The Angry Newf

Canada Day Pictures

2005-11-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know it's kind of late to be posting Canada Day Pictures (it did happen like 5 months ago), but well - I tend to be lazy and kind of slow a getting things done.

This are a few pictures that I took of the fireworks display in Fredercton. While they aren't super great, considering I had no coordination with the people doing the show and it was my first real experiment with doing nighttime pictures, I don't think they came out too bad.

Pictures From Newfoundland

2005-11-07T23:59:00.000-07:00

Well, seeing as how I was home to Newfoundland in August, I felt it was finally time to post some of the pictures that I took while I was home. I really couldn't post them before this, as I didn't want to give people the impression that I am motivated and get things done quickly.

All of the pictures here are taken on my Canon Digital Rebel, either using the 18-55 mm kit lens or my 55-200 mm Canon USM lens. It's a nice camera, and well, I think I've managed to create a few ok pictures using it.

This is probably my favourite picture that I took while I was home. It was taken near the lighthouse in Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland; with the silhouette provided courtesy of my good friend Heather.

This one is a bit of coastline, also at Rocky Harbour (taken about 10-15 minutes before the previous picture). I still don't understand why myself (or anyone else for that matter) would trade a place like this for the bricks and asphalt of a big city like Edmonton, but well, it's too late to change my mind now.

This final picture was taken in Southern Arm. Personally, I just kind of liked the old rusted anchor leaning against the rock so I decided to take a picture of it. It probably should have had a slightly wider aperture so the background would have been blurred a bit more, but it's too late for that now.

Hopefully I will get around to posting something else soon (as in less than a month from now), but I make no guarantees. I have some more pictures that I will eventually put up, some of the Canada Day fireworks in Fredericton and some from my trip across the country, and well - eventually I hope to take some of Edmonton that I can put up.

Yes; I did make it to Edmonton

2005-10-01T23:09:00.000-06:00

Well I haven't posted anything on here in a long time; with travelling/moving in the summer and starting my grad program at a new school I haven't really had a whole lot of time.

I did actually make it all the way to Edmonton, and so far I am enjoying my program - it is a lot of work (that would be mostly paper reading / synopsis writing for CMPUT 651) - but I guess thats the life of a grad student. You know I really think there is something wrong with my family, people aren't supposed to enjoy school as much as we seem to; probably why between me and my three brothers we have over 30 years of university, with two of us still going.

I do plan to eventually post some of the pictures that I took in Newfoundland and on my trip across.

Well this is enough for positive stuff - I need something to gripe about. I recently built a new small form factor computer - needed to spend the oil money on something. While the computer seemed to be good, I just over two weeks of having the computer my harddrive has already started to go bad - getting read errors and unable to reformat one (maybe both - didn't try to format the main partition) of the partitions. While it is not uncommon to get faulty parts, in particular harddrives, I was actually disapointed in this - I've had several seagate harddrives prior to this, all without any problems - but I guess eventually you have to hit a bad one.

I guess I will get to see how good Anitec's (www.anitec.ca) return process is; they have been excellent about things so far, answering questions, sending my a missing software disc express. Once I conact them and find out about replacement I will post again to let you know how it went; hopefully it will work out good and I'll need to find something else to complain about.

Finished Undergrad and Cross Canada Trip

2005-05-15T13:35:00.000-06:00

Well havn't posted in a while, so I thought I would make a short post.

I have finished my undergrad degree - with a pretty good final term I think (four A+s and an A-). The graducation ceremony (or Encaenia as UNB calls it) takes place the upcomming Saturday, so I'll get the first three letters (BCS in my case), only need a few more degrees an i'll catch up with the rest of my family.

As many people know I will be attending the University of Alberta in Edmonton in the fall to start a MSc in CS; I am planning on travelling by train and am intending to stop in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City (not in that order) along the way; if anyone has suggestions of places to visit in any (or all) of those cities let me know, as I've never been to Toronto or Montreal at all, and it was a long time ago that I was in Quebec City and Ottawa.

Mac OS X Tiger

2005-05-01T13:45:00.000-06:00

Well I got the new version of Mac OS X (Tiger) yesterday, and installed it on my iBook. While I have noticed a few bugs (nothing terribly bad) I have to say that overall I'm very pleased. There are definite improvements in performance in particular with the new QuickTime and in the user interface.

The spotlight search features are really great, completely removing the need for launchers like QuickSilver - and it's good for finding things if your completely disorganized like me. One feature that a lot of people seem to be ignoring is Spotlights Smart Folders - I find this to be a really useful feature; allowing me to create folders that will contain all of the files related to one thing; also you can have the same file be in multiple places (it's actual location, and one or more smart folders).

The Dashboard is rather cool too, although a lot of the included widgets are not particularly useful - either because of being US only, or simply because they serve no real useful feature. One thing I would recommend to people with Tiger is to enable the Dashboard developers mode - this allows you to place Dashboard widgets both on the dashboard layer or on your regular desktop (always on top). To put dashboard in developers mode type the following at a console prompt

defaults write com.apple.Dashboard devmode YES

Then either log out and back in or restart the Dock with the following command

killall Dock

Then to move things back and forth between layers simply drag the widget and switch between the Dashboard layer and the regular desktop (F12 by default). This is one of my small complaints though - the choice of F12 for the default button to bring up the Dashboard is in my opinion a bad one, as this is used by Apple laptops for Ejecting a CD. While this can be re-mapped by the user they should have stuck with one of the keys that are not already used on all of their systems (F7 or F8); F1 through F6 and F12 are used for special functions by PowerBooks and iBooks, and F9 through F11 are used for Exposé.

While I have not run into any problems with outside software I wouldn't recommend using an of the lower level hacks (such as APE and it's modules) as it is likely to cause an unstable system.

Finished Exams and the fall

2005-04-23T18:30:00.000-06:00

Well I have finished all of the exams for my final term of my undergraduate degree. Overall I think they went really well, but well you can never be too sure. The only one I'm really worried about would be my Operating Systems II exam; while my group has done very well on the project - there were a couple of questions on the exam that I'm not sure I did a really good job of answering.

On another note, I have decided on attending the University of Alberta in the fall, so I will be westward bound in September (actually, I'll likely leave the middle of August as I want to visit a few people and see a bit of the country on my way across). If anyone can suggest some good places to visit, things to see, in Montreal and/or Toronto it would be appreciated, as I will likely spend a day or two in each on my way along, if I can arrange things the way I want to.

OS II Project

2005-04-08T22:50:00.000-06:00

Well, the operating systems II project is finally complete. We did actually manage to get a complete set of drivers implemented - although the A/D converter is very picky and doesn't return consistant values - which creates it hard to write drivers for things - as the values returned for the same situation can be considerably (sometimes by up to a factor of 4 times) different for the same input.

We were able to actually get the LCD screen to work (well at least the top line of it) - which to our knowledge no other group was able to do. Also, our robot curling game kind of sucks as we only have one working robot - and well - you can't have a good game of curling with only one rock.

I have to thank my team members - they were one dedicated bunch - we were in the lab trying to get the last few things working for over 8 hours without a break. Thanks Jon and Tony!

Today was also the final class of my undergraduate career - all that's left now is one small assignment and four exams. Then I've got to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.

Desktop Manager

2005-04-06T17:45:00.000-06:00

One thing I've always missed since switching to a Mac from Linux is having multiple desktops. I found out about a little utility when I was talking to one of the profs. at school today called Desktop Manager (http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net/). It is a free (open-source) utility for OS X that gives you multiple desktops. One neat thing, but purely eye-candy, is the transitions when switching desktops. Personally I like 'Warp', sort of reminds me of the old Batman shows.

Anyway, If you have a Mac running 10.3 I would suggest you check it out, it's a nice little utility to have.

More rantings about OS II (aka - Those d**n robots)

2005-04-06T17:00:00.000-06:00

Well, now that my thesis project is done I've been devoting the majority of my time to my operating systems course. While in theory this should have been a very interesting and useful course, maybe actually even a learning experience, it has turned out to be nothing short of an effort in fustration.

Our groups main operating system (task management, semaphores, interprocess communiction) is all working fine, but getting device drivers working on the robots has been nothing but a nightmare. At the beginning of the term we were supposed to have five Rug Warrior Pro robots to work with for this course, in which our goal was to design and implement a pre-emptive multitasking operating system for the robot. While this task is all fine-and-dandy in and of itself, the fact that none of the hardware actually works properly makes testing of the system - in particular the hardware drivers miserable. Out of the five robots we were supposed to have to work with only two work at all, and of course the instructor for the course never bothered to test the equipment until a month into the term; leaving us with only two robots to work with (four the 13 groups in the class). While this wouldn't be terribly bad, neither of the remaining two robots are completely functional; the force microswitches to detect bumping into something are broken on both robots; one of the robots has both broken microphone and broken shaft encoders, the other has a broken stabelizer wheel, so even though the shaft encoders work it can't turn properly.

To make matters just a little bit better the instructor for the course has been gone for the last week; leaving us with no way to even attempt to get the robots working correctly and trying to implement things that may not be even physically possible to get working at all.

Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest, it's been bugging the heck out of me for the last few days.

Honour Thesis and Grad School

2005-03-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

My honours thesis presentation is finally done; seemed to go ok, and the people who I talked to seemed to think it's ok. Now I just need to finish off everything for my thesis report, which is comming along well.

On a completely unrelated note I recently received an e-amil from the University of Alberta's Computing Science department inviting me to apply for graduate studies (free of charge); I must say the the offer is tempting and I probably will apply. According to the e-mail I would be almost guaranteed to get $18,500 funding ( in addition to my NSERC) which certainly makes it attractive. If only I could take NRC with me it wouldn't be such a hard decision to make.

People who don't follow instructions

2005-03-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I have been feeling that my blog has been far too positive, therefore I felt the need to do some complaining; today's topic for complaints is people who don't follow instructions - or more specifically the marker for the operating systems course that I am taking, who seems to have a particular aversion to following instructions.

One of the goals of a well designed course should be to provide feedback on the progress of students throughout the term, typically through comments on projects and assignements. Our marker seems to either be incapable or unwilling to give feedback on the material he marks, despite several requests from the instructor to provide more comments.

On top of not providing adequate feedback, he seems unwilling to read and follow other instructions. For the second deliverable, which contained the code for our basic operating system, we were told to submit our code and a readme explaining how to run the system. For this deliverable we received one comment from the marker - stating that our code would not run on the simulator and had given a particular error message; despite having instructions in the readme file (in more than one place) explaining how to invoke the simulator so that it would be configured properly and avoid this error. We had lost marks on this deliverable until we talked to our instructor and had him return it to the marker with instructions to read the README file and follow the instructions included.

Well, I just needed to rant about that a bit; need to get that off my chest and make the blog a little less positive.

NSERC Scholarship

2005-03-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Well, so far this week has been nothing but increadible. Tuesday I got my tax return and bought an iPod shuffle, and last night when I was doing laundry I noticed a letter in our mail box. This letter was from NSERC, to which I had previously applied for a scholarship for grad school, and informed me that that I would be receiving a $17,300 PGS M scholarship to do grad studies next year. I guess I no longer need to worry about where I am going to get money to stay in school and avoid getting a real job, at least for the time being. Now all I need is to get a job for the summer, so that I can afford to feed myself until September comes.

I was talking to my father the night before and we were discussing financing for next year, he said that he thought it would be ok, he had a dream that I got a large scholarship. Well, that came true, I guess I just need him to dream that I will win the lottery now.

iPod Shuffle

2005-03-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to getting my taxes done this Tuesday, and I immediately (as in 15 minutes after having the refund money order cashed I had bought it) went out to get an iPod shuffle with my refund. This is the newest in Apple iPod line of digital music players, and I must say that so far I'm in love with this device. Nice and light, good sound quality - and well doesn't skip constantly (or at all for that matter) unlike my old cd player that this is replacing.

Some people complain about the shuffle not having a screen, but I do not see this as being a real disadvantge with this type of device. In a system with a large amount of storage a screen would be required, as you need to be able to navigate the large amount of music on the device, but with a device designed for a single playlist or a random selection of songs not only is a screen unnecessary, having one would be a waste of battery power.

If your in the market for a new music playing device, and are on a budget and cannot afford one of the other iPods, I would certainly recommend getting one, it's by far the best flash based mp3 player I've used.