Carpe PM

Wow! I haven’t written here in months. Time to run a number of updates and get things active again…

I am in the planning stages of building a diy opensolaris box. In the wake of Oracle acquiring Sun, who knows how well Oracle will keep OpenSolaris up to date. However, the potential of zfs entices me to try it out in the original habitat.

The most important part of a computer is always the case. I had a tough requirement this time around: I wanted 8 3.5″ bays and as quiet as possible. It may seem greedy, but I like the idea of setting up two four drive raidz2 mirrors. The quietest one I could find is made by Fractal Design in Sweden and gives Antec a run for their money in terms of loudness.

Fractal Design Define R2 Black Pearl:

You can see that this is an awesome potential box for storing a beast of a NAS. I am nailing down the final details for the internals, but it looks like I should be able to come up with a fairly affordable machine. I may also need to wait for the 2TB drive price point to drop since the low power “green” drives are apparently quite awful in performance and the server based drives are right now cheap at 1TB size. In addition, It looks like AMD consumer chips are the only processors that will support server type ECC memory. So, there you have it. More to come.

You’ve probably seen Iron Man. One of the coolest parts of Tony Stark’s mansion was the window in his bedroom. It was literally a transparent screen hooked up to his computer network. That technology is not far away. Samsung recently unveiled their own transparent OLED screen. Imagine waking up in your bedroom with an epic sized window that shows the current weather reports while being unobtrusive enough to allow you to still enjoy the view.

The Haiku OS is an interesting little beast. It acts very stable, but of course still has a lot of strange bugs. I’ve been running it with the free vmware player. I don’t know where the creators of this plan on taking it, but Haiku looks like a promising young startup that just needs to get all the open source applications to run on it. It looks like it has been attracting developers. They recently had a talk at Google too.

I just added some ancient posts that I had put up on my first web site from 2004. I found them on the way back machine at archive.org. I’ve lost all the posts I had on my previous blog though. But, I may be able to track some of them down.

I have a quiz tomorrow that I really do not want to take, but such is life. Spring Break is finally drawing near. It would have been nice to have the break earlier in the semester. In any case, one of my favorite authors, Maxx Barry, is in town tonight. I am going to try to get a book signed for myself and another one for a friend of mine. The author will be at Borders tonight at seven.

I haven’t posted in a long while. I guess that I haven’t had much to say. I’m still waiting for some applications for internships to get answered. In any case, I was tempted to buy an Apple TV last night, until I looked up the tech specs.

I wonder what Apple was thinking when they decided to ship an inferior product. What I mean is that AppleTV only can play up to 720p resolution. The HD standard will be 1080p because it has already be chosen for Blu-ray and HD-DVD. I’m shocked that this quality of playback is not supported. I was thinking of buying an Apple TV to play with, but this lack of power convinced me that Apple screwed up big time. I can personally deal with it only having a 40 gb hard drive on board, but I can’t understand why they would use a trashy 5400 rpm laptop drive. I can see why the price is only $300 dollars. Still, if they had also come out with another AppleTV that had a larger and faster hard drive and ran on one of their dual core processors, it would have received a huge number of purchases. The thing would cost more, but people would be willing to dish that out for a ‘puter with an HDMI out that would sit under their TV.

Somebody at Microsoft finally has a skin that looks nice. I was visiting the zune web site from some slashdot article and found the above skin in the downloads section. It’s black glass and runs real smooth here. The background is a picture I took in Arizona during one night in the car. I was also poking around ways to install OSX on an intel box. It looks pretty easy actually, but I don’t really care enough to get it. I actually have no preference as to what operating system I use, as long as it works.

The semester at school has begun and I don’t have a lot of homework so far. We finally have some quizzes and such coming up next week. I’ve also been applying for numerous internships. I haven’t heard anything from them so far. It’s kind of annoying to wait. Oh well.

Well, I’ve come back from the dead once more. Here are screenshots of my final project for the semester. We had to write a town using openGL, from scratch. Obviously we only had about one week to actually work on the project. I made all the models in maya, except for the zombie. Thank you psionic 3d. I also found out the limitations of milkshape. For example, forget about importing any animation or rigging into milkshape.

I had my last two finals of the semester yesterday. So, I’m going to go see a movie. I think I’ll try out The Pursuit of Happyness. Should be good to see Will Smith play a different role from his normal comic style.

Howdy. You’re probably wondering where I’ve been for the last month. Well, I survived those three midterms I mentioned. I received a good grade on the image editor I had to write. Also, I was assigned a project to create a roller coaster that could be built in “real-time.” I used OpenGL and fltk to build the program. I had to do everything from scratch. So, I had to define a curve for the track and figure out how to orient cars of the roller coaster to the track. I spent over 90 hours in about a week’s time. It was a ton of work, and I guess I don’t mind the punishment because I’m signing up for a games class next semester.

My final project for this semester will be to build a city. It’s meant to be an experiment with both texturing and modeling. However, we are supposed to have multiple “entities” moving about. The professor will hopefully be nice and provide the base code that was given the last time the class was taught. It already has some very simple cars moving about on the roads of a little residential district. Although, the texturing sucks for the base code.