July 30, 2010 — Comments Closed
From two entries ago (so still on this page…):
Come summer though, I’ll probably do something. I keep planning a lot of things to do, but never do them (story of my life). [March 14, 2010]
Sure, like that really happened. Wishful thinking as always. [Insert meta-ing about meta posts here.]
It is now July, and I haven’t done much aside from my fourth co-op term (done this item Sept. 3rd) and the Math Orientation website. John and I visited each other a lot, and I went to his cottage last weekend. He is there now, while I am studying for STAT231 (BS231) — lucky him! I also took another Japanese course this term, and already had the exam. Two courses and co-op — never again.
I remember back in high school, the summers I would just waste away doing nothing. I think all I did was develop random useless scripts on the computer and play RO. I used to stay up until 5-6am, go to bed, and then wake up in the early evening to resume what I was doing before. What a waste! This summer, I am working full-time, on the computer doing side projects/websites, and playing RO again. That is mostly just the weekdays, too. Weekends usually have consisted of John coming down (from Toronto) or me going up via Greyhound. There (or here) we spend our time lying around doing nothing at all.
Such contrast from the high school summers.
It’s a bit depressing that I will never have a high school summer again, as I will never have a summer where I won’t be in school still or working full-time. The only time I can imagine having a ‘free’ summer like that is when I am very pregnant/having small children. That won’t be for a long while though :)
Awesomely enough, my summer has also been filled with Pokemon. I think I have also progressed from a fan to avid fan.
From the beginning of the Orientation week planning, I suggest Pokemon because it’s awesome — it made it to being the theme. I am the webmaster for the website, so lots of Pokemon for me there. Designing/developing that hackery was/is fun. Check out the glory. A lot of the hours spent aren’t even visible to the user, sadly. The secret special FOC pages are what I spent most of the time on. There the four FOC can view/edit the applicants’/leaders’ information. Not exactly difficult with PHP/MySQL, but it takes more time for error handling/data checking when not just writing things for myself. A couple forms and things from the main website that the leaders/applicants used also took some time as well. Frankly I’m surprised no one from the CSC or elsewhere has attempted to break/hijack the entire thing. Everyone has generally been nice — only a few spams and stupid things.
In addition to that, I just bought Pokemon SoulSilver. I previously… acquired… the ROM image from the vastness of the Internet and placed it on my… piece of DRAM that magically allows games to be played on the DS… but the game kept freezing and once erased my save file. After 5+ times of restarting the game, I just decided to buy the thing. First time I bought a DS game. I was so excited to learn that it came with a little pedometer thing — the PokeWalker. Sounds really lame, but you can put a Pokemon from the DS game ‘on’ it, and take it for a ‘walk’. I thought it was just steps => EXP, but you can apparently play little item/Pokemon games on it. It has a little concept of currency which you can trade for the ability to play a little game to get an item, or play a little game to find a Pokemon and fight/capture it. It reminds me of those old Nanos and Tamagotchis. I’m pretty impressed, I must say.
The graphics of the DS game are super hot, too. :D
April 4, 2010 — Comments Closed
The last couple days were OS assignment3-filled. My group and I did the bulk of our virtual memory assignment over the weekend. I feel like interrupts were turned off and the only thread that was allowed to run was “do OS”. My sleep schedule was also like: 6am-10am on Friday morning, 4am-9am this morning.
It was a good assignment, but I think the system calls one (A2) was better. A2 was also easier to split up amongst a group of people. For A3, we needed to implement the physical memory manager, on demand page loading, and TLB replacement algorithms.
One of my major parts was the TLB replacement and it was pretty interesting. Since our TLB is a software-based one, you could modify your TLB to do whatever you wanted. I could have emulated ‘use bits’ or kept a reference count of some sort. However, something I made sure to keep in mind the whole time was that a TLB is supposed to be fast. This is the purpose of the TLB. So if the replacement algorithm takes a long time to decide or uses more TLB writes to store reference counts or whatever, it’s approaching the point of not being worth it. Instead I chose to just do a bunch of TLB reads to decide which entry to evict. I played on the fact that code/data is usually loaded sequentially in memory. I basically chose a random pivot entry, and compared the ‘distance’ in virtual memory between the pivot and the other entries. As the number of sequential pages increases in the TLB, I’ll also have a higher chance of choosing a pivot that has a lot of ‘close’ entries around it already. I then pick the entry ‘furthest’ away for eviction.
At the time this made sense to me, and even now it does, but I still get the feeling someone will be like “this is stupid because ___” and I’ll go “damn…” and cry on the inside. There are obviously better things out there, but this is already a slow software TLB so making it slower sucks.
Now I can resurface, resume my life, and do my last assignment. Then I start studying for finals.
It’s Easter today as well — I have a chocolate bunny to eat :D
March 14, 2010 — Comments Closed
Super behind in a lot of things, this included obviously. Come summer though, I’ll probably do something. I keep planning a lot of things to do, but never do them (story of my life).
School clearly keeps getting more challenging each time, and unfortunately I’m not nearly motivated enough to go meet it. This term, however, my operating system’s course is the only thing I’m really interested in (even Japanese is losing my interest). It’s so fun. We just had our ‘implement system calls’ assignment, and it was awesome. A really small subset of system calls, but fun anyways. We have groups for it too, and I’m with my roommate and her boyfriend (and friend of mine). Super fun. (and I’m a huge nerd.)
Today I discovered something cool while visiting some websites I hadn’t for a while (whilst procrastinating on homework of course). I know CSS2 and even CSS3 has been around for a while, but I’m really behind on that stuff too.
With the example below, things like sIFR are going to die for sure (and probably already have):
@font-face {
font-family: "FONT";
src: url(FONT.ttf) format("TYPE");
}
h1 { font-family: "FONT", sans-serif }
This basically will load the font specified onto your viewers’ computer, then replace the font as required in the load[ing/ed] page. With Chrome, this seems to be extremely flawless and happens in an instant. When I visited the person’s page, I thought the text was an image. However, a quick test of highlighting it told me it was not. Then I looked at the source, and saw this.
Firefox, on the other hand, took about half a second for it to replace the text. Not a problem, but people will notice. Especially if you user is downloading something else, or the font is just a big file, it will take a second or so to load. This is a lot of time for a user while viewing a website.
More information about this process here (alistapart.com)
So that’s pretty exciting, and motivates me a little bit to make a new design for my blog (which I barely update anyways). I guess I could bore anyone who comes here and talk about operating systems though, because I love to talk about it. :D
Also: Happy March. School ends so soon.. what a quick term D:
