Look Ma, I took more pictures:

• More Random Senior Year
• Metrotones Concert

(I’d like to do my part for contributing to a PageRank:) I’m very pleased to see that the Flash team over at Adobe has released a very working Flash Player 9 Beta for Linux.

I’ve tested it on a few videos in YouTube and the results are obvious: Sound and video are now synchronized well. I may very well be using my Linux desktop a whole lot more now.

I give a big thanks to the Flash team, especially Emmy Huang, the team leader.

For reference, I had to place the libflashplayer.so file into /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins and delete /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins/flashplayer.xpt. It kind of seems odd to me that my installation of Firefox is using the nsbrowser directory rather than the /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins directory. Whatever floats its boat, I guess.

Update: I unmerged ebuild netscape-flash from Portage to get rid of /usr/lib/nsbrowser. Firefox still believed I had Flash Player 7 installed. Then, I enabled the configuration option plugin.expose_full_path in about:config and figured out that the plugin it found was in /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins and despite the fact that that file has a date of October 19, it wasn’t Flash Player 9. Deleted the libflashplayer.so there, restarted, and works well.

I had a dream a few nights ago that was particularly geeky.

I was back at a panel discussion about infrastructure technology at Morgan that we had in the middle of the summer, where I first met my future boss. At the real discussion, I asked a few questions at the discussion including, “What technology really excites you and gets you out of the bed in the morning?” I had hoped the three members of the panel would engage in some banter about how the technology of their division is the most important. Instead, I got the relatively predictable but obviously correct answer of “the internet”.

In my dream, I asked perhaps the geekiest question I could think of: “If you were to choose a Linux command line utility to describe your personality, which would it be?”

I didn’t get to hear how each panelist responded, but began dreaming about a lot of potential responses. “cat because I am a real animal lover.” “sed. I’m a fantastic manipulator.” “man. Because I am one.”

Or my favorite, “less. because less is more.”

Today I was tasked with getting my software engineering group’s development environment set up. The requirement for our project is to build a three-tier application using a major component model framework. We chose to use:

• Java/EJB because it is well documented and in a language we all know (and since we don’t want to use COM+ or .Net as we don’t have Windows boxes, the only language we could use)
• Eclipse because it is the best Java IDE and is cross platform
• JBoss AS because it is a well supported J2EE application server and seemed to have good Eclipse support. Additionally, it is one of the few ASes to have J2EE 3.0 support (sort of, see below).

The combination of these tools is supposed to be easy, but I found it fairly tricky because of lack of documentation. I’m sure it could be worse had the guys over at JBoss not worked as hard as they have to bring a J2EE platform to the open-source world. The rest of this post include the steps that we took to install these tools and get them running. Hopefully they’ll be of help for those of you who got here through Google. (more…)

I found a one-liner few days ago that exactly accomplished what I needed to do: add a lot of files with spaces in each filename that exist in various parts of a source tree to the subversion respository. I reproduce the line here, to ensure use for posterity:

svn status | grep "^?" | sed -e 's/? *//' | sed -e 's/ /\ /g' | xargs svn add

This one-liner is shamelessly ripped from Britt Selvitelle’s blog.

Hooray! I was one of the first 400 participants in IBM’s Master the Mainframe competition to complete Part 1, giving me this cool, ridiculously geeky t-shirt:

Varun correctly pointed out that the font seems to come straight from Grand Theft Auto. I’m not quite sure what the allusion means.

I’m still debating as to whether I should complete Part 2. I have one more step to go and there are a few spots left to qualify for Part 3, but Part 3 itself is labeled “Approximate time to completion: Weeks to months.” That’s a bit intimidating and I think I have better things to do. That said, I learned more during the first two parts of the competition over the few days I was working on it than I have in any one class in a semester. We’ll see; continuing depends on my mood tonight.

I’ve added the following gallery links to my photos page above:

• Random Senior Year
• Salima’s Birthday Party
• Jenn and Marisa’s Party
• Columbia Homecoming
• The Woz
• Activities Fair
• Napa
• Midnight Madness

I just encountered a problem where Samba failed to start and just hung before daemonizing.

The last few messages left in /var/log/samba/log.smbd referred to trying to find CUPS: “cups server left to default localhost” and “Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost – Connection timed out”. I don’t use CUPS since I don’t have a printer and the service was not active.

Why would it hang on connecting to a service that doesn’t exist? For kicks, I started up CUPS without any defined printers to see what would happen to SMB. No luck, smbd still hung at exactly the same place.

Then I realized that I’m a big dummy. Network interface lo was not loaded. I’m not entirely sure how it was removed from my startup configuration. After doing an ‘ifconfig lo up’, I started samba:

Moral of the story: services need lo to use other services on the same box.

For the first time ever, I’m actually enjoying all of the classes I’m taking. You would think this is would good thing. Unfortunately, reading all of the assigned scientific papers, journal articles, and textbooks, coding, managing a small team of developers, and living with five of my best friends has taken time away from personal projects that I’d like to peruse.

The Xen thing took off nicely, but crashed. Not literally, it ran fine, but I had issues dealing with networking as doing things outside of the standard operating procedure (SOP for you home-gamers) isn’t horribly well documented. I had wanted to create that documentation, but then the semester started. I’ve been feeling a need to want to start again, but I am now adverse to doing it on babbage, my Linux desktop. That said, there is no glory in not taking a risk.

I got into IBM DB2v9-C for a while, with a desire to learn it thoroughly before starting my job next August. I got to through the relatively painless installation and slightly less obvious configuration and it runs well. DB2v9 has some good tutorials and excellent documentation support it, encouraging me to pursue this learning project. But, this stopped.

Then, a professor who is an IBM distinguished engineer pointed me towards a contest that IBM is running called Master the Mainframe. IBM gives entrants a mainframe ID on a z9 located in Poughkeepsie and issues a sequence of challenges in three parts to get them to learn their way around z/OS, ISPF, and other mainframe technologies. I learned more in the first 1.9 parts than I have from any class in the same time period (three days). I originally entered because I wanted a t-shirt with a mainframe on it (awarded after the first part), but I continued with the contest out of curiosity for something novel. Then I realized I had a lot of work to do and stopped.

Finally, Horde. I quit my (ex-)unix systems job at CUIT and am no longer paid to write small Perl scripts and hack bug-fixes and new features into IMP. I’ve been making Matt angry by not being able to dedicate as much of my time as we’d like.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but ambition is time-consuming.

My friend Jenn has a radio show on WBAR called Left Side Suicide. She’s one of the most fun DJs I’ve ever heard, doing crazy white midget rappers to good Emocore to JT. Check her archived shows out, conveniently posted in MP3 and Ogg and listen to the live show starting at 12:01am Monday.