ryan kennedy’s blog

I really don’t have anything to talk about, I just figured I’d post something to let people know I’m still alive. What have I been up to? Well…

I did some more hacking with maps and GPS data. I managed to come up with a system that plots the minimum number of points to get the route plotted. It drops any points that are all along the same line. Basically it takes three points, determines 2 headings from them and figures out if it’s in the middle of a turn (if the headings differ by more than X degrees, it’s in a turn). It actually works pretty well. If I get some time, I’ll document what I did here.

I also hacked a bit with the Yahoo! Music Engine. I really wanted to listen to my music out on my television, so I used Winamp with the Shoutcast DSP plugin to make a Shoutcast stream of my Yahoo! Music Unlimited music. Once I had that working, it was a snap to get my TiVo to stream the music. That’s good and fine, but I can’t control the playback in the music engine from my TiVo, so I started playing around with PHP COM support to write a remote. That worked alright, but I was hoping to build something a bit easier to distribute for others to use (although I suppose I could build an all-in-one package containing PHP and a suitable web server). So I started playing with PythonCOM. I got the basics working from Python, I just need to expose it as a network API (HTTP of some sort, I’m guessing) that the TiVo HME application I write can talk to. I suppose I could figure out how to get Java to talk COM, but this way I get to play with more things.

Work-wise, I’ve spent WAY more time in ktrace than is really adviseable. It’s pretty neat to watch your application in ktrace, but you can really work your way into a very deep, dark hole. Before too long you’re asking yourself, “are all these stat() calls really necessary?”

I’ve also started an apartment search. I’m looking around Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. If you know of any one bedroom places available for $500-$600/month, I’m all ears. I know, that’s pretty cheap, but I’m only in Sunnyvale two or three nights a week. So it has to be cheap enough to compete with just staying at a hotel (the nearby Sundowner Inn would run me about $140/week). I’m not looking to rent a room from anybody, I want to have my own place.

That’s about it. No concerts since the last one. No Yahoo! Mail Beta updates (if I had anything to share, I would…I promise). Work is keeping me really busy, life is proceeding ever forward.

To close…some random facts you may not have known about Ryan:

1. I went to college in San Luis Obispo.
2. Computer Science was my fourth major in college (the first three were Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry).
3. I collect spores, molds and fungus.
4. I memorize movie quotes (see #3 above).
5. I’ve watched Space Camp.
6. I’ve been to Space Camp.
7. I was scared of E.T. as a child (and my wife loved him).
8. I hate bananas.
9. I am an only child (like that needs any explanation).
10. I’ve lived in California my entire life.
11. As a child, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.
12. I got busted for horsing around in high school by my French teacher.
13. I got out of it by buying a $1 candy bar for his son’s soccer team.
14. I bought at least $5 worth of chocolate from him that year.
15. I’m a chronic procrastinator.
16. I’ve broken two bones in my body, both in my left leg (25 years apart).
17. I need a haircut.
18. When Chuck Norris goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Ryan Kennedy.
19. I wore a pair of flannel sheets as a kilt for Halloween one year (and a friend’s scarf as a loincloth…but that’s another story).
20. If I played by the rules right now I’d be in gym.

Okay, that’s enough fun for one night.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 12:28 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.