Major congrats goes to Matt Schaefer for a successful thesis defense! I'm sure he'll leave behind a great volume of knowledge in his thesis when he graduates and moves to the farm! I actually heard Iran's current rioting has given pause in order to honor the shifting of this wealth of knowledge from the cranium of Matt Schaefer to the public domain. Don't quote me on that thought.

After putting up with more crap than I want to running Fedora Core on the PS3 cluster at work, I decided to try out the new Yellow Dog Linux 6.1 on my PS3 at home. It was a toss up between that and Ubuntu 8.10, and in all honesty I'll probably end up using Ubuntu on my home PS3, but I wanted to at least try YDL since it has supported the PS3 from very early on.

The overall process was pretty simple. I already set up a 10gb Linux partition when I first got my PS3 (I knew it would be inevitable) so I didn't risk losing any of my current data. Just popped in the YDL 6.1 DVD, installed the kboot boot-loader from the DVD, told the PS3 to boot into the "Other OS," and reading the YDL PS3 Install Guide I entered the YDL installation process.

Having spent plenty of time researching with the PS3's limited memory, I knew it was a bad idea to enable any kind of GUI. I disabled all of these services in the installation which made the actual installation only take ~30 minutes.

As you might have noticed, this isn't a step-by-step guide of the installation of YDL 6.1. That can be found in their guide. The rest of the post is getting Wireless with WPA+PSK security working.

First off, I edit the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file, putting my wireless SSID in the ESSID field and making sure BOOTPROTO was set to DHCP. The rest I left as defaults (which was blank in most of the cases).

Next, edit /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant so that the lines INTERFACES="-iwlan0" and DRIVERS="-Dwext" appear in the file.

Thirdly, edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant and add

network={
        ssid="BensAP"
        scan_ssid=1
        proto=WPA
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        psk="*********"
}

Fourthly, we need to make sure wpa_supplicant starts on boot up! My understanding is this daemon encrypts/decrypts the data as it gets sent or received over the wlan0 network device, in a very brief nutshell! To enable this service, run chkconfig --levels 345 wpa_supplicant on. This will make sure wpa_supplicant is ran on both the text-only run level (3) and GUI run level (5).

Lastly we need to reorder the boot order, since wpa_supplicant has to be running before we can enable the wireless network device and have it search the network for a DHCP server. I couldn't find a good way to do this with any YDL tools or config files. Although it can be done with a couple rename commands. The first is mv /etc/rc3.d/S10network /etc/rc3.d/S99network and the second is mv /etc/rc5.d/S10network /etc/rc5.d/S99network.

At this point you should be able to reboot and it should work fine! This took me over the span of a few hours and a few different websites ([1] [2] [3]) so I might have missed a small bit. However I feel this post included the information I was missing the majority of the time.

Next up will be Ubuntu, I imagine. However I plan on installing the SDK 3.1 on YDL 6.1 and seeing if it would be any better than Fedora Core for the PS3 cluster.

Stay tuned!

I whipped up some chicken salad last night and it came out so incredibly delicious, I had to post about it. Honestly these are just instructions for cooking the chicken breasts. The salad part was just a bagged salad. The simplicity is a feature!

I got about three chicken breasts and coated them with some olive oil and heavily seasoned them with some Italian Seasoning. I preheated my oven to 350 degrees and put the three breasts on a cookie sheet covered in aluminum foil (Easy clean up!). I let them cook for about 25-30 minutes and then I started to check them with my meat thermometer every 5-7 minutes. The chicken breasts were different sizes so they all cooked at different rates. The instant a breast hit 170 degrees, I would take it out off of the tray and put it on the cutting board. Every degree over 170 you cook it, you just lose moisture! Don't overcook your chicken!

Alton Brown suggested you cut Turkey breast meat across the grain instead of with it. He mentions this helps keep the moisture inside of the actual meat. Remembering this tip, I cut each breast across the grain into 1/4" thick slices. Some of the bigger slices I did cut in half with the grain, just because some of the slices were too big for a salad! I tried a few pieces and they were incredibly moist. Then I put all the sliced up chicken breast meat into a gallon zip lock bag with the bagged salad.

Shake up that bag once you get all the chicken in there and serve! The chicken to greens ratio in my salad was skewed very much towards the chicken, but I wanted a lot of chicken in the salad! One bag of salad + three breasts will be enough for about 3, maybe 4 servings.

As an extra note, I could have marinated the chicken in some Italian dressing beforehand, however I was hungry before I decided to go buy the chicken, so I just cooked it right away.

This is a few weeks old news, but my one paper, "CellMR: A Framework for Supporting MapReduce on Asymmetric Cell-Based Clusters" was officially accepted to IPDPS 2009 in Rome, Italy!! I've always wanted to travel overseas and now this gives me the perfect chance to do just that, especially if the school is taking care of my travel expenses.

However on a slightly sadder note, the other paper I was involved with didn't quite make it into the conference. It is however being resubmitted to Computing Frontiers 2009 which is also in Italy at almost the exact same time as IPDPS 09.

I'm very excited about the CellMR paper because it is the culmination of my research work starting in the spring and was ongoing over this past summer. Work continues on this area of research as it will evolve into my Master's Thesis.

Lots of things happening! The last thing I want to worry about right now is this Numerical Analysis final at 10am tomorrow morning. However it will be the last final I have to take... so its time to just bite the bullet.

I've been crazy busy over the summer. Luckily since I wrote this site with Django it took only moments to jump back into it and update my paper listings.

The short and sweet version of my recent adventures include getting a paper accepted to a conference in Raleigh, NC, hopefully getting two more accepted to a conference in Rome, and I've recently accepted a job offer from Cisco in Knoxville, TN! I'm very excited about all of those things and perhaps I'll keep this updated a bit more.

We'll see.

There is an option to calibrate the Nike+ adapter to my walking and running speed. You select a distance, run that distance while it gathers data, tell it to stop once you know you hit that distance, and it uses the information to better estimate distance ran during regular work outs. Today I spent the first mile of my workout calibrating it to my walk and run speeds. Once I finished the first mile I started a workout to see how well it worked out. Once I hit 3.2 miles I was done, so I stopped the workout on my iPod. Lo and behold it read 2.18 miles! Much much more accurate than before. I can't wait to see how the calibration holds up on my future runs.

Since I've moved south I've been balancing a PNC Bank Account for accessing money without ATM fees when I'm in Erie, a Wachovia Checking Account for accessing money without ATM fees here, and an HSBC online savings account because, when I opened it at least, it had a great interest rate (around 5.5% I believe). Wachovia is nice because it is a local bank, however I just discovered that all outbound electronic transfers get a nice $3 fee! That's crap as far as I'm concerned.

However Platz just informed me about the Charles Schwab High Yield Checking account. This checking account has a 3% interest rate, doesn't charge any ATM fees, refunds all ATM fees any other bank charges you, and also provides you with a Brokerage account to go with the checking in case you want to do any investing. This is a really good deal so I went ahead and opened an account. I figure once I get some money coming in from my assistantship, I'll close my PNC and Wachovia accounts and just use the Charles Schwab Checking/Brokerage and HSBC Savings accounts.

Then when I make the big bucks I can use it to invest! At least once the stock market starts to look better...

I didn't realize the Nike+ website had a feature where I can put code on my own website to track my runs using the Nike+iPod integration. For now I'm going to slap it in this post and see how it looks. Eventually I might put it in its own section.

I started running last summer quite a bit. Doing consulting work from home freed up my mornings and having a routine that includes running after getting up helped me get into a work pattern for the rest of the day. However last semester was pretty rough so I didn't get to run much and when I did it was experimenting with different routes, since that was right after I moved down to Blacksburg. Now my semester is looking better and I started using the treadmill at the fitness center for the apartments until the weather gets a bit warmer. It made me realize the Nike+ distances are not very accurate. They seem to be a bit more than I actually run. The actual distance ran is about 80% of the distance Nike+ records. I'll have to play around and try to calibrate it a bit better.

I finally got this blog set up on my newly acquired slice from SliceHost. I've had the slice for just over a month but with school winding down things were absolutely crazy. Since I cancelled TextDrive as soon as I got my slice, I've only had a temporary place holder up on my domains. It still remains on benjaminrose.info and benjaminrose.name (a new one) but those should be updated soon since they were just static HTML pages instead of Django like this site.

I've also added a new section to this site for papers. I wrote a survey paper on heterogeneous core multiprocessors in my OS class this semester and decided I should toss it up here for the world to see! I'll update the page as more papers enter my graduate life.

As of 2:45pm yesterday, Robert Jordan passed away. He was the author of Wheel of Time and the best book series I've ever read. This is very sad considering he's been fighting cardiac amyloidosis for some time now. The last few posts on his blog led us to believe that he was doing quite well. I guess he took a sudden turn for the worst yesterday. We'll have to wait for more details. Right now the Dragonmount website is getting hammered pretty hard so if you let web page loads sit for a few minutes it might load a page for ya.

I initially was worried about the last book (book 12), but the word is he has been dictating plot lines and outlines for the whole book for quite some time and he has a team of writers that are working to convert that from audio tape to written words. I'm sure when Harriet (his wife) feels up to it, she'll take over the responsibilities of the last book. She has been the main editor for all of his book so far, so I feel confident the last book will be as climatic as we all want it to be.

It's no secret that I've been checking the track list for the upcoming Guitar Hero III on a regular basis. I really can't wait until October 29th so I can rock out every free moment I have on my Wii of all things! I hope the multiplayer lives up to the hype also.

Sadly I can't get quite as excited about Rock Band... just too expensive to buy all those instruments. Give me an axe and I'll be happy.

I decided that since tomorrow I have three classes that span from 11am to 6:30pm, I would get everything together for some beef stew and let that cook in the crock pot all day. My plan was to get all the veggies/potatoes chopped and let them sit together in the fridge overnight (as per Tomm's advice) and in the morning I'd brown the beef, toss it in the crockpot along with the broth, and begin the slow cooking process. I have determined this to be a great plan and I figure it'll go nice and smoothly.

Alas, a semi-major problem arises within the first step. I peeled all the potatoes I needed and I let the peels fall into the sink. One of the things I'm happy about this apartment is the fact it has a garbage disposer in the sink. So I turn the water on, turn on the disposer and start pushing down the potato peelings. There are peelings for about 4 or 5 potatoes in the sink (not all were large potatoes though), so there's a decent amount to push down. Its going well until all of a sudden the water stops draining...

I turn the disposer on and off, even leave it on for a bit, but the water is not draining at all. I realize the disposer was ok, but the pieces it cut the potato peelings into must have clogged the drain after the disposer. Crap. In my mind I'm thinking I've been here under two weeks and I'm going to be forced to call the maintenance guys. I start looking around for anything to remedy the situation. I briefly tried using a spoon to scoop anything out of actual disposer. This really did nothing and was more of a panic move.

I don't have a plunger, but I did realize the water stopper for that side of the sink is made out of rubber. I start using that to plunge that drain. Every couple of plunges the water goes down a bit at a time. I plunge a bit more fiercely and all of a sudden the water drains right out. I had successfully plunged my kitchen drain with the rubber stopper. I ran plenty of water through to ensure the potato fragments were completely gone. I was pumped, that was a perfect solution to a stupid problem.

When conveying this story to Tomm, he called me the "MacGyver of Household Manliness." I'll think that title describes this evening quite well.

Well for the most part I'm moved into my new apartment in Blacksburg. Of course the days that was packing/unpacking and moving were some of the hottest days this summer. Thursday night was actually the warmest in the New River Valley history. Low of 79 degrees! On a related note, having central air is really nice. I found a good deal on some furniture yesterday, so I now have a couch, love-seat, and chair for the living room. I also managed to get a table and some chairs for my "dining area". I got my new desk set up and its really nice. Plenty of room and very comfortable. I'll have some pictures up later, but its a very cozy little place.

Blacksburg itself seems really nice. I'll probably use the bus or just walk around quite a bit. On busy nights parking seems rough. I'm looking forward to starting at Virginia Tech. The campus seems really nice and I'd like to start meeting some new people and I'd like to get a taste of what classes will be like. Stay tuned for more updates!

I just got the best piece of spam in a long time...

Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (URL REMOVED) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)

I recently came across SliceHost, which offers Virtual Servers at a very low price. I'm seriously considering it since I'm paying about $15 a month for this shared hosted site, and for $20 I could get my own "Slice" set up my way. I'll probably wait awhile, since I am about to move down to Blacksburg and I'm sure there will be many expenses associated with that. Once I'm settled in down there, I'll probably make the switch.

Until then I'll continue developing this blog on my shared host

Welcome to my new blog! I've had a lot of new blogs over the years, but I really hope this one stays with me for awhile. Most of the other temporary blogs I've had were ran by software I wasn't a big fan of. I don't know why but I have trouble getting comfortable to blogging software that isn't my own. This blog is written using only Django, which I'm really starting to love.

This is still a work in progress so there will be updates to the site as time progresses. Right now I still plan to implement comments and I'll probably use the Digg API to display my latest Digg activity on the side. Oh yea, I also plan on adding RSS pretty soon, since that is a biggie nowadays!

Stay tuned for awesomeness