Rinsefirst

The grading in one of my CSCI classes has thrown me threw a loop. Our class got 2 grades discussed with us during lab. Both were up for dispute.

The first one was our homework grade on a c program we wrote. People lost a point for using the wrong kind of comment. I lost 2 points because one of my lines wasn’t tabbed properly, correction.. a line which was tabbed properly but word wrapped. The code ran perfect, and I got a High B. I was lucky. Many people’s ran perfectly and they got a low C. Those who’s didn’t run, got F’s. That’s now how you grade code… Style is not that important.

The second one was a quiz that had a question that read "Is there anything wrong with this code and if so, what is it". We were told to ignore basically all of the code with the exception of 1 line. The code syntax was correct. The overall logic was correct. So my natural answer was, it’s correct. The code would do what was intended. The correct answer was, the code didn’t check for an error that occurs roughly once in a million times. How were we supposed to assume that that was something we wanted to check for in the first place?

Needless to say, I’m going to fight for the 2 points it would take to get me an A. I will also fight on the quiz if it doesn’t result in something I’m happy with. This is not a good way to manange a course.

Grading should be precise, and set before hand. A student should know what they are trying to achieve. I dont care if your going to mark me down for a missing tab, if you let me know your going to do that before hand.

That’s my rant for now, back to the massive things I need to get done.

For the last 19 years of my life, I’ve been running. Sometimes running away from something. Sometimes running towards something. Rarely do I take the time to walk, let alone stop. The only time I manage to do that is in the presence of God and from time to time, in the presence of Amber.

The question is, where has all this running got me?

Honestly: by most people’s standards, quite far. I’m a semester away from being done with college where most of my friends are either just starting or in the process of picking their major. I’m starting a company that a Rich and I had envisioned since 5th, if not 4th grade (Dr. Quandary I think is where the name got created… We even considered chaning it to RJ Corp, but RJ wasn’t part of the company, the first documents about the company were in fake time articles in 5th grade). I’m well on my way to having a wife, if I’m daring enough to and humble enough to ask. But where has it gotten me?

Simply put…. Dizzy.

For now that means reading Amber’s paper, packing for shaminaue, wokring on SPCPA’s website, coding a pole for John, my last week of work at the u of m, a cgi script for 4131, lots of code for 5106, a midterm for 4041, some more code for 4061, an email system that may or may not be working, prepping to fix a lady’s computers that aren’t of the right quality for her business (and therefore break), thoughts about a computer club meeting, and lastly and most importantly, trying to be there for those I love.

I will be lucky to pass any of them.

Will time free up when I don’t work for the u? We’ll see….

This is scary. It takes a lot to scary me, and this… is scary. Not scary like a horry movie. Not scary like someone’s holding a knife to my throat. This is scary in the sense that my mind is just worried.

Now before I give you the URL, let me describe it. The program is small. Larger than the typical virus, smaller than most windows applications. It runs with a very colorful, and might I add windows-like icon in your system tray. When double clicked, it launches a window that you probably use every day, but what it does is drastically different. Imagine, a program that is aware of everything on your machine. That means it can see your old chats, your old webpages, your old email. Imagine that it remembered them. Imagine that someone decided to allow you to search your hard drive using Google.

Oh wait… they did.

That’s right, a full fledge Google search engine that searchs your computer instead of the internet. It caches, indexs, and makes searchable everything on your machine including but not limited to your Word Documents, internet cache, and email. That, in my world is: SCARY.

Add to the fact that it’s nothing more than a webserver running on your machine and you’ve got what has the potential to be the world wide web being able to search your machine. That is a huge invasion of privacy risk for most people.

Needless to say the software found at http://desktop.google.com has the potential to be insanely dangerous. On the upside, it’s a very cool tool.

So give Google another mark… I figure it’s only a matter of time before they eliminate the need for windows all together… Then we’ll have a new evil.

Until then, I’m going to shut up again and do some homework. Either that or try to figure out the mentality that is the freshman mind and how it works in tightly spaced environments.

Later world.

This is crazy… My last update was almost a week ago to the minute.. Ok, here goes…

The server install went great last weekend, got it all done over the weekend, and it turned out we did it right. Little to no trouble with it, and it looks to be running at 100%, which is great. Now to write some crons for it.

I upgrade the webmail to horde from toby. If your using our company for email, you can now check it at http://webmail.jrcorps.com/. Pretty cool stuff. I’m working on talking Horde into removing all the spam from the inbox and putting it into a folder. It will probably mean procmail, but I’ll get it done.

I’m overloaded with work right now… 3 design jobs on the dockett, and 2 major homework assignments due basically monday. Tomorrow, I have a business thing at 2 and at 4:30 and I need to get Amber at 4. Needless to say it’s going to be go go go. Not to mention: Nebraska football is on at 6. How am I going to get this all done.

As you can imagine, this kind of stuff has been putting a strain on Amber’s and my relationship. I’m not sure what all that means, but I think we will be ok. She’s been acting weird lately, whether thats because we are spending less time together or because she is growing up and changing her mind about what she wants from life, I dont’ know. College will do that to a person.

Well, it’s pretty late, and I should get some sleep. You should all read Amber’s site, seeing as, she has been updating more and more lately.

Night all.

Everybody say WOOT WOOT, Praise to the king… WOOT WOOT! awww ya!

Today had the makings of the long day, and it almost ended as such, but as you can tell… I’m in an insanely good mood. Let’s go through the downsides of today first that was we can run through the best part of the day last.

The first thing on the list of things to do this morning was to get to the bank to get some safety deposit slips into the bank. My school bills are due next week and without killing all my accounts (including ones I’m not allowed to touch for personal purposes), I would not be able to pay for it. Therefore: cash out bonds so I can. I left them there bright and early this morning and sure enough by this afternoon, they were entered in with the right number and everything! Very impressive, I think I’ll be able to pay the bill on time.

My next stop was the server room at MSA. The plan was simple: put Fedora Core on the new server and most of the webserver, and go home. Of course, the world Justin lives in is never simple.

When I got there, Dan had it in the rack thanks to the amazing rails of Dell. The PowerEdge 1850 has some downsides compared to the 1750, but other than that it was overall pretty slick. It had the blue light, nice shape, as well as the nice rails that the 1750 has, but it was lacking a drive bay as well as the ability to open the case without removing it from the rack. The bezel was also cheap plastic it would seem. Either way still cool.

As soon as it was in, Dan and I tried to install Core. Turns out, after countless install attempts and about 2 hours of google time, that there is no sane method of getting FC to work with the raid drivers in this state of the art Dell. They hadn’t been built for the kernel that comes with FC, and upgrading the kernel before you have a kernel is well… hard to do (note: upgrading the kernel in general isn’t the easiest thing in the world, read on).

Quick side jump for those of you who don’t understand what I’m talking about:

Fedora Core - An operating system like windows which can be installed on a computer. http://fedora.redhat.com
Kernel - the first thing the computer boots into that basically controls the computer. It’s the program running in "kernel mode" as opposed to "user mode" if your into computer hardware. From a windows perspective, it’s all that black text you see when windows is booting that isn’t the bios. The cores can be found at http://www.kernel.org
BIOS - onboard instructions for boot… Basically the thing that starts everything.
Debian - another operating system like Fedora Core that I’m about to talk about.
Compiling - the term given to taking computer code such as C or visual basic and turning it into machine code (1’s and 0’s). Ok… So sometime in the mess of trying to figure out what to do, Dan discovered that someone had taken the Debian kernel and added in the things for our hard drive drivers and made an install disk out of it. So I said, let’s give it a whirl and sure enough… The Debian boot disk had us installing in the main operating system in no time.

Here’s where we take another divergence. While the server was installing itself, Dan and I ran back to my house to pick up a hard drive as well as to Chipotle for lunch. We had a small talk about the debates last night, a conversation with my grandpa discussing Radio Shack and Wireless technologies, and Dan had Chipotle for the first time. I guess he liked it, which is good… who doesn’t like Chipotle!

Back at MSA we continued the install of the server. Dan had to take off so it was me, Joe, and Adam. They were working on other things until our mini computer club meeting started up. We got a bunch of things worked out there which is good. We should be all set for next friday.

About the time that meeting was done, I had just about finished installing our firewall software and routing software, only to find… it didn’t work. Poking around a little, I found out that the kernel version I was running barely supported IPTables (the technology I like to use for firewalls) not to mention, it hadn’t been compiled in at install.

Realizing that I have never had to manually recompile the kernel before in my life, as well as, never having used Debian and it’s apt-get system, I thought, "This would be the perfect time to learn." So that’s what I set out to do. Of course whenever your learning something new… you often make mistakes.

Needless to say: my attempt (technically my first 3 attempts) failed horribly. The first time I missed linking lilo to the new kernel. The second time, it didn’t completely build properly, and the third time, I overwrote some dependencies and not only did my new kernel not work, but my old one stopped working as well. It was about this time that dinner for my mom’s b-day rolled around so I said, "I’ll start another reboot to reinstall debian again becasue I won’t be able to do anything with this box anymore anyway" and then I left.

My mom’s b-day was good. We went to an italin place in Wisconsin. Pretty good stuff. My mom wondered where Amber was… I informed her that Amber was at home dying in bed and that everyone should send her get well wishes so that she gets well. Hopefully she will be all good (as will Nikki hopefully) and we will all be able to watch Nebraska football (if we want) at my house tomorrow. Yay for that. (6pm).

After dinner it was back to MSA. I spent another 2 hours putting the OS back on and reading up on kernel technology. This time, I went a slightly different route with the kernel… I succeeded. In fact, it was huge. Within a matter of 10 minutes I had what wasn’t working, and my servers, serving. Within the hour (and at this very moment) MSA was back to it’s normal routing structure. The website is still on the temp server, as are about a dozen other things, but the actual internet is being served to the network by the new server and new firewall. Awesome!

That was my praise the lord moment of the night… Blaring Toby Mac in the server room, shouting out ONE PHENOMENEONONN. There is nothing like a server that starts working after you learn how to do something. Learning… is cool.

For example: I learned something else tonight while reading the fedora website. Core 3 (which I’m still excited about) looks like it’s going to have something similiar, but better than, terminal services for windows. It looks like with the advent of gigabit networking, it has become feasible to do network boots again, such that you can have stateless linux systems again. Very cool. http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/

Ok… Well I have a business meeting in the morning during which I need to talk over new clients with my partners in crime. Hopefully we can figure all this stuff out. 2 weeks notice anyone?