First Post!

This is pretty much my first blog. I will be trying to show off some of my more useful software/personal projects.

Who am I? Well, I think I'm an upcoming linux/kernel/GUI/AI/DSP and all around software-renaissance-man (soon to get into the EE portion of things when I get money for supplies/screwing around). I graduated from UCI in 2009 majoring in Computer Science from the Donald Brend School of Computer Science (I nearly had a 3.65 GPA, some class screwed me over by .003 or something! Also, OUCH to the like 3 Cish grades I got in my entire UCI stay, those things hurt!). I studied alot of image processing, AI, Computer Vision (face recognition), automatic 3d model creation from commodity hardware (specifically 2 canon digital cameras, a tripod, and matlab), BioInformatics, Computer Hardware/Architecture (esp MIPS, also used VHDL), and Operating Systems design, and of course algorithms/graphs. The rest is pretty much GE or major requirements that aren't all that interesting.

I've been using linux since 2002, starting with slackware linux (hitting the end of version 8 and just in time for version 9). I moved on to use gentoo at some point between 2004 and 2005 and then switched to Ubuntu as this is around the time the clamour started on how much of a bs-free desktop it was. I didn't quite agree at the time but it was better than compiling all your own packages or dealing with third party people just to get up-to-date GNOME (specifically dropline gnome in slackware). Eventually I realized that pretty much all distro's were the same and that the only things that varied were their choices of versions of software, package format (tgz,deb,rpm), and how often they provided real updates to their system software. Ubuntu was too slow updating for me when I had a new laptop, and it broke a few times to many, so I tried out OpenSuSe in 2008 and have stuck with it on my laptop/desktop since. But I don't have anything against ubuntu. I actually put it on my mom's and sister's computers. It works enough for them it seems (doesn't make much difference of linux/windows if "things" work out of the box and you have no previous computer experience). But for doing this I never have to worry about them getting spyware/virii much, just falling for phishing (it's happened a few times already, alright!). Ubuntu does a good job of making sure those things which are difficult and of questionable legality (from the distro's POV) are properly dealt with and given to the user for a BS-free distro. Not many distros try and do this, I commend them for it. If only they allowed more things to be a bit more up to date! Oh well, there's always PPA's in the future. OpenSuse just has more "official" "stablizing" (aka stable) software branches and bleeding edge branches. And it also offers something like the PPA system as well. I like this approach better for my home machines. I also think writing rpm spec's is a bit easier than deb's control files though I think ubuntu has documented this pretty well in the last year so I may have to re-evaluate.

Anywho, In my time I've had to mess around/fix with quite a bit of computers, including my friend's/relatives. I've also been trapped in borked systems where the only two things working where the sole instance of bash running and sln (staticly linked ln) fixing bad glibc upgrades (it's alot of fun when tab completion becomes your only method of ls'ing) . I'd like to think there's no faulty software system I can't fix given some time. I've made a ton of small time software projects and a few big ones (with respect to me at least) for JPL and a RCC/WSTF NASA project in various languages (mostly C/C++/Java/Python) covering many subject areas.

I also can't wait till I can afford to get into robotics again and hope I can get into creating some interesting pet projects if not help out with making the first real automatic cars (human drivers suck!). Things have been quiet since the last DARPA grand challenge, but hopefully I don't miss the boat (fun fact: I believe one of the machines (Stanford?) used Ubuntu Dapper Drake LTS).

Anyway, I'll soon post a follow up about my new work with pulseaudio and equalization including why the ladspa solution sucks and doesn't work like how you think it does. I'll try and post some of my cool/usefull scripts sometime after that.