Nothing to do with

This picture has nothing to do with anything I know of



Except that I thought it was pretty cool.

I get to see

Alexisonfire tomorrow, along with Comeback Kid for Wakefest going on down the street. Party party music bikini music splash.

-Just a keyboard cowboy

War of the worlds movie

Because I said so.

I did say I was going to post my thoughts on Spielburg's War of the Worlds movie, didn't I. Let me just say, Ebert can have his opinion all to himself.

Oh, speaking of Ebert and his review: Is the Canadian version different from the American version? It appeared to me that in the American review they only see an alien outside his machine once, during the final death march that brings the machines down. However, when I saw the movie this weekend there was a scene where a group of three or four aliens peruse the contents of a basement.

But back to my thoughts. Spielburg stuck to the original story as best as a modern day era could allow. He pulled it off, he really did. The tripod machines, the heat ray, the human collecting, the fluid extraction, the red weed. OK, wait. The red weed wasn't quite like I envisioned. I was thinking something more short and shrubby, less tendril-y. He seemed to use a lot of firecracker sound effects, too. When a machine set down his huge pod of a foot "crack-crackle-pop-splutter". When someone burst into a cloud of dust (which evidently sends your shirt and pants flying straight up into the air) "crackle-boom-fizzle-pop-pop-boom".

And about those pants and shirts, there's a scene where Tom Cruise's character is running for his life from the monsters and all around him are pants and shirts falling from the sky. This happens again later in the film when he's accompanied by his children.

I'm looking forward to Timothy Hine's version of War as well, his being set during the actually time frame of the book. To see these awesome monsters destroying London of the 1800s should be fun to watch.

-crackle-fizz-pop "Oh look out! FALLING PANTS!!!"

simple audio fix

Well, listen here

Turns out I had a problem with my onboard sound card (via chipset) conflicting with my Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Gamer 5.1 sound card. The quick and easy fix? Here's what I had to do:

Show all sound modules currently enabled

> lsmod|grep snd

and in my case, I knew I wanted to turn off anything to do with via. So I looked on the left side for snd_[whatever via] and made a note of it. What is on the right side isn't important, even if you see via on that side.

snd_emu10k1 81668 1
snd_rawmidi 22944 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_seq_device 8332 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec 64608 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_pcm_oss 47652 0
snd_mixer_oss 16768 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 84872 3 snd_emu10k1,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 23300 1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 9604 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_via82xx [someNumber] [somethingElse]
snd_util_mem 4608 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep 9220 1 snd_emu10k1
snd 50276 11 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_hwdep
soundcore 9824 1 snd

I make a note of snd_via82xx because I want to add that to the system's blacklist. Open up blacklist with editing privileges:

> sudo emacs /etc/hotplug/blacklist

And somewhere at the bottom should be the snd_ section. Simply add whichever module you want blacklisted and it will no longer load at system restart. That allows the other sound card, my SB Live! 5.1 to work without the sound being disabled.

A point to note, this enables the dsp channel of the system. Only one program at a time can use this channel, wheres the alsa works any way. At least that's my understanding.

To see what is using the alsa channel:

> lsof /dev/snd/*

and to see what is using the dsp channel:

> lsof /dev/dsp

One last thing, codecs. You'll want to install audio and/or video codecs now that you've got your soundcard working. The codecs section of the Ubuntu guide suggests the following steps. However, you can search for the packages through Kynaptic just as well. Through kynaptic you don't have to do the gst-register step:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-lame
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install w32codecs
sudo apt-get install libdivx4linux
sudo apt-get install lame
sudo apt-get install sox
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install mjpegtools
sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
gst-register-0.8

-Audio goodness

simple nvidia fix

Get that nVidia video card working.

Real solution at the end of this post, borrowed from the ubuntu wiki. If this solution does not work or you do not have an nVidia video card, try there. It may have a better solution for you.

I couldn't figure out why my nVidia video card wasn't working with my new install of Kubuntu. I tried downloading a .sh package from the nVidia web site. When I installed the script, it complained about shutting off the X server. Well, figuring out what the hell X server is was another bit of research. Another easy fix.

Ctrl-Alt-F1 to bring up a text login screen.

Log in as root (or do it all through sudo). When logging in as root, you may have to set the root password now. That requires editing of the shadow file, basically erasing the * in the roots password (this makes it so you don't need a password for root. A very dangerous thing). Now that root requires no password, log in as root and change its password with passwd.

To turn off the X server (the graphical user interface of Linux, like the fancy login screen)

> sudo /etc/init.d/?dm stop
# where ? is either g for gnome, k for kde
# of course, to start it again, end the line with start instead of stop.

Now that X is turned off, the video card install script still didn't want to install. Something about not having access to the kernel to reconfigure itself. So the true, easy fix appears and viola! working video card.

Here are the simple lines to type into the terminal in order to automatically configure your video card for your system. Note, this is specifically for an nVidia video card. It will be different for ATI.

> sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

> sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

And that will do it! To make sure it's working, benchmark it in glxgears.

> glxgears

kyle@waggyMachine:~$ glxgears
8151 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1630.200 FPS
8825 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1765.000 FPS
8764 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1752.800 FPS
8774 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1754.800 FPS
8870 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1774.000 FPS

Not getting above 1000 frames per second? Don't fear. Either reboot the computer or simply log in as root from a text terminal then

> /etc/init.d/kdm stop
> /etc/inti.d/kdm start

and it should work fine.

-Now if I could only get my sound working

Three days of Kubuntu

I've converted

No longer am I a slave to windows. I've taken to Linux, I dove in head first. Some things don't work, sure. But they will, and I'll make them work. I'll be given instructions and I'll fix these problems myself. First was setting up repositories so I have a bigger list of programs to download and install. Next was setting up my passwords, I got to play with the shadow file. I wanted to play games next, so I installed almost everything game related. Well, not everything to do with games, but I did select gnome games and kde games and kde toys and supertux and tuxkart and tuxracer.

Waitaminute. How come I can't play tuxracer!? Right, 'build your own operating system'. My graphics card wasn't configured for my computer yet. More on this later, as it's another helpful hint for installing a new debian operating system.

Though I figured out my video card problem, I am still having troubles with my sound. I've installed the recommended media packages and still no luck. What is really strange is the game Frozen Bubble has sound wrapped around it's little finger. It has made audio its bitch. But why won't any other program make use of it? I can't hear an mp3 in Juk or Amarok. I've got no sound with a video in Noatun. Not even a squeek when playing Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid. Just another problem I've got to read about and and easy fix to apply.

-It's finding the easy fix that's the hard part

Kubuntu Repositories

After a fresh Kubuntu install

You're going to want to set the appropriate repositories so you have access to most every available piece of good software for Linux (at least that's my understanding, not to mention the security updates).

So after a fresh install, you'll want to access your sources.list which is found at:

/etc/apt/sources.list

If you're an Emacs user, you might want to start up Kynaptic, opened from a terminal by:

> sudo kynaptic
> password:

and then CTRL-F to bring up the list of packages. Do a search for emacs and select emacs-2.1 or whichever version is showing. Click ok, then press the last (third) button to commit changes. Press enter to agree and it well set off installing emacs for you. When that's done, to access /etc/apt/sources.list you type:

>sudo emacs /etc/apt/sources.list

Of course if you use vim then you've alread done this part before the others have finished installing Emacs. And if you do use vim, you're probably already done this walkthrough.

Now edit the sources.list to have these package addresses in them. Five should already exist, you should only have to uncomment two of them, and only have to add the last two, the multiverse and backport:

deb http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted
deb-src http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted

deb http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-updates main restricted
deb-src http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-updates main restricted

deb http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe
deb-src http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security universe

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary multiverse

## Backports
deb http://ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net/ hoary-backports main universe multiverse restricted
deb http://ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net/ hoary-extras main universe multiverse restricted

After you have edited sources.list it may be a good time to open up Kynaptic again and under file click on:

Refresh Package Information

then update all your packages (that's the middle button of the three). I just did that here and it took about 5 or 6 minutes on a cable connection to download and update on my 750MHz computer. Have fun installing games and toys through the package manager.

-Frozen bubbles?

Impressive Quick Install

30 minutes

That was all it took to install a fully functional operating system on my working hard drive. And I'm not talking about anything Microsoft related, either. My 15Gb hard drive was taken off life support yesterday afternoon. It was pronounced dead at 12 noon. The corpse still resides within its steel mounting as a reminder of what could happen should I choose to mess around with my computer without proper grounding straps and knowledge of disconnecting the power before handing components.

-Very impressed with my new Kubuntu

War with HG Wells

There's a war

And that war is between two worlds. In a few hours I'm going to catch the afternoon matinee of S.Speilburg's version of War of the Worlds. Roger Ebert was naysaying the movie. He thinks the movie is too much like the book version. Honestly, that's what I was looking for. I want aliens stomping around on tripods of death. Though Ebert may have a point in saying the tripods of death would be more believable if the movie were to take place in the late 1800's like the book.

-Bacteria saves the day

Computer play

I've been messing around with my computer, playing with my 15Gb hard drive. Messing around with Linux. It turns out my 15Gb drive has died. The head is off alignment and clicks every available random interval. To really test this I had Kubuntu installed on it three times. And that was a 5 hour install every time (5 hours due to the broken hard drive). When Kubuntu satisfied my theory that the drive was b0rken I then proceeded to put Suse 9.1 pro on there. That didn't work either. Broken hard drive.

Now I've booted from a Win98 floppy and have removed the partitions on the 15Gb drive. Now I'm setting up a large partition on it and am going to format the drive. One last test, I'm going to see if WinXP can get the drive working as it should (I doubt it, but this is an exhaustive test). I still hear random clicking, though, during the (very slow) partition sequence. Finally, when I see just how dead this drive is, I'm going to format my 120Gb and start fresh with that. I wouldn't bother with the reinstallation of WinXP on the 120Gb drive but I kinda screwed up.

Here's what I did. I mounted my 120Gb hard drive to the Kubuntu OS installed on the 15Gb hard drive. When I didn't think it had worked, instead of umounting it, I rm -r it. When I realized it shouldn't take 4 seconds to recursively remove an empty directory I cancelled that, unknowingly just what it was I had erased.

Surprisingly every thing I tried in the WinXP drive (upon booting up in Windows again) worked! It would take a long time before I find whatever was (partially) erased. It could be a game, half an episode of HackTV, etc. Except when I went to defrag, had to run Windows scan-disk and found a few cross-ref'd files. I assume scan-disk fixed that, so I then went on to the defrag. Unfortunately my 120Gb hard drive seemed to die then. (This was yesterday). I came back to my computer and was greeted with a blue screen. Not a BSoD, just a plain blue screen. An unexplained, something-has-happened-but-as-the-computer-I-won't-tell-you-what blue screen. So I shut down the computer hard, in the middle of an unfinished defragmentation.

When I tried to boot the computer up again, it really didn't want to. My BIOS couldn't find the hard drive on the IDE cable, but it could find the slave, 15Gb. I felt the hard drive and it was hot. Defragging a large hard drive in a warm room with a case that's clogged with bits of cat hair (damned cats and their shedding). I'm thinking the drive just got too hot and shut itself down preventatively. I waited for the drive to cool and Lo! It recognizes and boots up. The Western Digital diagnostic tool says the 120Gb drive is perfect. It says the 15Gb drive sucks.

I've backed up all the important bits I need to reinstall WinXP on the 120Gb drive. Tomorrow, after I'm done playing with the 15Gb, I'll format the 120Gb and reinstall WinXP with another partition for Linux and Swap.

-Crossing my fingers, toes and eyes

Throttle control

Just passed

I'd taken my motorcycle skills test (MST) last week and failed with 5 demerits. I don't know how many I'm allowed, but I failed all the same. The inspector, female, sent me home, telling me to come back in one week.

This morning I took the MST again. The inspector, a guy, passed me with 3 demerits. Wheres last week I rawked out on the slow-speed straight ride and was alright on the pylon slalom, and utterly screwed up the quick-stop from u-turn; this week I utterly screwed up the slow-speed straight ride, wobbling all over the straight line... twice. But I was great with the pylons and I rawked out with the acceleration/deceleration of the quick-stop maneuver.

Upon completion, I stalled the bike. A demeritable offense, one which he ignored since the test was over. He handed my license back to me saying "have another printed up inside", where last week she kept mine and said "have another printed up inside". But before I left, he made sure I knew that I sucked. "You need to practice. Holy Crap! You need to practice that throttle control. It's like riding a bicycle, that's where the balance is. It'll keep you in a straight line."

-And I drove home this week. 5 minute drive or 30 minute walk

One Funny Joke

Laugh a little

A young couple are laying in bed, sharing a pack of Gummy-Bears. The girl pulls out two Gummy-Bears that happen to be stuck together.

Girl: Look, they are having sex.

Boy: How come we're not having sex?

Girl: We're not Gummy-Bears.

-My girlfriend and I made up that joke.

Motorcycle Madness

Here's a bit of history

I took my motorcycle skills test Tuesday morning. My 'father-in-law' came by at 8am and I went for a 20 minute ride. He left me at the motor-vehicle department where I was to take my skills test, around 8:30. I was scheduled for 9:45 so I got to see people take the test before me.

Honestly, it wasn't a hard test. But I wasn't practiced. I hadn't done enough slow-speed maneuvers to really have control. And my balance sucked when coming to a stop. My break foot kept coming down and I kept relying on my hand break to keep me still. A mark off every time.

Then came the controlled quick stop. Accelerate to ~25 km/hour and slow down for a corner. Accelerate out of the corner and follow a white line. Watch the inspectors hand, break when it comes down. I think I did alright once. The other two times... nah. Not so good. Skid. Whatever, it was on a painted white line. Slippery.

She failed me and said come back in a week. So tonight I was practicing in the same parking lot with the same painted lines. I was doing alright, but I wasn't taking it seriously. And you know what, I still sucked. I stuck out my foot (my right foot) to catch myself when I was unbalanced. I did have better control over my quick stop. But that was because I did it enough times tonight. Many more times I sucked with the quick stop. I even had my rear tire locked up for 6 or 7 feet once. Not good on the official test.

And to bring the house down, my battery died. 20 minutes trying to hunt down the problem. Checking all the cables, making sure they are all good. Gas was at a half tank. The headlight would die when I tried the starter. Push-start, sure. Try that, no luck in second gear. Try third. Try fourth. Try fifth, oh my bike doesn't have that many gears. Finally, second ended up starting it. So I took off back to my place, leaving my supervisor back in the parking lot. He showed up shortly, behind me. He's got my battery now,

-Charging it up. 5 days to my retest.

Still too slow

I've found my second hard drive

I've two hard drives in my computer. One is a 120Gb with WinXP currently installed on it. The second is the 15Gb with Kubuntu (that I still need to configure). I've found my windows hard drive from my Kubuntu installation. Here's how I did it:

start a terminal window,

create a folder in /mnt
> sudo mkdir /mnt/win
> Password:

mount the physical Win hard drive to that new folder
(My Windows hard drive is hda1, Kubuntu is hdb1)
> mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/win

from here you can start Konqueror or Nautilus and navigate your way to /mnt/win to view the contents of that hard drive. Or within the terminal,
> cd /mnt/win/
and browse that way.

-More for my reference than any body else's

From the safety of Linux

Blogging from my home computer

I've done it! I'm writing this blog from my fresh install of Kubuntu Linux. Windows is still kicking around, as I've got some files I'd like to transfer over before I lose windows completely, but Kubuntu is here.

It's really slow, though. And that's all my fault. I'm thinking I didn't properly set up a swap partition. It takes 15 minutes from reboot for the computer to even load up a text login screen. Another 5 to log into the GUI. 3 minutes to open a Firefox browser.

-Will be reinstalling/partitioning today

Anti-Corporation

Some kind of bullshit

My girlfriend is the most qualified person for any job at her place of work. She was a shoe-in for the assistant manager position when it opened up. The manager was going to do her best to make sure my girlfriend was appointed. Recently the manager went on stress leave and has decided to never return. My girlfriend picked up the slack, without the title of manager or assistant manager.

Administration decides the store needs people that can be called "manager" and "assistant manager" so the rest of the employees have someone to look to. My girlfriend should have been made manager at that time, but you know what? She wasn't. The girl who's been working for the company two months longer was appointed. And you know what, that girl is from another store. She was a transfer to this store and my girlfriend had to train her in proper store procedures when she arrived. This other girl is not anywhere as qualified as my girlfriend. But still, this woman was assigned the manager position, and assistant manager went to my girl.

A month and a half later my girlfriend is still helping out this other woman when she gets stuck. My girlfriend is taking it upon herself to help this other person keep her job (making her look competent). I'm going a bit overboard here. She is competent, but still manages to get stuck or take her time or generally just not think her way out of a problem herself.

Well, now! Administration wanted people to be the 'official' managers of the store. An advertisement was placed. My girlfriend was still the most qualified for the job, but no. They've decided to replace her again. She's been bumped. I don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised if that other girl is now the assistant manager.

-Looking for a fair workplace

Set the path to java in your /etc/profile in Linux

'javac' and 'java' commands in Linux terminal

Those two commands above weren't working for me this morning after a fresh install of Kubuntu Linux on my work machine. I understand that normally Kubuntu would modify the appropriate paths to make the compile and run commands work. However, I needed an older version of java, and to hunt for that package through Kynaptic would have been more trouble than it was worth (maybe). So the file was downloaded by itself, and installed. But that left the paths in a state of non-existance. So in order to get them working I had to do the following:

1. Open '/etc/profile' as super in a text editor. In Kubuntu it would be:

> sudo emacs /etc/profile
password:

2. Just before the last two lines of the file (your version of java where appropriate) add the following line:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1_08/bin

where the last two lines are:

export PATH

umask 022

3. Refresh your /etc/profile by either logging out and back in, or in a terminal type:

> source /etc/profile

[EDIT]: After setting up a new install it would appear that going through the package manager makes this job so much easier. You can, of course, do it manually if you like. But using a package manager like apt-get sets up all paths for you.

-And that should do it

Hacker article on TLC

Nice article

The Learning Channel has a good article (or collection of articles) on hackers and it's history. I'm adding it to my list of links.

-Just something to read in an afternoon

Hey, look. Blog offers titles now.

So I guess I don't need this title any more?

Windows and its vulnerabilities. You don't really have to wonder why people still use windows, even after hearing of all its security exploits. Myself, I'm moving away from windows. I've got it on my PC at home, and on my laptop as well. However, I'm not going too far from windows. My problem is, windows is a gaming platform. Not too many games are supported on Linux at the moment. How am I going to get my Half-Life / Half-Life 2 fix on a *nix operating system?

I'm removing windows from my home PC, Kubuntu is taking its place. My laptop, however, is still carrying Windows, but only for the games. I've got Cygwin on there and it's configured very well.

-I've also heard good things of minGW

Research follow-up

My professor, I think, has finally realised how little enthusiasm I have for the mathematical sciences. Or, forbid! she has access to my blog.

She's proposed that I use my program to help out the two entomologists we've been working with. I have had questions all along in regards to how I should handle certain events in my simulation. Gary, the field guy entomologist dude, has suggested I try my question in my program, varying it so I can get an answer myself. The answer will be when we compare my data and his and draw a logical conclusion from that.

Sounds good to me, and I get to avoid the mathematical analysis. I do get to write an advertisement for my simulation. And I've gotten permission to post is as open-source.

-Building a better resume

Summer Loving

I don't know what to make of my summer research assistant position. My professor, she's a nice lady, but I don't think she knows what she wants with my research. I'll give her credit, she's juggling three students at the same time, each with a project unrelated to the other. Justin with his simulation of a swimming nematode. Brock with his recolonization by squirells in clear-cut forests. And myself, with my dispersal of codling moths in the presence of a network of pheromone traps. I found that the longer the title, the more impressed people are with your work. But that's getting off topic. Rebecca, my professor/supervisor, has her own research going on as well. And the school is forcing her to take her vacation time at the moment, which she is taking up until the end of this month.

However, her research runs parallel to mine. She's covering codling moth dispersal using a mathematical model. I'm doing a cellular based model on the computer. This is where it gets hair-brained. We started on my project last summer to coincide with hers. Toward the end of last summer our work was beginning to overlap. At that point, all I had was a simulated orchard with a central release point. I'd release a mass amount of moths in 4 trials of 2000 moths each. The moths would fly around their orchard and either die, become trapped or fly out of bounds; all of which would remove them from the program. OK, that's cool, but then she wanted more features. And then more features. And then she wanted me to throw together a presentation. Then she wanted me to run the experiments to gather data, from a program that I felt still needed to be polished.

The data was run, imagine 1000 trials of 500 moths each in a small simulated orchard. Now a program needed to be written to injest the 1000 large files containing data from the simulation. Enter MatLab, another language to learn. Now for the whole school year all I did was type what Rebecca dictated. I felt I could better be used in polishing the program, fixing my bloated code. I'd only had two semesters of programming experience, and that only in Java, before she had me writing this simulation for her. So 8 months of meeting with my professor for 3~6 hours a week, writing a program she was more than capable of writing herself. She knows Matlab inside and out. She could have written up the analysis program in a week, where it took the two of us almost 8 months! And I couldn't have done it that quickly on my own, I had my own classes to tend to.

So now that it's summer time again; she informed me that I was to have a paper written by the end of the summer with the intentions of having it published early next year. So the whole first month of my summer position I was modifying my program, fixing the code, tweaking it, generally making it speedier. When the program takes 30 minutes per trial of 500 moths (doing a trap efficiency experiment) you don't think that's too bad. 30 minutes 1000 times, well, that's getting a bit much. But when the program takes 8 hours for one simulation of 2000 moths, and you have to run 4 of those experiments to have enough data to say you've emulated what scientists do in the field... yeah, that's a bit extreme. But fixing my program, with the knowledge I gleaned this year in classes, I have the program going as quick as 2 hours per quarter. It takes only 8 hours to run the whole experiment!

As I said in the previous paragraph, I'd spent the first month making my program more efficient. But she wanted something I could show for. So I added sterile female moths to my program, to accompany the sterile males I'd had for the year. Though, we're not even close to ready to use these female moths in our simulation. I feel we still need to polish up the male aspect of the simulation. Get the no-wind model analyzed again now that I've made some modifications. Then we can move on to an all-male analysis using wind, since I just recently (this last week) fixed a minor bug that prevented my moths from moving in certain directions (they should be able to move in a full 360 degrees along the x-y plane). Then after we've got that data, and have analyzed as best we can, maybe we could then how the data changes when females are introduced.

But wait! Sterile males and sterile females aren't enough. Now we need to add wild males and wild females. Because, you know, we can. And when that's done, we need to have these moths mating with each other... you can see where this is going. This simulation is getting bigger and more complicated. I've got my boss looking over my shoulder (once a week, Wednesdays) telling me, "Looks good, now do this". And all the time, no research is being made. I'm just programming and programming. But don't get me wrong. That's what I'm here for, I'm here to program this awesome simulation that takes in the important parameters so the Scientist can use my program, tweak the numbers, analyse the data and write the paper.

However, my role in this project has grown. I went from just having programming duties to having to analyse the data. Then creating presentations. And with the presentations came the mathematical formulas I had to make sense of (I'm not a math student by far). I just want to go back and polish my program. I want to make it user-friendly. I want to write the document to allow the world to use my simulation (open-source if I had my way) to study the movements of more than just these Codling moths. The program could be modified to work with, say, salmon swimming up stream. Maybe even cows wandering across a field, eating grass and rolling in mud along the way. I'm here to program, that's how she sold this job to me.

And when you consider how much this program is worth, think of this. I've been employed for the last year and more to work on this. 4 months of 35 hours weeks, that's 560 hours right there. And 8 months during the school year of, say, 5 hours a week. That's another 160 hours. Plus the last two months I've been doing my summer position, another 280 (I hope I'm getting my math right). So that's a total of, wow I didn't this number, 1000 hours. And let's say I'm being paid an average $9.50 canadian for this (none of which I have managed to save) and that's $9500.00 that has been put into this simulation. So, thus far, this simulation is worth $9500, and if it were commercial, you'd want a product that you can sell to make a profit. If you wanted a profit, you'd be polishing the program and making it the best thing you could. But sadly, as you've read this far, that is not how this is going.

So now I'm going to read the stack of scientific papers I have sitting in front of me. Hopefully this will give me some insight as to how and what I should write about. That's the topic of meeting with my professor today, we're going to decide what I am to write about. All I can think of is writing an advertisement for my simulation. How it may benefit the scientific community. How to use it.

Providing I'm not contractually obligated to keep it under wraps, this is going

-to be open-source

Guess who's back

Gorillaz!!! They're 'performing' a virtual concert today for 99x listeners (everything alternative, radio Atlanta, Georgia). Click and enjoy.

-I've got sunshine in a bag