The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I have not been blogging much lately. It's difficult to find time and energy to do little things like blogging.

At the moment, I'm taking a break from writing several journalism assignments that were due last week. I've got two of four done which is quite good. Kirk has been working in 311 the past few days. I chose to come home after my test in microprocessors and meeting afterward about our little AI robot.

My group didn't do the worst this time and I think we owe that to Chris. He did well with the presentation. Next week, we must work on a shame/fame presentation for 30 minutes on Operating System GUIs. John is starting that project and I have to help in person on friday and online over the weekend. Byron and I have been working on flashback, our cross platform backup solution. Right now I've got the webserver working (mostly) and Byron has the scheduler and database code flushed out. The config class is causing the system to crash and it's clearly a pointer problem.

Tomorrow I have an assignment in English 427 due. It's an editing project with a website. I've had the website done for awhile, but I'm having problems printing it and will most likely have to photshop a few screen captures together to get it. I also need to write a letter to accompany it and have answers for the theme of my portfolio which I can't think about right now.

Next week Li wants us to brainstorm on improving linux for the masses. I don't think he's going to like my answers to that. I don't think there are many technical hurdles to linux adoption, more political ones. Linux must be advertised as a desktop and there must be software for it that equates to existing software. Games, productivity, and creative software is severely lacking on linux. Open Office isn't quite there for some people. There is nothing like the adobe creative suite or even business apps like quick books. When WoW and ET:QW runs well let me know.

I've been trying to pull together midnightbsd tasks this month too. We've got the build cluster running and several ports have been fixed. We've been near 2000 ports for some time now. The last run I saw had about 100 broken and a few hundred not tested due to broken depends. The OS itself is another problem entirely.

Users are starting to message me more frequently about JJ bugs and login problems. I got a very confusing email today.

Kirk wants me to push the computer science department more in discussions about magus.

It's been almost 36 hours since I last slept. I still haven't dozed off yet. I think I can in a few minutes.

I had trouble getting to sleep last night. I went to bed around 2 a.m. and found myself up for a minute or two around 7 a.m., but fell back asleep. I woke up at 2:30 p.m.

That's a lot of sleep. That means I missed both of my classes today.

To top it all off, we didn't get into SoC. Google told me I have to have big corporate backers or be something they use to get in. I have neither.

One aspect I did not find useful was the vague info on the password file format for cvs.

CVSROOT/passwd should look like this

username:encryptedpass:unixusertoimpersonate

There is also a readers and writers file that control access to the repository.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=55659&highlight=cvs+pserver

This covers cvs pserver setup. Normally, it would be insane to setup pserver. However, ohloh only supports pserver cvs setups.

I've setup a test pserver on one of my boxes to see how well it's going to work out. Down the road, it would make more sense to create a jail or setup a new box for this. EMU is out of the question since 2401 is blocked. (port for pserver)

I'm writing this on my Nintendo Wii. While that might not be amazing, I just learned from opera.com that the Wii supports USB keyboards for Input on the Internet Channel. I've successfully connected an Apple keyboard to the back of my Wii. It's one of the white keyboards (previous generation).

I'm also using an Apple keyboard extension cable with it.

This is great. So far, I haven't figured out how to hit OK as return just adds a newline in the box. Still, It's impressive.

I found this interesting blog entry on the differences between the two make. (freebsd vs gnu)

http://www.wgdd.de/?p=28

This just hit me with a project I was writing for class on bsd and everyone else was on linux. ugh. I just went with gnu make.

I'm having trouble sleeping tonight. I normally have trouble on Sunday nights. It's not just the fact I'm heading back after a week vacation (ha!), but the events that have transpired over the weekend.

Thursday, Chris met me to work on the build cluster for MidnightBSD. Caryn was playing WoW the whole time. I had this odd feeling all day, but I couldn't quite place it. My father was at the hospital, after collapsing during a test for his heart.

Ila called me sometime Friday with the news. My father had surgery. I talked to him Friday night. He called me Saturday afternoon to let me know he had been released.

At this point, the facts end.

Man enters ER after collapsing during heart stress test, fails to call family after recovery.

Isn't that how a journalist might write this up? I don't know, but it's happening to me. My father is at McLaren in Flint after he collapsed during a stress test. He had a 99.9 percent blockage in one of his arteries. They had to use a heart stint, and I don't even know his room number right now.

My grandmother had to call me after a brief call from him in the recovery room. My mother found out from his friend. I'm left with little information and a really shitty day.

My mother believes he's angry with both of us and we should visit him since he's a heart patient; we might upset him.

I'm still migrating from my PPC Mac to an intel model. It's been an interesting experience. I used a Time Machine backup to migrate data. It did not move data from the second drive I backup though. I've been copying 100GB of data over since yesterday. It's a very slow process. Mail.app still has some glitches, but the speed bump helped somewhat. I think Mail is the most resource intensive application on my system and I have photoshop installed! Many people would think that is crazy, but consider that it just "imported" 169,000 messages duirng the migration! I also have 3 accounts and until recently made use of hte RSS feature. I found it would lock up waiting on updates for that when I had to shut down so I stopped using it. Front Row is nice, but I think I'll like it better when I get iTunes setup. I have to deauth the mac before i can migrate to this machine.

One news outlet has run a story about the "controversy" surrounding Ann Richards what if support for Clinton.

http://www.kvue.com/video/index.html?nvid=222284

The original site is at:
http://www.standupforhillary.com/

This site is attempting to support Clinton in Texas.

Caryn and I had a nice meal earlier. It was nice to get out and relax after the the last few months. I had to do some work today, but it's not as bad as it could be.

For some odd reason, I'm watching Dragnet (the 80s movie). It's rather
amusing.

I'm testing out the new just journal command line client for UNIX systems. It's actually a very compact program so far. I'm quite happy about that.

this is a test

I've been quite busy lately working, going to school, and trying to balance many group projects. I had no idea this semester would be so busy at the start. In fact, I thought this would be an easy semester. I was wrong.

Nearly every aspect of my life has gotten a 75% effort lately. As a perfectionist, I'm quite annoyed by this course of events. It's hard for me to let go of one project and jump to the next.

Caryn and I went downtown on Valentine's day and on Saturday. We ate at Seva's and Cottage Inn respectively. It was a nice change of pace. Yummy. We also went to the new Borders store. It has a decent selection of computer books compared to other stores in the area. I got a book on GTK programming, and Caryn bought books on MySQL Stored Procedures as well as a cookbook. I revised the code for my assignment today and did some other homework.

I just googled my name and wow I came up everywhere. I think the first 10 hits are me. However, the first hit i found was disturbing that wasn't me.

http://books.google.com/books?id=DjlqULpdv3wC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=lucas+holt&source=web&ots=0RG9zvU4lD&sig=MZH4KZ93iYQm2qxid8GWIZDvAPU#PPA347,M1

Apparently, my name was used in a romance novel in the 80s. Bummer.

Apple released Mac OS 10.5.2 today. So far time machine seems to be much improved and the GUI is much more responsive. I'm quite impressed so far. I had to reboot a MidnightBSD machine (the build master) today to swap a video card. It had been up for 111 days. That is the longest uptime I'm aware of for MidnighBSD to date. I had to take an exam today in COSC422 which was rather weird. I'm not sure how I did. Apple has not yet released Apple TV 1.2.

On this super tuesday, I've had one hell of a day. I've been editing web pages for job #2, adding user accounts for job #1, trying to debug a strange windows problem on the server at job#1, editing word documents for Technical Editing, reviewing source code for a team project due at 1pm tomorrow, finishing homework for Li Zhang's class, doing laundry, helping andrew disable part of his script on the xserve, talking to triv about mports, and praying I get my journalism homework done tomorrow. I had one class meet today. I've been trying to follow the poll results. Needless to say, it's not a fun day.