apollonic.net

Bitten by the Apple TV bug, I’ve decided to put a PC in the living room for use as a video player. I already have a DVR box, so I don’t really need another one, but it will be nice to get all my video content in one place. Eventually, I would like to rip all my DVDs to VIDEO_TS folders to that I never have to mess with physical media again.

As the proud owner of a 4:3 standard-definition TV, I don’t really need anything fancy. What I’d really like to get is a Mac Mini and a few of those stackable external hard drives designed to fit so nicely with it. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the budget for that, being a young, married student. I have an old PowerMac G4 350 MHz machine sitting here that I could slap OS X on (currently running 9.2.2), but somehow I just don’t think 350 MHz is going to cut it for some of the nicer modern video codecs.

So, in the end, I’ve decided to use my old desktop machine for the build. It was state of the art way-back-when, and it will be perfect for this monolithic little task. The specs currently:

• Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz processor (the hottest little proc ever produced, I swear)
• GeForce2 Ultra 64MB video card with DVI, VGA, and S-Video out for the TV connection
• DVD-ROM drive
• 16x CD-RW drive
• Soundblaster Live! sound card
• This strange old Winnov video capture card that I found somewhere, manfactured circa 1997, just in case I want to import video from other sources or actually do some DVRing
• 2 PATA hard disks currently, a 30GB and a 20GB (hopefully I can scrounge some up from work/friends and stick a couple of nice, larger-capacity drives in there, but it’s a start)
• Ethernet card or mobo integrated, can’t remember which

Now, it’s possible that I may need a few more things. I’m not sure if this machine has USB 2.0, and if not, I’ll most likely want to add it. Then I can slap my 250 GB external hard drive on it, which has mostly video content on it anyway, and use my old 60 GB external as my desk-bound data drive. If I have any problems with DVD performance (which I don’t think I will, either due to possible hardware decoding on the GeForce or because the proc is fast enough), I have an old DVD-decoder card somewhere. It came out of a PII-400, which obviously needed it. I don’t think I will here.

I haven’t built a PC for myself since my freshman, or possibly sophomore, year of college, when I built one mostly on my dad’s dime for my mother. That system, a casualty of a lightning strike, has since been replaced with a Mac Mini (That’s right folks, God wants people to be Switchers!). I’m strangely excited about it, even though the “building” is just a few parts swaps. I build and rebuild systems at work all the time, but somehow doing it for myself is different. Ever since I switched to the Mac in the fall of 2003, I haven’t really had the same constant hardware desires that once filled me with a lust for more megahertz and megabytes.

More to follow on the building experience, scheduled for this weekend.

Well, it’s been a couple of busy weeks, and I am way behind on my blogging. Bad, bad Derek. I’ll be posting on a variety of topics today, and hopefully kickstarting my writing neurons once again.

I’ve been writing XML, XSLT, and PHP all night. It’s sleep time, folks.

Class: 13 hr/wk

Work: 19 hr/wk

Math Homework: 4 hr/wk

Coding Homework: 14 hr/wk minimum

Reading for Class: 6 hr/wk

Transit times: 7 hr/wk minimum

National Guard duty: 20 hrs

Total work and trans hours per drill week: ~77 minimum

Hopefully, I can fit a meet up with Josh, a meet up with my brother, and some time with my wife in there. Oh, and sleep, if I get the chance.

Added to phrases that I hate: “syntactic sugar”.

This is from The Programmer Personality Test:

My Type: PLSC

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

While I disagreed with the description of the first answer to the question (”planning is best done as you go”, or some such), I don’t really agree that 75% of the time should be spent on planning either. I think I actually fall somwhere in between the two extremes, but this test doesn’t really allow for that.

You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

Anyone who knows me as a programmer know that this is absolutely the case. See An Ode to C a couple posts ago (which has been floating around Usenet for years).

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

For projects that are not too extensive, I prefer to work alone. I don’t usually program in groups for class, or on my own projects. I just like to do things my way, I guess. But let me stress, I am not afraid to work in a group when that is the best option. It’s just that for most projects I do, it isn’t.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

Conservative in life, conservative in code, I guess.

I almost got struck by lightning today. I was walking down Green St. at the outset of today’s storm, when all the hairs on my body began to stand on end. Then, POW!, lightning hit something on the block (not sure exactly where it arced to). It was bright and sudden, and I had a definite flashback to being hit with IEDs in Iraq.

I walked a little faster the rest of the way home.

In other news, tomorrow is “Unofficial”, the not-quite-St.-Pat’s celebration held annually here in Chambana and heavily sponsored by the campus bars. Unfortunatly, Chancellor Hermann, as part of his continued crusade against anything that might make UIUC at all unique from the next politically correct institution of higher “education” (see the Anti-Chief ruling), has spearheaded an effort to stop Unofficial. He even seems to think he has the authority to do so.

Lobbying on his part and on the part of other Uni bigwigs has lead the Champaign city council to pass what I consider to be ill-considered, if not downright illegal, laws, giving the Mayor a sort of “emergency powers”. It has been mandated that bars are not allowed to sell shots or pitchers tomorrow. None. Explain to me again how it’s the business of the local goverment what perfectly legal beverages are sold at these establishments.

I wasn’t even planning to celebrate Unofficial this year, but now I’m going to make a point of getting a little tipsy.

So here’s the rundown of what’s been, well, going down:

• Rewrote Bitstream and Huffman encoder/decoder in Java, now fully integrated with my image editor (download them from the code page)
• Slept, finally
• had an intense session with JK with lots of Dew, code, and good discussion
• cleaned the apartment some

Tonight I have a study session for CS411, assuming that I manage to finish my CS421 homework. *Sigh* it never ends when you’re a CS major at UIUC.

Hopefully I’ll also have a chance to make dinner. I’m leading toward my mom’s classic marinara sauce recipe, which will be posted later if I manage to make it.

The world takes on a certain strangeness once you approach the 36 hour mark without sleep.

The Huffman Coding system that I’ve been trying to implement isn’t working. The tree structure sets up properly, but an attempt to print it out (and by extension, to locate particular nodes) segfaults, a strange occurance considering my minimal use of pointers. In an unusual twist, I haven’t been able to find the bug even after a couple hours of searching and experimentation. I think I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on wakefulness (and possibly well exceeded it), so after dinner I am going to crash. Unless, that is, I have a breakthrough, in which case I may have to visit the gas station for another Dew infusion.

It’s Heroes time. Thank you DVR and the scifi revival.