Downloaded the Led Zeppelin discography to replace the HORRIBLY tagged and organized copy I had previously. While it was downloading I read their Wikipedia article and the one one Jimmy Page too. I should be crucified for not knowing their guitarist was Jimmy Page before now. My plan is to listen to Led Zeppelin from start to finish in the proper order. I have "8.6 hours" of Zeppelin to work through.
2009/05/26
5:23pm
Post
Still alive!
Todo: Write "24 hours in emacs: A story of life, love and keyboard macros", write a tale of the trip to Playa del Fuego.
2009/04/13
7:51pm
Getting a GTK development env. installed on OS X
So yeah, Hoss is setting up GTK + GCC + Xcode on his Leopard installation as part of is senior project. If you've ever had to do that then you know that it takes a little bit of legwork to get your CLI environment set up just right to make all the dependencies compile correctly. One hurtle in particular is getting your $PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable set up correctly. In the end you end up with this. I post it now to the unwashed masses of the internet for posterity should some other poor soul require this vital piece of information.
I should have 8 GB of ram (4 GB currently) and 2360 GB of storage (360 GB currently) by the end of Thursday. Yes. 2.3 TB of storage. I'm more than likely going to build a raid 1 (mirrored) array out of the two new 1TB drives.
My CS450 (Operating Systems) group has finished module R3. Which means we can context switch on the CPU-register-level now. We've tagged our code in SVN that completes module R3. It can be found at our google code page. We are proud to announce that no lives were lost during the production of module R3!
On the Technical Knowledge page I've made a link to a new section: VirtualMachineProfiles. It hosts the XML files for VirtualBox and KVM virtual machines in common configurations as they get made. It's for my benefit mostly so I don't have to remember which virtualized device works on what OS, etc. Currently I've only posted the profile for a working VirtualBoxWindowsX64 image. Highlights are always shown on the macine VirtualMachineProfiles page.
2009/03/04
10:04 PM
Migrating site, maybe, kinda
Might experience down time if I don't get it right.
Look for updates on peopleareducks.com if anything should go awry here
2009/03/04
3:05 AM
Note to self: Take more caution when setting up new DNS/DHCP services
Accidentally tried to configure my router (running dd-wrt) to act as a DNSMasq server. Essentially it would have provided me with the functionality of a full DNS server as well as DHCP assignments down to the machine.
As luck would have it, however, I configured it incorrectly.
And being gung-ho about it I put all 3 of my machines into it at once without testing. Whoops!
Lets try that again
2009-03-03
3:19AM
Have I ever posted after 8 am?
Group assembled and worked on tdf-os again tonight. I printed out the project manual, hole-punched it, and put it in a binder. To get extra spiffy I printed out our 30 pages of developer documentation and put that in the binder too. I found it helpful to have for paging through function declarations and definitions.
We are working on process scheduling right now. I either don't understand fully, or I'm not very pleased with our current doubly linked list data structure for holding created Wikipedia:ProcessControlBlocks. It doesn't seem generic enough, then again, today is the first time I've worked very close with that part of our code base. After I finish implementing methods to remove a processes from the Running Queue and move it to the Ready Queue I'd like to take a chance to re-evaluate the design of the queues. Perhaps after working with them more in-depth I'll find them more to my liking.
"This project just got real" we said to each other. Getting a functional shell is one thing, messing with the registers on the CPU directly is another thing. See, we have a "Process Control Block" which is supposed to be the functional equivalent of an atomic object that contains everything about a process. It's name, it's execution stack, it's priority. If it were a running process then the moment it was context switched out of the registers the process control block would contain the value of all the registers the last time that process was running. It's like an instantaneous snapshot of every value and state attributed to a running process. So what we need to do now is implement code (almost Assembly) that saves the state of a process into a bunch of variables (simple enough) in that process control block, then for each value we just saved, we replace it with the respective value of the next process to run.
I'll admit it isn't the most difficult thing in the world. However, it's the kind of thing that is simple but must never ever, absolutely not once ever fail.
Site note, if anyone reads this and is a C guru let me know what the best strategy for maintaining a "global" variable is. Our approach thus far (Taken from The C Programming Language - Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie) is to declare our proposed global variable in a header file, define it once in one C file, then use the declaration extern type name; in each method we wish to access the variable in. It's straight from K&R so I doubt many people will have squat to say about the method other than *thumbs up*.
I bought a SliceHost. It wasn't an all-in-one package where they set up DNS and domain name registration at the same time so I'm going to take this as an opportunity to learn about DNS. Blue Host doesn't let me modify my own DNS records so for the first time in my life I'm asking the question: who's a good host for DNS? SliceHost recommends DNS Made Easy and their services look legit. May the geek lords bless my journey into the world of DNS records.
PS: Please note the addition of a new block above: CollectedTechnicalKnowledge. There you can find my AboutDNS page. It's basically a terminology and conceptual reference guide for myself.
update (time +5 minutes)SliceHost offers DNS services free of charge, I failed to recognize that before. Whoops!
2009-02-27
2:51 AM
As you can see I changed the website
No more static index.html page. I enjoy using WikkaWiki so much for tdf-os that I decided to put it here. Sorry spam bots, Registration is disabled, plus all new pages are automatically owned by me.
However, if you're A Thinker, or a ThinkingCode Monkey and would like to edit pages on the domain then let me know.
....I should really go to bed now...
2009-02-22
8:32 am
never trust Western Digital again.
Seriously, how difficult is it to put a hard drive into a protective shell.
It appears that it's quite difficult for WD to grasp.
Your software barfs consistently while attempting to do a firmware upgrade in OS X
that's just terrifying
It finally flashed when I rebooted Leopard into XP.
I'm returning this POS the first opportunity I have
today to get back to the store I purchased it from.
(No hate to that store, they didn't mess up)
And in it's place I shall buy:
two of these
...and...
these beautiful twins
And as far as Fedora is concerned, after this post the disk goes in and there's no turning back.
....../update/....... - 9:19am
I got to this point: "Starting Install Process. This may take a couple of minutes."
And there it stayed for a long time. About 20 minutes, or so.
At first I thought it was accidentally malphrased, trying to express:
"Started the install process, this may take a couple of minutes."
But that does not seem to be the case. I'm not certain what the installer was
doing during that time. "Starting" is a little vague, but I have a guess.
With this being a 130 MB netinst CD install I think it was downloading the
required packages for the desktop system I'd like setup.
...9:23am: 72/1309 packages completed
2009-02-21
3:55 pm
Installing Fedora 10 x64
It happens today. Putting fedora on the main box, Fridge. DvD's are
big and the bandwidth is capping out in the 750 MB/s -> 1.0 MB/s range.
Johnny suggested downloading the netinst iso instead. Will report back regularly.
2009-02-11
9:32 am
Projects. I need to start making project pages for things I want
to get done. Maybe seeing them would encourage me more.
2009-02-02
6:15 pm
Disappointment
happens
2009-02-01
11:16 pm
Loss of significance...
Not in my personal life, but it's chapter 2.2 in the
text book for my Numerical Analysis class.
I dig this class. In 3 weeks we've gotten into some more
intense Computer Science related subjects than we've done in around
two years in the actual Computer Science Department. I'm supposed
to be doing homework for that course right now, buuuuuuuut,
yeah, blogging, it has a precedence over homework...
2008-12-26
4:04 PM (EST)
lovely day for traveling. just as good as the trip down here!
I arrived as the tampa airport at about 10 am, maybe a little
sooner than that. my scheduled time to depart was at 12:11 (noon)
but poor weather in my destination (where I'm composing this)
did't allow us to depart until almost 2pm. it wasn't all terrible
tough. I purchased a book, "how to speak so people will listen".
I ended up reading that in its completeness by the time I
arrived here in Atlanta, GA. Its a nice little book, around
170 pages. It was nice to read a complete book, I haven't done
that in quite some time.
The delay in departure had another positive edge... Instead
of a 4 hour layover here in Atl it will only amount to around
one hour in it's entireity.
The room I'm composing this in has so much haze from smoke that
otherwise it would be a quite well lit room. It's an airport
smoking lounge, and I'm certain that the intensity of the smoke
in here will leave me smelling more pungent than after a typical
night at 123. Apologies in advance to the poor soul(s) that
must sit next to me on the next leg of my journey.
On the thought of smoking, it was remarkable (note my remark)
the price they charge, and that I was willing to pay for a pack
of smokes. All in all I spend $8.30 on a pack of Camel Lights
and a 20 oz. bottle of Coca-Cola.
I think I shall write a CLI based app for blogging. I rather
enjoy, or prefer, the simplicity of an emacs terminal and a
plain ASCII document for composing notes. With some version
control and some simple push & pull hooks I could write a
pretty swanky blog util. I haven't written a CMS in a while,
and I think it's well overdue. The ones you find online are
just too "fully-featured" for what I want to do. I'd like
to attempt to coerce BlueHost into installing git on my
hosting account to make this process less hacky.
....leave smoking lounge....
....check on flight at gate....
....find out it was delayed until 7:55pm....
There goes my shorter layover. Oh well. More time to hack.
Provided nothing unexpected happens I should be in Pittsburgh
by 9:30 tonight. I was fortunate enough that my old roomate,
Jamie, volunteered to collect me from the airport. According
to the Googlenet that puts him in for a 4 hour drive from
his home in Teays Valley. Awful generous of him I think. Must
find a way to show him I appreciate his generosity.
Just spent $7.95 on a one day subscription to the wireless
network here at the airport. It's sponsored by "Opt-Fi".
There was a collection of providers and I chose Opt-Fi
because it was the first provider page to load.
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