Bloggregation

So I decided to aggregate all of the historic blogs and roll them all up into WordPress as it has become my preferred blogging tool over time. Some will notice that Ninjacrab is yet another blog and it is there for the pure techy notes as well as updates on the side projects.

Things I plan on documenting more here are updates on being a dad, non-deep tech stories that I find amusing and the occasional link to awesomely hilarious youtube videos I might come across.

So as for my update on being a dad, this week my grandparents (Ethan and Dexter’s great-grandparents) are visiting from Korea. Since my parents want to entertain them and Diana is so new to her new job, I decided to be a stay at home dad for the past few days and “Good googily moogily” is it difficult to watch after the kids full time. On top of that Diana is feeling a bit under the weather so after coming home from work, I still had the duty of putting them to bed. I didn’t actually shower for two days!

Admittedly, Ethan got a TON of TV time in the last few days. I’m literally parsing through my mind on how the day had gone by and where I spent my time with them. Asides from the TV time, there was some Duplo action, building train tracks and hide and seek.

Dexter was basically, clean drool, clean diapers, sing to sleep, feed milk and make goofy faces during belly time.

With all that said, the days blazed away and domestically, I basically got nothing done. I did get some night time productivity to squeeze in activities like aggregating the blogs, working on other pet projects, however showering apparently wasn’t high enough of a priority and Diana must love my manly musk.

What have I learned from this and how can I do better?

  1. I stayed up too late. Not treating this like a real job. Going to sleep at 2am-4am made me a terrible performing father the following morning.
  2. I prepared what I knew Ethan would eat. Being that I was actually in control of the entire daily schedule, I could have actually got the little guy hungry enough to want to experiment. I got him to taste an orange, but that was one meal of one day. I should have done more.
  3. I didn’t prepare or plan for this week like I would have on any other project. I’m not talking about blue print schematics, work flow design documents, object model diagrams and gantt charts. I literally could have just brainstormed various activities, wrote them down on preferred platform (paper or pencil would do) and then plot days to do activities.

@Ethan @Dexter I promise to be a better Dad, just give me some more time

No excuses – just lazy!

To sum up about two years, Diana has delivered us a new addition to our family. I’ve been doing the same o’le at work and we have various nights were sleep was interrupted from time to time.

We also moved twice, yup that’s right twice. As we discovered we were with child we moved to the financial district to start nesting for our little boy. After a year, we found various options which included more room for more optimal dollar per square feet values. In this cost effective move, we actually lucked out tremedously

Literally the day before Hurricane Sandy struck the north eastern coast, we moved from one building that was about 5-6 feet lower in elevation than the building that we live in now. Our old apartment had major issues from flooding and is not expected to be habitable for even a few months in the future.

Our new apartment is still not completely restored, but was at least habitable after 3 weeks. Eletricity is pumping from a diesel generator outside and I hear that the maintenance crews have to pump water up the towers 20 minutes at a time, every hour on the hour. Still the team that works at this building is incredibly courteous and I’m very grateful that we made it through.

With that the final update is that we’re still setting up the new apartment. It’s about 85% setup, I would say. The last few things are assembling some last pieces of furniture, installing some shelves and putting up some pictures. I look forward to this holiday season and wish everyone else some joy this season!

BlogSpot

It has indeed been some time since the last blog entry and it definitely has been a mis-mash of ideas of how I wanted to blog, but I’m thinking the best is the idea that is the easiest. Now with Blogspot and “Windows Live Writer”, Diana and I should hopefully be able to both collaborate what’s going on in one place.

Some very slow progress is going on to revamping the main page with HTML5 & CSS3, but a lot more progress is being made on the android shooter game.

Other news is that our son Ethan is less than a month from joining us. I can’t wait to see him!

Disk Failure!

So it’s been a while since my last post and it’s interesting to see that I haven’t blogged since I entered the E2 program. I’m now done and it was indeed quite an adventure. I’ve leave out the details for anyone who is interesting in pursuing it, but be ready to be tired!

We’ve now moved back into the city and on a very loud and annoying street. I get to enjoy the sound of buses, random drunks, jack hammers and velociraptors.

So back to the nerding topics. Shazouty had an uber disk failure which made me a very sad panda and I potentially lost about 4 months worth of data /sadface. It turned out that having raid 0 is good and bad at the same time. I don’t know if this was just a bad batch of disks, a random anomaly or what. Regardless, one disk was silently failing with bad clusters. The raid was protecting the data by having it available on the other disk. However, the secondary disk was slowly degenerating as well. While both were sprouting full of bad sectors, they were in different sectors so one was protecting the data from the other. That happened until eventually both disks had a bad sector… on my file table. Additionally ReiserFS had apparently stop being a good choice… years ago.

So after trying ReiserFsck to death and booting off cd images over and over trying to squeeze off from the dying raid, I realized it was time to cut my losses and just learn from the lesson. Fortunately, some of the data was still on Bunny(Diana named our newest laptop) and Badbox, so it wasn’t a complete loss. I now have a monthly reminder to check the SMART data of the drives to check the bad sectors and also backup to an external drive.

While this nerdy info isn’t as programming nerdy as I’d like my poasts to be, I will try to make sure I have some interesting for the next post. In the mean time another youtube video.

I should be …

Well I caught a cold recently and I’m pretty sure it was from a recent TX visitor. Regardless of where it came from, productivity pretty much died up until this morning. I made a few pathetic attempts before the weekend started, but pathetic they were. I am glad to know that I’ve made really good friends/alliances with my team members so they helped pull my slack.

This year I got into a program at work called E2(Expert Engineer). It is supposed to represent my company’s leetest of the leet. However, there is another title called DE(Distinguished Engineer), which apparently is even “more leetierest” than E2. Anyways, my point of this is that I should be reading about 200-300 pages worth of materials for the program… and I am uber failing to have the drive for that now.

Instead, I toyed around with writing C++/CLI and XNA applications. The CLI stuff is pretty bland. Wrote code, didn’t work and threw an obscure error. I then remembered that c++ is target platform specific(x86 or x64). So setting the flags correctly, I got x86 to work and attempted to do the same with x64 but then those ‘x’s reminded me of XNA and I deviated to that.

On the platformer, I started following Microsoft’s guidance on populating models using Xml IntermediateSerializer. At first I was a bit cautious on how well it supported OOP paradigms and patterns, but apparently it seems to do all of the magic that I requested; it also has pretty decent pre-compiled support. So I performed that refactor and off it ran again.

My Reference Site

Now that I feel like I’ve done something productive to increase my Programming skill points a little bit, I’ll get to that reading

Post Wed-dum

So it’s been a while since I’ve last put up an entry and this one is long due. People quite often ask “How is married life?” So to answer “It is blissful!”

After the wedding, work became crazy for a good number of months, Diana and I have been finding reasons to travel on a relatively frequent basis and just about things were calming down, Starcraft 2 came out

Now that all of that is settling down, I’m back in the mood of doing some extra circicular coding. Tonight will be playing around with XNA 4.0 and the platformer.

Wedding Gift Preview!

Here is a preview picture of the wedding gift that we’ll be giving. Some of you may say “I went to the Nerdy Couple’s wedding in Texas and all I got is this lousy picture.” and if you say that. You’re mean!

Preview

I’m taking a break from drawing as I don’t have the endurance to hold writing instruments like back in my college days. So in the mean time, I’m going back to the web cam app, but I’m also going to play with a relatively new library that Microsoft has released called “Reactive Extensions”. As most of my app is intended to be event based and dealing with multiple concurrent processes, it may be the perfect platform to play with and test.

Check it out guys!

Youtubed!

So the upload appears to have finally completed. What’s weird is that, monitoring the bandwidth on my Ubuntu router, it only took about a minute to send, but Youtube’s progress bar continued to scroll as it was uploading. Apparently, youtube has some background service that takes your video and renders them into lesser quality videos. The problem is that even it’s 1080P looks like poop compared to the original. I’ve uploaded the original to my web server for those who want to see the video without all the fuzziness.

Enjoy!

[Edit 2/4/2015 – I took the videos down as they’re not very helpful]

XNA Evolution Step 2!

Actual blog content will be quick tonight since it’s already late and I’ve got two things to mildly entertain you for tonight.

One! I got the XNA Evolution Step 2 video compressed and ready for youtube. However, youtube seems to be bottlenecked after the actual video sends. I guess it’s processing the video. I should have it up for everyone by tomorrow!

Two! Here is a parady of “Delilah” that I slightly modified and mangled vocally.

Badbox is Bad!!

The “good” bad apparently. So as my RC candidate of Windows 7 is to expire within the next two weeks, I decided this would be a good weekend to wipe and load my official copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.

Well the install started as smooth as I would expect. First came the formatting, then the installation of windows, the drivers and finally the software.

Unfortunately, I started noticing that my desktop’s network connection kept dropping. It would force me to disable and then re-enable the hardware for the network connection to restore. At first I was concerned it was my router or my modem, but alas, it was worse.

I was re-installing WoW, even though I’m not playing it till the wedding, and at some point my entire PC just powered down. Along with the constant network card dropping. I eventually took off my PC Door and felt the heatsink. Indeed the heatsink was a good indication that things were way too warm.

So to satisfy my curiousity, I downloaded a hardware monitor to get my cpu temps. It was reporting -40 degrees! Looking at the software I figured that it may not be compatible or some other story so I checked out the forums, it turns out that my cpu was so hot, that it was overflowing the maximum thermal sensor value of 85C.

Quickly reacting, I took a deep breath and blew in the case and as I did an eruption of dust spewed from various cavernous regions. When I pulled my head out of the desk to check the temps, it had reported that the cpu temps were now at 75-77C. Funny and sad at the same time. I haven’t upgraded in so long, that I haven’t cleaned out my pc in a long time as well.

It was time to clean out the dust and I began. Piece by piece completely coated in dead human skin particles and other anomalous objects. I started wiping away and dismantling. I got to the cpu heatsink and when I removed it, there was no longer and adhesive force. The thermal grease had turned into a thermal cookie and was no longer provided any thermal conduction.

I then took everything off and got my q-tips out to remove the gunk from around the sockets, but as I started cleaning the sockets, it then recalled to me that Intel decided “Hey, lets put the pins on the motherboard instead of the cpu!”

I ended up bending three pins… I thought I had them all fixed, but my desktop was no longer booting. It kept whining and complaining with post codes that aren’t documented on google. I was almost going to stop by J & R at that moment to finally just upgrade to a socket 1366 platform.

However, I decided that I at least need to give this box another shot. 2 hours later of prying everything off and looking at the socket with a magnifying glass and a paperclip, I managed to fix the board

Everything came back up, and I’m now restoring the settings of the board since I reset the CMOS as a potential option for resolving what I didn’t realize was a bent pin at the time. I’m now happy to report that load temps are at 64-67C now and my machine is overclocked back to 3.2Ghz on the cpu and bumped up on the memory 200mhz to 1ghz.

People who don’t overclock their pcs due to concerns about longevity, meet my E6600, 3 years at 33% overclock and still not dying. Badbox is still alive, allowing me to perform mischevious programming deeds! Unfortunately I wanted today to be a good milestone day for XNA evolution step 2 and another webcam app project. However, that will just wait till later in the week.

Time for bed, night all!