Thoughts and Ramblings

Well, VPN induced a kernel panic the other day so finally I have had it. I emailed the security people at A&M and got the ball rolling on opening up my office machine through the firewall. I eventually got them to do it, so now I don’t need VPN again (with the exception of wireless connections without WPA). Now, just in case people don’t believe that the Cisco client can kernel panic, here is a snippet of the the panic log to prove it: Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies): com.cisco.nke.ipsec(1.0.0d1)@0x52186000

A few days ago, I managed to get my AC3 codec to do AC3 passthrough on the AppleTV. It wasn’t that hard once I stopped making stupid mistakes. Now, if you have a video file with AC3 audio along with a dolby digital decoder, you can play it on your AppleTV and enjoy full 5.1 dolby digital surround.

David Conrad later sent me a patch to make it work on PPC based macs. It is annoying not having a decoder to test these things on. I suppose that just adds to the challenge.

Ok, so scam may be too strong of a word, but still, there is something seriously wrong with this. Essentially, the Career Center here can get a fee added to a student’s bill without informing them or getting their consent. Here is how it works:

• The career center or others encourage companies to come to campus to find potential students
• The company must do interviews that day or the next day in order to maintain their position on campus
• The company likes a student and asks to interview them on campus. They have set aside a room to do that day’s interviews, and so they request a student at a certain time. They contact the student directly
• The student shows up, and must sign in to indicate that they came.
• The career center sees the student’s name, and if they don’t have the fee on their bill, it is added

This happened to me, and has happened to others as well. At no time during this sequence is the student informed about the fee, much less asked for their consent. I had to call them to get them to remove it. Guess I won’t interview on campus unless I see it worth paying $50 to do so.

Well, it seems that the V3m’s battery life sucks. I am going to have to chalk this one up to Sprint’s stupidity. The same phone, with other carriers, is capable of lasting longer on the battery than Sprint’s. I even got their own employees to admit to this, but they insist that the fault does not lie with them (the company). They claim that the firmware for the phone is loaded by the manufacturer, Motorola, in a sort of sly way to pass the blame on to them. The problem is that I know the firmware is modified by the carrier and the manufacturer loads different firmware for different carriers. So that means they are really at fault. In the mean time, I have found a few ways to increase the battery life. The longest I have gotten it to last is 22 hours on a charge, but ATM, it has been 12 hours, and the battery indicator is showing 3 out of 3 bars, so maybe it will last longer this time. Anyway, the tips for a longer battery with Sprint: