EECS from the Trenches

I never really understood what Top Gun was about until I watched this:

I love Quentin Tarantino

I have a couple of issues with Nowtune.com so far:

- Uploads only work if they’re all from the same directory. Bugfix I guess?
- You can’t delete tracks from a playlist!
- SLOW with lots of files. I have about 600 tracks in my main playlist and it takes about 5 to 10 seconds to load. And this is on a blazingly fast DS3 line.
- Crashes now and then, uploads fail…

BUT

I can do this: http://nowtune.com/njoubert/loungelatenight

and you can listen to the best late night lounge / study music Global Underground has to offer!

I just happened across a great article on music copywrites, by jwz himself. Finals week, so no time for chitchat, but check it out:

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.html

A buddy at Cal sent me a link – www.nowtune.com – to play around with. Concept: upload your music to their site and listen to it online anywhere from the internet. make friends and listen to their playlists in a radio station fashion.

I like the idea, although i don’t know how feasible the idea of uploading my entire music collection to their servers (which happen to be Amazon S3 in the back), the idea is great. I’ve been struggling with the same problem – making my music accessible from anywhere – and this is one solution. Winamp has tried the same thing with their Winamp Remote, which runs a local HTTP server on your computer, and gives you access to your library through their web interface. Nowtune.come gives you the social aspect, and you don’t need to have your local computer running. then again, you need to upload your music.

I did find a bit of a security hole (if you can call it that) that i’ve decided to keep private for now. Youtube, google video, all these sites have basically the same problem they’re looking at, but there are ways around it in this case, which i’ll gladly give them the time to fix.

Anyways, definitely something to look out for.

OiNK, probably the best online music source, has been shut down a while ago, and record sales are going south like a duck in winter. The public is pretty outraged, but for many of us its still a blind rage at why your college friends are being sued and why you have to pay $18 for CDs if you really just want the third track on the bonus disc. I’m pretty much in the same boat, until I read this fantastic post by a former record company employee.

For enlightenment through music

Here I find myself once again two days away from a deadline and sick as a horse. Not fun! Must have eaten something off……..

So in between coding on Bezerker, my Web Server in C, and signing up for classes, i get some solace from the wise words of some random blogger:

“We need to slow down, think about our priorities, and ask ourselves what the point is of an expensive kitchen remodel when we don’t take the time to cook, and why we work so hard that we never have time to see the people we love,” she said. “Maybe if we traded some of our discretionary income for discretionary time, that would be the true luxury.”

(From Eating French)

And of course RJD2 always keeps the party rocking:

I still find this one of the most descriptive songs I know:

Jet Life, by Plush:

Jet Life
i’m living live like a rockstar
how i really want to go far
from here

cool cats
riding the town like they own it
that is something i will never get
oh, i will never get that

and i do believe
i do believe
no-one feels this pain
inside of me

dead tired, dead tired
im dead tired of all of this
dead tired, dead tired
im dead tired of all of this
dead tired, dead tired
dead tired of all of this

jet life, slow life
picking up the broken pieces of my life
tentative hesitant a bit
God
it all looks so positive

its a shame about the world though
lost dreams and no tomorrows
its a shame its such a stuff-up
you know it wouldn’t be
if we weren’t all so stuck up

cause we know nothing at all
if we didn’t realize that we’re so small
one shake of the earth
one spin of the sea
we’re squashed up bugs beneath God’s feet

all i am is a believer, all i am is a believer
are you a believer?
we’re all just dreamers

dead tired, dead tired
im dead tired of all of this
dead tired, dead tired
im dead tired of all of this
dead tired, dead tired
im dead tired of all of this
dead tired, dead tired
im dead tired of all of this

while the rest of the world is fighting
in a war that no-one survives in
young men are sift
before they’ve even lived
well that doesn’t seem fair to me

and daddy’s at home, he’s angry
cause he’s Son’s no longer his property
well man you had the wrong perceptions
cause he was never your possession

and women walk around
with mace in their bags
just a piece of meat
waiting to be tagged

well i can’t believe this happens in my land
i can’t believe the value of the Rand

oh jet life, everybody’s striving for a good life
and nothing’s gonna happen if you sti around and waste time
you’ve gotta move
you’ve gotta prove
you’ve gotta stay humble
or this world will surely crumble

*acoustic solo*

I’ve been working on 2draw.net for a while now with Marcello, and one of our issues in managing packages on a CentOS installation. YUM seems to have become almost a standard in the RPM distribution world, so we followed suite and unpacked this little python app of magic.

I’ve been battling to get the latest MySQL version up and running, so i thought i’d post up the first few steps to update MySQL through YUM.

I’m using the CentOS repository for YUM. To get the latest MySQL, you first need to enable the CentOS PLUS repository.
<br />Find your yum repository directory:<br />cd /etc/yum.repos.d<br />emacs CentOS-Base.repo<br />Find the [centosplus] section<br />Make sure the following flags are set:<br /><br />enables=1<br />gpgcheck=1<br />

Once this is done, you can go ahead and install mysql:

<br />yum install mysql<br />

Voila!

I’ve been playing around with an ubuntu linux server connecting our two apartments together, and the aim of this port is to explain how i’m going about routing between two subnets, each with their own default internet router. I’m using the power of DHCP3 on my ubuntu box to set routing tables on all clients connecting to the network to properly route through the correct gateways.

The network topography looks like this:

Internet <--> [router a] <--> LAN 0 <--> [Linux Server] <-> LAN 1 <--> [router b] <--> Internet

So, hosts in LAN 0 must use router a to get to the internet, and hosts in LAN 1 must use router b to get to the internet, but hosts on both LANs must use the linux server to get to each other. Thus, the server must do IP forwarding / IP routing, and the clients needs the proper routing tables. To get around the dumbness of the DLink router a and b, i’m running DHCP3 on the server to hand out routing and IP information to clients on both networks.

The resources i’ve found useful in setting up this config is:

• Windows Routing Tables
• HexRoute and routing info
• Supplying routing info using DHCP (Slightly dated, but the comments contains the real good stuff!)
• RFC3442 since they wrote the standard!

Even on about 4 hours of sleep a night, there’s still time for a laugh:

“Man, fun is so overrated”

“Yeah, fun really bites you in the ass”

The news of the death of my dearest friend and mentor, Lona Antoniades, reached me this weekend. She was my violin teacher since i was 11 years old, and I spent 10 long and beautiful years playing music with her. My time in the Stellenbosch Youth Orchestra under her, and my time with her in lessons, in visits to her house, in talking and being, have made me who I am. She shaped my appreciation of life and all that is in it. To know that she is no longer with us, is to know that an angel departed this earth. I look back and am lucky to have such fond memories to treasure, but there is so much I want to tell her, thank her, praise her.

At the beginning of my freshman year, about 6 months after leaving South Africa, I sent her an email, thanking her for the impact she had on my life. I found it and read it again today, and in some ways it made this loss more bearable. In this message I expressed my deep regard and sincere love for this mentor of mine. It made me realize that I do not have anything to regret for not saying something to her before she died. She already knew how much I felt for her.

Lona, you have left us, departed from our little world. But you will always continue living in the people you affected to deeply with your life. I miss you so much, but I can open my violin case and almost hear you talking to me. You will remain in my memory as a sight of uplifting energy, throwing your arms up in rejoicing, with the final chords booming out into the audience. If I can make a tenth of your impact in this world, I will deem my life a great success.

I wish I could have been there, but the bittersweetness of leaving my home rises in my throat with such thoughts.

Goodbye, my deadest friend. Goodbye for now. Your body is gone, but your spirit lives with us still.

I’ve been doing some more Arduino hacking, this time with my newly-arrived MAX7219 LED Driver circuit. Here’s what I have right now:

The circuit is very simple – The MAX7219 connects to Arduino on pin 2, 3 and 4, and I use the sample code in the Arduino wiki (http://www.arduino.cc/playground/LEDMatrix/Max7219). The LED Driver is connected to a little 7×5 segment display I picked up at HCS (A surplus electronic store in Sunnyvale) labelled the LTP2657AA. I had to reverse engineer the pins to figure out what goes where, but manage to connect up the digits to the ground (cathodes) of the LEDs in the segment, and the segments to the positive (anodes) terminals. With one transistor (10K) to keep the voltage levels okay and following the MAXIM data sheet I managed to get it all up and running.

For future reference, here’s the pin layout of the LTP2657AA, if the notches is at the bottom, bevels at the top, and held horizontally:

rows are anodes, cols are cathodes

LEFT

1 – green row 1
2 – red row 1
3 – green col a
4 – red col a
5 – green row 2
6 – red row 2
7 – green row 3
8 – red row 3
9 – green col c
10 – red col c
11 – green col d
12 – red col d
13 – green col b
14 – red col b

RIGHT

1 – red col f
2 – green col f
3 – red col d
4 – green col d
5 – red col e
6 – green col e
7 – red row 3
8 – green row 3
9 – red row 4
10 – green row 4
11 – red col g
12 – green col g
13 – red row 5
14 – green row 5

Its quite a nice little matrix, duo color (although it only displays one at a time), and for $2 i cant complain!

so, now its all about building a sweet project.

It looks like the folks over at Google has been keeping busy with Youtube lately. They have a new player, quite a major redesign of their original, now on their website. The color change is a bit startling – the red bar now indicates playing instead of downloading (gray bar) which is just confusing.

But the big stunner is the ads they put over video. Everyone is trying to get some revenue from the tons of videos being watched online (something like a 30% click-though rate in video search results) and superimposed ads, like what Youtube is doing, is a step towards the classic Television-like banner ads. We’ll have to see whether this is the “big answer” for video advertising. Personally, I find it distracting and annoying, especially since Youtube content is generally so short. Luckily they included a little “close” button to get rid of it.

Then, to (hopefully!) demonstrate this ads appearance, here’s a crazy little Red Hot Chili Peppers video I found. I’m sorting my RHCP collection (I have just about every song ever published by them) and in the process I figure i’d poke around for some less well known RHCP music videos. Have fun with this one:

if you haven’t seen this yet… it’s worth it.

“Raw footage of a performance that “CS rapper” Monzy gave last summer outside Stanford University’s Computer Science building. This footage was shot for the documentary, NERDCORE FOR LIFE.

Nerdcoreforlife.com”

I watched Avenue Q yesterday night in the Orpheum Theatre in SF, and it was great! Excellent play, fantastic cast, all around wonderful. They kept the audience spellbound for 2 and a half hours, and no-one wanted it to end.

I didn’t realize how big of a phenomenon their “The Internet is for Porn” song became, but after witnessing it first hand, i can’t help but post some youtube videos!

The Opening Act:

The Original “The Internet is for Porn”:

Avenue Q meets Fiddler on the Roof:

And of course, the Presidential Debates, as done by the Avenue Q cast:

Seeing is believing, right? So it’s not that surprising to see that many people have gone to great lengths to hook up tons and tons of LEDs to various hardware projects. Youtube has some cool videos, which will have to keep my happy until I recieve my shipment of MAX7129 chips. More on that later ^_^

So! I just hacked my first arduino project – a tiny VU meter. there’s not much more to say so here’s a video!

I just recieved my Arduino NG rev C board in the mail, woohoo! With glee I ripped off the post office packaging to start playing around. The kit I received from the workshop at Yahoo that focused on Physical Design. Very cool of Yahoo to support even its interns in such diverse interests as Physical Computing.

My glee soon wore off with the incredibly painful setup procedure. My hopes were that you take it out of the box, plug it in, (maybe install some drivers) and off you go. That is why i got the USB version. Unfortunately its not quite this easy. Arduino follows a fairly long road from IDE to Microprocessor, which is not uncommon, but painful none-the-less. Microcontrollers are harder to work with than what would be nice for the average hobbyist, and Arduino does a darn good job to make it easy, but its not perfect. Arduino uses Cygwin to compile the C programs you write into MIPS hex for the microprocessor. To upload the program, the Java IDE calls out to cygwin to connect to a pseudo COM port, that wraps the USB connection to Arduino. (You need the supplied drivers for this). This wrapper talks to the USB to Serial chip on Arduino itself, which talks to the bootloader on the MIPS processor to save your program into EEPROM. Since there is a lot of moving parts, it doesn’t always work…

To keep it short, this is what I needed to do to get Arduino working:

1) Download the Arduino zip from www.arduino.cc and extract

2) Replace the cygwin1.dll in the home folder of Arduino with the newest Cygwin dll from cygwin.org

3) Download the newest drivers for the virtual COM port from http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

4) Plug Arduino In. Install the above drivers you downloaded to talk with Arduino.

5) Set the COM port driver to a COM port lower that 10 (this is important! Windows gives the weirdest errors if you try a COM port higher than 10) and a BAUD rate of 115200. You can do this by using Device Manager. Look under Ports -> USB Serial Port

6) Open the arduino program you originally downloaded.

7) Set the COM port to the port you made the USB driver use. (I used 2, since it was the only one free)

Follow the instructions _VERY CAREFULLY_ on the Arduino Guide page.

Hopefully this gets you going! The setup took a while to figure out, and it could be simplified, as well as better instructions on the Arduino website, but it was easier than using a PIC programmer!

Once I got it up and running, I immediately built a little night rider viz with the 10 LEDs I received in the kit. I’ll put up a couple of pictures soon. The reference guid is clear and easy to understand, and the given examples are clear and informative.

For a good workshop-based into to Arduino, check out http://jennylc.com/teaching/yahoo/

This is the workshop that was given at Yahoo.

Arduino definitely looks like a great little platform to play with and get some physical computing going on. Even for circuits-oriented people, this is a nice way to get easy interactivity with computers, or more intelligence than you want to put into your analog circuits. I want to build the world’s biggest VU meter to put up against my ceiling to visualize when I play music. Something along the lines of the Urban Carpet. I’ll post pictures!