All plants must die

It seems that all the plants have declared war on me. This morning I woke up with my eyes all puffy and watering, and my nose completely stuffed up. Apparently something I am VERY allergic to is spewing its devil pollen into the air in an attempt to kill me. I've tried taking some prescription strength allergy medication, but it has had little effect against to the weapons of the plants. At this point the only option is a mass attack to eliminate the plants before they kill me in my sleep.

At this point there is no hope of a peaceful solution and so it is with great sadness that I declare war upon the cellulose ones.

It's Alive

I can't believe it finally works!! What is it you might ask? It is the Maquina engineering fountain remote server I've been working on the last couple of years. Or original server was written by me in about 10 minutes a year or two back. Since this fall we've been slowly rewriting the server to support several concurrent connections and actually be somewhat feature rich! No longer does it completely crap out if you give it invalid input (actually I lie, it sill dies when you give invalid input only now it's a nice assert!).

You should check out Colins blog (link on the right) for movies and pictures of the server in action. The working version has been the effort of a bunch of people. Tim reworked our ladder network code to deal with disconnects. Colin and Craig have been the primary coders on the new and improved server and have done a good job. I revamped/cleaned up my networking library(it's still not perfect), wrote a logging library, gave some random C++ and system design/architecture help, and have been figuring out how to turn our poor console app into a Windows service (which as of about 10 minutes ago I think I have figure out).

All that's left before we can do an initial deployment is:

• Finish coding the last bits of the server
• Port the server to a Windows Service (my job)

Stuff left for final version:

• Implement User ID Protocol
• Finish Website Design (Mikah where is our Ajax Web 2.0 XML Service Client?)
  

Thank You for Smoking

Last night I saw the excellent movie "Thank You for Smoking". I definitely recommend the movie, it gives some interesting insight into "Spin" and the world of lobbiests. It even comes with some good tips on how to debate someone, just remember you don't need to be right you just need to show the other person is wrong.


This morning I'm heading to Engr to give a talk to high school students about how great computer engr is. I hope I manage to convince someone to become and engr. To be honest I'm not sure how much influence college student has with highschoolers. I could really see making a difference if I worked with them everyday and showed what cool stuff you can do in engineering, but given 1 hour? Hopefully our demo of our fountain remote control project doesn't totally break just before we give our presentation. What could possibly go wrong? Computers never make mistakes.

Afghani food made easy

Since I didn't make the 5 hour drive back home for Easter this last weekend, I decided to spend a rainy Sunday making some Afghani food with a recipe from my favorite restaurant. Well it turns out I didn't have all the ingredients necessary, and I was already hungry and didn't want to wait on food. So instead I made my own cheesy version of Kabeli Palow that was much simpler.

Rather than doing all the work in the recipe I simply browned some chicken in a pan threw in some garam masala, garlic salt, and raisins. I then combined the mixture with some basmati rice, and amazingly it turned out pretty good. It wasn't nearly as good as the food from Da Afghan but it sure was easy to make. I'll probably have the same thing tonight since all I have is some chicken and a 10lb bag of rice left in my apartment.

Dell invents everything!

A recent interview with the Dell CTO has Dell claiming if it wasn't for them PCI-Express, 802.11, 64 bit x86 support and more would never have come to be. While I agree Dell has a lot of power in the industry I think they are taking to much credit for other peoples work. About the only technology I might give Dell some credit for is making Intel support 64bit technology on their processors. They probably had a conversation along these lines:

Dell: Hey, Intel.

Intel: Yes?

Dell: We need 64 bit computers HP is stealing sales from us.

Intel: You have 64 bit processors. Itaniums should be good enough for you.

Dell: We want 64 bit x86!

Intel: Microsoft doesn't even support this.

Dell: I WANT IT!!!

Intel: No.

Dell: We'll use AMD.

Intel: .....

Intel: Would you like anything else with your 64 bit x64 procs?

Dell: Buy one get one free with your processors.

Intel: Ok.

Hell just froze over

Well I think its official hell just froze over. Apple has just announced a beta for a tool which will allow end users to dual boot Mac OS X and Windows XP on their Intel based Macs. This tool makes repartitioning your harddrive as simple as adjusting a slider and it gives you a full set of Windows drivers for the Apple hardware. This solution is more elegant than the previously announced user written BIOS compatibility layer. While the layer allowed you to boot xp it driver support for Apple's hardware was lacking. This makes me want to replace my 17in PowerBook with a MacBook Pro. Except I really can't justify dropping another 2k on a laptop in less than a year.

One of the funniest parts of the announcement shows Apple's attitude toward its PC competitors and Microsoft.

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Newegg is Teh Sux0r

Well the title says it all. I received a replacement mainboard for my broken one today. Only it wasn't really a replacement for my mainboard. Instead of the model I returned I received a inferior model which retails for $30-40 less than my board. It doesn't have even the same set of features as my old mainboard. To top it off the mainboard came all by itself and didn't include any of the cables, a manual, drivers, or any of the other stuff I returned as per Newegg.com's instructions.

After talking to a customer service rep I found I needed to RMA/return this POS board they sent me, and wait for them to get off their butts and possibly send me the correct item. The rep was kind enough to tell me they would refund $20 for shipping the item back (it actually costs $20.49 to ship). Hopefully they will actually credit my account, but as the overnight shipping I was promised on the phone doesn't show up on the RMA order my hopes for this aren't very high. At this point I was better off attempting to fix my mainboard by myself. This is probably the last time I ever buy anything from Newegg.com, or even recommend them to others. It seems that Newegg's customer service is starting to suck as they become more and more popular.