I was just thinking about how I’m going to make the move to FreeBSD+ZFS for Jayne, and decided to write down a few things I want to fix with my computers and stuff this summer. That turned into a rather extensive set of instructions for getting Jayne transitioned, so I figured I’d post it here so I don’t lose it! I’m not sure why the lists look so crappy, but whatever.

Kaylee and Simon

• Reinstall OS X and Jaunty, and install Windows 7 RC on Kaylee.
  • Get Steam and friends working in 7. No more Wine!
  • I’m currently consuming 245GB in OS X. This can be reduced to 200GB.
    • Don’t install FCS/CS4 content, this time.
  • I think a 260/10/50GB split (OS X, Linux, Windows) should do it.
  • Install 2.6.30, pray that WiFi works now. (still no WiFi)
• Install Fedora 11 final on Simon.

Jayne

• Move racarr.me to Dreamhost.
• Move hortont.com to Dreamhost.
  • Get better DNS control, put Jayne-services and stuff jayne.hortont.com.
  • Archive and remove Ease wiki.

• Install three additional disks (750GB, 1TB, and 160GB), at about 230$ cost.
  • 1TB, 750GB, 160GB, following my usual choices…
  • Move all content we want to persist to the 1TB disk (use ext3).
    • Don’t persist backups (maybe Matt’s); don’t persist Star Trek.
      • In theory, without those things we’re under 1TB.
      • Otherwise, start harassing Amy + CYGNUS for storage.
  • We now have 3×750GB + 3×1000GB + 1×160GB (5.41TB total).

• Install FreeBSD-8-CURRENT on the small disk.
  • Quickly make sure that all hardware, AFP, git, Apache, etc. work.
  • Recreate users, groups (share, www-data, etc).

• Create a RAID-Z pool across the 750GB disks (2.25TB zpool).
  • Create filesystems:
    • /srv/share/public (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/public
    • /srv/share/www (setgid=www-data,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/www
    • /home/* @ /tank/home/*
    • /git (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/git

• Copy the data from the single 1TB disk to the zpool.

• Add a second RAID-Z pool (consisting of all of the 1TB disks) to the zpool.
  • This brings the global zpool to approximately 5.25TB. For all intents and purposes, that should last us through the next two years with no problem, even with me taking video classes…

• Backup Kaylee to Jayne, see what happens. Fix, rinse, repeat. Win.

About a month ago, I bought a Nikkor 135mm f/2.8 pre-AI lens. It turns out that my D80 doesn’t accept pre-AI lenses – oops! – but, luckily, Robb’s D40 does! So, I (with some sadness) gave the lens to Robb… it was cheap, and it’s pretty awesome, so he might as well have it, rather than go through the hassle of modifying it or trying to sell it.

Below the jump, you’ll hear the story of what happened next. Click on!

Continue reading ‘New-Old Glass’

The last day of Sophomore year (for me) just ended; instead of thinking any more about that, I thought I’d write about a handful of material(ish) possessions of mine that came at small monetary cost (to me or my family), but have since proved to be worth it time and time again. Most things don’t stand out in this regard; they integrate themselves into my life, but they aren’t something that I actively remember and enjoy every second of. These three, however, are things which have a value far greater than their price for the entertainment and experiences I’ve derived from them:

Firstly, our Firefly box set. At the time, it was a somewhat off-the-cuff purchase. Dad, Amy, and I had seen an episode or two on TV, had heard about it on the internet, and were awaiting the movie, but had no emotional attachment to the show. Now, a few years later, I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve watched and rewatched these fourteen episodes, nor can I possibly estimate the enjoyment I’ve received both during and between these watchings. Mom commented long ago, while the three of us were quite quietly caught up in the world of Malcolm Reynolds and Co., that those four DVDs were possibly the best 40$ she’d ever spent. I can’t say I disagree. (Indeed; all three of my main computers at the moment are named after Firefly characters!)

Next, the Orange Box. I know this is a strange one, because I’m not a gamer; in fact, I only just finished playing through Half-Life 2 and the two episodes for the first time within the last week or so. However, this collection is more or less my only connection to the gaming world that many of my friends and colleagues so adore; I was introduced to it about a year ago by Mike and Nate, who insisted I play Portal. I sat, for five or six hours, without moving from the chair once, and finished the game – my first introduction to gaming post-PacMan, WASD+Mouse, and probably my single most enjoyable computing experience until Half-Life 2. Now, the story of Gordon and Alyx echoes in my head quite constantly (possibly because I only finished episode two a few days ago, but I hope it stays this way), and provides me yet another world in which to construct thoughts (both in my head, and in my occasional screwing around with the Source SDK, which I hope to soon resume after a few-month hiatus). In any case, this is another 40$ very well placed.

Finally, my Arduino. I’ve progressed on to breadboard- or PCB-mounted ATmega designs at this point, but this is where I got started again. About a decade ago (what!?!), Dad and I spent great deals of time playing around with Parallax’s Basic Stamp, making various small devices, teaching me how to program with the then-obvious choice of language, and providing a platform for a young me to experiment. Robb convinced me to pick up electronics again last semester so we could build guitar-related stuff; while this particular reason didn’t come to fruition, I invested a significant amount of money getting together anything I would need to complete any sort of small electronic project. I chose to grab an Arduino Diecimila while I was at it, so I had a microcontroller to tie things together. Since then, I’ve spent loads of time learning the ins and outs of the platform, building small things (and designing larger things), and in general trying to get acquainted with the internet’s favorite microcontroller. More importantly than my own work, though, I’ve helped a countless number of people here at RPI on various little Arduino-based projects, providing experience, parts, or programmers – most significantly, Connor, with his various IED projects (one of which is turning into a summer job!). All for 20$.

Yesterday, I got a wonderful email from Google telling me that my proposal for Summer of Code was accepted! So, this summer, I’m going to be working with Thomas Andersen on GNOME Games. I’m going to finish polishing Lights Off and the Seed-Same Gnome rewrite, make it easier to write games in Seed (by making libgames-support available), and (primarily) port Mines to Seed+Clutter. I have a feeling the work encompassed in my proposal might not take the whole summer, so I’m keeping my mind open for anything else that might be interesting to do towards the end. We’ll see!

Anyway; thanks, again, to Google, GNOME, Thomas, and everyone, and I hope we all have a great summer!

P.S. A little birdie told me that Mike and Matt both also got GSoC projects this summer! Congrats!

This is my second-to-last weekend at RPI for this semester; things are wrapping up quite nicely. Nearly half of my grade has yet to be determined in two classes (LITEC and SD&D), but overall this is shaping up to be my best semester so far, by a long shot… I’m much, much happier now, in Computer Science (and Engineering) classes, rather than Physics with a side of CS…

RCOS

Robb, Nate, Matt, and I presented on Ease and Seed today at the Rensselaer Center for Open Software, finishing our final requirement for this semester. Many thanks to Moorthy and Sean O’Sullivan for the opportunity!

Nate and Robb are planning on working with RCOS this summer, I believe; Nate is going to write a pretty, not-chintzy, G*-based typing tutor/testing application. I’m not sure what Robb’s planning to work on – probably Ease or Seed.

SD&D

A significant portion of Software Design & Documentation involved the design, documentation, and construction of an application of our choice. We created groups on the second day of class – I latched on to Andrew (who I didn’t know at the time), who proposed that those of us comfortable with Objective-C and interested in developing for either the Mac or the iPhone should stick together… I really didn’t want to be stuck working on some buzzword-infused web application, hosted on Windows, stuck in a SourceSafe repo, written in a combination of Java and ASP and Ruby… I really don’t take kindly to such projects

We eventually decided that we’d put together some sort of iPhone application – Andrew had an application that made it onto the App Store within a week or two of class starting (Notecards), so he had plenty of experience; I’d spent a good bit of time with Objective-C in the past; Sarah had spent a lot of time with straight C, as she’s been a LITEC TA for at least the last two semesters; and Cheng had a good bit of experience with C++ and the other languages espoused by RPI. Both Sarah and Cheng were quite open to learning whatever they needed to, so we had our group of four!

I believe it was Andrew who originally brought up the idea we eventually took to designing and implementing: a location-based task application. Basically, your generic to-do list, with the ability to tag a task with locations; when the phone detects that it’s near that location, it gently reminds you that you have something to do. We named it Tasc, after noticing the obvious pun based off of our first initials.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have quite enough time to finish the location part of the application – another week probably would have done it, but between me having no experience with UIKit and half of the team having never used Objective-C, there simply wasn’t enough time… so, you can tag locations, but auto-detection is not implemented. It’s really not that interesting without the ability to background applications, anyway.

We all had fun – I certainly consider the three of them new friends, now – and managed to succeed to a great extent. There’s still a significant amount of documentation to complete in the next week, but the Construction phase is over… luckily, since the class is mostly about design and documentation, the fact that we didn’t quite finish won’t affect us too much…

This experience also led me to buying into the iPhone Developer Program. I’m going to write another app or two and see if I can’t make my 100$ back (or more, who knows?!) over the summer… but that’s a story for another day!

P.S. We released Seed 0.5 on Wednesday. There’s a Bugzilla product for us in GNOME Bugzilla now, and Robb pushed our documentation to his GNOME webspace.

P.P.S. I moved Carol and Matt’s blogs to a Dreamhost server last week; if anyone has any trouble, let me know. Planning on moving Robb there or to b.g.o at some point in the future. There’s no reason other people’s stuff should depend on Jayne’s uptime.

The FOSSCamp at UDS : Hardy Heron was, more or less, my reintroduction to the Linux world… I’d been solely using Mac OS X up until that weekend. Robb dragged Gino and I (and Sarah) down to Boston to hang out with everyone there, and see what was going on. Since, I’ve become somewhat more involved in said world, mostly through contributions to Seed…

Fast forward to this year: Mom and Dad are helping (for Christmas) to send me to UDS : Karmic, so I’m going to Barcelona!!

I’ve been looking around at hotels and flights and stuff; most places in the area only offer doubles, so if anyone’s going sans sponsorship and is looking for a roommate (and doesn’t mind Hotel Rey Juan Carlos’ 200€-a-night prices), I promise not to be too bad (really, I just might talk about JavaScript a lot… that’s all!)! Email me if you’re interested (or, even better, if you know of somewhere in the area that’s cheaper!)…

Chromium is surprisingly usable on OS X at the moment. There’s some quirky bits in rendering (which are funny because of the whole it’s-really-WebKit thing), and you can’t reorder tabs at the moment (they drag out and don’t reattach to the window). I haven’t crashed it yet…

In any case… I’m rather impressed with how far it’s come so far, what with nearly nobody ever actually talking about it. Nate is convinced it’ll be a worthy competitor to Safari, but I don’t understand what a browser could offer that Safari doesn’t already

Oh, also… Google’s SVN server is a million times faster than Apple’s. I checked out all of Chromium (including a whole checkout of WebKit) within an hour. Which is signifcantly faster than the half-a-day it takes to get from Apple’s SVN or Git. And build was really fast, too. But I’ve never built WebKit+Safari, so I have nothing to compare with (still, I’d say the overhead of Chromium+V8 over what WebKit normally takes to build was minimal…).

Try. It. In a few months…

P.S. Wrote this from Chromium!

I got all signed up for classes on Thursday. Besides the below, I’m also signed up for Robotics I, but I’m probably going to drop it because it’s at 8:30AM three days a week (and is by no means required), and I have plenty of other class. I’m also TAing Inventor’s Studio next semester, so that’ll take up a good chunk of Wednesday mornings.