The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Saturday, February 22, 2003
.:6:00:48 PM:.
Sad news.
Tear kissed clouds meet,
tho' light hides in midst of rain,
Its all bright above.
Friday, February 21, 2003
.:2:25:06 PM:.
Tabbed Menus in CSS
An interesting perspective (over a year old) on how to do a tabbed menu system. Its probably been done many times over-I'm still looking for the right system. Maybe one that might not use tables? maybe!?! Its a nice clean interface and its very nice, but I'm still not sure.
.:1:31:30 PM:.
Running on 4 hours
Ugh, 2 projects in 24 hours... yeah I'm feeling it-and its not like I could avoid it either... well I guess I could have chosen not to do it, but I don't think I would have been able to sleep. The first one, was really a rush job to get a tribute done. One of the people I met from the fellowship wastrying to figure out something he could do. I suggested doing it in Flash and before I knew it I had the mp3, the lyrics, and a pic. The specs were pretty simple, he wanted a webpage with actual music (not midi) and he wanted the lyrics. Ordinarily, if you wanted to do just that it would take about 5 minutes -splash all the lyrics at once, pump the mp3 into the flash and you're done. Of course, I wanted to do it differently, I wanted to time the lyrics and the choruses so they would appear at the right time. That required timing and streaming the mp3. Then you needed to insert the text at the right time frame, but the frames are numbered sequentially and not in terms of seconds. So, a quick calculation 6fps*seconds gave the right area. Since there wasn't any fading or stuff like that I thought running at 6fps would be good, now thinking about it some more, I could probably run it at 2fps or even 1fps but I guess if I want to add more stuff then it might be better running at 6fps. Anyways since the requirement was simply "no midi", I could run the mp3 at a lower quality, say 16 KHz as opposed the the "regular" quality of 44KHz. Slashing everything reduced the file to a mere 647KB! I love Flash-its just that easy to prototype stuff.
Finally there's this other webpage project for a friend of mine. Originally I thought I had a much larger timeline, like at least another week-not so!
friend:The thing is, I need this ASAP, like by this weekend
Dan: K. I'll get it to you tomorrow morning
That was based on the fact that I wouldn't need to create a flash thing, and that this graphic tab thing would work better-obviously not. Fortunately my friend isn't going to start working on it till later tonight-woohoo an extension!
Thursday, February 20, 2003
.:8:56:12 PM:.
Life in a broken blender
Its never linear even the ups and downs are completely out of phase. One of my greatest fears is losing a family member or a close friend-I consider there are to be quite a few. Its not something I'm showing off or boasting about, it just seems to be a fact that I know quite a few people. Some more so than others, but I consider the majority of them to be friends. Best friends are few and I'm glad I have who I have-we support one another, and the best part is you simply take up where you last left off. I just received news that the situation does not look good for my pastor's youngest daughter.
Just now, I made arrangements to go see Chicago. The movie is supposed to be pretty good, I've heard from all counts that its top, but again, that's just the bonus to the night. Make no mistake, I'm excited about this, I was so happy to hear it. It isn't ironic, its just life. You can be happy and yet sad at the same time, you put both in some erratic blender and you get life.
.:1:52:05 AM:.
Praying
My pastor's family got in a car accident earlier this afternoon, I'm praying for them as they go through this rough time.
I sort of had to pause for a moment and think of the correct words to say-but then it doesn't really matter, whether it be my pastor, your pastor, my friend, someone else's friend. We all live and breathe the same air, we live under the same God, the same sun, on the same earth. We belong together.
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
.:8:40:38 PM:.
House Cleaning
I manage to figure out how to overload >> operator and overload == operator in C++. The hardest part was in figuring out the declarations and the ostream.
class Blahclass
{
//Declaration
friend ostream &operator<< ( ostream &output, const Blahclass & );
public:
friend bool operator==(const Blahclass &set1, const Blahclass &set2);
}
Also, in reference to when my partition was corrupted by trying to install Win98 through System Commander 7-I finally managed to fix it (yay). Originally I thought I might need to format the entire drive physically. I still had about 18GB of information on the non-corrupted side. From my VHDL and other EE projects stuff, it just added up to a lot of information. Backing up 18GB is not easy, you have to figure out how to segment everything in nice little chunks or face a nightmare afterwards. Anyways I had been holding it off until I had some time to sit down at the computer and think clearly. Anyways in the midst of backing up, I decided to pull up the command prompt shell thing in Windows. Orginally my attempts to format the "lost" drive proved fruitless. Every time I opened the Explorer window and tried to right-click on the drive it would open up the Format Drive menu and then I would try and format it. Of course after spending a few minutes formatting the drive, the computer would spit back some error. So the other day, I decided to give the command line interface a try, couldn't lose anything else-worse case it'll spit back the same error at me
C:\format d:\ Invalid Format use /fs C:\format d: /FS Invalid Format use /FS C:\help format blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah /FS:FAT32 blah blah blah blah blah blah C:\format d: /FS:FAT32 Formatting... XX%
Success!!!! So now I have my 14GB of space back, a cleaner and leaner second drive. Woohoo back to the mp3 project we go!!!
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
.:3:23:27 PM:.
Itemized Check
Tetrinet is down, overloading the >> check, overloading the == not yet
.:1:46:50 AM:.
Doh!!! I just lost an entire post-too tired to write again, I'll just post some links to some new webcomics I found: Strings of Fate which is updated once a week and Wish3, also updated weekly. They've both progressed into some length of a story and are definitely worth checking out. You know, if you're into the whole webcomic thing. Even if you aren't there's no difference between that and reading some newspaper's comic-only that you have much more choice as to what you want to read. Sinfest is also some good daily comic dosage for those in need of a good laugh. (Apparently, there's a character in there who winds up in a situation and his reaction is me down to a tee-even though technically this has never happened to me-and I've never done that before-its a full 29 strips so its a pretty short read). Enjoy!
