The blog of Matthew A. Smith and Michael Chappell, on topics from A to Z

It’s that time of year once again, when the last final is completed, the calculators and pencils are put away, and the books are burned (just kidding - they cost too much). However, I’m feeling a little melancholic for I have finished the last final of my undergraduate career. Five years of college, four years of high school, two years of middle school, and six years of grade school… I’ve only known school, and now that chapter of my life is done. It’s time to move on to new things, see new places, and meet new people  (but of course I’ll miss the ones I leave behind). Here’s two little lists that should sum it up.

Reasons I’m Sad

• No more staying up until 3AM
• No more sleeping ’til 12PM
• No more all night parties
• I have to pay bills

Reasons I’m Happy

• No more finals or exams
• No more school loans
• No more drama (who am I kidding)

Anyway, I’ll be around Macon (and the rest of Georgia) next year. I have accepted a job at RAFB doing some sort of engineering work and I’ll be living with another ATO alumnus who is buying a new house about ten minutes from campus. The party shall continue (but only on the weekends)!

On another note, I’m going to be around Macon from now until I start my job at the end of June (aside from a couple weeks of vacation), so be sure and look me up. I want to hang out and enjoy my last few weeks of freedom!

Some of my Facebook stalkers friends (I kid, I kid) may have noticed a lot of recent activity on the Beat House Productions page. In case you are wondering what Beat House Productions is, I am here to clarify (more or less).

Beat House Productions is the name of a group of DJs performing in and around the Macon, Georgia area. The creation and name of the group were products of one of my late night musings, but we’re now churning out awesome parties on a quite regular basis! The term “Beat House” was coined from two elements we work with: beats and house music. Of course, we work with beats a lot more than we work with house music… mostly it just sounds cool.

Beat House was originally myself and Adam Sekulow. However, my friends Wes and Brian liked the idea and have joined forces with us. Wes has been DJing parties for several years longer than I have, and has much better equipment. We now use (for a full party) 2x JBL powered cabs, 1x 18″ JBL powered sub (yes, an 18″, 500 watt subwoofer), a bevy of awesome LED lights, and a bunch of computers and control surfaces, mixers, etc. Not to mention a huge library of music!

Our next evolution in party-making will probably involve the addition of a projector and the ability to provide a visual experience along with our sound. And sometime after that, we’ll be adding virtual vinyl (or Vinyl-like controllers) for full creative potential!

If you’re interested, be sure to fan the Beat House Productions page to receive the latest updates (we also have a Purevolume and Myspace page). Currently you can find set-lists from the parties we’ve played to date (on the Facebook page only) and a few audio samples from past parties (usually short clips demonstrating song transitions).

I’ve also been kicking around the idea of adding a “party-in-a-box” section, with full 4 hour mixes that could be downloaded and played at a party… so be sure and keep an eye out!

Yea, I know… I’ve converted to the dark side.

If you’d told me two years ago that I’d be owning a Mac sometime in the future, I’d have laughed. However, over the past two years, I’ve used various Apple products at the computer store and helped friends with their Apple computers. I have become quite a fan of the construction and design that goes into these products and I finally decided to add an Apple to my extensive stable of computers.

I purchased the new laptop yesterday afternoon and I’ve been extremely happy with it so far. It’s doing everything I want or need it to do and works flawlessly with my other Windows computers. And of course OSX has plenty of nifty eye candy.

If you’re wondering about the specs, it’s a 15.4″ widescreen with a 2.5GHz Core2Duo processor, 250GB hard drive, 2GB ram (which I’ll probably upgrade to 4GB in the near future), with the nVidia 8600 GT 512MB graphics card and all the other shiny Mac goodness.

By the way, this computer is a graduation present from my grandfather.

Thanks Granddad!!!

I just finished upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress. So far, I must say that the administration back-end has received a fantastic overhaul and I’m enjoying the new features so far.

I will soon update the theme to take advantage of the new features, but until then I can’t really comment on the coding aspects (but I know they’re sound). Anyway, I’d highly recommend updating if you use Wordpress.

Read this page and you might be a little confused. Apparently the author wishes to bring monarchy to the United States enough to write a web page (in some form of what appears to be Middle English) all about it. Go read and then bring me your thoughts (in the form of comments).

I hope one of their first goals isn’t reverting to Middle English.

Good heavens, the last post I made was two weeks ago! I suppose I have a little bit of explaining to do.

Over the past two weeks, I have had spring break, done a lot of maintenance on the BMW, DJ’d two parties, gone camping, had a job interview, and just plain grown older. Hopefully that’s a decent excuse for my absence, most of which has been spent covered in grease underneath my car, which now has 100,000 miles on the odometer. Now that some preventative maintenance has been done, and a nice dent made in my wallet, I hope to get another 100,000 miles of of it.

Anyway, this week is just as crazy as the past few weeks. I have a presentation at 9 AM and a research paper due Thursday morning…

Happy St. Patrick’s day!

I may not be able to explain how cool this is, but I'm going to try.

Right now I'm working on a replacement for the nasty VBScript I posted a while back that updates the software installed on the computers at work. Sure, the script did it's job but it wasn't pretty to look at and updating it or adding new software is a pain in the arse.

To make my new and improved version, I wanted to redesign my installer/updater code in a nice, modular, object-oriented, easy to update manner. I devised a modular solution where I would write one main script that would perform all the heavy lifting, with the specifics of each application provided by simple scripts that could be added, removed, and updated with ease.

The main script scans a directory looking for all files that end in ".app.js," loads them up, and executes the commands found within. Each .app.js file provides a single class, with the same name as the first part of the file name (so foo.app.js would provide a class called foo). This class in turn provides a set of properties that the main script can use to perform actions (such as checking versions, upgrading software, removing software... you get the idea).

Now the tricky part? You have no idea what the class names are prior to run time. So you can't create new objects using "var bar = new foo()."

I'd learned about the JScript "eval()" statement a while back, which I used extensively for simulating C's "#include" statement. The cool thing about it is that eval() performs JScript execution on a text stream... so to perform dynamic loading with eval(), I simply used concatenation to produce a string like such:

and then evaluated the string:

And it works like a charm! Now I can run a loop over my array of class names, create new objects, and perform all my other nifty little tasks. It looks simple, but I had to contemplate this for a second before the light bulb flashed on... I'm sure someone out there has already done this, been just as excited as me, and posted about it on their own blog. However, this is the solution I came up with off the top of my head without the assistance of any Google searches, so I'm going to be happy and post about it here before I ever check Google!

Yes, it's now one day into my spring break. What am I doing? Why, staying in Macon and spending all my money on the BMW!! It's time for the 100,000 mile overhaul, so I will be busy in the garage (once my parts arrive). If you're in Macon, be sure to call!