Settled In University

Well, I know it's been a long stretch since I last blogged, but anybody who has this on a feedreader will probably get it within a day. Those who were visiting the site manually will have dropped off by now and won't know anything about it.

I'd say I'm now pretty much settled into university. I'm back at UBC, taking second year computer science, and I'm living in Nootka 464. I'm right back on the same floor that I was on last year! The kids here are fine, they seem to be more the partying type than last year, but they also manage to find their parties elsewhere, which is fine by me.

One of my plans in coming here was to have my main box (Babbage, PIII 500MHz) as my work machine and then set up another box (Cerf, PI 90Mhz) as a server machine, hosting things like http, ftp, svn, and maybe even some bugzilla. Unfortunately, the bios seems to be going on it (can't boot from cdrom like it used to), so I think I will just junk it. If anyone needs a 2GB hard drive, a 1GB hard drive, or some old old RAM, they can talk to me. I don't think I'll get too many inquiries. Perhaps in a while I will get Apache set up proper like, with some ftp and subversion, just like I planned. That won't be for a while though.

UBC is also really messing with me. Someone put the wrong co-requisites on the registration website for one of my courses. Long story made short, I'm not allowed to take a course this semester that I wanted to, and I'm being forced to take it next semester (it's a requirement for my degree). This means that I will be taking 4 courses this semester and 6 courses next semester. My plan is actually to attend the classes for the course this semester so that when I have to take it next semester, I will already know most of the material (except the labs).

On the previous two notes, when I do get my Apache up and running, then I will add my timetable to my server. I have already copied it from the UBC webpage (dynamically generated just for me) and stripped the html down to bare minimum. You'll just have to wait.

On a non-personal, non-educational note, I've had this problem with XMMS (Linux's answer to Winamp) not reading the file length of some MP3's properly. It either reads them to be too long, or can't get the length at all and treats it as a stream. In the latter case, any seeking results in a "failed to seek" error. I tracked the problem down today to being a bug in the MAD decoder plugin incorrectly reading tags when XING tag reading is enabled. Perhaps over Christmas break I will make it my job to hunt this one down and fix it (or sooner if I can). One quick fix is to disable MAD and use MPG123 or to disable the XING tags in the MAD options.