My reason for building the wireless bridge is twofold:

1. My desktop computer / server has a wireless card, but the Linux driver has some issues with dropping connections.
2. Because of the wireless card flaking out, I had two options: get a new card, or connect via ethernet. I decided to go the ethernet route, but I didn’t want to run cables through my house to connect the machine to the main router.

Enter wireless bridging.

For about $10 more than the price of a new wireless card, I picked up a Linksys wireless router. Now I have a working bridge, and also, when I move out into my own place (which will happen eventually) I’ll be able to bring it with me. One less piece of equipment to buy in the future! Also, since dd-wrt is Linux-based, I have increased my geek-cred.

Overall it’s a fun little project that is testing my Haskell programming ability. It is not overly complicated, but I have already found uses for the MonadPlus type class I’ll post the code up when it’s further along, maybe I’ll make a package out of it or something, though I wonder who would find any use for it

Needless to say I’ll be staying off my foot for the next few days as the swelling has already begun to set in. If I’m not able to put a lot of pressure on it by Monday I’ll just work from my couch instead of going in to the lab. Chelsey, my awesome girlfriend who is a nursing student, told me that I should be good by next Friday, so hopefully my Ultimate career isn’t totally ruined I do give props to the bee though – pulling off that kind of landing is really tricky. Maybe he should enlist in the Air Force put his stinger to good use.

Chelsey and I drove together on the Thursday to meet with her family who had already been at the campground for a few days. The reason we had to go up later than everybody else was because Chelsey could not get the time off work. My current job is more flexible with hours — so long as I get about 20 hours of work done a week, I’m fine for making my own hours; I simply worked more hours from Monday to Wednesday to compensate for taking a vacation. The drive up was fairly uneventful: we took the highways all the way up, bypassing Toronto (thank goodness, Toronto is a very busy city). We split the driving job amongst ourselves, each driving approximately three hours; I took the first shift, and she took over afterward.

Chelsey and I arrived at the campground at around 1:00pm and we promptly settled in. Chelsey’s family brought up a trailer, while her uncle chose to sleep in a tent. The trailer was modest, but cozy. It had running water and electricity, and I was able to charge my phone (at the relief of my mom, hehe), and thus it didn’t really feel much different from a small house. The backyard of that small house, however, was nothing short of breathtaking. There were huge trees as far as you could see, in fact the entire campground seemed as though it were embedded in a cave of green. It was gorgeous.

On the first day we mostly relaxed and got ourselves settled into the trailer. We had an early night, which was good, since we decided to take a nice 4km hike on the second day. Arrowhead contains many trails, both walking and biking, of varying lengths. On our second day at the park Chelsey and I walked one of the larger trails: Beaver Meadow. It was amazing how quiet it was! The only sound we could hear was the calling of birds, and the skittering of the occasional chipmunk. We didn’t run into any black bears, thank goodness. The entire trail took us just over 1.5 hours to complete, and by the end we were very hot and sweaty. Luckily there was a beach for us to cool down! And when I say cool, I mean cool. The water was a bit chilly.

Later that evening (this being Friday) Chelsey took me canoing. This was my first time in a canoe, and some may have questioned my Canadian citizenship before that, but I can now proudly say that I am an expert canoer (canoeist, canoe-pilot, canoe-dude?). I was taught how to properly rudder a canoe for steering, as well as how to properly J-stroke (which, by the way, is really the only way to stroke on a canoe). I even saw a beaver! As we were heading back from the falls, I stated to Chelsey “That piece of land is floating away!”. It turns out that I was actually witnessing a beaver carrying away some wood to add to a dam further up. It was very neat!

On the third day, Chelsey and I went on another hike, this time down the Homesteader’s Trail, which is another one of the longer trails. The Homesteader was really hilly, our legs got quite a workout that day! The Homesteader gets its name from the fact that it winds past some very old stone structures that must have been made from early settlers. There is even a broken-down buggy along the side of the path. The evening of the third day was fairly calm. Chelsey’s dad cooked a roast over the fire pit, and it was delicious! Everyone was going to bed fairly early in order to get ready for the long drive home the next day, but we did wait up long enough to see the stars come out. It’s amazing what you can see in the night sky when you get away from the light pollution of the city. I was moved enough to purchase a book on amateur astronomy and some day I plan to build (or buy, maybe) a telescope for use on clear nights.

Sunday morning we packed up camp, and we began the homeward journey around noon. I, lacking in highway driving experience, opted to drive the whole 6 hours back home, just to prove to myself that I could. Aside from the occasional stops for gas and food, I drove non-stop.

And that describes my first trip to Arrowhead Provincial Park. Hopefully it will not be my last. I look forward to more camping trips with Chelsey in the future. Just as I got her hooked on reddit and her macbook, she got me hooked on nature.

In case you don’t know about it, rsync is one of the coolest programs around. In a nutshell it syncs files and directories across networks. This blog post won’t go through the nitty gritty details involved with setting up rsync to run as a daemon (meaning it runs constantly, listening for connections), but I will briefly go over my personal setup that keeps my machines in sync.

I started out by picking a few directories on my laptop that I wanted to keep in sync: my documents, my pictures, and, of course, my code . I then set up rsync modules corresponding to each directory. An rsync module is essentially a name that is attached to a directory on the server. So for example the module “bryan_code” corresponds to the directory /home/bryan/Code.

Next I wrote a shell script to automatically call rsync over a list of directories to sync. It responds to two commands: “push”, which pushes the laptop files onto the server; and “pull”, which yanks the server files down to the laptop. I have released the full script under the MIT License, and it can be found here. Hopefully it will be useful to you.

Next I started looking for a way in which I could tell my laptop to push its files up to my server daily, so that I don’t have to constantly run the script manually. I looked into using cron jobs, but when my laptop is asleep (which is often) it may miss its scheduled uploading. Luckily OSX has a program called “periodic“, which works just like cron, but if the machine for some reason misses its scheduled job, it runs the job as soon as it possibly can.

Therefore all I had to do was dump a small script into /etc/periodic/daily in order to have daily automatic backups! The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

script=/Users/bryan/bin/sync

log_file=/var/log/sync.log

if [ -e $log_file ]; then

    sizeof_file = `du -k $log_file | cut -f1`

    if [[ $sizeof_file -gt 1024 ]]; then

        rm -f $log_file

    fi

fi

date >> $log_file

$script push >> $log_file

This dumps all output to /var/log/sync.log, in case something goes wrong and you need to see what screwed up. And voila! Automatic backups!

ssh myname@myhost ‘tail /path/to/logfile’

Inside of the single quotes is the command to execute. For programs that are user-interactive, such as top, you can pass the -t flag to ssh. I didn’t know this before, I found out today while reading systemsboy’s blog

ssh -t myname@myhost ‘top’

With this newfound ssh knowledge, I decided to put it to work by building some server control scripts. I now have scripts to shutdown, and restart my server which I can execute from my laptop

Chelsey enjoying the fireworks

Every year Windsor and Detroit hold a joint fireworks display along the Detroit River to kick off the International Freedom Festival. It is the largest international display of its kind, or so I’m told. The fireworks were simply breathtaking! Chelsey (my super-fantistic girlfriend) and I watched them downtown by the river after she finished her shift at work, and I was able to get some really nice looking photos of the display, which you can see at my photo page. I don’t own a nice camera, so all of the photos were taken with my Blackberry (it takes decent photos, but the zoom is a little wacky).

Every year the displays get better and better. This year was fantastic, and next year will be even more grand.

http://prideinutah.com/?p=2040

And now for my Fall 2010 schedule! My courses are (in order of fluffiness): Intro to Linguistics (first year languages); Cell Biology (first year biology, not required for a major in bio, for fluffy reasons); Physics and Society (second year physics elective, seems like it will be more like a history class, but physics is at least interesting); and lastly, as a final CS course (I had space for one more), Seleted Topics with Dr. Frost — I don’t really know what to expect yet, I believe it’s some sort of reading course — Neat!

So that’s it for my last semester. I hope to start graduate studies in the Winter Semester with Dr. Frost. It’s been a long time coming now, and I’m really itching to be done!

P.S. My face is still dry. I’ve got to have more bloodwork done tomorrow to monitor my progress. I’ll supply updates when I know the results