To answer the first question, the story is rather complex. In June of this year I participated in the 2007 graduation ceremony, even though my course work was not completed at that time. Most schools will let you “walk” a bit early, if you only have a handful of classes to complete (one in my case).

I took the last remaining course for completion of my degree at Foothill College. Taking classes during the summer is never easy. You might ask: How hard could an Ancient History class be? Well, start with a 12-week quarter. Summer courses are 6 weeks long. But this class is only 4-quarter-units, so it is only 5 weeks long. This class ended a week early, so we are down to 12 weeks of content in 4 weeks. No assignments were due in the first week, so the next 3 weeks were absolute and utter hell: a 6-page paper was due every week. That doesn’t seem bad, but the bad part for me was that this 6-page paper was actually three 2-page papers on three different subjects. I had a lot of trouble staying focused, and even more trouble staying on topic. Well, in the end I survived all of this and my final official grade was A-. The professor doesn’t like +/- grading, so an A went into my academic record.

Before the quarter was over, I ordered a transcript to be sent from Foothill to UCSC at the end of the quarter. This was sent about a week after the official end of Foothill’s quarter. This was around August 17. About 3 weeks later I was wondering why it hadn’t shown up on the UCSC computer system yet, so I called the UCSC Registrar’s office. They reported that the transcript had been received and is being processed. They said it could take up to about a month to go through.

It showed up in the computer system on October 23.

Back to graduation.

Since all of my course work was completed as of Summer 2007, I applied for graduation at the beginning of the Fall 2007 quarter, on September 22. This means that during this quarter the paperwork for my graduation will be processed by the Registrar’s Office, the College Nine Undergraduate Advising Office, and the Jack Baskin School of Engineering Undergraduate Advising Office. Only once my paperwork has been reviewed by both advising offices and then sent back to the Registrar’s office for official sign off and data entry will this process be complete and the computer system will show that I have earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. I expect this to occur towards the middle to end of December.

There will be much rejoicing and merrymaking when this point has been reached.

The date when my physical diploma will show up is still unknown. All I know is that it will be a few months after I have actually graduated. This puts it around the beginning of Spring 2008.

I don’t care about the piece of paper as much as I do the electronic version showing up in my web browser.

Stay tuned.

Lecture
MWF Courses; Duration 1:10 hours x 3 days = 3:30 hours per week per class x 2 classes = 7 hours
TuTh Course; Duration 1:45 x 2 days = 3:30 hours per week = 3:30 hours

7:00 + 3:30 = 10 hours, 30 minutes of lecture per week.

Required Lab and Recitation Sections
Required 1 hour graded lab
Requred 1 hour recitation section
Total: 2 hours.

Running total: 12 hours, 30 minutes.

Homework
Conservative estimate: 2 hours per class x 2 classes = 4 hours.

Running total: 16 hours, 30 minutes.

Projects and Lab Work
Lab work conservative estimate: 10 hours per week
Programming Projects conservative estimate: 15 hours per week.
Total: 25 hours per week

Running total: 41 hours, 30 minutes per week.

Total
41 hours, 30 minutes per week.

The only real issue was that I was trying to make this and get a cup of coffee going at the same time.. think the coffee needs to get finished first. The recipe states that you should soak the matzah until “soft but not soggy”. Because I wasn’t watching it carefully, the matzah got soaked too long and became soggy to the point where it almost falling apart. The fortunate part about this mistake is that it’s still edible even in this state. It just means that the matzah can’t soak up any of the egg.

I’m going to try again either tomorrow or Tuesday and force feed some of it to my housemate…

Happy Passover.

MWF    2:00-3:10p  CMPS130   Computational Models
MWF    3:30-4:40p  CMPS104B  Fundamentals of Compiler Design II
TuTh  12:00-1:45p  CMPE117   Embedded Systems Software

No 8am classes this time!!! yay!

I’ve been dealing with its idosyncrasies and nuances for a long time, so it is old-hat to me. I have been putting off the upgrade from Xorg server 7.0 to 7.1 for around 6 months. The problem for both of my computers is vendor supplied binary drivers. My laptop has a ATI Radeon eXpress 200 card, and my desktop an Nvidia 6000ish something. The last attempt to do this upgrade resulted in no X display and a few days of “downtime”. Being an uber geek I can deal with the text screen for a little while… reading web pages in links gets a bit old though.

Feeling hopeful and optimisic yesterday after a few months behind the bleeding edge, I unmasked the base Xorg drivers and let emerge do its work. It was able to run for a few hours and managed to get to the xorg-server package. I had to stop it when it was time to click the suspend button and go home. My HP Pavilion L2000 laptop has always had a temper when it came to taking naps. Some time in the few hours before I put it to sleep and took it out again at home, it did its normal thing and woke up inside my backpack and baked itself until the battery ran out of juice (HP’s poor ACPI and BIOS is another rant worthy of its own post). I plugged it in overnight so I could have a fresh charged battery in the morning.

This morning I whacked the power button, selected kernel 2.6.20 at the grub prompt, and watched the boot process. Instead of a GDM login screen, the machine “bounced” a few times (blanking the display then returning to text mode), then gave the oh-so familiar “”Failed to start the X server (your graphical interface)” message.

The first thing to check is the Xorg log file for errors marked by “(EE)”. Sure enough, there was a line complaining about an incompatibility between the X server and the fglrx ATI drivers. Time for an upgrade: Make sure that ati-drivers will install the latest and greatest (~amd64) and then emerge -u ati-drivers. The latest version available on ATI’s Linux Driver Page 8.34.8 was installed. X started working again, and I can go back to using Firefox to tap this rant out.

What remains to be seen is whether this 6lb electronic brick will finally have a sound nap or not. Stay tuned.

Your website reports that my package started its life on January 29, 2007 and has a label of “Arrival Scan” on December 31, 1969 at 3:59:59 PM. Either my package has gone back in time, or your website has a bug. You should probably look into fixing this. See the following link for an example:

Link: Amazon Order Detail

Complaint about: Specific Incident
Subject: Poor service times today on N-Inbound
Date of Occurance: 7/5/2006
Time 6-6:30pm
Location: Montgomery St. Station
Line Number: N
Direction: Inbound

Comment:

I use the N line to connect from Caltrain to my office near Montgomery St. Station. I expected to catch an N Inbound train around 6pm to connect with Caltrain Baby Bullet Service leaving 4th and Townsend at 6:33pm.

This evening, I arived at the inbound platform just before 6pm. I had to wait about 10-15 minutes to get a N train. About a half a dozen other lines ending at Embarcadero went by during this time. Each one paused for up to a few minutes before pulling up to the platform to open the doors and allow boarding. I boarded the train around 6:10. Then, the train waited in the tunnel between Montgomery and Embarcadero stations for about 5 minutes. The train waited again in the tunnel after Embarcadero station for about 3 minutes. It got to Caltrain around 6:30, and I had to run to just barely make my connection. I feel that a trip that normally would take around 10-15 minutes wound up taking the entire half an hour is worth complaining about.

Another thing to note: The audio announcements in the station were working, but all of the electronic signs on the platforms were dead.

Were you having some computer or control issues this evening?

While on the Caltrain, I called your customer service line around 6:40pm from my cell phone and waited on hold for about 20 minutes. By the time my call was answered, my phone dropped the call. I called right back, but by this time your office was closed.

This email is the only timely way that I can complain about this incident at this time.

I am a new commuter from the south bay to the city. I hope that this constructive and detailed complaint will get used to help improve your service and make connections from Muni to other transit services easier.

Signature:
Michael Furman
phone number
mailing Address

MWF  12:30-1:40p  CMPS104A  Fundamentals of Compiler Design I
MWF   3:30-4:40p  CMPS102   Intro to Analysis of Algorithms
TuTh  2:00-3:45p  CMPE185   Technical Writing for Computer Engr

No 8am classes this time!!! yay!

The Little Willies… who ever came up with that name? Doesn’t matter, they make some good music. Kind of a combination of Jazz, Blues, and Country. I heard one of the tunes from this album playing as background music in Starbucks here in Santa Cruz, and had a vague recollection in the back of my mind of reading having read about this album somewhere. Very shortly after hearing this, walked across to Borders and picked it up. I’d rate the sonics at about a 3/5. Norah’s vocals seems compressed and pretty far in the background. The instrumentals are good, but the percussion a bit soft but that means its not harsh on the ears. Performace wise, is more like 4.5/5. They sure seem to be having a lot of fun on this album, makes you stomp along. Jones sings her heart out as usual, and the guitar playing reminds me a lot of Jerry Garcia.

The Dixie Chicks however is kind of a sonic blah. Played on a vacuum tube system that’s sort of laid back, there’s no warmth to the vocals, the instruments have no body or distinct sound. Just kind of a wall of sound that’s harsh on the ear drums. Thats just kind of how it hits me, on the second lsiten. I had to put in something with known good sonics just for a point of comparison….. Allison Kraus and Union Station Live, sounds about how it should through the same equipment. Kind of reminds me of a previous sonic disaster, previously reviewed Tift Merrit’s Tambourine.

This coffee shop’s free wireless connection, which doesn’t allow ssh or instant messenger, is pretty useless to me. So in times of need I fire up my Verizon Wireless EVDO connection to get on the ‘net.

The device that I have is a Verizon XV6700, a Winders Mobile 5 PDA with Wi-fi, Bluetooth, IrDA, EVDO, and 1X-RTT all built in. The deal here with this whole rant is that it just refuses to work with Linux. So I am running it under Winders XP Professional running under Vmware 5, running under my Gentoo Linux installation on my laptop.

One could expect, that you jam the usb port in the phone, the other end in your computer, bring up the windows dialer, click dial, then you’re up.

The modem dialed, and winders was able to talk to it. The evdo dialer on Winders is shared with Linux via Winders’ Internet Connection Sharing feature. This only requires one extra step on the Linux side, to throw a default route over the vmware virtual ethernet interface, and its supposed to work. It worked the last time I used this setup about two weeks ago. Repeated redialing and futzing with the linux routing table yielded nothing.

I checked the settings in the dialer and discovered that it was trying to use a non-existant bluetooth modem device. Couldn’t find any evidence of the CDMA USB Modem driver anywhere.

Delete the original dialer.

Had to disconnect the USB, reconnect it, then the device showed in Winders Device Manager.

Reinstall driver.

Reconfigure a new driver. Uncheck firewall and check connection sharing.

Dials up, winders talks to the net over the phone. Good.

Still no go for Linux.

Check the vmware virtual ethernet. Instead of being on the RFC1918 network 172.16.2.0/24, winders reconfigured it to 192.168.0.1 for me.

Disconnect dialer.

Set a static address on the virtual ethernet.

Redial.

Now it works.

This seems like a pretty typical day for a Winders user.

Now I can get the work done that I set out to do in the first place… (yeah right)