Category Archives: Work

Flying, OSing

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I am sitting in the airport. In about an hour I will be in an airplane heading toward California. I will be gone until Saturday evening.
My flight doesn’t get in until around 11 PM California time, which makes it 1 AM Pittsburgh time.
My flight leaves really early on Saturday, meaning I have to get up at 4 AM to make it.
I’m sitting here trying not to think about that.

In the meantime, I am trying to write some kernel code. I made an attempt at a loader that probably does none of the things it’s supposed to. I can’t help but feel incredibly, incredibly lost as far as that class goes… I understand all the concepts and such, but when it comes to actually writing the code, I stare at my blank emacs window and can’t think of what the hell I’m supposed to write. That’s kinda the exact opposite of the thread library, in which I sat down and churned out pages of correct, functional code.

Also, I’m probably a really bad partner, as I’m leaving 8 to get us most of the way toward checkpoint 1 while I sit in luxury in California, staying in a nice hotel and talking to some awesome people who might give me a job. But, even given that, I can’t bring myself to actually get something done on the kernel.

Blar.

Today I guess I’ve just been feeling really out of it and/or lost. Perhaps it’s just my dislike of flying combined with my guilt as far as OS goes combined with my nervousness of interviewing… but I can’t help but feel like I don’t want all this. I don’t like flying around the US every week and, the entire time, worrying about the work I’m not doing and feeling like I just want to be at home, curled up and either sleeping or hacking at code with 8 there to give me guidance… because god knows I’m not smart enough to figure this stuff out myself.
I suppose this is a necessary part towards the entire “doing a job I enjoy” part of life, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about it. We either need to invent teleportation, or companies need to do interviews with teleconferencing, or I should only be applying to local Pittsburgh companies.

Meh.

Okay, that post was overly emo-riffic. Apologies.
But meh, it’s going to be a lonnngggg couple days.

Life, the universe, and thou

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Life has been interesting lately.

The thread library was due Friday. Given that we had run largetest and successfully created and exitted and joined over 1.2 million threads, I think our library was fairly good. We did some comment and code cleanup on Friday and handed in on time.


Wean has entered the 410 zone.
What that means is that the kernel came out Friday… I’ve been studying the spec and going around writing pseudocode this weekend. I really feel like I should have gotten more done, but alas, such is a lazy weekend.

Next week is going to be death. Flight to California on Thursday, OS midterm on Tuesday, an in-Pittsburgh interview on Wednesday, and oh-god-lots-of-kernelling this weekend after I get back because checkpoint 1 is on Monday.

Car, Jeff, Tyler, Alan, and I experimented with chocolate bacon,

and chocolate-dipped salt-and-vinegar chips.

The former was interesting, the latter was vile.

There was more CS volleyball on Friday.
I think I’m getting better at anticipating action, because this set of photos came out better than previous times’.





In any case, I should sleep. Tomorrow is class, work (last day for a couple weeks), interview, kernelling, and studying for midterm. Ahhhh death!

OS, Late night happenings, and thou

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First, I want to link a journal entry by my friend:
Here
I think it’s well written and deserves a read. Seriously, Christians are getting way too worked up about things nowadays (although, to be fair, so are a lot of liberals who want to completely ban all references to god/religion).

Last night there was an Evan-from-the-internet and halfpricing with some people. There were games of Eat Poop You Cat and mini-EPYC (where you are limited to two words or a tiny drawing). Afterward, we went to the 8th floor whiteboards in Wean and drew a (terrible) group picture:

(Click, it gets bigger)
Can you find all those things in it? ;)

OS goes. We are still making tweaks to our code. Found a race condition that wasn’t exposed by any of the tests… hopefully it’s fixed. We’re going to write better tests sometime this week and generally improve the performance/cleanliness of our code.

Tonight there was delicious Unos pizza followed by work followed by ITG. Also, Alan and I playtested Student Wars v2. It seems my adjustment to strengthen the Fine Arts faction may have gone too far and made it a bit too strong. Meh… I’ll do some more tweaking to it later.

It is 1 AM. I should sleep.

Posted in OS

More OS

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OS is going very well.
Our thread library now passes all tests, a week early (it’s not due until next Friday). Our mutexes, condition variables, and semaphores have all been tested. Everything seems to be working. This is awesome.
We are going to make a bunch of improvements to it… for example, thr_exit() currently does not clean up its memory (we leave that work to thr_join(), which is kinda not a good idea). We also want to generally clean up and optimize our code and replace our slow linked lists with faster BSTs. Woot.

Other stuff has been awesome too. Life has been full of interviews lately with very interesting companies. Hopefully I’ll actually have a job after I graduate. This would be good.

Student Wars v2 is coming along. I’m almost done with the base set, I think. People should help me playtest sometime (this weekend?).

OS and life

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I’ve been seriously neglecting this journal (as well as most of my website). Meh.

My life has been full of work, interviews, and OS.
OS, in particular, is amazing and awesome, but is consuming my life like no other class ever has before. We are in the midsts of P2, the thread library. It’s harder than it might look and/or sound… but holy crap is it fun.

My parents came to visit this weekend, along with my aunt and grandpa. It was lots of fun. There was a Costco run. I now have something like 10 pounds of chicken, 2 pounds of salmon, boxes upon boxes of snacks, a huge cake (now half-eaten), and more shampoo and conditioner and soap than I will use in two years. It was also nice seeing them again… it’s been a while.

I bought Psych Season 1. Unfortunately, it came the day before P2 came out, and so I haven’t really had time to watch it. Blar.

Work is going well. I’m doing (more) unit testing for the API refactoring.

I also have a decent number of interviews, although the two places I’m really, really interested in haven’t contacted me, and I’m thinking it’s unlikely they will. Meh.

Back to OS.

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