| Just good news, this time... |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|11:20 pm] |
So, it turns out I fail at reading the rules considering my master's degree. I get credit for Cs, after all, which means, just so long as I don't screw up my GPA (a safe bet), I will finish my degree on time. This means I can take that job offer...
Yay! |
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| schedule... |
[Nov. 17th, 2009|06:37 pm] |
It looks like this is my schedule, unless something strange happens:
https://scheduleman.org/schedules/lnOxAhotXm
I'm waitlisted for 549... apparently there were 30 people on the list by 12:00 noon on Monday.
I will also admit that I have Information Theory on the list largely because, if I happen to pass all my classes this semester, which is, unfortunately, looking highly unlikely, passing 4 classes next semester will actually get me a master's in the time frame I originally intended. One of that or 549 will get dropped otherwise, because it will increase the odds of not failing other classes.
Incidentally, I dropped Security this semester. I ... failed to turn in the second homework because I was screwing up my MEMS homework that I kept thinking I'd be almost done with. There's some irony to this, in my opinion, as MEMS was there at the last minute "because it fit my schedule", and frankly, I'm really bad at it. (On the other hand, Security is all vocabulary, which was obnoxious and had something to do with failing the exam, as opposed to messing up homework the way I did in MEMS...)
Hopefully, sometime this week I'll have some good news from Qualcomm (I'm not feeling too hopeful about Green Hills Software) that will make failing my classes because I was interviewing two weeks in a row worthwhile. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 16th, 2009|03:20 pm] |
I'm going to take this as a sign that I'm bouncing back from my previous mood:
(Otherwise, it means I'm insane because I'm trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.)
I now have a copy of the A Game of Thrones board game, and I have to admit I'm itching to play it. It's sort of like Risk or Diplomacy except that it gets over in a sane (1-2 hours) amount of time. Who would be up for playing? Alternately, who's up for [board] games sometime soon (this week?) in general? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|10:11 am] |
I thought the guy directing the project I'm working on would be back from his family emergency today... I'm pretty sure I heard he'd be back this week. Unfortunately, it seems I'm still lacking a good idea of how to go about stuff after the last checkpoint, which I reached a day or two after he left, over a week ago.
I suppose I could obsessively document my code doxygen style to keep myself busy. c.c |
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| borken phone... |
[May. 8th, 2009|11:08 am] |
This is a bit of a public service announcement. I will not be carrying my phone around for the near future, because currently its buttons are a bit haywire. I left it on my desk and it regularly took pictures of the aforementioned desk without moving anything. Also, now, if I press, say, "1", it dials "*71" and tries to load it as a contact. (2 doesn't dial anything funny...) Finally, it keeps trying to get on the internet, which I'm pretty sure is not an included part of my cell phone plan, and I certainly don't use. There are more of these problems but I can't enumerate them...
Anyway, I won't be answering my phone while this is the case because I don't want to deal with the phone. It just started doing this after I left it plugged in and fully charged for about a day. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 22nd, 2009|10:13 am] |
KGB elections were this Monday. I'm now second vice president.
This feels really strange for some reason. Essentially, I think, my brain is so used to knowing but not being on exec, or something like that, that the fact that now I am on exec is supremely confusing to it. On the other hand, it's also really cool, because KGB is a really awesome organization and I am now in a position to do great things for it... but for the moment it's just kind of weird.
I expect I'll get more used to it when it isn't a new thing this week. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 12th, 2009|06:43 pm] |
I feel dumb... I just remembered I have a hat that probably would have prevented most of my sunburn. I got sunglasses! Why did I forget the hat? (probably because it's not as immediately available...)
Also, apparently sun burns can make you feel sick. This is rather unfortunate. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 11th, 2009|06:48 pm] |
I haven't posted in entirely too long, and since, apparently, I'm exhausted from booth for the day (admittedly, I got up at 5am today, did Buggy stuff from, let's say, 6:30am to 9:00am, and then was on Midway at 9:45 or so, I have a right to be...) I guess I'll post things.
I have a job for the summer. It is with Vocollect.
Also, apparently I have a sunburn on my forehead, possibly part of my neck, maybe my cheeks from the way they feel, and the backs of my hands from the first day of booth building, since it was sunny out, although nowhere else because it was also cold and windy. EDIT: seems like burned my entire face...
I feel like I should be posting other things too, but I'm not sure what to say... I have housing for next year? |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|01:41 am] |
Inspired by events today and a line from a movie,
It's the helpful ones you have to watch out for: You never know when they're going to do something incredibly ... useless.
This was inspired by some things someone did today, but I later realized that it's also the problem I have with any Microsoft product released more recently than Windows XP and Office 2003. Everything they have done which could only be explained as trying to be helpful has done nothing but get in my way, confuse me, or both. I bet some significantly less computer-savvy luser out there likes it, and I'll admit that they got rid of one minor problem (games installing all over the place in the start menu), but only by making things instead more complicated and somewhat clunkier to use.
I reskinned Vista to look like Windows 2000, which at least makes it not an assault on my eyes. I wish I knew how to reskin Office 2007 to look like any previous incarnation of it. For once I actually think OpenOffice is actually better, because I know how to find things, as opposed to "almost as good and runs on Linux"... |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 29th, 2009|11:20 pm] |
Oh man... I just realized what I've been doing wrong this semester (and school year, for that matter):
Before I went to Switzerland, I had a reasonably hard rule not to take more than one project class, for a rather inclusive definition of "project class" per semester. This allowed me to put as much time as it needed into it. Somehow, in the past year or two, I managed to forget that rule. Both this semester and last semester, I have taken two project classes, even for a demanding definition of a project class. This semester, I even piled research (arguably equivalent to a project class) on top. (... not to mention that my third class this semester would have fit under my permissive definition of project classes...) No wonder things have been so ridiculous, despite feeling like I haven't done work for most of the classes! |
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| well, crap |
[Feb. 19th, 2009|11:34 pm] |
... and my screen's hinge just came apart again.
I might not have cleaned the hinge sufficiently. On the other hand, I practically filled the damn thing with epoxy, and it worked for a week or two before ripping clean out, as opposed to four or five openings before it came apart, like my last failure with epoxy.
Maybe I should actually get a new laptop and scrap my plan of keeping this around as mobile computing while I get a desktop... |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 8th, 2009|01:54 pm] |
My laptop is kind of broken... one of the hinges cracked, and I haven't applied the superglue yet. Amusingly but conveniently, it's cracked in the "open" position, because the hinge has too much resistance to turn without the lever arm of the rest of the laptop, which is, I guess, important for keeping the screen up.
This is remarkably annoying. |
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| Yes, I'll admit this is another rant... |
[Jan. 14th, 2009|12:57 am] |
So... Mechatronics...
This class is an ECE capstone. It is also essentially a robotics class. In fact, it is cross-listed as a robotics and mechanical engineering grad class.
Unfortunately, it also expects that every team has one person on it who is capable in terms of mechanical design... for a class mostly populated by ECE undergrads and which probably only exceeds 1/3 non ECEs if we count both the MechEs and the robotics students.
What's wrong with this picture, especially if we assume group dynamics involve people trying to work with people they already know, a practice which seems even more deeply a part of the MechE culture here than the ECE culture?
As a side note, as of 8pm, 8 groups had been formed, out of 16 if everyone on the waitlist comes off... one group had two mechanical engineers and an ECE and was seeking an ECE, as they had been since reporting they were looking for people to work with, and one(1) mechanical engineer did not yet have a group. Please tell me how this is going to result in all groups being functional? For reference, I think about 10 ECEs have not reported groups but have reported seeking one, and team size is, worst-case, four. (They like teams of three: one mechanically-inclined, one electronically-inclined, and one programming-inclined.)
UPDATE 6:51pm:
After a bunch of hashing in class, we eventually produced 14 teams of four. (Now we get to wrangle over vision, because the two ECEs have the same idea, the robotics Ph.D. student wants to use his experience with hands, and, well, I think the MechE might be caught between us, because I haven't heard him advance an idea yet, though this is partly because Wednesday is his hell day...) |
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| What is butter? We just don't know... |
[Dec. 18th, 2008|09:53 pm] |
Inspired by a discussion which ended up declaring that interfaces are frosting, I've decided to troll LiveGerbil poll LiveJournal...
We all know what syntactic sugar is, right? For reference, I'd describe it as something which makes writing code more palatable without fundamentally changing how things work.
However, not all frostings are entirely sugar. Some of them contain butter as well, and it distinctly changes the taste of them. Given that, what would you say syntactic butter is?
Since butter can serve as a grease or something fatty to make things more palatable, I propose that syntactic butter makes having objects interact less sticky... something like explicit getters and setters. For extra fun on that metaphor, I relatively dislike frosting which has too much butter in it.
(I was also going to suggest that Perl is a syntactic sugar overdose while Python can be syntactic butter overdose, but then I remembered Java... and besides, my Python comment was going to hinge on the underlying implementation. Go ahead and discuss anyway. :-P)
EDIT: word choice c.c |
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| copied from kazriko... |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|08:54 pm] |
This was sufficiently ridiculous I had to spread it...
http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html
A middle school teacher gets angry because one of her students is distracting kids by doing something with his laptop and handing out CDs. (reasonable...)
When she finds out they are Linux LiveCDs, she confiscates them as "stolen software" and writes a threatening letter to the kid's father. This letter contains a remarkable display of ignorance.
Clearly students should only be taught to use Microsoft software because nobody in the Real World uses anything else. Ready, Real People?
(Now, admittedly, Windows does have an enormous market share, but asserting that nobody in the real world uses it is a bit off the mark...)
(source)
EDIT: followup: http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/character-assasinations-aint-us.html |
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| Swarm computing??? |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|04:55 pm] |
I am now lined up to do research! :D
The expected topic? Distributed computing on cell phones. (I mean seriously... all these cell phones with ARM processors... who actually needs the processing power of a 400MHz 32-bit processor on a clamshell phone?) Also... it's cloud computing... that floats around.
I think this is a pretty fantastic concept. Unfortunately, we don't have a killer app for it, so if anybody has any ideas, I'm highly curious.
As a side note, the only real drawback to this that I can think of off the top of my head is that it would involve tracking where people are so that you can migrate work as people leave or turn off their cell phones or whatnot, and I know there are people who might think it's a nifty idea but do not, under any circumstances, to be tracked like that if they can get away with it... (That said, the really paranoid people would pitch their phones altogether because you can track someone reasonably well just by watching cell tower handoffs, so this might be less of an issue with people than it could be...)
Oh... also the fact that this is all kinds of ripe for security vulnerabilities, but that's a small matter of programming and is our own damn fault if we screw it up. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 11th, 2008|12:06 am] |
I have come to the conclusion that it would be really nifty to make an arm-driven netbook. Admittedly, it'd be going more for the low-power, long battery, and minimalistic system requirements angle rather than the "cheap" angle...
In fact part of the idea is to see just how little power I could get one of these things to draw by sacrificing other requirements aside from the fact that this would probably be built in a hobbyist style.
Instead of studying like I should have been, I poked around on Gumstix's website and found this, which seems like it'd make a nice base for something like this... c.c
http://www.gumstix.net/Documentation/cat/Overo/109.html
Suggestions for other components or a better ARM board would be fun. I'm curious to see what ideas can be come up with. I've got a suggestion to Bluetooth large portions of the peripherals (like keyboards), and that's not a bad idea in the small-scale case. (Oh... and it's running linux because it's been established that there are ARM linux builds.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 1st, 2008|12:10 am] |
I seem to have a distinct case of the burnout, partly because Thanksgiving was not sufficiently restful, and I feel like I didn't get enough done as it was.
This is not a week for me to be feeling burned out. Only one week left, right? Yeah, that's only one week left to make sure I don't completely tank Embedded, for example. I know of at least two of my professors who want to give out two weeks worth of assignment and only have one week left. I also know neither of them have given out their assignments yet. (Correction: I just got an e-mail stating lab 4 for Embedded goes out on the 1st. Still no word on the essay for French.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 18th, 2008|12:47 am] |
The kernel deadline hits. You die...
Would you like your race conditions identified? [ynq] y
We turned in a kernel. Yay!
On the other hand, about two hours before the third late day expired, I realized that we'd totally overlooked an obscure race condition that is usually not a problem:
It is possible but unlikely that two or more threads from the same process will try to get pages from the same nonexistent page table at the same time. In that case, they can get into a situation where they both discover the table does not exist and, in succession, allocate new page tables for it. At this point, we will leak one page of kernel memory, one of the two threads won't get the pages he requested from the table, and some threads will probably take a page fault. There may be yet more implications of forgetting to lock the memory context of each process, but that's what occurred to me.
We didn't test our thread forking terribly rigorously because we had bigger problems, like passing the hurdle to run p4. On the other hand, this is very difficult to run into. I can only think of two cases off the top of my head where it could accidentally happen:
1) A program has two threads, one of which is getting more pages for the heap while the other one is trying to get the autostack extended.
2) Several threads are forking at the same time using our thread library, which directly calls get_pages().
... of course, it's always possible that someone can be running a program to actively screw us over by calling get_pages() all over the place in an attempt to get this to happen. In that case, well, they can go perish() in a conflagration. :P |
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