Six Months

Ethan turned six months last week. In a way it seems like the time has gone by quickly, but at the same time it's hard to imagine life without him. I think he has made a pretty big impact on us in a relatively short amount of time . So far we like him a lot.

At his six-month checkup, he weighed in at a little over 20 lbs, which ranks in the 93rd percentile. He now stands (kinda) at 2 feet, 3 1/2 inches, which puts him in the 80th percentile for height. So he's slowing down a little, but he still routinely draws raised eyebrows when people find out how old he is.

Last night he was sleeping in his crib and I thought he looked pretty cute, so I started taking some pictures. After a few minutes of playing with lighting and moving some things around, I was staring through my lens and all of a sudden he started smiling. This isn't the first time he has done this. In fact, the first time he smiled in his sleep was at the hospital when he was about 15 minutes old. It makes me wonder how many nights he's been in his crib all by himself in a dark, quiet house, smiling to himself for no one to see.

GRE

What a crazy few weeks this has been! We took a trip down to Newport Beach in sunny California (See pic of where we stayed. It was gorgeous.) and had a fabulous time visiting with Lacey's family. We got back a few days before the 4th of July. Our neighbor had a little party so we hung out over there for a while. But before the weekend had finished, it was time to start studying for the GRE! The GRE, if you don't know, is a standardized test, similar to the SAT, that is required for admission to grad school.

I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I started looking around on the intertubes and found out that some people take studying for this test pretty seriously--like, studying-for-several-weeks-and-memorizing-hundreds-of-vocabulary-words serious. I started to panic, as I had only given myself about a week to prepare.

I calmed myself down long enough to review some Math problems like I hadn't seen in 10 years. Someone at work recommended that I get a book on how to study for the GRE. I think it's kind of ridiculous that they sell books on how to study for this single test, but I guess that's just how it is these days. I got one on an inter-library loan (W. Richland library is crap), but it didn't arrive until the Friday before the test, which was on a Monday.

So from Friday night when I got home from work until Sunday night when I went to bed, virtually every waking moment was spent reading that book, memorizing vocabulary words, and taking practice tests. I managed to memorize about 150 new vocabulary words over the weekend, so if anyone needs to know the definitions for useless words like enervate, penurious, perspicacious or magnanimity, I'm your guy.

So after a week of intense studying I felt fairly well-prepared. I took the test and scored above the minimum goal I had set for myself, but when the computer showed me my scores (they are scored instantly) I made an error adding them in my head and thought I had done a lot worse than I did. Dejected, I called Lacey to tell her the bad news. I told her my scores and what they added up to and how they didn't add up to my goal, but she corrected me and informed me that they *did* add up to significantly more than my goal. Hooray!

Dual Booting with Wake On Lan

I don't usually talk about technical stuff here, but I'm going to take a little break from gushing about my kids to explain part of how I solved my problem of too many pictures. To quickly summarize, I found that my digital picture library was too large to continue storing on my laptop, and even if I upgraded the hard drive in my laptop to a 320 GB or possibly a 500 GB drive, I would just be delaying the inevitable as my library is growing very rapidly. The crux of the problem is that only one hard drive will fit in my macbook pro (I have the 15" model which doesn't support this crazy option, even if I wanted to).

To solve this problem, I am now storing all of my original photos on a desktop computer running Windows. This computer has multiple hard drives and provides plenty of space for my pictures. I use Lightroom on my laptop, which is smart enough to only store reasonably small previews of all my photos, drastically reducing the amount of space required on my laptop.

This setup works fine when both machines are up and running, but I usually keep my desktop turned off to conserve energy. I often find myself in a situation where I am in another room and don't feel like walking down the hall to turn on the desktop, just so I can import photos from my camera. Wouldn't it be nice if I could remotely boot my desktop and import my photos without getting off the couch?

It turns out I can. I poked around in my BIOS settings and enabled a feature called Wake-on-Lan. Then I installed a Wake-on-Lan Dashboard widget on my laptop. Now I can boot my desktop from another room at any time with 2 simple clicks.

This worked well for a while until I decided to install Ubuntu on that same desktop and dual boot between that and Windows. Now things are a little trickier, because sometimes I will want to remotely boot into Windows, but other times I might want to remotely boot into Linux. Unfortunately, Wake-on-Lan doesn't have the capability to choose an OS when the computer turns on.

The solution I came up with (read: found on the Internet) was to use Wake-on-Lan to boot the computer and let Grub boot into whichever OS is set to default, then use a shell script to change the default OS to one of my choosing, then reboot the machine. It's a few more steps than I'd like, but it sure beats getting off the couch!

Here's everything you need to get it working yourself.

Requirements:

1. Grub bootloader. This solution could be adapted to work with other bootloaders, but right now it only works with Grub.


2. Ext2 IFS. Allows your Windows partition to access your Linux file system.

To get started, create two copies of /boot/grub/menu.lst in Linux. Name one menu.lst.win, and the other menu.lst.lin. Then edit each one to boot into the corresponding OS (Windows for menu.lst.win, Linux for menu.lst.lin). You will probably only have to change one line like:

default  0

to something like:

default  4

But there are instructions for doing this out on the web if you need help.

Once you've done that, create a file named grubEdit.sh with the following.

grubEdit.sh

usage="Usage: grubEdit [win | lin]"
grubHome="/boot/grub"
menuLst="/boot/grub/menu.lst"
menuLstWin="/boot/grub/menu.lst.win"
menuLstLin="/boot/grub/menu.lst.lin"

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
 echo $usage
 exit 1
fi

if [ $1 = "win" ]
then
 rm -f $menuLst
 cp $menuLstWin $menuLst
else
 if [ $1 = "lin" ]
 then
  rm -f $menuLst
  cp $menuLstLin $menuLst
 else
  echo $usage
 fi
fi

Now boot back into Windows and create a file named grubEdit.bat, and copy in the following.
Disclaimer: I think this is the first time I've used goto's in a real script. I don't write many shell scripts, but I think this is how it has to be done.

grubEdit.bat

@echo off
set grubHome=L:\boot\grub
set menuLst=%grubHome%\menu.lst
set menuLstWin=%grubHome%\menu.lst.win
set menuLstLin=%grubHome%\menu.lst.lin

if "%1" == "win" goto win
if "%1" == "lin" goto lin
goto error

:win
del %menuLst%
copy %menuLstWin% %menuLst%
goto end

:lin
del %menuLst%
copy %menuLstLin% %menuLst%
goto end

:error
echo Usage: grubEdit [win ^| lin]
goto end

:end

Now from either OS, just run:

grubEdit win

to boot into Windows, and

grubEdit lin

to boot into Linux.

It's that easy!

(Note that you'll need to prepend sudo to either command on Linux, and I've left out instructions for editing your PATH to make sure the shell can find your new scripts.)

Five

We celebrated Rian's birthday last weekend. I still can't believe that he is five already. Rian had a blast and now he has a bunch of new stuff to play with.

One of his presents was Mouse Trap, which we played today for the first time, but we didn't quite do it right. We spent a bunch of time putting together this elaborate trap, and then read in the instructions that you are supposed to build the trap gradually as the game progresses. Whoops. Rian didn't seem to care that the first half of the game had pretty much no point as a result. I'm pretty sure he could play a game where you just roll a die and move your piece around a board with no variation and no special spaces on the board and have fun for at least an hour.

The game got pretty exciting when we started trying to trap our opponents' mice, though. The trap failed two or three times before I got a chance to trap Rian and Lacey for good. I carefully inspected the trap to ensure its correct operation, then I turned the crank which rotated the gears, which caused the lever to move and push the stop sign against the shoe, which tipped the bucket holding the first metal ball which rolled down the stairs and into the pipe which lead it to hit the rod held by the hands, causing the second metal ball to fall from the top of the rod, roll down the groove, fall into and then out of the bottom of the bathtub, landing on the diving board, catapulting the diver through the air and right into the bucket, causing the cage to fall from the top of the post and trap Lacey and Rian's unsuspecting mice.

They never saw it coming.

Michelin Man

Ethan had his four month check up this morning. I can hardly believe he's four months already!

He weighed in at 18 lbs and is 26 1/2 inches long. He's in the 95th percentile for both height and weight. I knew he was big but, holy cow! His head circumference is in the 97th percentile so at least he's pretty balanced. 

 

Too Many Pictures

I am quickly running out of disk space on my laptop. I was looking for a way to visualize my disk usage to see where I needed to focus on cleaning things up, and ran across JDiskReport. It's written in Java, and thanks to Java Web Start, is simple to get running.

It turns out that a little over 50% of my hard drive is filled with pictures from my digital camera! This tool allows me to take a closer look and see where all that space is going. I found out that the amount of data from pictures I took in 2005 is greater than the years 2000-2004 combined! Also, I accumulated more picture data in 2007 than the previous 7 years combined!

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, in 2005 I upgraded from a 2.1 megapixel point-and-shoot to an 8 megapixel DSLR. Second, I started shooting exclusively in the RAW format in 2007. All of this increase in image quality comes with the obvious cost of having to store all this data. So I guess I'm in the market for a new hard drive.

Looking Back at Rian's Surgery

I put together a little video about Rian and the days leading up to his surgery. I mostly put it together for myself, to help me remember that time, but also for Rian so that maybe when he's an adult he can look back and see what he was like when he was 4 1/2 years old and preparing for eye surgery. By putting it on the web I'm not only giving you a chance to watch it, but also increasing the odds that it will be around in 10 years when Rian might appreciate it.

Anyway, enough of that. This video is pretty long. Believe it or not, it was actually a lot of work to get it under 10 minutes, which is the maximum length that YouTube allows.