Tim’s Blog

Good news: My server is back up and running (on one hard drive).

Bad news: My laptop started smoking.

My winter break was as follows: Bozeman -> Bellevue -> Molokai, Hawaii -> Schweitzer, Idaho -> Santa Barbara, California -> Bellevue -> Bozeman. In Bellevue I went to an eagle court of honor for one of the boys at my old scout troop. I saw a bunch of my scout buddies, including one who just joined the Army. After about a week at home, almost all of my Dad’s side of the family went to the island of Molokai for Christmas. We went to the beach, went snorkeling, hiked to a waterfall, swam in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall and generally caused chaos wherever we went. After Hawaii was snowboarding in the powder at Schweitzer for three days. Then after a week in Santa Barbara with my Mom, I flew back to Bozeman. And now it’s back to school.

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md3.

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md2.

Of course this happens after I get home, so I don’t have physical access to the computer. Damn it.

My server is back up and running! I just happened to have a couple of extra 250GB SATA hard drives sitting around, so I replaced the old 80GB PATA hard drives with them and setup raid 0 on them. I put some information on what I did on my wiki. I added the hard drives, booted linux on a live CD, partitioned the hard drives, setup raid, and copied all the files over using cpio. Then I updated /etc/mdadm.conf, installed grub on the master boot record and I was all ready to go. Except that I had partitioned the hard drives incorrectly and it took me 6ish hours to figure it out. Then I was ready to go. Thank god for raid.

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on ____.

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md3.

Faithfully yours, etc.

Crap. There goes one of my hard drives. Hopefully I can get it fixed sometime tomorrow before the other one goes out.

After 752 lines of code, my partner and I managed to write a program in Lisp that plays the game of gomoku. It took several almost-all-nighters to get the job done, but now we have a working program. In the class-wide gomoku tournament today, we won the first 2 games, then lost our third. In our third game our opponents beat us in 22 moves when we went first, and we beat them in 34 moves when they went first. Unfortunately since they won in less moves, they win. Here is the source code, if anyone is interested.

I decided to go to the big Montana State University vs. University of Montana football game this year, but I didn’t want to wait in line for tickets. Luckily one of my roommates had gotten a media pass from the radio station where he works and didn’t mind making forgeries. At Kinkos we were able to make color copies and laminate them, making them look as good as the original.

I convinced my buddy Chris to go along with me and act as a reporter.

The day before the game I went to the Salvation Army and bought a pinstripe suit jacket and a pink spotted tie for a grand total of $1.87. I put on a striped shirt, borrowed a hat from my roommate, and my outfit was complete.

The morning of the game, I woke up early and Chris and I went to an Eggs and a Keg party. I brought a small pad of paper and a pen for taking notes.

After an excellent breakfast and some beers, Chris and I continued on to the game. Our first stop was the tailgate area. I interviewed a some people and had a few of them convinced that I was a real reporter.

We were able to enter the stadium with our forged media passes without a problem. I got lots of comments about my awesome attire.

During the second half, I decided it was time to try and enter the press box. You can see the press box and the balcony in the picture above. Chris and I managed to find the elevators, but he chickened out and decided not to go up.

I flashed my media pass at the elevator operator and made small talk as we ascended to the 5th floor. I got out on the press level and immediately began wandering around, looking for anything interesting. I found the balcony overlooking the field and snapped a couple of pictures. Notice the nice view of the mountains.

Very shortly after I took the pictures, a lady approached me and asked to see my pass. She took a quick glance at it and said that it should say “Cat - Griz” on it. I guess there were different media passes for this particular game and the only person that knew it was in the press box. She then pointed me to the exit and told me to leave. Luckily I had already achieved my goal of making it into the press box and taking photographic evidence of it. Chris and I went back to the stands and watched the rest of the game.

We didn’t end up winning the game. We were in the lead for a little bit, but we fell way behind in the second half. UM was undefeated so we weren’t expected to win. I took lots more pictures of the game and the associated festivities.

No Shave November is going pretty good. I have a beard with only a couple of bare patches. John is winning with the best looking facial hair. Luke and I are pretty even. No pictures yet, I’ll post some at the end of week after it’s all done.

I got back from a good Thanksgiving with my family. It was pretty much the same thing as the last couple of Thanksgivings. I suppose that’s the point of tradition. We went to my Aunt and Uncle’s house in Seattle and had a feast. Then we went to Whidbey Island for a short visit.

Less than 2 weeks of class left, then a week of finals. In that time I have to write a program in Lisp to solve gomoku for my Artificial Intelligence class. Everyone in the class is writing one, then we are having a class tournament. I have read a couple of papers on the subject and I hope to be able to write a winning program.

So it begins. John, Luke and I are all not shaving for the month of November.

Finally I have a relatively robust email setup. Google allows you to setup email for your domain for free, so I decided to give it a go. Now when an email is sent to me, it is sent to Google’s server, then it is fetched using fetchmail by my dad’s server, then I can view it using any IMAP client. This means that as long as Google’s servers don’t go down (highly unlikely), I will never lose any emails.

Have you ever heard a power supply pop, then see it start to smoke? I did. Yep, that right. My server’s power supply died a horrible death, popping the circuit breaker in the process. Unfortunately it happened at a very busy time for me, so I wasn’t able to get it up an running until yesterday. Despite the terrible smoke-belching death of the power supply, luckily none of the other components were harmed. Thanks to my roommate Rune for having an extra 500 watt power supply lying around.

In other news, my laptop (kind of) died. I bought a new CPU fan because the bearings went on the old one and it started to sound like my laptop was going to take off. I was able to dismantle the laptop and install the new fan with no problems, but during the reassembling, the I broke a couple of little tabs that keep the keyboard and speakers attached to the case. It still works fine, but it is falling apart. I am currently bidding for 2 broken laptops of the same model on ebay, I am hoping that will all those spare parts, I won’t have to replace my laptop for a long time.

On a more upbeat note, I got a bunch of free stuff. My roommate Luke and I drove by a pile of free stuff in someone’s driveway. Naturally we stopped to see if there was anything good. I ended up walking away with a desk, a philips screwdriver and a working laptop! The laptop is only 600 MHz and has 256 MB of ram, but it runs perfectly. I also just got 3 webcams, they are really low quality, but they were only 99 cents each. I don’t know what, but I definitely have a project ahead of me.