If you are ever curious as to what temperature it is in my room, visit http://kobe.rh.rit.edu/. It is a webserver running on my TINI board. It gets the temperature from a Thermometer iButton.
tini
Open the pod bay doors, HAL
Wow…. Another year gone by… And more importantly, the last day on my “Pop-up Video” Day-by-Day Calendar that My Roommate, Jon Parise gave me last Christmas.
I think I remotely finished up my work on Drink for this break… I made quite a few improvements to it overall, allowing multiple client connections at a time, wrote a dirt-simple logging server so we can keep track of what’s going on, tested the latest beta TINI OS (which is way more stable). I am looking forward to getting back and hooking it up to the machine (but that’s the ONLY thing I am looking forward to back there).
Finished up the First season of the Sopranos last night, and I watched an Interview of the series creator that was on the last disc… It was 1:15h long! It was a pretty good interview though…
Chuck called me this morning, we are going to go get him another DVD or so after he runs some errands… He finally has the ability to play DVDs, and he only has one… He is thinking about Willy Wonka, which I think is a great idea… :P
Not gonna phone it in tonight…
Today was very productive for me…. I acquired a hub and some 10Base-T so I could start hacking on my TINI, and I did so. I upgraded the TINI OS to 1.02b3 (we are only using 1.01 in drink right now) for testing, and I had to hack the drink source to work on it, since there were some API changes. This version of the OS allegedely addressed the “Telnet Server dying randomly” bug, which will be a major benefit to drink. I fixed another bug in drink earlier tonight regarding refunds if the drop fails, and I am thinking of hacking on multiple client threads for the SundayServer if I really have lots of energy in a few minutes.. :)
After dinner, I headed over to Chris’ place to see her one last time before she returns to CA tomorrow morning…. It really bums me out that we are so seperated these days.. It really depresses me. You never really know how much someone means to you until they are gone. Chris isn’t exactly gone from my life, but I only get to see her every few months, it is really upsetting… She is probably my best friend, and I wish I could spend time with her without feeling that the clock is ticking…. Maybe after graduation..
Ok, now off to possibly work on drink, but maybe to just call it a night and crash… We will see how I feel when I reach my bedroom. :P
Wow….
I had a great time today doin’ the family thing…. We got up at 6am, before my mother had to go to work, so we could have “Christmas Morning”… The family was really split as to whether or not to wake up early; I was teetering (I think our family tradition was neat, but no-one other than my father seemed to want to wake up at 6 to do it).
I am very thankful, I can’t think of another thing I could have received, and everyone I gave gifts to seemed to be very pleased. While some people criticze the gift-exchange part of this holiday, I think it gets too much flack…. Yes, we shouldn’t be so product-oriented, but it is a great feeling to give and to receive.
As far as the receiving end goes, I received many DVDs, a bunch of CDs I wanted (Including 3 Talking Heads discs), and a TINI Board, which has little practical justification for me, but it totally for fun. Regular readers know that the TINI is the basis for the new drink hardware, so it gives me a non-production platform to play on, and I also have a few other ideas for fun things to do with it… The only way to install software on it (other than the shell) is via FTP, so I need to go out tomorrow and score a hub or a crossover cable so I can start playing around with it in earnest.
I truly hope everyone had a wonderful day today, and if you didn’t… Drop me a line, maybe we can make up for it… I have a good deal of happiness to go around… :)
Brr….
After taking a few days off from it, I started to hack on Drink again. Today, I removed a stupidity from the protocol that was inherited from whatever stub daemon that Joe initially used.. It stuck a Null character (\0) at the end of each line of a STAT response. Joe has an excuse, he hacked his client/server out in 10 hours over a weekend. I was just lazy. :P
I cleaned up the source and UI for the Unix commandline client that Joe wrote as well. That is more of an ongoing battle with my dislike for straight ‘C’ more than anything. :)
It certainly does look cold and solid wet outside.
I’ve got a drink-ing problem
Ok, so I continue to work on drink. :) As I believe I have mentioned before, we have broken the project up into phases. The first phase is laying down the infrastructure for the machine and enabling people to ask what drinks are in the machine and letting them drop a drink…
As of this morning, I believe that this phase is now complete. I wrapped up a few loose ends, changed the way I was authenticating users, made users timeout if they picked their nose for too long… This project is certainly keeping my attention. Plus, I talked with Bill about licensing the code, and we agreed on a BSD-style license.. :P Down with the GPL!
Drink
I have been working on Drink a whole lot these days, and I finally added some info about what I have been doing to my projects page. I spent most of this morning (after Chem) documenting the protocol that Joe whipped up last year.
I am hoping to support the ‘classic’ protocol as well once I get some documentation.
Drink
Gravity holds galaxies together…..
…..but 8am class rips my head apart…. :) Jetlag and this new schedule are working in concert to really make my life complicated right now. :) I assume that once my body readjusts to the timezone, and my mind adjusts to waking up at 7am instead of noon, things should get better.
It’s early in the quarter, so I am still in that “not much to do” state of mind…. I am going to leverage this to my advantage and do some Calculus this weekend… Man, I really wish I had a professor who spoke english. :) My classes this quarter don’t seem too bad so-far, but I guess that it is still a bit early to pass judgement.
In theory, Jon and I are headed back to Imaging Science around 12:30pm for another round of Junkyard Wars on the big screen. Unfortunately, right now I am less than motivated to do anything… :)
I am also going to try and wrap up my work on phase 1 of Drink (which means getting it back to the classic Drink functionality, dropping drinks over the network when asked to). It turns out that the TINI board does not support either ObjectOutputStream or ObjectInputStream. Of course, I would have known this had I just paid attention to the TINI API Differences. While the TINI API supports almost all of Java 1.1, there are a few differences. Fortunately, I was only using serialization in a handful of places, so I just have to hack out a different solution. I used Serialization because it was easy, not because it was necessary. :P
Damn Mail!
The rest of my stupid iButton kit still hasn’t arrived.