Category Archives: GDC4S

Day of endings

Posted on by

Today was my last day of work at Viz. It was good… got the testing infrastructure started. Did as much as I could given I only had 8 hours to work on it. Managed to get it done after 5.5 (Wednesday plus some of today) and did some final bug fixing and integrating afterwards. Bid farewell to everyone.

Today was our P3 interview, which marked the end of our kernel project. His main criticism was that we used 5 locking primitives in our kernel (mutex, cond [condition variable], icond [internal condition variable], ENTER_CRIT/EXIT_CRIT, and disable_interrupts/enable_interrupts). He said this was indicative of “running away” from problems by creating more locking primitives than figuring out those problems. Yeah, sounds about right. He also found a potential deadlock in our kernel (that, at least, is very very unlikely) and a few problems with the scheduler. Also, one part of our kernel (a function that either copies to/from userspace/kernel space or vice versa depending on where the pointer you pass to it is) was called a 1337 hax and we were told that 1337 hax should be very well documented (whereas ours was lacking any documentation… oops). Also, we generally had bad quality/missing documentation in our kernel. Not surprising, given how we mostly did the documentation in the last 2 days.

Today was our pen-based computing presentation, which marks the end of the pen-based class and also of our adventure game mapping tool project. That went pretty well… we managed to implement all desired features and Carl and Edmund got saving/scrolling working at the last minute. Woo.

Also, today was our P4 late day. We went into it rather confused on why free was causing page faults left and right and wondering if it was a kernel issue. After about 5 hours of debugging (in addition to the debugging yesterday), as I read through the code because I was completely stumped, I discovered the lines:
file_desc* fd_struct;
...
fd_struct = (file_desc*)malloc(sizeof(fd_struct));
...
Oops.
So yeah, the end of OS projects (and our ~7 hour debug issue) and of the semester of workdeath was a stupid typo bug. Whee.

Overall, it’s been a good semester. I think I’ve decided on a job (the one I kinda decided I wanted since the beginning), and I’ll send out the acceptance letter tomorrow (along side my last rejection letter).

Updates

Posted on by

I suppose I should update this, since I haven’t in a while and stuff has happened since Thanksgiving.

An Endeca interview happened. No offer, as expected. I suppose that’s just as well. Boston was mostly uneventful.

Some rejection letters happened… rejected three of the five offers I had. Two left to ponder over.

A P4 happened. I wrote the entire lab in about an hour. We’ve just now started debugging it, but it really shouldn’t take too long.

A work happened. I have a huge project for my final 3 days of work. I’m not going to get it anywhere near complete. I swear, my coworkers have way too much faith in me.

Also, complaints:
No one’s been available for portraits, and I haven’t shot any portraits in a semester… starting to feel this intense urge to shoot potraits again. People always seem to be too busy for me. I’m more torn than I thought I would be on my job offers, and one of them has an absolutely-final already-pushed-back-2-weeks-despite-corporate-policy deadline of tomorrow. I haven’t been doing well at ITG. I haven’t been fulfilling my commitments in Pen-based Computing (my group probably thinks I’m the world’s biggest slacker). Went out to try and shoot landscapes of the fresh snow, and that didn’t really work out either. The scroll wheel on my mouse is starting to go… I’m going to have to get used to using scrollbars again. Feeling incredibly inferior at photography after seeing some of the stuff submitted to the yearbook this year by people far more talented than I. No one is ever interested in my card games or anything.
Blah.

On top of everything, I’m almost certainly leaving Pittsburgh forever in under 2 weeks, and that’s really starting to sink in. I’m not ready to go out on my own.

Snow piccar, because why the hell not:

Work, water, Wean, and wars (of students)

Posted on by

Work has been awesome lately. I’ve been writing more unit tests (the fun kind), and I often find myself wishing I could work more hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and wishing that I could work fewer hours on Tuesdays. I might re-adjust my schedule to be 5 hours every day instead of the current 4/8/4/4. That would be awesome, except it would mean I work until 5 on Mondays and Wednesdays.

In case you haven’t heard (i.e. you aren’t a CMUer), a water main broke in Oakland today, leaving all of campus and most of the area around campus without water. Fairfax still had water (albeit with weakened water pressure), but Greg and I went to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet for dinner instead anyway, as there were notices that we shouldn’t use water unless absolutely necessary. So yeah… good times.
See here for a lovely piccar of the street exploded.

So yeah, as a result of that, they shut down the clusters (no AC without water) and server rooms, so I was left unable to really continue doing my OS project. I’m fairly confident about the idea though… so I shouldn’t be too terribly worried about the actual implementation. In any case, I have this (extended) weekend to do it, and it isn’t due until next Wednesday.
I also worked on (finished?) my first pen-based computing assignment today: a tablet PC version of tic tac toe. Unfortunately, I can’t get the program to run due to a security error. I should figure out why eventually.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on Student Wars v2 lately. After I make a few more GPA cards, some core Events, and a couple Rules, I think it will be ready for playtesting. Hopefully this will be much more balanced than Student Wars was… and not in the boring “everyone is on equal ground” kind of way, but in the “each of the four primary factions have a specific strength” kind of way. Exciting.

Life is amazing.

Photos from House Wars last week, since I haven’t posted them yet:



It’s almost 2 AM. I should probably be asleep.

Break

Posted on by

You know you love your job when you wake up on the first day of your break (I’m off of work until next Monday) and find yourself wishing you were going into work today.
Relatedly, last night’s build broke. It might be my fault, but I have no way of checking as to *what* broke the build from home. As such, I’m hoping I don’t get a chicken in my email, or I’ll have to go in and fix the build.

Woke up at 7:30 like usual this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep (I fail at this “sleeping in” thing). As a result, I’ve been lurking around teh intarwebs and posting photos. The galleries from Colorado, Twins Days, Toronto, and playfair are now up. Whee!






So yeah, nothing much has been going on in my life besides work, food, and sleep… which I suppose is why I haven’t been posting lately. I’m really happy though. Whee. Life has been full of awesome.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with these three whole days I have to myself. I should probably work on Student Wars v2 and/or CMU Adventures (does anyone actually play that anymore?).

I have the urge to do random portraits. Does anyone want to model for me?

Camera repairs, take four

Posted on by

I wish this could be a “my camera is back and I am happy” entry….
My camera *is* back. However, they somehow lost the button that pops up the flash, so I currently have a paperclip attached to the strap that I have to insert into the hole to pop the flash.
Grrr.
There should not be this many problems with a company that is named for doing camera repairs.

In any case, work on Friday was amazing. I now have a total of about 28 bug fixes integrated into the codebase, fixing everything from minor code cleanup issues to major exception-at-runtime-and-loss-of-data issues.
I also worked a bit with another intern trying to get some software running off of the web.
Yay job satisfaction!

There was tasty dinner followed by 3-layer vanilla bean cake last night. I think this was actually the first time I’d eaten out in a while… and it just made me appreciate more how much cheaper it is to cook yourself (and not any less enjoyable than eating out if you have someone else to cook for :) ).

This weekend (later today, actually) is Ohio funness for twinsday. I get to photograph twins! Here’s hoping my camera holds up… given how much I paid to have it fixed, it’d better.
I should also call the company today and complain about the flash button. Bleh.

So yeah, I don’t recommend this camera repair service.