[V]andemar.org

Dan and Jeff happened to be in town simultaneously this weeked, so on Friday Kurt and I met up with them for dinner, and the following day Kurt, Amanda, and I met up with Dan for dinner again. Although we had a great time, it’s odd thinking that Kurt, Jeff, and I will be entering “the real world” in a couple of months, and even weirder, Dan is already there. Dan was in town on business. I’ll repeat that for emphasis. Dan was in town on business! If anyone was destined to remain the perpetual college student, always around to crack jokes at the expense of minorities and women, it was Dan. I still can’t grasp the fact that he actually has a job (two in fact). As much as I look forward to gainful employment and a paycheck (and escape from NU), it’s still not something that seems real.

After arriving back at the apartment after such a great weekend, I was horrified to realize I had completely forgotten about my ECE 357 (VLSI design algorithms) homework which was due the next day, complete with programming project. Although normally homework would be no cause for concern, in ECE 357 there are 5 assignments, counting for a total of 30% of our grade, and no curve. In the resulting fury at the realization that I’d probably have to drop the class, I managed to stab a mechanical pencil through my desk (it’s now classily taped over with packing tape). Thankfully, the next day I managed to complete most of the assignment, but there’s still no guarantee that I will be able to keep the class. Good job me.

There was however, one bright spot amidst my disappointment at the prospect of taking only three classes. Since I was so crunched for time, I decided to do the programming project in Python. In an hour, I had gone from not understanding the algorithm involved, to a short, efficient Python program which took in a polish notated set of chip sizes and orientations, and output an optimized floorplan for it. Throughout the process, I only had to look at my Python book once. Even though I am far more proficient with C and C++ than Python, I would have to have the book open on my desk the entire time had I used C/C++. The more I use Python (and the more I use Perl, ugh), the more impressed I am with it. It’s easy to understand, and I am able to write functional code nearly as fast as I can think.

Due to how much Python has impressed me, I’ve decided to do my CS 339 (databases) project in it instead of Perl. The project is self defined, and my current idea is a simple fitness tracker for multiple users. It will allow the user to enter weight, body fat percentage and graph them by date, as well as allow the user to enter the nutritional information of food they commonly eat, and track fat/protein/carbohydrate ratios and the number of calories consumed each day. This isn’t something I anticipate a huge demand for, since there are commercial websites that do the same essential thing in a much flashier, more feature complete, and more complex way, but I’ve always wanted a simple web accessible way to keep track of how my training is progressing, and how my diet is. I’m definitely open to other ideas, so if you have any other project suggestions, let me know (or ideas for features to make my existing idea cooler).

I’ve been using Ubuntu steadily over the past week, and it’s still been performing great. I have however, had some serious driver issues again, this time related to my ATI radeon 9500 video card. Trying to install the newest ATI drivers proved to be a harrowing process. Although I was able to install the drivers and compile the kernel module necessary to access those drivers (stupid proprietary drivers), every time the system booted it would replace the new module in /lib/modules/2.6.12-9-686/volatile with the old one from restricted-modules. This resulted in a version mismatch, which disabled 3D acceleration. If I copied over the module and restarted X, the new ATI drivers worked fine, but as soon as the system restarted the module was clobbered again, and I couldn’t figure out how. There was no trace of the old module until after bootup. Eventually, I gave up and used the slightly older ATI drivers that Ubuntu includes, only to be confronted by periodic X freezes (the system was still running, X just wouldnt’ respond to anything, including kill commands). Now I’m running the open source ‘radeon’ driver that I started with, and image quality is better, and everything is perfectly stable. No 3D acceleration, but I don’t play games so it’s not much of a loss.

Every experience I’ve had with proprietary binary drivers under Linux has been poor. They’re unstable, poorly written, and nearly impossible to install reliably. Although this in part due to Linux’s lack of a static driver interface, most of the blame lies at the feet of the manufacturers. In the open source world, when you write code you know that dozens of very skilled eyes will be looking over it, and if your code sucks, you’ll get harshly criticized for it. In the proprietary world, code quality doesn’t really matter. No one is going to see it anyway, so why bother make it extensible, portable, clean, readable, or efficient? If it works most of the time, is completed by the deadline, and is good enough to sell the product, why make it better? I think the reason a lot of these companies refuse to open source their drivers is because they can’t, they’re so poorly organized, completely unportable, and horribly hackish. Sure, they work, but they’re written to work only within a very very specific environment. Wonder why so much software broke with Service Pack 2, and why it took so long for companies to come out with patches (I’m talking to you, Netgear)? It’s this same “profit above anything else” philosophy. Open source coders are reverse engineering hardware and writing far better drivers than the manufacturers who designed the hardware. Sadly, I don’t see any indication that the vast majority of the hardware industry will ever start concentrating on driver quality. It seems that as operating systems finally become stable, hardware companies are taking up the “lets make computers unusable!” torch.

In a very loosely related rant, this weekend I attempted to buy a bottle of Southern Comfort at Jewel and was rejected based upon the fact I have an expired driver’s license. I was less than impressed. My birthdate doesn’t suddenly become invalid in conjunction with my drivers license doing so. Although I can understand why they do it (some stupid kid “borrowing” an expired license to buy booze), it seems to be the way Evanston operates, ie: complete and total control. Everywhere I go in this town, something like this seems to happen. I can’t buy booze despite the fact that I’m 21 years old, I can’t buy the movies in Blockbuster, I can’t use a video camera in Blockbuster, I can’t get the printer cartridges off the wall in CVS without an employee to do it for me, I can’t use the computer in Radioshack without an employee watching to make sure I don’t “take it to one of those hacker sites with the spywares and stuff”, I can’t look at TV show DVDs at Borders without someone to open the case for me, and so on. Over the past four years, I’ve been working up a sketch of the political orientation of the usual Evanston resident. Here it is:

I’m going to be happy to leave this town.

~ by Andrew on October 18, 2005.