So… it’s funny, but my last post here was pretty much produced by the same situation today. I upgraded Ubuntu to 10.04, PHP got upgraded, and WordPress exploded. Now it’s generally functioning, and my server is doing ok too, barring a few quirks.

A lot has happened in two years. I finished school in May 2009, found a job at Meggitt Aircraft Braking Systems in Akron, and bought a car.

Well, from the time of my last post until the end of 2008, I don’t think I can say much about it. I was in school, working my butt off for the ultimate payoff. I finished the summer semester and rolled right into two more. I remember anticipating my return to school in the fall to begin working on my senior design project, and to be able to finally finish my education. A few tough classes awaited me that fall, mostly elective like Digital Communications and Embedded Scientific Computing. I thoroughly enjoyed both of these classes, but senior design was what dominated most of my days.

Finally I had finished school. August 2003 to May 2009, it seemed like an eternity at the time, but now looking back it feels practically like a blink of an eye. Time is funny like that I guess, never moves fast enough when you want it to, but then before you know it, too much has slipped away. At any rate, my last two semesters at The University of Akron were enjoyable. My senior design project, which we dubbed the “RSS Enabled LED Marquee” was a blast to work on. I’ll try to write another post dedicated to this in the near future. I made a lot of good friends that semester and truly reveled in the time that I spent working along side of them.

Most of my classmates had either taken jobs before they left, or quickly found jobs after we had our final days at the U of A. It took me until August 2009 to finally find something. I made a huge “mistake” that summer, around the beginning of June… I bought a copy of World of Warcraft.

To anyone who reads this, do not let a game run your life. World of Warcraft is fine within itself, but scheduling real life time around gameplay is… well… not a good habit to practice on a regular basis (IMO). I’m not saying that running a raid in an MMORPG or having a clan match in an FPS at scheduled times is a bad thing, but when your guild wants to raid 3 nights a week, and you feel obligated to do so… it might affect other things in your life. People close to you start to wonder if your OK, and have concern that maybe you’re spending too much time in a virtual world. Everything in moderation. This truly is the key. At any rate, as of March 2010, I haven’t logged any more hours in that game, and I can’t say that I miss it all that much. Listening to the soundtrack makes me feel a little nostalgic about when I leveled my first character to level 80. I remember running though the zones, observing all of the scenic views, listening to the music in the background and just being in awe of what Blizzard had created. But once you reach the cap, the game turns into a monotonous grind for the “best” equipment, which is the mechanic of the game I like the least and the reason I stopped playing. Anyhow, I made a few friends that I used to play with and I hope that someday in the near future I can actually interact with them in real life.

So enough about games, like I said before I went off on my WoW tangent, I found a job at Meggitt Aircraft Braking Systems in the fall, after I graduated. My position at the company was (is) a software test engineer. So basically, I would take the Brake Control Units into a laboratory environment and subject them to tests to validate that the software is working properly and can detect issues with the entire braking system on the aircraft. Software test wasn’t exactly the position where I envisioned myself when I graduated, but after looking for a few months, I figured I would give it a shot. I was hired in as a contractor, with no benefits, at an hourly rate. After repeatedly extending my contract, once in December to February and again in February to May, I decided that I wanted a stable, full-time job. If I couldn’t get it at Meggitt, than I was going to go elsewhere. Originally, when I had been looking for a job back in the summer and fall, a friend of my parents had mentioned to them that Rockwell-Collins often hired engineers. So, in March I submitted application to about 10 Rockwell-Collins positions. I had some interviews, two of them, in Iowa. Now don’t get me wrong, I do have some love for the midwest states, (Ohio is after all in the midwest) but when the population of the largest city in your state is outnumbered by the Akron/Cleveland metro area… At any rate, after having two really good interviews (with some exceptionally nice people by the way) and seeing lots of corn, I came home with hope that there was something other than a temporary position in a job that doesn’t really fit my career goals. A week later, I got a call back from Katie in talent acquisition at RC. I was offered both jobs. I was so happy, someone wanted to commit to me! Unfortunately my biggest decision was yet to come… I told my boss the next day that RC had made me an offer for a full-time position, and he explains that he had put in for two full-time salaried contracts for my coworker and I. Three days later, I have both offers in my hands. It was time to decide if I wanted to stay in Ohio and stay near to my friends and family, or to venture out into the far midwest (OK maybe its not that dramatic…) to start a new life with a new job (one that I believe fit my career goals more closely than my current one). Now typically, like most people, I’m a creature of habit. I don’t hate change, but given the choice I prefer sameness. This was the first time that I really had a chance to redefine what my life was. It was definitely an eye opener. In the end, I apologized to Katie at Rockwell-Collins for not making my decision sooner, (this was due to the slowness of Meggitt’s hiring approval policies) told her that I truly appreciated the offers, and signed a full-time offer with Meggitt.

So here I am today. Contributing to society through joys like income tax and enjoying daily rush-hours. I can’t complain too much though, the job is good and as far as I can see, stable. I keep a running tally of all my time-cards electronically, and in that spreadsheet there is a calculation for number of years of service. I just hit “1″ a few days ago. As much as I like the job and the people I work with, I hope that number never hits “6″. By that time I hope I have moved on to something different, something I LOVE to do. For now, I’m happy.

I’ve dropped my callsign off of the title of my blog. Just like Cliff Blizinski I think “it’s time to grow up a bit”.

*END TRANSMISSION*

Today, however, I couldn’t access my site. I figured, maybe Apache was being temperamental, since I had restarted sometime yesterday. So I ssh’d into my box and looked around, but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Later this evening, after trying for several hours to make it work again, I concluded the server was working fine, but port 80 was mysteriously being blocked somewhere outside my network. Since we have Time Warner’s Road Runner service, I immediately figured they were blocking it on their end, which wouldn’t be the first time they had pulled some jack-assery of that type. So i got on the live chat and asked them. They stated that they NEVER block ports on their end, which I just assumed was a bold faced lie. After playing with port settings and a few other things, still no luck, I decided to reboot the router. BINGO. Working website. Maybe running the release candidate of DD-WRT isn’t the most stable thing for the network that I always trust to “just work”.

Besides that issue, I started summer school a few weeks ago. It’s ok, I suppose. I’m still trying to recall how to write good VHDL code, since it’s been about 2 years since I’ve even looked at VHDL. Vacation to Myrtle Beach starts this Friday, and I’m missing the first week of my 5 week Latin Civilization class. Alwell, I haven’t been on a vacation in years, and I think it’s a well deserved break.

So that’s about all that I can think of that is new right now. Hopefully summer class ends well and I can glide right into fall semester.

Besides the snow, a lot else has happened in the last few months. I finished my co-oping period with ABB in December. It was an enjoyable and valuable experience. It does feel good to be back in school though, I was really starting to miss the academic environment that has become so familiar to me over the last few years. Christmas break was pleasant, we spent some time with family, saw some friends, and burned up a lot of time playing Rock Band and other video games.

Now I’m back in school, and back to the grind. This semester I only have four classes, but they’re all engineering courses, so it’s a very difficult semester. I am taking VLSI, Operating System Concepts, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Communications & Signal Processing. Over the summer I’ll have to take a few more courses to make sure I can graduate next spring.

Other than that, the last few months have kind of buzzed by. Tim is looking at colleges to attend in the fall and head to France after he graduates in June. Mike is not currently attending school, and is trying to find a job (which he is finding out is very difficult in today’s job market) . I spent some time with Nick Koehler over his winter quarter break a couple of weeks ago. Nick will graduate this spring and start working at AEP in Gahanna, OH this summer. Also, Tom Downerd will get married to Ashli Litten this April. Exciting times for all, that’s for sure!

Anyways, that’s pretty much all for right now. Hopefully I will be able find some time to blog a little bit more often than once every 3 months!

HISTORY OF MY BLOG/SERVER
My first post was actually written back when I had a Blogspot account, which is now owned by Google, and renamed to Blogger. These posts were then carried over onto a new install of WordPress on my first server. The specs for that machine were: AMD K62 @ 400MHz, 92MB RAM, Windows 2000 Pro and XAMPP for the web services. There were a few other things that my server was doing for me, like running HoTTProxy and VibeStreamer, but all in all, everything was it slow and not very pleasant to use… Once I decided to take the plunge into Linux, the experience was a whole lot better. Basically from this point onward, I have loved my Linux experiences. I make reference in a post about how the server just performs better with Linux, and it is so true! Fast forward a bit, last November I got a new server, since Lake Twp. was going to auction off some old PCs. This machine has really helped me out a lot. It now has a 500GB RAID1 storage array for music, movies, games, and backups of my laptop. Its a torrent box, uPnP server (for getting media to the 360), web server, phone proxy, and probably a couple other things I forgot. There are a few choice pieces of software I miss that are Windows only, but both of them have plans in the future to release Linux versions.

It’s crazy to think that just 2 years ago, I didn’t know anything about Linux, let alone hosting a website. I will have to say, that my experiences with my Linux server are invaluable to me. I have learned so much about so many different things; from troubleshooting system problems and software problems to writing shell scripts to automate tasks. The whole concept of being thrown into an OS with no idea how anything works is now tolerable for me. Anyways, Happy Birthday Blog and Merry Christmas to all!

P.S. Special thanks to Ben for helping to introduce me to Linux. You really helped me a lot Ben. Thanks!

Now since the internet has chosen a name for the whale, it is time to save him. So lets in an effort to try to keep the Japanese from hunting and killing these amazing creatures, sign the petition, and donate a little money if you support the cause.

Ruckus is pretty cool, the quality is acceptable, and you can’t really beat “free”, but… as soon as you leave the institution providing the service, the licenses that allow you to play the DRM‘d WMA files will expire, and you will have lots of unplayable music files. Along with that, DRM‘d WMA files can not be converted to be used on iPods or some other portable media players, and if you use OSX or Linux, your also out of luck. If none of these things bother you, you can stop reading here, otherwise keep reading…

Now the solution kind of goes into a gray area, at least with Ruckus, DRM, and the concept of Fair Use. The real thought behind Fair Use is you have already bought the license to the media, now you are trying to unprotect it so that you can use it in other ways, i.e. Putting a copy protected DVD, that you bought, onto your iPod. The gray area you run into is, with Ruckus, you never really paid for the media, at least not directly. So do you really own the same rights to it that you would if you directly paid for it or not? I don’t really know… What I do know is how to get rid of the DRM that your music is infested with.

Keep in mind, as with all things, someone has to pay for it. So if you like the artist, support them.

• -First, you need to obtain FairUse4WMA. You can get it from the zip archive, here.
• -After you extract the files, I found the easiest way to remove the DRM from the files was to use the FairUse Commander.
• -When you open the FairUse Commander, you need to set the path to FairUse4WMA.exe, which you should have just extracted.
• -Select the folder that contains the files with the DRM, and I leave the “Find only protected files” checkbox enabled.
• -Next, check the “Use output folder” checkbox, and select a place to put the un-DRM’d files.
• -You can choose whether or not to leave the “[NoDRM]” prefix, but check the “Batch DRM Removal” checkbox.
• -Click the “Search for Media Files” button, and verify that the music inside the gridview is the DRM’d tracks that you want to un-DRM, then click the green “Remove DRM!” button.
• -You should have WMA files in the output directory that are DRM free!

If you have problems, you can check out this article. Contrary to what this article says, however, I have been able to remove the DRM from Ruckus tracks without removing Windows Media Player 11 from my system, so YMMV. Good Luck!

Since FairUse4WM is no longer being developed (read cease and desist), in order to free our DRM’d WMA music we must turn to another method.

To everyone who is having problems getting FairUse4WM, I have some unfortunate news. After trying a few things, I can no longer get it to work either. I think SP3 for XP may have updated WMP and that might be causing the problems, but there is no way to know for sure.

Since FairUse4WM is no longer being developed, there’s not much we can do but to move on to a different technique. I would suggest using TuneBite. It allows for ripping at a higher speed than 1x with their proprietary high speed driver. This makes ripping the DRM for a CD worth of music doable in about 10 minutes.

I don’t really like this solution as it requires you to transcode the songs from one format (WMA) to another (MP3, AAC, etc…), thus resulting in a loss in quality from the original lossy source.

Obviously most people can find TuneBite w/o too much problem (*cough* piratebay *cough*), but for people who can’t, http://tunebite.com/en/remove_drm/index.html

Good Luck!

I really wish being able to use media, in which we have been given (or have purchased) a license to use, would be simpler.  If you feel the same way I do, please check out DefectiveByDesign, a group opposed to the DRM imposed on us by big corporations.

Protect your freedom!

Support FOSS and ride the OSSM!

Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.

Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.

I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.

I suppose in principle, a ISO open format would be a wonderful thing, but OOXML is definitely not ready to become that format. In her article, Stéphane Rodriguez lists 13 different scenarios where the Whitepaper results from Microsoft don’t seem to actually be valid. She even goes as far as listing the exact steps necessary to reproduce the results. From a programmatic perspective, OOXML is amazingly bad. A programmer could probably spend a good couple years trying to write code that would be able to work with these remarkably unpredictable XML documents. Some of the elements in the VML part of the documents aren’t even valid XML elements!

It is good to see that someone (among others) is standing up against bad standards. Microsoft is inciting a format war, that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. They are afraid of being left behind as governments and other public bodies see the need for an open format, and are starting to move to ODF. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, said “What the world needs today … is a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past.”

I guess someone made a short film titled, “Transformers Preview Review” which looks at all of the material that was out before the movie and tried to make some predictions. I’d say for the most part, it was valid. A point that I thought was really interesting was that the Transformers movie was setting up for a trilogy. I suppose this makes sense, because most of the huge blockbuster films over the last few years have been three movies. Some of them that come with built in fanbases (i.e. Spiderman, Batman, and Transformers) create a new movie with new characters and pretty much drop all of the references to the original series. I guess Michael Bay was told that he could only have 4 vs. 4 or 5 vs. 5 or something like that, rather than having an epic Tranformers battle.

Overall, I thought this movie was amazing, and if I had the time, I would definitely go see it again! I remember reading just a couple of months ago that low theater attendance was being blamed on piracy. The MPAA can blame it on anything they want, I still feel that the real reason is because there aren’t enough “Transformers” in the theaters. So if you haven’t seen it yet, like giant robots, and were born in the 80′s… what are you waiting for?!

Anyways, for starters, I am currently employed at ABB part-time over the summer. This is pretty cool because in order for me to make the same amount of money every pay, I would probably have to work about 2.5 times more hours than I work here (Here being where I am right now). Not to mention the work isn’t too difficult (Note the last parenthetical statement). Also, this summer, I finally embarked on the Great Journey (read Circuits II), hopefully it will turn out like I expect it to. Speaking of the Great Journey, I bought a Xbox 360 back in May, and it is leet. I tried to buy used, to save some bucks, but that was a bad idea. Out of the two used ones I had, neither worked… Regardless, I now have a pretty all white Core system, and the Halo 3 beta kicked serious butt!

The new Transformers movie comes out today! It should be cool, I’m going to go see it at 10:20 PM tonight. I’ll have to put up a post of what I thought of it. Today I had this for an away message… “Transfloormerz! Robuts in Da’ Guys!” And Ben Radey messaged me with “transgenders! more than meets the eyes!”. That was good for a laugh!

I’ve done a couple things to the site lately. First of all, I made a new header. I used the base Flash file that the snow header was created from, rewrote the action script, found a cloud image and did a little PSing, and it looks pretty good to me. I also dropped a Twitter javascript into my sidebar. So that’s been a summary of the last couple months. I’ll update again with more soon.

‘I am wri9ting this because I am suppored to be working right now
e’I reall don’t know how Long I can type snsles chars in to the VB editor
‘because i have still 1 hr and 57 minues, oops make that 56 minutes left
‘before I should leave. I reawlly want to gome and break out the 360 but mom wou
‘ld be so pissed that i bought one.

That’s life unscripted peoples…

Anyways, I really wanted to post some stuff over the last month, but either have been too lazy (bad me…) or been forgetful. So I will make another update soon. I mean for gosh sakes, the stupid server that hosts this blog is in my basement, there’s no reason for me not to update it!

Peace outs!