JARinteractive

Tonight I purchased an iPod for the first time. I finally have the finances and a good justification. My commute on the MetroLink is about 30 minutes, and having an iPod will be far simpler than a CD player and CDs. I plan to get a case for it in the near future, but I’m not sure which one to get. I will probably get a car stereo adapter (maybe the iTrip) too.

It has been a while since my last entry. I am now settled into my apartment and have DSL (yay!). I am starting to do some actual work at SBC, as well. Free time is a premium right now though. Working every day plus an 50-55 minute commute each way really eats up the time. I would like to dig into Objective-C and Cocoa a bit deeper if I can find some time. Maybe I can be a bit better about updating my blog, too.

Today I began my career with SBC in St. Louis. I should be getting DSL within a couple weeks - hopefully sooner than later.

College is over. School is over. I graduate on Sunday. Today I moved most of my belongings to an apartment in St. Louis. On Sunday I will graduate. It is a strange feeling knowing that a couple of my long-term goals will be met within the next couple weeks. I have completed two degrees and I have a software development job. It is a strange feeling knowing that I have met major goals that I have had since junior high. I am eager to unpack everything into my new apartment, but that will have to wait.

When did TextWrangler become free and how did I miss it?

It has been a while since my last update. Most of my time since then has involved preparing my Digital Media Portfolio for its presentation last night. Now that the portfolio is finished and the presentation is over, I only have one major class project left before graduation. I will be spending the next week exploring parallel programming as a part of my parallel computing independent study. After (finally) getting the cluster running, I have been busy working on other projects and have not yet had time to explore parallel programming. I am eager to dig into that after taking a little break this weekend.

I did take the time to install Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on my PowerBook a week ago. I am enjoying Dashboard a lot. It would be fun to create a dashboard widget, although I’m not sure what I would make. While working on my DM Portfolio I noticed that I could no longer drag PHP and Perl files to the SubEthaEdit icon on the dock (they want to be associated with Adobe GoLive). In 10.3 it was never a problem to drag a file to an application on the dock, as long as the program supported that file type. What happened?

Yesterday marked the end of a huge project that all seniors are required to complete at Greenville College. Now I have time to turn my focus back to my digital media portfolio and parallel programming. There are two weeks before my DM portfolio presentation on May 5th. I have until the end of the semester to complete work for my independent study in parallel programming. My flock of Electric Sheep continues to grow larger; For the last couple weeks I have been mating the sheep to watch the traits of the parent sheep appear in their children. Through this process some great (and some not so great) sheep have been born. Here are the thumbnails of a few of my sheep…

    

We got back from our tour last night. It is great to be back in Greenville after travelling for 11 days. The tour was a wonderful - though taxing - experience. Shortly after the Pope’s death on Saturday afternoon we sang for a vespers service at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. We were also privileged to worship with Edgar O’Neal (of the O’Neal Twins), a 2004 inductee of the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, on Friday evening.

Last night I designed and queued up about 20 sheep to render over spring break. Now I am laying on a bed in Galion, Ohio. We (the GC Choir) drove for 8+ hours on a coach bus today: a good time of watching scenery, hanging out with Jaime, and listening to Mars Ill and a few other choice CDs. Tomorrow we are singing in a Good Friday service @ noon, then performing a concert in the evening. I’m hoping to have some time to read up on parallel programming or dig into Eclipse a bit more if I have some free time during tour.

Yesterday the GC Cluster group met and we finished setting up the OpenMosix cluster. We also discussed using VNC to connect to it from elsewhere on campus.

Tonight I connected to the cluster using X forwarding over SSH. What does that mean? I can use the cluster from the comfort of my own room. Even better, unlike VNC, X forwarding can run X11 apps in the window manager that is running on the client machine. On my Macs, that means it runs within OS X styled windows. Now that the cluster is useable and easily accessible, we are able to move on to parallel programming.

For the past week and a half, I have been experimenting with Electric Sheep (ES) and I’ve decided to make it a part of my DM portfolio. My PowerMac is hosting the ES server - written in perl and including some executables written in C. Tonight I got the final portion of the server working (hopefully): uploading sheep designed in Apophysis. Apparently the clone feature of anim-flame, which is required for the uploading process only exists in some versions of the code. It was added in version 1.16, but is gone now. Weird.