Got FIVE As this final semester of my four years at Cornell, so I just had to thank God for that.

I now have a newly minted Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Phillips School of Electrical Engineering. So that’s it, I’m official now. I now have my first degree. How do I feel? I feel like I’m on summer vacation. Doesn’t feel any different than any other summer. It DOES feel really good when I tell someone that I’ve graduated. It has the accomplishment feeling to it. Also, I get to tell people that I graduated from Cornell and that usually gets another round of congrats. It’s funny because for the past two days I’ve been really busy helping out around the house, unpacking my computers, and doing wedding preperations, but at the same time it feels like an eternity until my marriage.

We’re back! The server should continue up uninterrupted until I finally move to my permanent home (sometime between Oct and Dec this year)

It has been a wonderful journey with this server. I have been able to be liberated and have my very own server. I am limited only in the space and hardware constraints of the machine. I can have SQL databases, php, and whatever else I wish to support. I have been able to have my own blog, fully customizable in the way that no other is. I have provided space for my friends; Andrew Laine used it to the fullest. That’s why I’m so sad to have to shut it down. But don’t worry! It’s just temporary! I plan to have it back up as soon as I can when I get back to my parent’s house. Then it will run until I move to my job location. After that it should be running for another long period of time.

One of the best things about Linux is the ability to write shell scripts. These are most often used as utility programs to do repetitive tasks for you. I just wrote my first one on Sunday and here it is followed by commentary.

#!/bin/bash echo "starting xchat..." xchat& echo "starting Gaim..." gaim& echo "starting Thunderbird..." thunderbird& echo "starting Gkrellm (docked)..." gkrellm -w& echo "starting 2 instances of Eterm (transparent, no buttonbar, no scrollbar)" Eterm -x --scrollbar=0 --buttonbar=0 --trans& Eterm -x --scrollbar=0 --buttonbar=0 --trans&

Two panoramas I’m really proud of. They’re being hosted on flickr and you can click on them to go to the photo’s page.

Here I have decided to run the “top” command in the top transparent Eterm window. This is a great command to have running on the desktop. Basically it’s equivalent to hitting control-alt-delete in Windows and then clicking on “processes”. It tells you what you are running on your system, how much RAM/CPU cycles it’s taking up, and a bunch of other information. It dynamically updates so as you run programs you can see what’s holding up the computer. It doesn’t normally have that line running down the middle. That’s a consequence of some glitch when I was taking the screenshot.

This server will go down this Wednesday. It will be down at least until Tuesday while I move out of my university apartment.

While it turns out that the place I’m living at never went with wireless, thus allowing me to keep the server running, I know for sure that we will be shutting down soon. There is always one problem with running your own server at home - when you move there’s no way to keep it on and connected. I’ll be leaving this place in about two weeks. After that I’m not sure how long it will be before the server is operational again. Ideally, it would be the following week. Since I’m also getting married soon, the timeline might be a little different. So if you try to come by two weeks from now and the site isn’t here - don’t worry, it’ll be back really soon.

Finally I have figured out something else I have wanted to do for MONTHS! If you look on the top-right corner you will see what looks like an embedded terminal in my desktop. The biggest reason why I’ve wanted to do this is simply because it looks really neat to have a terminal “built into” the desktop. I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet, the way people use them to run a logger in the background or other neat utilities. Besides looking really neat, it allows you to enjoy your background while using the terminal instead of covering it up. I mean, what’s the point of going through all the trouble of having such a great background when you can’t even see it? If you are into computers you are now nodding in agreement. So, how did I do this?