Graduation, Working and my Lab

The past year has been extremely busy for me as I have been working to finish my studies at the University of Washington. I am proud to say that I have successfully completed my BSEE as of the middle of July after fulfilling the final requirements through gaining credit for previous University of Colorado coursework. I have also started working at a local engineering firm, Williamson & Associates, assisting with their latest deep-sea submersible drilling system (check them out at www.wassoc.com, we do some pretty cool stuff!). I have also been working to tidy up my home office/lab and organize the devices, components and test equipment acquired over the last few years so that I may work on some of my own projects at home. It can be seen below:

I am pretty excited to be done and working so quickly. I am also excited to start on stuff that I didn't have time for the past two years (electronic and non-electronic). I will be sure to post any new (and even previous) projects that I am working on. My current project is building my own adjustable bench power supply. Presently I use a discrete regulator on my circuit coupled with a rectifier and my transformer-in-a-box to power stuff. While not horrible, I would like one that has adjustable DC output (voltage and current) so that I can focus on the circuit and not the supply. As far as build vs buy? I would like to know what is going on inside my circuit so I am building it.

tar, rsync and netcat

In my quest to quickly move files from my dlink nas and my new file server I was looking for a quick way to transfer files (and maybe keep them in sync later on). I tried tar over ssh, however this is rather cpu intensive for a little nas box with a small ARM processor and 64 MB of RAM. I then started looking at netcat, since it doesn't use encryption (and thus much cpu). This doesn't have to be secure since the storage network in my case is physically and logically isolated from the rest of the network. Here is what I found:

On the receiving end (do this first):

#nc -l 7000 | tar xvf -

Or on some systems:

#nc -l -p7000 | tar xvf -

And on the sending end:
tar cvf - * | nc hostip:7000

Or on some systems (like Mac OS X or *BSD):

tar cvf - * | nc hostip 7000 (note the space not the colon)

this will send everything in the current directory from the sender to the current directory of the receiver. The port doesn't matter, just use an unused one (port 7000 I believe is for AFS which I don't use). This should help preserve file permissions, etc. as well.

Just an update: this worked, though it took a while, it did successfully copy everything (ran spot check md5 sums to make sure).

Another clever one is to tar and gzip them before sending them off:

On the receiving end:

# nc -l 7000 > filename.tar.gz

Here you are saying whatever comes out of netcat is part of this archive, so you redirect and concatenate it into the file you just specified.

And on the sending end:

# tar cvf - * | gzip -9 | nc hostip:7000

Here you are just piping the output of tar into gzip. The -9 is to specify the level of compression (man gzip for more details) and then send it off to netcat.

I also verified with rsync, yet another good way to now keep these files in sync. Sure enough, it only copied a few files that changed (Mac's annoying .DS_store and a couple of touch'd files).

#rsync -ave ssh user@hostip-or-fqdn:/source/dir/path /destination

One thing to note is that the source is the full path to the directory to copy from, and the destination is where you want the entire tree - so path would end up being a subdirectory of destination: /destination/path, but leave out path.

opteron-prime

The Jones home has a new server: Opteron-Prime. It is a quad core AMD Opteron based system. Lynn was very gracious in letting me purchase this basically since it will serve as a new file server and allow triple redundancy on our data (it will back up to a network raid array). The purpose is to keep safe all of our documents (like our wedding photos, music, etc) and allow remote access to said files from anywhere with internet access. My goal is single-sign-on to my Mac OS X, Windows 7 and Linux hosts. I plan on using VMWare ESXi to run Windows 2008 Server R2 (as an Active Directory Domain Controller), OpenFiler (as our fileserver), m0n0wall (as our remote access and firewall) and probably another linux server on this box. I will have to update as this project comes along.

sex in unix

Apparently sex in unix looks like this:

look; gawk; find; sed; talk; grep; touch; finger; find; flex; unzip; head; tail; mount; workbone; fsck; yes; gasp; fsck; more; yes; yes; eject; umount; makeclean; zip; split; done; exit:xargs!!;

bits and pieces

I will be honest, I am tired as I write this, I have been up since 6 am with no nap (it is currently 9 pm), and I've spent the day thinking from the get go. Nonetheless, I am drawn to write a bit. Lately I've been struggling with some ideas, like inerrancy and authority of Scripture, and how we use (or abuse) Scripture, and its role in the Christian life and the Church. It seems to be a lense I'm seeing life through right now (thank you Lynn), be it my work in class (Reading Practices and New Testament), community group or early morning scripture reading (that is why I was up early) or in my conversations with friends. Anyways, I don't have the mental capacity to engage that right now...I will, hopefully, soon.

I also had a moment of perspective tonight, concerning my education. I am currently in New Testament class, for which I m paying $100 for just tonight's session (it is roughly $33 per credit, per session). I honestly have never thought about my education that way. Lately, I've been rethinking many aspects of my life, honestly, and again, more on that later.

I better pay attention, I think I just missed out on at least $1 worth of education in writing this.

::myth, community::

You are a king among men.

Those were the words of my friend Brandon to me the other night, part of a deeply meaningful exchange, concerning life and my experiences here in Seattle.

What struck me was the way he communicated all of what we talked about to me, it was not so much propositional knowledge, but mythic in nature. He compared me to Strider of Lord of the Rings, a king in the making, with many many challeges to overcome right now (like grad school). It struck me then that the language of the heart is story, not proposition, probably why Jesus chose to speak in parable and story rather than just proposition.

The other thing that struck me was the call came at a desperate time for me, a dark hour, and it wasn’t lucky timing but because another friend, Adam, had called him to say he should call me. It made me think about the wonderful blessings of community, three men separated by geography, Brandon in Colorado, Adam in West Virginia and me in Seattle, but still involved in very deep and meaningful ways in each others lives,. And it’s not perfect, we are all fools and idiots to be sure, but we still have community, and that is essential.

I haven’t fully processed or even felt the depth of that exchange, and perhaps it is far too deep right now for me to even put words to, but they were words I did need to hear, and perhaps I can follow up at a later time, but for now I must leave you, and get some desperately needed rest after a very intense and exhausting week.

::the riddle::

Today in my random search for music videos to amuse me, I came across The Riddle by Five For Fighting, a band I love and have recently come across again. I am completely in awe of The Riddle, a very catchy yet meaningful melody, a father-son love song about life and meaning (the description given by John Ondrasik, the musician).