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

I feel like I should be happier during my break… but I’m really not. Home is stressful, buying gifts was financially stressful today, and seeing my marks this evening was just icing on the cake for terribleness. Sighh. I’m so screwed for money in the coming months, it’s not even funny. I know my debt is not even that crazy right now opposed to other people, but I just feel so crappy about it. I feel like a failure for not being able to pay for school myself. Not really my fault though, as it costs a lot.

This coming school term will probably be a lot of fun, but I need to work really hard too. I guess that will be my ‘new year resolution’.

This is just one big complainy post now. :\

The end of my term is going well compared to the beginning/middle. I’m improving on most of my important assignments. The courses that aren’t as imperative are probably suffering a bit more though. Most important is definitely CS240 and CS246, though. CS245 is even more of a mindfuck now, and MATH239 is getting weirder. I’m sure if I spent some time reading over notes a million times with those two, I’d understand eventually.

I just really can’t wait for the holidays… I haven’t actually had a solid week off doing anything I wanted since last Christmas. Last Christmas. I need to catch up on sleep and do nothing for a while.

I managed to sign myself up for more volunteer work today. I already have the profQUOTES database thing I haven’t finished yet (since the profQUOTES books were printed so finishing the script wasn’t very important anymore… the books were awesome though!) and this very website is also suffering. Anyways, the orientation committee is starting to plan Fall 2010 orientation already, and Maria is a FOC so I felt the need to get involved. I offered to do the website and some other back-end stuff that involves collecting information from the students who want to be leaders/organizers. The previous orientation used Google spreadsheets and email. You perhaps understand how that could get disorganized quickly. Spreadsheets had no error checking, no authentication, and no way to guard against duplicates. Emails were great for announcements though. What I proposed was a more centralized location for all these forms we need to fill out. A database would store the information, and the FOC/organizers could just select their data/filters.

A small hurdle to get over: The guy I’m working with hates PHP and uses Perl. He told me today that it was because he’s seen some horrible PHP code. It’s true, it’s very possible to write horrible code and have it work. As with any language this is possible. However, PHP is a bit different as you can embed HTML/CSS/whatever in it. So this can turn into a clusterfuck of language in one file. It’s good to separate out into classes/functional files, and simply call your functions within your ‘pure’ HTML files.

A new-ish concept for school so far: working in partners for a project. I know this is coming for OS next term, but it just makes the end of this term a bit hectic. There wasn’t anyone I knew in the class who didn’t have a partner already, so I asked the girl who I usually sit next to (but don’t talk to) to work with me. This should be interesting :) I think it’s better I’m working with someone I don’t know. OS will be with someone I know (hopefully?).

I’ve been using Windows 7 so long (because it’s awesome!) that I really miss my linux. Using linux is also more ‘natural’ and easier for me to do constructive things like programming. Things like git/compiling/http-servers feel… closer to me I guess? There’s too much stuff in windows I need to do to get at a working setup for development (for me anyways). I should probably start using an IDE at some point.. but I find them just too clunky. I downloaded NetBeans about an hour ago, but I dislike it already. Just a text editor is good enough for me (but clearly there are times in the future where this won’t be sufficient…)

Final note: Congratulations Jem on her new baby girl :)

It’s been a month now of the school term. I’ve had (I think) 5 total assignments now. I definitely didn’t start those early either. I’m supposed to do some volunteer work that was started in bloody May that I still haven’t done. Sighhh I’m a waste of space.

School is going well so far. The math class I’m in is a bit over my head, but I think it’s getting better. It could be because the prof barely understands what he’s writing on the board himself. Fail. The three other classes I’m taking are all computer science classes. They are of… varying awesomeness. One is a heavy programming course, one a theory on data structures and run-time analysis, and the other logic course. All three profs have their many faults. The best prof is the one that doesn’t know anything beside the slides he’s reading off of, the other two can barely speak English. The data structures prof pronounces words like ‘complexity’ as ‘compressity’ and ‘graph’ as ‘gwaff’.

On the plus side: I’m going to the gym to lift weights with a bunch of big guys. They’re not that massive I guess, but they can lift a bunch of weight so therefore big in comparison to me. I’m mostly the only girl in the weight gym when we go. I think my total for bench press, squats, and dead lift is around 300lbs now. I feel more rigid and stronger too; I can actually see my biceps!

There were other big things… I think. Every time something cool happens I say to myself: Yeah I’ll go blog about that! It doesn’t happen of course. If this blog starts getting updated once a week, assume it’s someone impersonating me.

I’m totally addicted to the newish Facebook app – Café World. The name is a little lame (‘World’? ohplease). You basically have your little café, and make meals. Random bots and AI-controlled friends of yours walk in and stuff their faces full of your stuff you just made. The game is slow compared to Farmville — it doesn’t seem well balanced at the moment. It seems to take a long time to earn the currency, yet decorations are pretty expensive. Oh! Here’s something exciting: The company that made these games (Farmville, Mafia Wars, Café World), Zynga, is coming to U Waterloo to give an information session for co-op students applying for jobs. I’ll definitely be going, and asking questions about why their flash optimization seems to suck. It chews up way too much CPU for this stuff.

That’s it for now, I’ll just continue staying up all night now. I want to get some assignment stuff done before going home for the weekend. The biggest downside is that it’s so cold as I’m not warm in bed… :(