiding my face. The new ones are thin, streamlined, and made of titanium, which I suppose explains the cost at least a little. Still, it’s hard for me to come up with good reasons why a simple pair of glasses should cost more than a hundred dollars or so.

They’re supposed to come in Monday. Perhaps I’ll get a picture taken and put it up. I should probably also revamp and update my homepage. I’ll have to see how that goes.