My (infrequently updated) Blog

Meghan & I would like to thank everybody who showed up to our wedding last night and made it the unforgettable evening that it was!!!

We're busy packing now for the honeymoon but we will both certainly write more after we get back.

Thank you all so much!

This finding gives me great joy. Tim Minchin's beat poem “Storm” is easily my favorite of his works. If you've never seen it, you can view it on youtube here (of course, this video was the first video I ever posted to my blog... so of course everybody has seen it already). Anyway, it appears that both Tim Minchin and his work have become so popular as to warrant making a movie out of the poem! I cannot wait to see it. I simply cannot get enough of this man's work.

The website for the movie is www.StormMovie.net, and you can view the trailer for the movie, released today, below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9bT73BM2Ic

With much cleaner code, a slew of new features, and all old bugs removed (though no doubt there are new ones!), I am proud to announce the release of vitunes 1.0! See the details at the new website:

www.vitunes.org

The only major feature still lacking is audio-scrobbling/last.fm support. I simply lost interest. Also, I don't want anyone to know that I secretly love the Grease soundtrack. Wait... oh nooo!

During exam week, when no students come by for office hours (although many of them should have), I used my extra time to start hacking on vitunes again... indeed, I ended up re-writing almost all of vitunes from scratch!

I had initially started writing vitunes so I could learn curses. After I had a simple proof-of-concept kinda-sorta working, however, I far too quickly hacked together the rest out of sheer excitement. The code was a real mess, and it became difficult to add any new features without spending hours on even the simplest task.

So, after about 10 days ... I have a brand new, clean, ... no, polished version! It has a slew of new features and will soon have a few more (including audio-scrobbling / last.fm support).

I'm hoping to use and test this branch extensively over the next couple of weeks and flush out any bugs before 1 January, so I can release a true version 1.0. Should anyone wish to test it as well, I've been uploading snapshots almost daily at the vitunes page.

As of today, 8 December of this year, Neal has officially been a nerd for one full year! It seems like only yesterday he was asking me about “cd” and “ls,” confused as hell about how one moved around in *nix (like all of us were at one point), and how to use this strange beast called “vim,” as he logged into my OpenBSD machine to use LaTeX.

Well, a little over a year ago Neal decided to take the plunge and just install it... and of course, he was immediately hooked. I soon gave him and old server of mine and he quickly put it online, hosting one website... then another... then a few more. Now he's hosting websites for, I believe, every member of his extended family and most of West-Chicago. In addition, he's now the proud administrator of an official OpenBSD mirror, at LambdaServer.com, the first nerd-only website he registered... one year ago today.

It appears the noob has become the nerd!

And now, he's learning C... and hacking. They grow up so fast, ya' know?

:P