My Little World

I now own three Sun Ultra 10's at a price even a graduate student can afford. I have lots of ideas on what I could do with them. Right now they all have NetBSD 3.0.2 installed on them, but I think I'll try installing Solaris 10 on the best one. I tried before but got a read error and the terminal settings were messed up making configuration a pain.

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So I started running yesterday to help wake up my mind. I burnt 500 calories according to the treadmill computer. My sister says that as soon as I start showing abs she's going to sell me. Exactly to whom I don't know. I hope I don't become a manwhore. -----

I had three days off. I was planning to get some work done. Then, Sunday afternoon at a lab, I got a headache. I ended up with a high fever, sore throat and a weird dream about artificially intelligent blankets. My throat has been sore all week. It probably hasn't healed yet because I don't sleep enough. I only slept for 4 hours last night. I'm tired...

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I finally figured out how to program the parallel port through Windows XP. Because of special hardware security reasons I needed a special DLL called inpout32.dll to access the hardware. But I finally got it to compile and I can turn an LED on or off through my computer!

I ran across the needed information on CodeProject and followed the link to a Win XP compatible inpout32.dll on this site

The code I compiled to get the LED to light up was one of the example files. Here it is:

// InpoutTest.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application.
//

#include "stdafx.h"
#include "stdio.h"
#include "string.h"
#include "stdlib.h"
/* Prototypes of Inp and Outp */

short _stdcall Inp32(short PortAddress);
void _stdcall Out32(short PortAddress, short data);

/*-----------------------------------------------*/

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
	int data;

	if(arg<3)
	{
		//too few command line arguments, show usage
		printf("Error : too few arguments\n\n***** Usage *****\n\nInpoutTest read 
 \nor \nInpoutTest write 
 \n\n\n\n\n");
	}
	else if(!strcmp(argv[1], "read"))
	{
		data = Inp32(atoi(argv[2]));
		printf("Data read from address %s is %d \n\n\n\n", argv[2], data);
	}
	else if(!strcmp(argv[1], "write"))
	{
		if (argc<4)
		{
			printf("Error in arguments supplied");
			printf("\n***** Usage ***** \n\nInpoutTest read 
 \nor \nInpoutTest write 
 \n\n\n\n\n");
	}
	else
	{
	Out32(atoi(argv[2]), atoi(argv[3]));
	printf("data written to %s\n\n\n", argv[2]);
	}
}

return 0;
}

Yep, it's pretty straightforward. I used address 888 to write 255 and light the LED. More fun stuff to come once I get stepper motors and other gizmos.

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I finally watched all thirteen episodes. It's cool how she made everyone connectto the internet without devices, scary how she could control everyones memories,and sad that her real body ended up rotting away as she was fully absorbed into cyberspace. Makes me wonder if the one laptop per child project is really a good idea.

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The internet really is the wild west. There are so many outlaws out there in cyberspace. So in my endless quest to keep my computers secure I decided to check that nobody here on SDF is compromising the security of this server. Unix shells like the one I'm on are notorious security hazards. That is why so few of them exist these days. But it is because you have so much control that I love them. I want SDF to be a secure, healthy, community. And I will try to be it's super hero. There are many ways that the Super Dimensional Fortress could crumble and be used for evil. I'm still new to the cyber world so I can't evaluate all the possibilities yet. I just browsed around checking peoples file permissions on their mailbox files. Sure enough I ran into one person who had read access allowed to all people on his mbox file. I could read email addresses , password changes, and other things I should be seeing. I emailed him about it and he was surprised I found out, but grateful because he was getting spammed A LOT! I hope the SDF admins don't kick me out for snooping around. I'm just trying to keep my community safe, I'm trying to be a white hat hacker. I'm trying to dominate the forces of evil ^_^

So yeah that was my highlight of the day. I was pretty productive at work today, even though I woke up really late, like 9 a.m.! Sigh, this time I really needed to get up early to finish my measurements. Ed needed the tool and was complaining that I wasn't there in the morning. I think I'm going ot have to take some sleeping pills this time.

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Ah it's Tuesday again. My Monday was pretty nice. I was going to write on Monday but I got distracted by unix shells, music videos, and other random computer stuff. Funny...my last blog entry is dated for Monday, but I'm pretty sure I wrote it on Sunday. Hmmm....
So on Monday I managed to wake up early and make it to the morning meeting on time. Then I finished making my capacitors for the latest quality control experiment I designed. I'm testing electrical parameters on them since Monday afternoon. Wow, most of it is a blur now.

So it's Tuesay. Since I stayed up late on Monday as I just explained I woke up at 7 a.m. and got to work late again. Not that anybody cares when I show up since I'm just a lowly grad student and not working there full time. But I would like to think that I could be responsible enought to maintain a routine. Guess not right now...
Today management was giving a tour to all the big shots that fund us and letting them know about our progress. Some of my work was actually displayed to them to show how grad students work together with the pros. Some sharp dudes from Raytheon were shown the capacitance and leakage maps I do for evaluating the quality and uniformity of my tantalum pentoxide films. Looks like my advisor was happy that I'm contributing to the dog-and-pony show.

So the place where we do our electrical testing is in a dark room at the HVAC level. It's walls were painted black for test reasons, and because of that it is affectionately known as Hell. We have four probe stations running in there. They are named after the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So we have Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The one I work with is Famine. We name other tools as well. Downstairs in the clean room I work on a machine for depositing thin aluminum films on my wafers to make capacitors. This machine is technically an MRC-603, but it came with a big sticker that said "King Kong". So everybody knows it as King Kong. It has a newer brother, known as Mr. T. I don't know why nobody else named their tools. Guess they don't like their job as much.

When I wasn't in Hell I was at my desk programming. I'm improving on the programs I use to process all the data I collect. Each wafer will contain thousands of data points for capacitance and leakage current information. I write programs using Excel and Visual Basic for Applications to format the data, make graphs, and do some statistical reports. Some people would say that VBA in Excel isn't really programming. I guess I could say scripting or writing macros. I definitely can't use Excel's macro recorder because it sucks and isn't efficient. Excel is good for formatting and filtering data and making charts. It's really the easiest way to combine thousands of individual files into one coherent report. For hardcore statistics I'm currently using Minitab for ANOVA and factorial designs. I think I can get it to talkt to Excel so I can process all my data by pressing just a single button. Didn't really feel like I got a lot done though. The electrical tests are far from over an my macro is still at the file retrieval and parsing stage. No pretty contour plots yet.

I got home at 7 again. It's 9:21 and I should either go to sleep now or eat something. I think I'll have a burrito. For lunch we talked about politics, then the iphone and PS3 technology, then back to politics, which lead to how to build nuclear weapons. This of course simmered down to how to make safer nuclear power plants (fast breeder reactors all the way people!).

Hmmm, I was going to try to be funny more often on this thing. Guess I'm not quite there yet. I was also planning to rant about how short sighted society is and why we need more funding for the space program. I guess I'll write an article about it. Another idea for endless bable is going to be titled, "There can be only one...". Stay tuned for that crap. Hmmm, yes hmmm. I think my writing style sounds angry. Words like "rant, "crap", "Hell", and "apocalypse" would probably bring up bad things in a google search. Well time for some more fragmented thoughts like:

1. Can't do arithmetic well
2. Late for work...again!
3. Am I developing terrets syndrome coupled with aspergers syndrome tinged with manic depression? Maybe it's just wishful thinking.
4. I need to build a robot
5. I need to get published
6. girls are silly, why give me your number and expect me to call 20 tiems before you reply?
7. I need a burrito
8. I wish I understood computational chemistry and how to apply it to real world problems
9. Tommorrow I will wake up on time
10. I need to ask the boss for more shadow masks
11. I need to process our organic transistor data too! crap...
12. I need to learn how to use Labview
13. I need to finish reading that paper on reflectance anisotropic spectroscopy and prove that it's useful in my case.
14. Sigh...
I need to tell you guys about the silly girl I met, it's hilarious!

- Tomorrow

1. -----

My buddy Danny Kopa was finally playing at a bar I could ride my bicycle to on Saturday night. He is one of the guitarists for Stress-Faced. They played at the Big Fish Pub so a grad buddy and I went to check it out. They were playing for charity, so I participated in a charitable event which makes me feel good about myself.

The first band when we got there was Corvus, whose lead singer was pretty good. They reminded me of Avenged Sevenfold. Next was Fluent, which was also good and reminded me of Kid Rock/Rage Against the Machine. After that was Lennor, which hurt my ears. Finally StressFaced played, and they reminded me of System of a Down with their strong vocals and political angle. Kopa was hardcore playing even though his foot is probably broken. He must be in real pain today.

I really enjoyed the show. I like System of a Down and listen to them evey once in a while. That type of music always makes me want to fight people and I was jumping around thinking about what I would need to do to knock out the bouncer. But THIS bouncer was pretty nice to me so I tucked away such thoughts for another day ^_^

Hopefully Kopa will give me a call whenever he is at The Club House, since that place is right next to my apartment. The Club House has played some good music as well. I ended up staying till 5 in the morning watching movies and eating nachos again. That's the second time in a row this weekend. Next weekend I have an extra day off for MLK, I hope I use that time wisely. I woke up at 1 again. The damn dog was in my room and chewed on my glasses. I have bit marks on one of the plastic lenses. Sigh...

Man what else did I do today? Laundry, ate a burrito, and surfed the web. Time passes by so quickly when you are still half asleep. At least I didn't lose my keys again. Didn't do any work, just surfed the web about the Hong Kong Blondes and what Sealand was all about. Then I was checking the file permissions on my account here to make sure strangers can't read my email or alter files. Then I was looking for other servers that give out free shell accounts. I found a few but none of them give away as much free space as SDF does. A lot of them require postcards, which isn't too much effort in my opinion. One guy didn't want to give me access because I didn't want to give away my phone number. I gave him my real name and links to my SDF and Miki accounts to try to convince him that I wasn't an evil hacker. Oh well, "yeah right" indeed. He could easily turn me in with the information I provided him IF I was an evil hacker.

So it's 9:27 p.m. and my sister is finally going to be home. Now that dog will finally leave me alone and she'll have to clean up/put up with him. Man, what a short fuzzy day.

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Argh! So I went to check the mailbox today. Opened the box with my keys, pulled out and started looking through the mail. Threw out the junk mail. Started looking through the book catalog. And walked out.

Anything missing from this scenario? I forgot my damn keys! I didn't realize it until I was at the door, which is only a few minutes walk. I come back and my mailbox is closed. I couldn't believe someone had already taken them. It was a very quiet afternoon. Nobody was around, and yet they just had to come into the mail room when I'm in stupid mode.

Well I checked with the managers office and I was lucky this time. The person had closed the mailbox for me and returned my keys. Lesson learned? Probably not, this happens to me all the time. I've locked myself out of the car 3 times. I've forgotten certain settings in the machines I use all the time. One of these days I'm going to get myself killed for being so damn absent minded.

I guess I should feel better knowing that I'm not at the point of pissing on myself forgetting that I'm not in front of a urinal. Things like this should be considered from various levels of severity to help judge whether I'm making progress or not. After all I am aiming for the ambitious goal of being perfect in every way :) I really like being hard on myself so others don't have to.

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If I'm ever going to present some hardcore math on this thing I need LaTeX. Fortunately this machine has it, but probably not latex2html since that requires perl and I'm not allowed to use scripting languages at SDF. At least I can attach a link to a PDF file though. So here is a link to test.pdf Yay! -----

So I just got a call from my sistem who is in Guatamala right now. She has already read my blog entry and says I sounded emo. That's strange because I added a smiley face to the entery, but the icon didn't show up properly. I'm not depressed or anything like that. I was just wondering out loud. Isn't that what journal type blogs are for? Hmmm... Anyways check out my research page. I added some of my powerpoint presentations for people to download. -----

Yeah so I don't know what's wrong with my head but after I got back from a masquerade party I went straight to bed. That was at around 1:00 a.m. I woke up at 10:00 but for some reason my head hurt and I felt half asleep still. I took a shower and wound up asleep on the couch. Woke up again but wound up asleep in bed again. Finally woke up at 4 to tell my friend I was in Tempe and not in Buckeye anymore. What a waste of a day! Argh... But now I'm writing and that's good because I'll eventually write about work and when I do it should help me get one step closer to graduating. Lets see if nanblogger can detect a smiley face icon :-) At the party people noticed I wasn't interacting a whole lot. I was really trying but all that comes to mind is engineering type stuff and I didn't want to bore them. Same thing happens every time I eat lunch with the group at work. I really just don't feel like talking a whole lot and now it seems I stutter and stuff. At work people seem to be accustomed to me not saying much. I'm really obsessed with my work and when I do talk it's always engineering related. I think graduate school is tougher for me than for most people. Or at least it seems like people are making more progress than me. Anyways I should eat something. It's been a long day of empty thoughts. -----