Today was a day of small errands and impossibly bad timing. I dropped by Georgia Tech to get passport photographs taken at the BuzzCard Center. I noticed that the Student Center has also recently undergone renovations and it looks really nice. Finally, I managed to drop by the Windy Hill Post Office a few minutes before closing and picked up stamps and a DS-11 passport application. Hopefully I can get everything ready in time for an upcoming Argentina trip.

Made several minor changes to the online journal layout. I downloaded and installed the Opera Internet Browser for Linux. It has a lot of cool features, such as built-in RSS feed support, and uses the lighting fast Trolltech Qt API. Of course, it also helps to configure Opera to use bitstream fonts for an overall nicer appearance.

Stacie and I attempted to have a brief lunch at Allen and Son Barbeque before my departure, but it was unfortunately closed. Instead, we went to a nearby Chinese restaurant, whose name I can’t currently recall. I’m back in Atlanta now though. The return trip was thankfully uneventful with exciting tunes provided by New Rock 93.3 The Planet for most of the way. Bidding adieu to everything that never mattered. I miss everyone already.

Sravanthi, Stacie, and I left for Mardi Gras Bowling to play Police 911 and DDR at their relatively smallish arcade. We joined Laura shortly after for lunch at the Spotted Dog on Main St. and Weaver St. in Carrboro. They are a bit on the pricey side, but unlike most restaurants, offer a variety of healthy vegetarian and vegan dishes. We joined Tracy and Lindsey and a few of her friends that evening at the Cosmic Cantina in Durham, and subsequently left for the Carolina Theatre of Durham for one of the many nightly showings of Fahrenheit 9/11. There was not an empty seat in the house. Overall, I greatly enjoyed the film, though I do wish that I was more aware of our current political situation than I am now.

Recitation covered hash tables and function pointers. I investigated the use of high-resolution timing in Linux, and ultimately determined that none of the provided techniques would meet the requirements of the dcsp senior design project. I eventually settled on GLib Timers and polling, which gave surprisingly good resolution in the microsecond range. Other than a few minor quirks, our senior design project is now feature complete.

Juan and the usual gang and I left for improv comedy at Dad’s Garage once again. It’s always a lot of fun.

I somehow misread the DAS-1700 Series User’s Guide, which led to all sorts of confusion this past Monday. The das-1701st-da card analog input and output channels are not actually identical, as I had been led to believe. The analog input supports a voltage range of -5 to 5 volts, while the analog output range is approximately -10 to 10 volts. More importantly, the analog breakout box uses a differential ground for the analog inputs, but uses a common ground for the analog outputs. These realizations immediately fixed a large number of weird bugs in the dcsp software.

The comedidataread function returns an integer that is either 0 or maxdata if the voltage is out of range. comeditophys translates this differently depending on the out-of-range behavior. If set to COMEDI_OOR_NAN, the default, endpoint values are converted to NAN.

Turned in time sheets on time for a change and picked up a lease termination form from the Wellington Point main office. This is it folks. Languages and Translation lab covered the use of make and Makefiles in general. I helped David study in the evening for his upcoming Microelectronic Circuits exam. The exam covers second-order filters, comparators, diode rectifiers, and other fun topics.

Since Straw still doesn’t work in Debian, I decided to try out alternative RSS feed readers and stumbled on the console-based reader snownews. It’s actually quite good.

I made several small aesthetic changes that hopefully improve the usability of the web site. Juan and I met in the senior design lab to work on connecting a DC motor to the dcsp software. It unfortunately didn’t work. That of course didn’t stop us from leaving for Highlander in the evening, chatting with friends, and performing our usual Monday routine. Looks like tomorrow is going to be another busy day.

It’s not only Father’s Day, but it’s my sister’s birthday as well. I spent a few hours in the senior design control lab testing the changes made to the dcsp code from yesterday. Juan and I later went to Fat Matt’s for an early dinner and split a most delicious full slab of ribs. Juan fixed the many quirks in the root locus code, and I’ve completely redesigned the single-input to single-output user interface. It looks spiffy.

I somehow managed to not leave the house at all today. That’s pretty sad. Began using Aptitude, an alternative front-end to apt for updating Debian packages. I spent a large part of remaining day working on senior design. Mainly, I completed a preliminary difference equation implementation and wrote a clean user interface for it. I also added threading support to the feedback loop code using the GLib API Reference. It seems that the mystery that is Glade and GTK has finally been conquered. Despite my lack of understanding of control systems, the project is coming along nicely.

Slipstreaming Windows installations used to be a massive pain when I volunteered for Hands on Atlanta. I discovered new tools such as XPCREATE and AutoPatcher that make this process much simpler.