Phoenix

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Well, I’m back “home,” whatever that means.
I always have the problem of forgetting what I used to do with my free time whenever I start break. Then, by the end, I don’t want the break to end because I’ve found things to do again. Hmm.

I’ve been working a bit on Student Wars v2. The base set is finished… I should get around to posting it.

Pat came over yesterday. It was nice catching up with him and watching him play Metroid Prime. I don’t know… for most games, I still find it more interesting to watch people play than to actually play. It really annoys people back in Pittsburgh when I used to (blah, past tense… bad!) prefer to watch them play board games than to participate. I dunno.

Interesting thought: I’ve been re-reading some of my journal, and it seems that my mood (averaged over each week or so to allow for particularly bad/good days) fluctuates depending on my relationship status. I suppose this isn’t all that terribly surprising since I always thought that it was important for me to have a relationship (not for the sake of having one, but because I need someone to care for and to have someone care for me)… but having experienced one brief fling of romance and currently being in an amazingly perfect, committed relationship allows me to reflect back on all of this with less bias, I suppose.
I dunno.
I guess that’s a way of saying I have been contentedly happy for the past 8.5 months, and that not even distance can ruin that (too much, at least).

Leaving Pittsburgh

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I’m sitting in the airport. My last hour in Pittsburgh is going to be quite boring. Meh.

The past few days have been amazing. I saw just about every person I know/knew in Pittsburgh and got to spend time with a bunch of people.

Meh.

I’m not ready to grow up… :-\

Final #1 done… college done

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I just got out of my OS final. Overall, it wasn’t bad. By the end, I was at the point of just not caring anymore (perhaps not the best place to be, but meh). I mean, I have a job, and it’s not like getting a B or C in OS is going to make them retract their offer. I kinda BS’d the last problem (worth 1/5 of the final, but meh).

So yeah, with that, my undergrad is over. At this point, I don’t think there’s any possible way for me to fail, since I only had to pass one of my two classes this semester to graduate and I’ve basically already passed the other one (Pen-based computing, which doesn’t have a final).

…
I am strangely sad right now, seeing the parts of my life over the past 3.5 years scattered around the room in various boxes or suitcases.
I really don’t want to leave CMU.

*sighs*

I leave for home on Sunday.
I wish Sunday would never come.

Posted in OS

Job acceptance

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Job offer (informally) accepted (formal acceptance going out later today, if I can get the paperwork completed in time).

Starting early next year, I’ll be working for Salesforce.com in San Francisco.

…
That decision was harder than it really should have been.

Now comes the not-so-fun task of finding housing. Epic fail.

Day of endings

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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).