yonkeltron

Well, yet another summer at Camp Ramah in the Poconos has come to an end. While nearly everything about the summer was pretty far from perfect, I had a rather productive year in the radio program. I got done loads of work and also learned a ton in the process. A few things I ended up doing:

• SOAP: I learned how to use WSDL files to automagically configure SOAP drivers in order to fetch data. I tested this out on the NWS National Digital Forecast Database and spent more time trying to decipher the super-contrived response message than actually writing the Ruby code needed to fetch and parse it.
• Bayesian Classifiers: Figured out how to train some naive Bayes classifiers to the point where they could pick out text that discussed weather forecasts. Neat!
• Baseball stats: As part of my continuing baseball education, I had Gnuplot spit out plots of 30 years of Phillies baseball statistics. It didn’t work so well due to some axis labeling issues I never got around to fixing. Might it be worth revisited past work with something like R? I wish there were some higher-level toolkits for charting and plotting with Ruby. Python has Pyx…

I wish I had gotten around to studying and doing more things though…then again, it’s fairly irrational to expect so much free time when running an educational radio station full time. It would have been nice to have a chance to study some additional techniques such as general heuristics or algorithmic design. Then again, there are more practical things which would most likely have been better to learn and experiment with. I should have maybe continued my explorations into Qt or maybe even getting better with metaprogramming. In the end, I feel like I have much to learn. I have the whole year ahead of me…

Back from camp. It was an absolutely wonderful summer. I’ve been back for a week and have been enjoying the chance to unpack and sleep (On the subject of sleep, I’m suffering from a bit of the phase shift).

In more recent news, my father was kind enough to let me use his old desktop as a new house server. It’s an (only slightly) aged Dell machine with a 1.6ghz P4, 512mb RAM and 40gb hdd. The 40gb disk is what has me most worried. When I booted it up to install Debian Sarge, I noticed a screen out of place in the normal boot sequence. The screen informed me that the Dell Disk Utility had found the hard disk to be “operating outside of normal parameters”. I don’t know what that means because the only additional information I could get out of the utility was that I was supposed to contact Dell support for a replacement disk. I ignored the warning knowing full well that once I removed the Dell Utility Partition, the error message would be no more. Sure enough, after throwing XFS on the disk (after the advice of my friend Ryan), the machine booted into Sarge nicely. I’ll watch the disk and if it fails, I’ll replace it with a nice new 250gb disk.
After getting the server setup and configured, I realized that the minor trouble with my pipe was getting worse. I know have an average ping time of 2.5 seconds to any outside server. I called Comcast to ask them what the deal was and they reported that the cable modem registered an average ping time of 3.8 - 4.2 seconds. Before I continue, I need to pose this bit of wierdness: How is the pingtime from my side of the cable modem less than the ping time from the cable modem itself? I can’t figure it out! In any case, there is a field servoid coming to take a look at things on the morrow. By noon tommorrow, things should be at least on the way to being back to normal. Hopefully, my upcoming experience will be more positive than the encounters of other folks.