The Next Generation of Gangsta Rap

Sometimes I run across some pretty off-the-wall stuff online. This YouTube video got my attention while I was reading this blog post. It's a short segment from a kid's show called Yo Gabba Gabba! I'm glad that kids of today will grow up knowing how to make the sickest of beats to impress their homies.

TA

It looks like my TA times are set now. I'll be in EME 56 on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 3-6PM to help students in EE 214 and EE 324. The first day of labs was today, and it went pretty well. Neither class has anything due until after the upcoming long weekend, so most people left early. It was fun to help everyone set up their boards, although I'm a little rusty when it comes to this stuff. I'm glad Dan Pederson (the head TA for the classes) was there to help refresh my memory. I'll have to dust of my Nexys board and fire it up to make sure I can still do all the labs.

Class Change and Music

Great news! I was able to change the meeting time of my E E 586 class from MWF 4-5PM to MWF 9-10AM. It turns out that nobody (including the professor) wanted to have class that late in the day. Essentially, it adds an extra half day to my weekends. Give me some time and I'll update my online schedule.

After that class, I walked across the EME footbridge and ran into a big event happening on the Honors lawn. There was free pizza, a slip-and-slide, a volleyball net, and a stage for live music. As I was grabbing my pizza, I found out that Rocky Votolato and Tyrone Wells were going to perform. I hadn't heard of Tyrone Wells before, but I have some Rocky Votolato on my iPod and I like it a lot. So I took a seat in the grass and ended up staying for both concerts.

Here's a list of the Rocky songs that I recognized, with my comments included in parenthesis:

Alabaster (I was happy that his opener was one I knew.)
White Daisy Passing (One of his all-time best. Sounded great live.)
I'll Catch You (Beautiful lyrics. He introduced it by saying, "Here's an old one.")
Suicide Medicine (My favorite song on the album of the same name.)
Mix Tapes / Cell Mates (I liked his performance of this song better than the version on the album. It was very good)
Tinfoil Hats (I hadn't heard this one before, but I liked it enough to add it to my iTunes cart.)

It seemed like most of the people in the audience were there to see Tyrone Wells. I hadn't heard of this guy before, but he turned out to be really good. He had enjoyable solo tunes and I really liked his band, too. Tyrone is originally from Spokane but now lives in California. He has a nice mix of slow, soft songs and upbeat, fun tunes. I bought six or seven of the songs I liked on iTunes when I got home.

In other music news, Switchfoot sent out an email yesterday announcing that they are going independent from Columbia Records. Also, they'll be coming out with another album sometime in 2008. They've already recorded 13 new songs! I'd be interested to hear more about why they wanted out of their contract.

Wedding Website

Kristen and I are getting married, and I've created a little website to keep everyone updated on the details of the wedding. The URL is http://www.dupyshon.com/wedding, and can be found as a link under DupyLinks. Check it out, write in the guestbook, and enjoy.

Printing Woes

I always say that printers are the worst part about computers. Just think about it: there are so many things that can go wrong when you're trying to print a document. Bad connections, paper jams, low ink, no paper, and more. The problem gets compounded when the printers are on a network and no one is quite sure how the system works.

This semester, EECS is switching over to a new print server setup. Now students are only given print quotas if they're taking a lab class. If you're not enrolled in a lab (like me), you have to pay out of pocket for your print jobs. Now, I'm not totally against the concept behind this new system. It's understandable that I should have to pay for the pages I print. I would support this system, except it doesn't work. I've found quite a few problems already, so I submitted a support request to the HelpDesk. Here's a copy of my message:

Hello, I've run into a few problems with the new printer server setup.

First, I was unable to find any documentation about how to add new printers. Please update the EECS website and post bulletins in the labs to explain this process.

Second, I have no print quota. Although I am not taking a lab course this semester, I am a TA for the EE 214 lab. I think I should be entitled to a print quota because I am providing an important service to EECS which will require me to print documents.

Third, I was unable to add any money to my printer account. I talked to the HelpDesk attendant and he was unable to help me do this. He was also unable to find anyone in the building who knew what to do. This should be a streamlined process. If you're expecting people to pay for print jobs, there needs to be a system in place that allows them to pay.

Fourth, you absolutely need to have a way to add money to your account online since the HelpDesk is not open 24 hours a day. What if I'm pulling an all-nighter and need to print something, but have run out of credit?

Fifth, am I losing the leftover account balance that I had from last semester? During last year, I paid to have my print quota extended. I should have nearly $5 left to use this year. Please transfer my outstanding balance to the new system or give me a refund.

Sixth, has the price-per-page increased since last year? I seem to remember that it used to be 2 cents per page. Now it looks like it is 5 cents per page. If this is in fact a price increase, what is the justification for 150% inflation?

Seventh, I'm concerned about the quality of service that will be provided for this new pay-to-print program. Last year there were plenty of times I could not print because of paper jams, low toner, or no paper. I ignored these inconveniences at the time because printing was essentially a free service. If I'm being asked to pay for my printed copies now, I will expect the printers to work whenever I need them to. Do you have a plan that will ensure this?

Thank you for your time, and thank you in advance for your efforts to resolve all of these issues.

Jazz Band and Other News

I recently auditioned for Jazz Band here at WSU and made it into Big Band 1 as 3rd trombone. Accordingly, my long term schedule has some days which I will not be available due to performances. If you want to come see the band perform, just take a look at our performance dates on the DupyCal on the Main Page. The performances start in October and end early December.

In some other news, I was able to get access to the Honors bike storage room and I also managed to buy a crimson pass. Now all I have to do is to snag a spot right outside of Honors for my car.

I have also applied to run for Vice President of Honors Hall this year, so that should be interesting. Most of my classes seem manageable this semester, so I hope not to run into too many problems with school work and similar aspects of balancing my life. I will still have to see about fencing club and whether I will have time for that, as well as a regular workout schedule. It seems that Marching Band will be adequate enough exercise for a little bit.

Overall, the first week has been good, and I feel that I am lining up my classes pretty well. That's all for now...

National Lentil Festival

Pullman is the Lentil Capital of the World. Every year before school, it hosts the National Lentil Festival. Since Kristen and I aren't doing band this year, we actually had a chance to take part in the festivities. I must say, I was impressed with the quality of the festival. On Friday we went downtown to experience the street fair. We sampled lentil chili, looked at the different booths, and even helped a lost child find her parents. On Saturday morning, we watched the Lentil Parade on Main Street with a couple of friends. There were a lot more entries in the parade than I thought there would be. We yelled for all of our friends in the Cougar Marching Band when they came down the road, but an old lady got mad because she "wanted to hear the band play, not you four yelling." Anyway, I took some pictures at the parade and have uploaded them as an album. Click here or check out DupyPics to view them.

First Day

The first day of CPT S 560 Operating Systems was this morning for me. The other students asked a lot of basic questions, which leads me to believe that they didn't get much systems programming exposure at their previous schools. I think I have a little bit of an advantage because I've already taken two OS classes from this professor before. It looks like he will cover most of the same topics as before with a little more depth.

I moved into my office today, Sloan 324. I haven't seen any of my office mates yet (there should be two of them). There's one phone in the room, and I can be reached there at 509-335-1787. I'll have some pictures of my office up a little later today.

No TA assignments posted yet. Until I know what lab I'm in, I can't set my office hours or my schedule at SEL. I talked to one of the secretaries and she said the list would be up by this afternoon.

Revised Schedule

My schedule for the fall has changed a bit, and it will probably be changed again before all said and done. For this reason, I've used Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create a schedule I can easily modify. You can view it at any time by following this link. It's also included below:

Jaron's School Schedule

This is my schedule for this semester at school:

Monday, Wednesday, Friday
8:00
9:00
10:00 Spanish 307
11:00 Philosophy 198
12:00
1:00
2:00
3:00
4:00
5:00 Marching Band (:45)
6:00 Marching Band
7:00 Marching Band
8:00

Tuesday, Thursday
8:00
9:00 Political Science 103 (:10)
10:00 Criminal Justice 101 (:35)
11:00 Criminal Justice 101
12:00
1:00 Psychology 198 (:25)
2:00 Psychology 198 (:40)
3:00
4:00
5:00 Marching Band (:45)
6:00 Marching Band
7:00 Marching Band
8:00

The parenthesized numbers indicate what minute of that hour the activity will begin or end, if it isn't close to the hour. For example, I have marching band at 5:45 every week night, so there is a "(:45)" after the listing at the 5 o'clock hour.

New Music

Until today, I'd bought barely any new music this summer, except for some Charles Brown tunes. Today, though, I went on a shopping spree. Here's the list of what I got:

Our Song - Taylor Swift
Just Might Have Her Radio On - Trent Tomlinson
Johny Cash - Jason Aldean
I Wonder - Kellie Pickler
Guys Like Me - Eric Church
Famous In a Small Town - Miranda Lambert
Amarillo Sky - Jason Aldean
Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal) - Fergie
Big Girls Don't Cry - Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons

I think all of these songs are pretty good. I've been listening to most of them on the local country station during my drives to and from work, but need them on my computer now that I won't be going to SEL every day during the school year.

Arrivals

Kristen and her dad came into town yesterday. It was so great to see her again! We went out Wingers and then watched No Reservations at the Pullman Village Center Cinemas. This morning we ate at the Old European (yum!) and now I'm waiting for a call to help load her storage stuff in a U-Haul so they can take it up to Spokane.

Jaron and my parents will be here this evening. Before then, I need to try to remove the door panels from my car so my dad and I can work on fixing the speakers. It's fun to see everyone again, especially after a whole summer of living in a ghost town.

Fire!

Right now there a big fire in a grain elevator in town. It's really close to where I live... we've been watching it from our balcony since about 5PM. There were flames filling the whole thing from bottom to top, and for a while there was a 40 foot pillar of fire coming out of the top.

The firefighters have been working hard and seem to have it pretty well under control now, but it's still smoking like crazy. This was a huge deal and firefighters were called from all the surrounding towns to come help out.

It's been really exciting to watch the whole thing. The whole town came to camp out on our back lawn to see the show, too. I'm kind of getting tired of all the smoke, though.

Check out the pictures I took by clicking on the link in DupyPics.

Audio/Video

Nick arrived for good yesterday, and he and I spent last night fooling around with his big 60's era speakers. They're set up in our living room right now, and they're mighty powerful. I was able to set up my old iBook to hook into the CD player and receive music streams from the computers in our bedrooms. Matt should be moving in today, bringing his new 37" flat panel HDTV with him. Add that to the mix and we've got a home theater paradise.

What I Saw at the Rec

Yesterday I saw a car accident when I was leaving the Rec Center. It happened right in front of me, not more than 15 feet away. There was a blue Ford Focus coming down the parking lot and a Ford truck that was backing out of its parking spot. The guy driving the truck just hit the gas, swung out of his spot, and crunched in a headlight on the Focus. The man driving the car had no time to react - he stepped on his brakes but wasn't even able to honk in time. I had one of those slow-motion moments and yelled to the driver of the truck, but it was too late. Everyone was shocked for a second, but then both parties just parked their vehicles and began exchanging information. I was glad to see that both of them were pretty calm about it. Remember - always look behind you when backing up, and proceed with caution. I think parking lots are just really accident prone.

getopt Keeps Internal State

Here's the solution to a problem that's been bothering me at work for two days now:

If you want to use getopt more than once within a program, across different inputs, you'll need to reset its internal state counters before each use:

printf("%d %d %d\n",optind,opterr,optopt);
... do getopt stuff ...
printf("%d %d %d\n",optind,opterr,optopt);

This outputs the following:

1 1 63
3 1 63

the '3' in my case is because I only had one option + parameter (+ program name == 3).

So, if you reset optind, opterr and optopt to 1, 1 and 63, before each new use of getopt, you should be fine.

-- Courtesy of DanielLawson and the Waikato Linux Users Group

Shake Hands with the Devil

When I was in Rwanda last summer, I spent a few hours as an extra on the set of a new movie about the genocide called Shake Hands with the Devil. I just read a news article that said Rwandan president Paul Kagame is attending a private showing this week and that the film will be submitted to film festivals in early September. Later that month, it will be released to the general public. I wonder if it will hit wide release in theaters across the US.

Old Movies

There's really something to be said for old movies. Lately I've watched quite a few, courtesy of my Blockbuster Total Access account. They include On the Waterfront, Some Like it Hot, and The Grapes of Wrath. I've appreciated these movies because they have great acting and wonderful writing. Back in those days, the actors carried the movies, not special effects or creative editing. A good movie is escapist: it moves you from your world into that of plot. A great movie does this, too, but it also makes you realize that the people you're watching on screen are true masters at their art.

Unit Testing

I started unit testing for my project at work today. A unit test is a program that goes through your program line-by-line, following every branch and conditional. Unit tests aren't simple to write, especially when you're trying to cover unusual conditions or large functions. I was dreading these tests, but they've actually been really fun so far. I think it's because I'm no longer just reading code or translating it. I'm actually writing it from scratch. I have much more freedom, plus it's kind of like a game to try to get 100% coverage of the code. Maybe I'll get sick of it in a while, but for now I'm enjoying it a lot. For my next project, I'd like to try writing the unit tests as I develop the code. That's more of an extreme programming approach.

Remote Control

If you're like me and you have so many computers that you don't know what to do with them (or just two that you can't use at once), this is exciting. I found an open source application called Synergy, which allows you to control multiple computers with one keyboard and one mouse. You choose one computer to be the server and the rest are clients. After setting up a simple TCP connection, you can move the mouse cursor off one screen and onto the other. Right now, I'm typing this post with the keyboard on my Ubuntu laptop to the browser window on my MacBook. The mouse is a bit jerky on the client computer, but the program works great overall.

Anticipated Movies

In summer of 2008, about one year from now, there are two movies that will be coming out that I would like to see. The first is Star Trek XI.
There were ten movies previous to this one, and one of the most exciting things is that this movie will be directed by J.J. Abrams, whose works have included the television series Alias and Lost. Abrams now represents a possible new life to the Star Trek franchise. He offered to take up a new movie project for the Star Trek franchise and his project is now pretty much confirmed. According to sources on the net like Rotten Tomatoes, the movie is set for a summer '08 release date.
There is a high likelihood that the movie is going to be set in TOS era (that's acronym language for "The Original Series") due to reports that an actor named Zachary Quinto (who has also played in the TV series Heroes) will be playing Spock. Oddly enough, Spock will also be played by Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock. Could we be looking at some type of flashback situation here? Perhaps a 200 year-old Spock at the end of his days is recounting some tale to a friend or some young Starfleet Academy cadets? We'll surely see.
The second movie to look for in a year is The Dark Knight. For all my Batfriends out there, you know what I'm talking about: the next installment of Christian Bale's portrayal as Batman. For those of you who saw Batman Begins, the latest news on this project appears to be just as compelling as the first movie in this series.
Once again, Rotten Tomatoes is helpful in getting the scoop, including information about a teaser trailer. Not much on the visual side, but the audio is quite exciting, at least to me. The basic idea is that Bruce Wayne is consulting Alfred on his frustrations, most likely at this Joker character (played by Heath Ledger... Better than Jack Nicholson? We'll see.) and saying that he's tried reason and fear, but Alfred explains that some men are just pure evil. And that isn't far from belief as The Joker gets the last few lines in, saying, "People are gonna die. I'm a man of my word," followed of course by the creepiest cackle you've heard since Nicholson in Burton's 1989 Batman. It sends chills down my spine just to think of this movie.
Anyway, those are my two anticipations in the movie industry a year from now. Keep on the lookout...

Model Rockets

My roommate John an I are talking about building some model rockets to shoot off in the field by our apartment. The plan is to build the rockets before school starts and have the maiden voyage around the time everyone is returning to Pullman. I'm planning to start on mine this weekend.

Speaking of returning to Pullman, I'm available if you need any help moving in. Just give me a call or shoot me an email.