collegegeek.org

A few days ago, I finally broke down and got a new phone.  I settled on the Samsung Instinct, because I didn’t want to switch to another carrier.  I’ve had it now for just over a week, so I thought I’d type up some of my initial thoughts.

My primary use of my cell phone is text messaging, because I can use it to manage and receive updates from Twitter, Facebook, and Google (including Google Calendar), so it was my first concern.  At first, I was hesitant about going with a touchscreen keyboard, but I have been pleasantly suprised with the Instinct.  The phone vibrates just a bit whenever a button is pressed giving it a little bit of tactile feedback.  The on screen keyboard is also very accurate, and I rarely mistype on it.

The next feature that sold me on this phone was the GPS navigation (though a lot of Sprint phones are capable of that).  Turn by turn directions are very good, and the rest of the phone also makes good use of the GPS location feature.

The phone has also replaced my iPod as my primary mp3 player.  While the iPod is still a superior player, it’s not enough to warrant carrying two devices.  It came with a 2GB MicroSD card, but I’ve ordered an 8GB card that should give me plenty of storage.

I’ll be writing some more in-depth thoughts on the phone over the next few days, for now I have to head to sleep.

A few days ago. my roommate Patrick bought a copy of 21.  After a watching peeked our interest, we started playing blackjack at home and then went to the Horseshoe Casino last night.  Patrick managed to make around $80 and I walked out with exactly the same amount of money I walked in with.

Today, I started working on developing a simulation to test various strategies.  After a full day of development, I have the basic framework working, and it is able to run a simple simulation based on basic strategy from Wikipedia.

The program is written in Java, and the first source tarball is attached to this post.  To run the simulation, build and run PlayerVsDealer.java.

blackjack-r5.tar.gz

Update: Fixed a pretty major bug that was causing the decks to not be shuffled.  It works much nicer now.  Also, the win percentage is up closer to 48% now.

blackjack-r6.tar.gz

Yesterday, the keyboard in my Logitech MX3100 desktop stopped working, and after half an hour of trying to get it to work again, I decided it was time to replace it.  After poking around online I found the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard, which was just released a few days ago, and I headed over to Best Buy to pick one up.

At 9.3mm thick, the keyboard is incredibly thin.  It uses laptop style keys and, true to its name, the keys are backlit.  Unlike other backlit keyboards I’ve seen, however, it’s still very easy to read the keys even when the backlight is turned off.

Another nice thing about this particular keyboard is that Logitech didn’t decide to mess with the location of the backslash/pipe key, which a couple of models I looked at did (by using a large Enter key, then moving the backslash/pipe to the left of the backspace).

The Illuminated Keyboard doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary keys like my MX3100 did.  There are a couple of media shortcut keys at the top of the keyboard, but that’s it.  For comparison, the MX3100 had a few programmable keys, keys for launching Office and several other applications, a volume knob, zoom & scroll wheels, etc.  The result is that the new keyboard fits much better on my desk that the previous one, and I now have plenty of room to put my mouse and mousepad alongside it in the keyboard tray.

Summary:

Retail Price: $79.99

Pros: Laptop style keys, incredibly thin, well designed backlight.

Cons: Pricey for a keyboard, but as a programmer a good keyboard is essential.

With the G1 coming out in less than two weeks, I’m tempted to jump carriers to T-Mobile in order to pick one up. However, Sprint will apparently be releasing their Android phone “early next year.” With my phone on it’s last legs, I really need to get a new one soon, and I don’t know if I can hold out long enough for Sprint’s Android. T-Mobile’s network is also kind of spotty (and no 3G coverage in Louisville at all) while I’ve never had an issue with Sprint’s network.

Gah.

My iPod tried to kick the bucket again today, but I fixed it.  Screw you, Apple, I’m not giving you any money any time soon.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I recently got the Android SDK set up and I’ve begun working on my inital Android project.  I’m not going to go into any details until I have something to show, but I’m hoping to have a good chunk of it written by the time the G1 releases in a couple weeks.

The Android SDK is really nice, and the documentation is excellent.  The only thing that took me a little while to figure out was how to add an addition GUI file.  For the record, if you add an xml file to the res/layout, Android will build it automatically.

I’ve also gotten Eclipse set up nicely, with Android and SVN integration.  I just wish Ubuntu would get newer versions of Eclipse in the repositories so I don’t have to keep installing it manually.

I recently helped my roommate shop for a small, personal web server.  We wound up basing it on Intel’s Atom platform, and I was amazed at how cheap it was.  The server (pictured above) came up to almost exactly $200, including shipping, and has a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 512MB of Memory, and an 80GB hard drive.  It runs Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition.

The motherboard is a Mini-ITX form factor board, so the whole server is pretty small.  It has a low power consumption, with the Atom CPU using only 4W of electricity.  For anyone looking to host their own web page, the Atom is a great way to do it.  So far, the box has handled everything we’ve thrown at it quite nicely.  It’s running a LAMP server to host a few personal sites.

If you’re willing to spend a bit more (close to $300 for the same specs) you can get the server down even smaller by using a slimmer case and laptop components.

With the cost of hardware dropping, I wonder if we’ll see devices like this mass marketed to the general public.  It’s mainly a matter of making a nice interface for it to easily allow setting up a photo or blog site. Imagine a desktop application that would allow a user to type up a blog post, upload photos, etc., then automatically upload that content to the server.

If anyone’s curious, the hardware we bought is here.  The motherboard is currently out of stock, however, as Intel has released a dual core version.  I’ll update the wishlist when Newegg gets the new board in.

Yesterday, I decided to set up a an automated backup solution for my site here.  Basically, it does an sqldump then sends the dump to another server over SCP.

First, I had to enable SSH login without a password in order for SCP to work in a cronjob.  I followed this howto and it worked perfectly.

Then, I created a backup script to be called by cron:

#!/bin/sh

cd /home/backups/collegegeek

FNAME=collegegeek-`date +%F`.sql

mysqldump –add-drop-table -uroot -pPASSWORDHERE collegegeek > $FNAME
bzip2 $FNAME
rm $FNAME
scp $FNAME.bz2 zach@192.168.1.82:backups/
echo “Nightly Backup Successful: $(date)” >> /home/backups/blogbackup.log

This will also leave a copy on the local server on the /home partition.  Note that /home is on a different physical drive than /var, so if the drive with the SQL database goes down, I should have a local copy as well.

With Deluge 1.0 out, the first stable release not based on my original 0.5 code, I’m in the market for a new open source project.  I’d like to start something from scratch, but I’ve been racking my brains looking for a good idea.  I’m trying to follow a similar criteria that I used when I started Deluge:

• Something that is wanted by the community.
• Something that will be useful to more than a small subset of users in order to maximize testers.
• A medium sized desktop application, around the same level of complexity of Deluge (ie, something like Eclipse would be way to big)
• Something that is either missing on Linux, or that could be better implemented on Linux.

The application will most likely be written using GTK, and I’d like to start experimenting with D as well.

The idea for Deluge came from posts I saw on Linux forums about the lack of a solid GTK+ Linux bittorrent client, which led Alon and I to start hacking on a new client (called gTorrent at the time).  I’ve been looking around on a couple of forums for a similar idea, but I’m coming up with nothing.

If you have an idea, either post a reply here or drop me a line at zach@collegegeek.org.

I realized that I hadn’t written anything in a while, so I figured I’d post an update. We did lose power last Sunday after the windstorm, and on top of that, a couple of downed trees were completely blocking off Central Ave. We wound up staying on campus late (as late as 1 AM one day) just for the power and internet.

We finally got power back Thursday night at around 9 PM, and cable and internet were back up the next day.