Thoughts and Ramblings | Thoughts and Ramblings

Passed My Defense

I haven’t posted here in a while, and with good reason. About two weeks ago, I passed my Ph.D. defense. So, come May, I will officially have a doctorate in Computer Engineering, though I am effectively done with my degree.

Legacy Comments:

Steve - Feb 15, 2010

Looks like I get to be the first (at least on your blog here) to congratulate you - great job, Graham!

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 13, 2010

Incorrect Podcast Order on my iPod

One of these days I will learn not to grab the latest and “greatest” software the moment it comes out. Yesterday, I upgraded my iTunes to version 9 and my iPod Touch’s firmware to 3.1.1. Then, I noticed that one of my podcasts was out of order, and furthermore, the release date was no longer showing up on the iPod itself. Strangely, only one podcast was having this issue.

I started to suspect that this was my fault, since this one podcast, Escape Pod was a podcast I was listening by going through its archives. I had written a program which downloads the archived episodes, and modifies the ID3 tags so iTunes will properly recognize the file as a podcast and insert it into its database as if it had downloaded it itself. Getting the release date working correctly was one of the harder points, so I figured that I still didn’t have it quite correct and the new iPod firmware was being more sensitive to it. I got even more annoyed by the fact that iTunes, after upgrading my iPod’s firmware, decided to trash the old firmware versions preventing me from ever downgrading.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, September 10, 2009

Text Compression Techniques

A friend of mine develops on an Bible application for the iPhone, BibleXpress. Since his application includes several translations with the app, he once mentioned to me the possibility of compressing them to save space. Any compression that is done must achieve a good ratio, but more importantly, decompression must be fast. I took it upon myself to find a compression algorithm that could fit the bill.

In my test case, I worked with the NASB translation of the Bible. The raw text of this translation, minus formatting and book/chapter/verse identifiers is 3.965MB. Since the iPhone already has zlib, using gzip compression is an obvious choice. When compressed with gzip, the file size becomes 1.189MB, a significant savings. Even though bzip2 is not readily available on the iPhone (at least not that I could find), I tested its compression which produced a file size of 0.8548MB. While these mechanisms provide a significantly smaller file, when one desires a certain portion of the file, one must first decompress the entire file up to that point. This is an expensive operation on a small device such as the iPhone.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, July 29, 2009

New Car

Well, after much hassle, I now have a new car. Here are some pictures:

The whole ordeal was mostly due to the CARS program, which is often known by “Cash for Clunkers”. Anyway, I finally got that resolved and got a lot more for my old truck than I would have ever gotten in trade-in value. So now I have a VW Jetta, and so far I’m happy with it. I just need to get used to driving a car instead of a truck, but otherwise it drives well.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Using Newer Subversion in Xcode

I use MacPorts to get a whole host of utilities. In addition, I’ve always used it to obtain later versions of subversion that the one provided with the OS. Xcode, on the other hand, is locked into using the version of Subversion which is installed in /usr (currently version 1.4.4 where as I have 1.6.3). Since I often work in the command line, eventually I will use the newer version of Subversion on a directory which I also use in Xcode. This causes a problem since the command line utility will upgrade the local repository format in such a way that old versions of Subversion (Xcode’s) cannot use it.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, July 25, 2009