Dan Mayer's Blog

Slowly getting thigns done... There are millions of little things that have to be taken care f and whatnot to get everything the way you want it. I have slowly been fixing and working on computers in my room, fixing them up to work they way I want. I have been moving tasks from my main computer to my server and my secondary computer. I have been increasing performance on my main machine a bunch in the process. It sucks because i am not getting anything noticeable done with the site or the work around it, but it in the long run will make everything work smoother and lead to me being more productive. Oh well the site is starting to slowly gain on its own now, the videos section has been growing recently as I had hoped. Slowly but surely we will add more users which will allow us to work on some cool software that requires users to make it work, IE any social collaborative software. Social webfiltering pretty much anything we can think of and have the time to work on. So that is good. I am excited about the ideas and project to come in the next few months.

Well i guess i am growing up or something. I spend my free time and weekends far differently. I spend alot of the time programming and working and getting done all sorts of little important tasks i am to busy to do during the week. I havent gone out and done a night at the bars since i started my job. I havent really done much all that social, and it isnt because I am hiding indoors or anything, it is just cause i dont feel the huge our to chill with a bunch of people. I am mostly hanging out in much smaller settings of one or two friends. Anyways who knows if this will be forever, but at least for now i am kinda a little more settled down than normal... oh well

Well i guess i can mention this now cause Dom mentioned it on his blog. Dom and Nicole got engaged. Exciting news huh... Anyways I would like to take this time to publicly say I wish them the best. They are both such beautiful, amazing, and caring people. They make a great couple and should have a great time together. I offer them all my hopes, support, thoughts, best wishes, kind words, fond memories, and to be a very sketchy odd baby sitter in a few years so they can spend some time together (hey i might be dating a trustworthy kind girl that is good with kids at the time... hehe). So congradulations let your future together be so bright that it always radiates on those around you... It has always been a little weird but I am sure at times i will miss our little 3rd wheel evenings out together. I love you both.

Yippie this is a video i always thought was cool and now the music video is online.

http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/26854/

Arrggg an idea i have had for a long time appears to already be in use... I thought it would be fun to hook up a huge helium balloon to yourself and be able to jump as if in a low gravity enviroment... it is cool and some company is doing it.

Para Bounce

After having her try hard to ruin my time at CU this evil horrible woman is leaving... yippie for hoffman resigning..

Hoffman Resigns

now we need to get rid of most of the athletic staff and our football coach... and try to get someone to head up the school who actually beleives in education as an important part of our country, opposed to education is a business that should be profitted from. Hoffman and others raked in dough and tried to turn our school into a money making machine with most of it skimmed off by administrators... good ridence.

just cause i didnt find code on this fast enough here is code to copy a file using java. It reads the file in while writting it out using buffered readers and writters:

public static void copy(String from, String to) throws IOException{
InputStream in = null;
OutputStream out = null;
try {
in = new FileInputStream(from);
out = new FileOutputStream(to);
int length = 128*10240; // danger!
byte[] bytes = new byte[length];
int read=0;
for(;;){
read=in.read(bytes,0,length);
if(read==-1){
break;
}
out.write(bytes,0,read);
}
} finally {
if (in != null) {
in.close();
}
if (out != null) {
out.close();
}
}
}

Well i had a really crappy week for various reasons, but it looks like the bas has past and that things will go smooth for awhile again... One of the main frustrations was accidently loosing about 2 weeks worth of code on my website. Oh well i lost it, it is gone and now moving on.

So i rebuild some of the most needed feautres that i have lost and have the majority of the site up and running again. It sucks cause i had written alot of nice functions that i hadnt really even started to use yet. Oh Well i guess everything will work out.

Not much new starting to get the flow of things as work and getting use to the enviroment and stuff, starting to feel like i might begin to be productive and actually start to contribute to some stuff, which is good i hate feeling midly worthless which at a new programming job you always do for awhile.

happy st pattys day everyone...

I got to chill and chat with matt a bunch last night and ski with him today which was great. I hadnt gotten a chance to hang out with him for a long time and it was really great. I also learned that I will be in his wedding so I will be in springfield in august some time for some great celebrations. yippie

Anyways all is well and all is rolling along i have just been really busy with some extra stuff to take care of lately.. I will be looking forward to things slowing down in a bit...

Rock on

Everyone wants to be a rock star because at some time they see a live performance where the audience and the musician connect in a way where it is like they are communicating in a way that is without words but somehow more in depth. I want to sing to people in a way that they see and realize the joy of life. I really have no musical talent (that has been left to my brother but i still see the magic and the touching beauty of music. I need to make sure to leave an impact on peoples lives like some others music has left on me. So one day i might have to try to convey some feelings and emotions in a magical and musical way...

oh yeah a quick quote that is my thoughts for now, "I am not who i want to be, I probably will not ever be." - Modest Mouse, Karma Payment Plan

With that ends my temporary eviction from home and I now return to trying to accomplish some work stuff..

I was in a arty mood on friday night. I listened to the commentary tracks on the fight club DVD hearing what all the actors and stuff had to say. As I watched that I did this drawing of my roommate Dom. I think it turned out well. Anyways so here is a drawing... as per usual click for the larger version.

Alright after being gone for about a year my movie Dead Awake is back online. So if your interested in seeing the movie i made awhile ago, go check it out and leave me some feedback here.

Dead Awake

Ok well here is just a little tale for no reason really. If you know me you probably know that i dont really were accessories. For graduation I got a nice watch. So i was determined to for the first time learn to actually wear a watch. I was quite worry that like all other attempts at watch wearing it would eventually bother me and I would take it off forget about it and not put it back on. Well I forced myself for awhile to wear it and for the most part it doesnt bother me anymore. The real trick though is that It is a metal watch with a bunch of links and the links kept catching my arm hair and ripping it out. Now i will probably always have to wear the watch cause when it is off there is a noticable bald spot in my arm hair where it has successfully removed most of the hair. This is a good thing though because it makes it very hard to forget to wear the watch cause when I am not wearing it I look like an idiot that shaves a small section of his arm hair off.

I have been working on adding a bunch of GNU tar features to java tar. I will release the source soon, but I just wanted to comment on the lack of good documentation on the format that makes it very hard to work with the GNU tar format... Simple things like regular tar takes char 32 as a null and ignored character... and so does GNUtar for the regular tar fields but in the offset field needed for multi volume tars 32 crashes the program giving you header errors. It only accepts char 48 as a null which in the other size field it accepts either 32 or 48... things like this are commented no where and i only discoved by writting and editing the GNU tar source. Which is also far under documentated in the code and very hard to follow.

GNU Tar size field: If your working with GNU tar the size field is just like the standard tar field in ustar... except which is no where to be found in their documentation when you support unlimited size files. If you have a file larger than 8GB to support it you must write the number as bits in twos compliment notation. Also after doing the you have to flip the sign bit (the very most left 0) to a 1. Which would normally mean you have a negative number and now if you decode this as a twos compliment you end up with a huge negative number... but not encoded it normally as a positive number and flip that bit. I only figured this out after manually reading and decoding gnu tar and stanttard ustar headers for a long time. The is nothing that talks about how the support for unlimited files was added to gnu tar... well hopefully if you are having the same problem you found this page. So upgrading GNU tar or other programs to support GNU tar should be easier.

I have added support for these gnu features to javatar:
Multi volume
verification
unlimited filesize
fast single file extraction
Tar Table of contents (xml of the files and there offsets with in the tar)

If your interested in this or have any questions about GNU tar or JAva tar feel free to send me an email and ask.

I have released a development version of java tar with added support for various GNU tar features like multi file, verification, and breaking the 8GB barrier. It is pretty nice so if your into learning some java code or working with tar there is alot of good info here and well documentated source code.

Java Tar upgrades

Java Tar source. This might not be the final draft, but it is getting pretty close. Most features seem to be working well and the source is very well documentated. So if you want or need the new GNU features you can get them from java tar here. The main java tar build hasnt incoporated these yet but all of the modifications have been sent off to them, so hopefully they will incorporate them soon.

Java Tar homepage

Until then feel free to download the java tar source from me. You can edit and modify as much as the orginal liscense allows, which says it is public domain use it as you wish. I would like to give a big thanks to Timothy Gerard Endres, who is the orginal author of Java Tar. If you have any questions comments or problems let me know.

Download Java Tar

I recently added a new background and image section to my site and here is a background that i made for it that i think is pretty cool. I dig it alot.

Sexy Background

oh yeah and nicole is the hottest girl on the internet cool huh. check it out by searching on images search.

Nicole now is more than the hottest girl ever, apparently she has moved up to the hottest girl in the world. Nicole also now has her hottest girl gallery so you can check her out.

It is fun to become a little bit of an internet celebrity, kinda like my Famous Beard has become. hehe got to love the beard-o project.