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argh. the unexpected mass and volume of my interviews (up to 14 now) has me thrashing for free time. i just realized i also have to read a book and a half by next thursday before my soc 232 "mid-term self-assessment". at least i'm taking it DE so it's not a full midterm. i already have two midterms next week. not fun.
oh yeah, the new cell processor from sony/ibm seems über-cool. if it's able to do the things that people were (gossip|rumour)ing about a few weeks ago (connecting multiple cells over the internet or wireless and distributing tasks dynamically among them), that would be amazing. i think it has a really good chance of beating x86 just because thousands of people will buy it right off the bat (in the PS3). that will establish a huge user base without the users even knowing about it.
presumably the PS3 will also support internet gaming, which will get the users to connect their cells to the interweb. from there, it's just a stone's throw to formalize this huge distributed computing network, harness the huge computing potential, and set up a scheme to pay PS3 users for use of their cell while they're not gaming. and then, of course, the users get greedy, buy more cells (not necessarily in PS3 form now), make more money, build a bigger network, ad infinitum. just one of many possibilities.. but yeah, huge potential here.
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ok, so i read another linux review.. this one about PCLinuxOS. sounded cool (i.e. based on Mandrake) so I tried it out. trying it out, actually. much better than my last experience with yoper. it keeps all the nice things about mandrake, and adds even more integration with KDE. they even have a customized version of OOo.
i booted off the liveCD, and didn't even need to touch the keyboard (or mouse) until I had my X server up and running and needed to log in. auto-detected sound, graphics, network. no problems with anything so far (except that it started off 800x600, which i was able to fix easily).
it seems pretty fast too, although i can't get a good feel for it since it's running off the CD and has to pause every once in a while to load stuff. but still.. really sweet. maybe after i finish my concurrency assignment this weekend and have some time, i'll install it onto the hard drive and give it a full spin.
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debugging hardware is weird. i started off with vhdl code that was supposed to control a simple state-based heating system. it didn't work right (despite appearing logically correct), so i started debugging it.. i added a handful of extra output signals (hardware equivalent of printlns) and moved some stuff around. apparently, by doing this, i fixed my original problem and created another one. by the time i removed my extra stuff, the code, which was logically equivalent to the original code, was working fine.
i feel like the opposite of those guys in the escher painting.. they went around a flight of stairs but ended up at the same place. i went through a set of steps that should have led me right back at the same place i started off, yet my problem was fixed.
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so finally jobmine is kicking in and giving me employer responses.. i'm doing pretty good so far. 6 interviews :) pretty good jobs, too. there's one for a job in vancouver which i applied for because the description sounded good, but i would prefer not having to go to vancouver. unless the job is really really good (which is a distinct possibility). got one in ottawa, one in north york, and three in waterloo. ah, the choices.
ETA: make that 7.
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so much stuff that needs to be done this week. midterm tomorrow. lemmings assignment due wednesday. job fair wednesday. engsoc meeting wednesday. SECC meeting thursday. group+individual co-op interviews thursday. concurrency and vhdl assignments due monday. random other crap throughout the week. it's gonna be busy..
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so, scunt was over yesterday at noon. 2A chems (aka chemikaze) won. math came second, tied with the 1B mechs. the 1B softies didn't show.. :(
scunt was pretty good overall, despite the fact that events only ran from 1600 to 0900 instead of the usual 1200 to 1000. and over 50% of the people at opening ceremonies were actually present at closing ceremonies, which was great.
science and ahs, which were supposed to put in teams, didn't show. that was kind of expected.. they always say they're coming but never do. a lot of engineering teams where there, though. other than the top three, the old mechs showed up, as did the 1B comps and the 1B civils. and of course, 3A software (us).
the quest was cool. at the end we had 34 letters that we had to unscramble to figure out the final destination. ever try running 34 letters through a standard anagram generator? ugh. when one of the scunt gods came over and saw what we were doing, he said he'd give us bonus points for writing our own anagram generator to solve it.. so i did. well, not so much an anagram generator and a find-all-possible-combinations-of-words-from-/usr/dict/words-that-fit generator. and it would have worked if they hadn't given us an S instead of a Y. we still got it based on some of the combinations it was spitting out, but the math team beat us to it.. :(
anyway, i just finished sleeping for 14 hours, and it's 5 in the morning, so i think i'll go back to sleep for a few more hours.
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The Art of Influencing Difficult People.. now that sounds like a useful course.
in other news, i'll be big-fat-greek-scavenger-hunting from noon today to noon tomorrow. i hope the '09 softies win, and re-start the 1B-software-always wins tradition.
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temperature: -30
with wind chill: -5.5
is that even possible?
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so I read this really great review of Yoper Linux, and decided I wanted to try it out. in case you don't know what's coming, it's a review of my install.. and the short version is that it was quite underwhelming.
i downloaded the single CD (v2.1.0-4), burnt it, and booted it (after backing up my data, of course :) ). i got to pick between a text or vesa installer.. naturally i went with vesa. it went through a bunch of hardware detection stuff, spitting out a few warnings here and there, but nothing serious.
then it mounted a system and dropped me to a command prompt with the instructions "type yoper to install". i figure the command prompt might be useful in case of system recovery.. so it kind of makes sense to have it. i ran yoper, which took me to qtparted, the partitioning utility. this is when i discovered that it doesn't allow me to resize existing ext3 partitions. it can resize ntfs, but not ext3. go figure. so i booted back into windows, ran partition magic and squeezed out 6 GB from my existing linux /home partition. reboot back to the CD. back to qtparted, create the swap, root, and home partitions, select them. it allowed me to choose which filesystem i wanted, so i picked the default selection (reiserfs). it ran fdisk to set up the filesystem journals, etc.. i had to confirm a few "YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR DATA ON /dev/hd8"-type messages.
then it went to the "install" screen, which is just a message telling me to wait 5-15 minutes. and to be patient. so i waited.. eventually it finished and asked me to set up the bootloader. grub was experimental, so i went with lilo.. it then asked me if i wanted to install lilo on /dev/hda. the two options: yes, which i knew would clobber my existing lilo and make my other partitions non-bootable, or no, which would, as it said, make yoper non-bootable. tough choice.. i went with yes since i can always restore my other lilo from the rescue disk.
then it configured alsa (sound) and the timezone. it then said that it would reboot and told me to pop the cd out of the drive after it rebooted (makes sense), but then it dropped me to a command prompt with the instructions "type exit + enter + reboot + enter". why on earth could they not have automated this step? having the user manually type in the reboot command seems ridiculous. again, it does give you a command prompt if to tinker with if you need to, but it seems quite unnecessary at this point.
anyway, i rebooted. it took quite a while on the first boot-up, re-detecting my hardware and whatnot, then ran SaX2 to configure my display. at the time iit was running at 640x480x65536, so i bumped it up to 1024x768x32m and enabled 3d acceleration. it said that it would use the settings the next time it started. that was kind of odd, since usually the changes take place right away, but i restarted X anyway. guess what.. the changes did not take place. i even rebooted the machine, but no luck. at least it auto-detected the network, so i'm typing this on a misaligned 640x480 screen before i wipe yoper off my machine.
despite the wackiness with the X server, it is definitely a nice-looking KDE-centric distro. they've customized a lot of the apps so they fit in with the general look and feel. icons, cursors, etc. are all nicely done. it feels fast and responsive, even with stuff like transparency enabled - this probably has to do with the fact that the kernel was specifically optimized and compiled for 686 architectures rather than the 486 or 386 most other distros come with. (not a problem with mandrake since it has multiple kernels and picks the most appropriate - i've now installed mandrake 10.0 on 5+ machines, and have yet to see the same default kernel on any two machines).
another thing the review mentioned was that it comes with apt-get and synaptic and all the other cool debian install mechanisms. well, i tried them out and i'm not that impressed. mandrake's rpm managers (despite being buried deep in the kicker menu) can hold their own against it. dependency handling and all that is pretty much taken care of automatically.
overall, it wasn't too bad, but there is a LOT of room for improvement. i think the main problem is that they need to figure out who they're targetting - a newbie or a pro. the install seems to go for pro, since it's mostly text interfaces and it drops you to a command prompt a couple of times. on the other hand, the GUI integration with KDE and all the effort put in the UI in general seems like they're targetting a newbie (or more specifically, windows converts). looks like i'll be sticking with my mandrake for now.
anyway, back to lemmings..
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so for the se382 assignment, we get to program lemmings! now that's a fun assignment.
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