Tonight was the Big Dream Gathering at UNI. My Marketing professor was gracious enough to let me leave during the break, so I was able to enjoy the gathering from 7pm to 8:30pm or so. I arrived and was immediately impressed with the number of posted dreams, and I added three to the walls myself. I spent time reading every dream posted, and commented on a dozen or more posts. A big shout out to Mitch Matthews for hosting the impressive display and inspiring people to dream big!
On Tuesday I enjoyed my first day in my new office. I have been accepted into the Student Business Incubator (SBI) program at UNI, which is run by the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center. It is a rather large office and is well equipped and furnished, and it is provided to me for free. I was still absorbing the absolute shock of having a second office at the age of 20 when Laurie Watje, my teacher, mentor, and the SBI manager knocked on my door to give me a heads up: “Mitch Matthews, a UNI alum, is with Big Dream Gathering and will be stopping by to tape an interview with you around 3pm, so be thinking about what you want to say!” I was awestruck and terrified. Here I am, 30 minutes into my first day and now I have to give an interview on tape!
You see, to stay in the incubator you must make satisfactory progress in various areas of running your business, such as business development, personal development, networking, SBI involvement, and other things. You are required to obtain a certain amount of “points” per semester by doing various activities. This is easily achievable to anyone reasonably motivated, and I will certainly pass the requirement by a large amount. One of the things you can get points for is being available for incubator tours, which merely amounts to talking to anyone Laurie brings by when you are in your office. I could have turned down the offer, but beyond looking bad on the first day, I had no desire to! Fear is not a reason to reject opportunity. Indeed, one of the big lures of entrepreneurship is the ability to challenge myself in ways I have not experienced, the ability to improve skills that have gone undeveloped, and to thrust me into situations I that I find uncomfortable. Confronting things you are unfamiliar with and having the courage to do things you might not do otherwise is an important part of being not just an entrepreneur, but a leader as well.
Sure enough, a small mob of people swarm in around 3pm, and I hear the knock on my door. The time has come, and I think, “Now, what do I say without sounding like a fool?” While I’m not entirely sure I accomplished that, I felt like I had a great interview. Mitch Matthews is a very impressive and personable guy, and it was obvious that he has a lot of passion for what he does. As Laurie noted, he was coming around filming people to talk about their “Big Dreams”, for he runs BigDreamGathering.com and is going to host an event on campus that I will surely be attending. Part way into the interview the camera guy ran out of tape and went to retrieve another, but Mitch and I just kept talking anyway!
As my interview wrapped up he gave me a few very useful bits of advice and then moved on to the other incubator inhabitant present, Travis Steffan, who runs two bussinesses out of the incubator: Synn Clothing and WorkoutBox. I knew his story because I met him during a tour last semester when I was in a class, but I wanted to listen to the interview anyway because he is an impressive individual and a successful student entreprenuer. While listening I got to gab a bit with the other people present, which were mostly people from around UNI that were showing Mitch and his small crew around and grabbing people with Big Dreams.
Eventually the excitement passed and I took a few minutes to reflect on what had just happened. My first formal day as an entrepreneur and I had already accomplished these things after four hours:
Networked, which resulted in connections, advice, and a possible customer (before I have written any code!)
Filmed an interview, resulting in free marketing / press
Successfully delivered an elevator pitch on camera and off, with positive feedback from four or five people
Was told by at least three people they loved the name of my business
Had my business concept reaffirmed by people I did not know, which felt great
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Registered domain names
Setup work environment
Read policy information
Gained points towards business progress for staying in the SBI.
As I walked to my night class I could not imagine a higher octane start to my business, nor could I imagine a more productive day. I had a great sense of accomplishment, and yet I technically have very little done. But as I say in the interview: I have all of the pieces, I just need to put them together.
So, to anyone reading that wants to find the moral of the story, I leave you with these two lessons learned:
Develop an elevator pitch! It is absolutely necessary to be able to describe your idea and sell it to a person in just a few sentences.
The first day is -NOT- too early to buy business cards! You never know who you might meet that wants one. I was kicking myself for not having any!
I’ll try to post a picture of my office and maybe come back and insert the video of my interview once it has been posted.
As the semester finally wrapped up I found that my list of things to write about has begun to explode. However, at the very top was something I discussed with several people when talking about my software engineering project: the eureka moment. Epiphany.
When writing software, you often analyze several ways to accomplish a task and embark on what seems like the best one; but on occasion, the stars align and the meaning of life becomes crystal clear. Your solution is so perfect and elegant that you know, even feel, that it is right and it shouldn’t be any other way. I detail my experience with this below.
When buying my new graphics card I received a free 4GB flash drive. I didn’t realize this when I bought the product, but I was excited as you can never have too many flash drives! However, as I read its reviews I heard a great many complaints of it being slow. This made me wonder just how fast it would be, and how it compared to my other flash drives.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to jump on the flash drive bandwagon. I bought (well, my mother bought) my first flash drive, a massive 128MB for over $120. That is a joke now days of course — you can obtain giant flash drives cheaply, and people routinely hand out “small” 4GB drives for free. And, as long as you plug them in once every twenty or so years they’ll retain their data!
Here I will detail the analysis of the flash drives I currently own, from my oldest, original 128 MB PNY flash to the newest free OCZ drive I have received.
In the order they were acquired, here is make / capacity (note that my original drive is the largest physically, even compared to the 16GB drive):
- 128MB PNY Attache (bought around mid 2004 or early 2005. It came with a Windows 98/ME drivers disc that I carry in my backpack to this day)
- 128 MB UNI ROTC – Special drive received from the department when I was in high school
- 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro – My first flash drive in many years. 2GB seems like a lot when you are used to 128MB!
- 16GB Kingston Data Traveler – Received from Distek, my employer, as Christmas gift in 2008.
- 4GB OCZ Diesel – Received as a free addon by NewEgg for buying two video cards.
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I will test using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 using a USB 2.0 port doing sequential reads and writes:
Drive
Filesystem
Read (MB/s)
Write (MB/s)
PNY 128MB
FAT
4.858
4.172
ROTC 128MB
FAT
10.71
4.891
SanDisk Cruzer 2GB
FAT32
30.51
8.950
Kingston Data Traveler 16GB
FAT32
22.17
14.11
OCZ Diesel 4GB
FAT32
17.84
6.498
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The conclusions are quite interesting. In comparison to similar technology, the OCZ diesel is indeed slow. There are many drives that function much faster then the ones listed here, though these are some of the more common drives.
It is interesting to me that write speeds increased dramatically, but now seem to wax and wane depending on what you buy. I also find it interesting that there was no clear winner here. The Kingston drive would be the obvious choice with good read speeds and the best write speeds, as well as superior capacity. However, the Sandisk drive has superior read speeds by a fair amount, and at 2GB will hold most anything I would want to carry around. I suppose these will be my primary drives depending on what I am trying to do.
As for the free OCZ Diesel… well, I think it is time to testReadyBoost with all 4GB of it
After programming heavily for my Software Engineering project, I determined that I could make extensive use of a third monitor. I came to this conclusion after having spent many long nights in front of my screens, endlessly resizing windows so that I could view what I would like to see, as well as view the chat with my teammates. I generally ended up with at least three SSH sessions open, and while I am aware there are many ways to quickly switch between windows on a command line (screen, buffers, and the like), the whole problem was switching at all. I was tasked with writing the search part of our system, which turned out to be interesting and a lot of fun. However, I was most productive when I was able to sit at the MySQL prompt and run test queries while writing the search code itself. I also needed another window or two to do general things without removing focus from my other two windows, and, for anyone who knows me well, I -ALWAYS- like to watch the performance of my computer so I generally had a session simply running htop.
After running my server for 20+ days, I shut down everything to go on Thanksgiving break. When I finally returned home, my server would not boot. Having gone through this before, I checked the RAM immediately, as it was an old high performance stick that saw heavy use in my desktop before being retired. The stick was at fault, and so my server was dead until I could buy new RAM. My graphics card was the only thing in my desktop that had not been upgraded in a while (two years or so), but I wasn’t going to bother ordering something until I actually needed parts. Now I had to order something, so I looked for new graphic cards! The desktop was running an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, and with the graphic card industry being the way it is, it had now moved into legacy status and there were much better cards to be had. So I decided that if I needed RAM for my server I would also throw in my new monitor and grab a new video card (an ATI Radeon HD 5770 from Sapphire).
Already annoyed with the RAM blown and having to gimp my desktop (took 1GB and threw it into the server for the time being) while being embroiled in coding, I eagerly awaited my parts. However, 15 minutes after placing the order for my monitor (a 22″ 5ms Acer, similar to my other two 20″ monitors), a sale on Newegg began for a similar monitor that had a better contrast ratio for ~$20 less. Thinking there was no way they could have processed my order in 20 minutes, I went to cancel. My request was denied. I tried again. Request denied. After further inquiry, it seemed that the monitor I ordered just 20 minutes earlier had hit their shipping lines! Instead of being disgruntled I merely canceled the order for the other monitor and decided I would be content with fast shipping of the pricier, slightly less capable monitor. In the mean time, my other order (video card and RAM) did NOT ship until Wednesday, the day I received the monitor I had ordered two days later than the parts. Newegg, recognizing their shipping hold up, decided to 2-day air ship the parts to me so I could get them today (12/4/2009).
Having done my research ahead of time (and thus, part of my reason for writing this blog post as that research was hard to find), I knew that my ATI Radeon X1950 Pro legacy card would very likely conflict with my new ATI Radeon HD 5770 under Windows 7, despite being workable under Windows XP. Now, after two hours of trial and error, I have found that you indeed cannot mix a legacy card with a newer card simply because it is no longer supported by Catalyst Control Center, which is needed to govern multiple ATI cards. So, it seems, ~$330 later, I simply have two more inches of screen space and an extra monitor on my desk, waiting to be used. The question now is do I buy a second graphics card or find an alternative? Having come this far, I’m inclined to say the second graphics card is the way to go. This is also after some research which led me to some interesting devices, but all for more then $160, which is about what another graphics card will cost me.
So, to recap for anyone searching:
If you want to use three monitors with your computer, the easiest and most reliable way to do so is with three DVI connections. In that regard, you will want two graphic cards, with at least one of them having two DVI/D-Sub outs. For maximum reliability and compatibility, and the ability to CrossFire or SLI later, try using two of the same card. If you have an older card that is no longer supported by ATI, you cannot mix it with a new card on Windows 7 due to driver conflicts (this has to do with the way Windows 7 pulls and uses legacy drivers). However, you should be able to use a newer card (that is, any card not in legacy status) with a brand new card (say, mixing a 4000 series and 5000 series) and have it work just fine.
Another question remains: If you have two cards and Crossfire them, can you support three monitors? I was curious about this too, but according to ATI only two monitors are supported with CrossFire at this time, although this link seems to say up to five can be supported. I should note I’m not much of a gamer or performance chaser. Instead, I chase my own productivity, and it so happens that multiple mid-range graphics cards seem to be the answer!
While I do not have hard benchmark numbers, it is quite clear after a few minutes of use that this card is a big advance over my Radeon X1950 Pro. It had double the memory (1GB v. 512MB) and it is faster (GDDR5 v. GDDR3). It has a much higher clock speed (850Mhz v. 600 Mhz) and a much larger number of graphics pipelines (800 v 600). I was concerned about heat (which any good system builder should be), so I watched in CCC as I ran the Windows 7 benchmark program. As the test chugged away, I watched the GPU get red-lined for a bit and the fan never went above 33% (great for noise), and the temperature never went above 50C. I suppose the question now is how hot will two of them get in my case? They will be quite close to eachother, and the top one will receive little air flow, so I am concerned. However, my temperatures are something I monitor quite heavily (I’ll probably write about that eventually), so hopefully it won’t be a problem
I spent some time yesterday playing Team Fortress 2 to test out the card a bit (I don’t play many games, so it is the most intensive one I have). I jacked up all of the settings to max, including Anti-Aliasing 8x and Ansiotropic Filtering 16x. The card ran like a champ — it never really broke a sweat, leaving its fan at 33% and never going above 55C while maintaining over 60fps, usually much more (100+).
For the curious, Windows 7 rates my system thus (scale ranging from 1.0 to 7.9):
Processor (C2D Q6600) – 7.1
RAM (4GB 800Mhz 4-4-4-12 GSKILL) – 7.1
Graphics (Radeon HD 5770) – 7.3 (up from 6.0)
Gaming graphics – 7.3 (up from 6.0)
Primary hard disk (WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM 500GB): 5.9
Thus, my base score is 5.9, with my disk drives being the only item under 7. This is a little curious to me as both of the drives are quite new and feature dual processors each with access to its own 16MB buffer. That said, I run the two drives in RAID1 using my motherboards fakeraid, so it isn’t surprising there is a performance hit here. All of that said, my desktop is considered extremely high end, and thus I will not need any more updates until I build a completely new rig in a few years. Until then, I look forward to testing triple monitors and another new 5770.
In the mean time, I’ll settle for my Linux box getting it’s own monitor:
Sometimes a talk turns into an experience, and Evelyn Glennie delivers. Evelyn is a Grammy-winning percussionist and composer who became almost completely deaf by the age of 12. Who better to teach you how to listen?
For such a long time now I have bookmarked and otherwise hackishly cataloged some of the most interesting and persuasive material I have read or listened to. I have persistently and adamantly shared much of this with other people, and I often revisit them myself. I plan on reviewing much of this material in an effort to not only write more often, but to write down thoughts and ideas now on the things I am learning so my future self (and others) might analyze them later.
I plan to go through the many lectures I have bookmarked, and many of the best books and articles I have read. Much of the information is technology or entrepreneurship related, which makes sense if you know me. However, I think it is important to expose myself to the incredible expertise present in other fields. By learning more about art, music, politics, biology, physics, and anything else, I can develop an understanding that transgresses the fields themselves, and I will be a more well rounded individual.
I boldly support the idea that the more you learn, not just about one topic but about all things in life, the more unique your views will be and the better and more creative your solutions to problems will be. It is to your advantage to learn all you can about everything you can.
Note that many of these talks come from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an organization devoted to “ideas worth spreading”. You can find their web site at:
Unlike most students, I enjoy the general education I am required to take at my university. This is because I am interested just about everything; I simply cannot have too much knowledge. This semester I am enrolled in one class I have been looking forward to for four years: Philosophy, The Art of Thinking.
I think given different circumstances I would do very well in the Philosophy program and would like having a degree in the field. The ideas behind philosophy fit well with my life — not just to question what we don’t know, but analyze and question what we do know. Is something right or wrong? I like to play devil’s advocate and just think about things from different viewpoints because I find it interesting and fascinating. Mental challenges like this can broaden your view and creativity, which is an absolute must in the world we live in today.
My friend John has recently switched his major from Computer Science to Philosophy and is discovering how interesting and joyous the field itself can be. While I cannot pick it up as a major, the things he is going over are things I have discussed and thought about my entire life. It is interesting to me that so many people are willing to accept the world as it is and not analyze and question it. I suppose there is comfort in not knowing and not caring, but not knowing and caring can be frustrating and create an immense craving for knowledge and understanding.
As of late, it seems that questions and thoughts out of the norm have piled up around me to dissect and analyze. Below is a brief glimpse of some of them merely because I have spent time just thinking about them and I wish to save the ideas some place for later analysis.
The first came to me after following a random train of thought that led me back to one of my favorite movies of all time: Meet Joe Black. (Please, if you have not seen this movie and wish to then do not read this!) While there are many things I could say about this movie, there is only one I wish to address.
Brad Pitt plays a salesman that “Death” kills and takes over his body to have a physical presence in order to examine the excellence of Bill Perish’s life. It is true that every civilization has always had some sort of myth surrounding the grim reaper — a physical manifestation of death, which this movie builds upon. However, in my view and many others, I have always thought of “Death” only as the taker of life. That is to say, he may take life from people but he may not give it. Now you could argue that since he gives Perish more time to carry on his life then he is, in a sense, bestowing more life to Perish. On the other hand, I view this more as bestowing time existing life, not creating new life itself. This is an important distinction. Ultimately this brings me to what I consider the most moving (and in my mind, controversial) part of the movie. In the end, Perish and Death walk off during the fireworks, returning to the abyss where Death resides. A minute later, as Perish’s daughter Susan (actress Claire Forlani) comes seeking them, Brad Pitt then comes back over the hill. The salesmen is back into his body — revived from death. This is controversial because, in this movie, Death can not only take life but also bestow it. This then changes who Joe Black really is; he is not the grim reaper or death, but must actually be God. This has a large impact on the rest of the movie because we can then see that God is not a benevolent and caring being, but is instead an indifferent enforcer of rules who is curious (and ultimately jealous) of what humans have. This view changes the entire tone of the movie.
Another thought was brought up while watching the end of an episode of Ergo Proxy, which Dan began rewatching lately. The episodes all end with notes explaining some of the references brought up in the previous episode. During this one in particular, Vincent and Pino become lost in a fog and Vincent enters what he believes to be a book store, but is more or less a place to visit and analyze memories. This is important because Vincent’s memory has been intentionally erased, and it is the first real step in him realizing and accepting that he is indeed a Proxy.
What I found interesting was more or less the note at the end which is briefly touched on in the episode — a reference to The Origin of Languages by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The interesting thought is a paradox: in order to develop language, beings must be able to think, but in order to be able to think beings must have language.
This is actually a concept that several of my friends and I have talked about for years in the context of some of the games we used to play when we were world builders. Wade described something he read where a race of people did not know what love was because they did not have a word for it. Culturally, they were loveless. How can someone love without knowing what love is? Obviously this breaks down somewhere, because every day we create new words and things in this life of ours. Granted, we have an advantage in that we have a vibrant and growing vocabulary on which we build. If such a foundation did not exist, imagine how different life would be. How fortunate we are to not have to endure the pain of existence without language.
One night, Dan and I were talking about Computer Science as we often do. We were trying to come up with some interesting things for Computer Club to work on or talk about. Unsure of what people we have and what their interests are, we decided to work on something that interested us and then see if we could get people on board with the project. ABE is the result of that conversation and many other considerations since.
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Ideas we wanted to talk about and learn about: distributed processing, high performance computing, formal software engineering process and techniques, AI programming and emergent behavior.
Ideas we did not want to work on in-depth: graphics programming, user interface creation and design, user input.
When Dr. Gray allowed us to borrow the LittleFe, we instantly decided to use it for this project. This provides us with a high performance, transportable medium to do our testing (although I would later assemble a simple, low-end machine to run smaller MPI-emulated simulations). After much discussing, and even consideration of OpenCL and/or Cuda, we opted for an MPI (Message Passing Interface) based application for this project.
The goal itself is not to make a video game, but a large-scale battle simulation involving thousands (hopefully tens or hundreds of thousands) of units. We want a lot of units to readily see the effects of AI changes and to stress the system processing the updates. Ultimately a simulation will consist of several players, each with a defined rule set (which will be simple and defined by us, nothing too fancy) that will govern their units as each side faces off. We hope someday to have several unit types, terrain considerations, random catastrophic events (meteors, nukes, tornados, etc), and an event tracking system.
ABE will have two core parts, the simulation and the player. The simulation will run on the LittleFe or some medium and will load the rulesets, run the simulation, and then output information step-by-step to text files. We will then have a player that can read these generated text files and somehow visually display each step so we can actually see what is happening. The player should be able to play, pause, and advance one step at a time.
So what does this give us? Anyone who is interested but doesn’t know how to program will be able to talk about and influence our decisions and design, and even create their own AI rule-sets. This can lead to a lot of student interaction without a lot of domain knowledge. We realize not everyone wants to get into the technical aspect, so we want to take that out of the picture and talk more about our design, process, and issues. We figure this will make the project more marketable.
As the software process is an important learning part of this project, we plan to make extensive use of things not usually seen in student projects. DISTek, my employer, has graciously agreed to let us use their conference rooms for design and code reviews, so we will try to take full advantage of this. I don’t expect many people who will help with this project to understand the code I write, so their ability to review it effectively may be low, but it is a chance to help them learn none the less. The project is hosted in a Subversion repository and we will try to keep it up to date as possible. If things go well we will probably release the code under GPL or a similar license and allow people to use it once we have a stable, working version. Also, as we are following a more formal software engineering process, I personally will try out CPPUnit and attempt some test driven development. This is something I personally am interested in and would like to try on something beyond homework-scale.
Currently I am set to design and write the simulation. Dan is tasked with creating the player and, perhaps more importantly, setting up the LittleFe in a way we can use it. He is more of a Linux junkie then me these days, and he seemed quite interested in it so it should be fun for him. I personally can’t wait to dig into MPI and get things moving, but I don’t want this project to fall on its face. Thus, I will probably spent some large amounts of time designing things once I have a good idea how to setup the simulation correctly to take full advantage of MPI.
The start of school is just around the bend, and my life has been buzzing as things start to pick up again. In preparation for school I have found myself gearing up in several ways to make sure it is a successful semester:
Despite my normal frugality, money has been flowing quite steadily as I pursue quality and success in my life. Back on January, this meant buying a new car so I could avoid paying ~$2000 a year to fix a ~$3000 old luxury car. And I do mean new, as in 2009 Jeep Compass new. I have been absolutely happy and satisfied with my decision and find it quite enjoyable to drive, so I consider it a success. However, I must admit that if I knew my CS scholarship was going to vanish I would have forgone the car and used that money for debt and tuition payment instead. On the other hand, driving a car backed with a warranty and knowing each and every mile put on it was by me is a very, very good feeling. I used to think new vehicles were a huge waste of money due to depreciation, but I realize now that if it helps put your mind at ease (as it does for me) then it is money well spent, especially if you keep it for a long time as I plan to do.
My brother and several friends started buying computer equipment from NewEgg, so of course I ended up joining the trend. When our school received Win7 RTM copies and keys, I couldn’t help but throw it on my laptop and see how it ran. Considering it is still unreleased to the public, I am incredibly amazed with it’s state and the amount of polish. And, as XP starts to show its age in size and performance, and I became increasingly dissatisfied with my computer’s setup (two 37GB 10k RPM drives holding XP/Steam games, and then a larger 160GB drive holding programs and other bloat) I decided to bite the bullet and reorganize with Win7. I decided to get two new 500GB drives and put them in RAID 1 via fakeraid on my motherboard. This left me with enough spare parts to only require a case, power supply, and motherboard to build a cheapo computer, so I jumped at the chance to finally have a dedicated Linux machine (more on it’s intended use another time) at the cost of $130 or so. I ended up buying new hard drives, more RAM for my desktop, more RAM for my laptop, an external hard drive enclosure, a KVM switch to switch between my two desktop computers, and more. As I spent a night or two piecing everything together, I was reminded of just how much I really enjoy putting things together. It was a very fun and satisfying experience. Sadly, I have no plans to do any more computer hardware flip-flops or buying in the near future.
To prepare more for this school year (and fill a void of wall space near my window), I bought a brand new wooden desk from Target.com. It is quite stylish, well priced, was easy to put together, and seems pretty sturdy. The theory is if I have a dedicated homework space I will be more productive. We’ll see how that goes. It is a problem I’ve “solved” before, but I ended up switching from my old desk to the desk I bought for homework only as a computer platform to facilitate more monitors.
A month or two ago, I also decided to become a legitimate Pandora.com customer. While 40 hours a month is a lot of free music, I find myself listening to Pandora at home and at work (meaning I blow that in a week easily). I figure $36/year is fairly cheap compared to what many people pay for music, and I am quite satisfied by the service and use it regularly.
After a near eight-month break from the game, my brother and I have reactivated our World of Warcraft accounts. This came about only because I have found many of my coworkers play together, and the only reason Dan and I quit in the first place was because we had no one to play with. So, in league with the title of this post, we spent this weekend playing like the good old days: gearing up with heroics. I imagine with limited playing the game will stay fun for quite a while, though I have started my payment cycle on a monthly basis just in-case it starts to conflict with schedule.
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#include “std_blog_apology” // Clever, eh?
I spend an ample amount of my day thinking and analyzing everything. Current events, health, exercise, programming, school, work, food, games, cleaning, economics. My brain is constantly crunching the angles, and when I stumble upon something I find interesting and wish to explore more it makes it into my draft post called “Topics to Blog About”. As summer quickly comes to an end and my list of things to write about is in the dozens, I figure it is time to start making this whole blogging thing a bit more routine like it used to be. Even if there happened to be few, if any readers, I often find myself coming back to the pages of this blog to reread my analysis of topics and refer to whatever started the post in the first place. Plus, it is a convenient place to store information I use on occasion (such as the hardware information for my computers) or would like to give out to people (gift list).
Given a new schedule that will free up more time for stuff like this, I hope to be posting more. Lets see if I can keep that promise!
