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12/9/02 -
Haha... we made Crime & Incident in the Tartan! It's the second entry on this page. This is in reference to my entry from 11/24.
12/8/02, 1:00am -
My apartment has turned into an Asian hostel. Right now there are 5 Asians sleeping there. One is asleep on my roommate's keyboard, a couple is asleep together on the couch, and my roommate and his girlfriend are asleep on his bed in our bedroom.
Yes, amazing huh? It's nice to know they think they can just camp out there. Sure, sure, free housing for all. Hell, even the bums off the street can come in and sleep in our apartment, no problem.
I'm in the Tartan office now, since I have to finish scitech.
I think I should lead a raid on the Asian hostel. I should dress in black leather and take my Rosewood Tai chi sword off the wall and start yelling crazy noises in strange tongues. Yeah, that might work. ;)
12/5/02 -
The filesystem is FINISHED! It was a grueling four and a half weeks, and I'm so relieved it's over. It was more work than the kernel - it seemed to take much longer, even though it was the same amount of total code - 5000 lines.
It was especially intense the week before Thanksgiving when Terrence and I did an all nighter and several nights up till 4 or 5am. OS has forced me to neglect my body so much this semester. I have lost sleep, 80% of my exercise time, and have consumed lots of junk. But I don't regret it, I'll just have to make up for it next semester. :) I kept a list of everything I ate and drank during work on the filesystem:
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11/28/02 -
Today I woke up as the sun was setting - 4:00pm! I slept 14 hours last night, and 15 hours the night before. :)
I'm using Thanksgiving break to catch up on the huge sleep deficit that I had accumulated.
I saw Harry Potter 2 last night with my sisters. It was pretty good.
11/24/02, 5:30am -
Today we were having a little birthday party for Nirav on Catman 9th floor, around 1am. We had cake and were a little noisy with laughing and a happy bday song.
Then a CMU Police officer walks in and tells us that the old lady across the hall called the police on us. She also called the police on Zach+Terrence's neighbors last night when they were making noise. The officer said that she calls the police all the time - he said that now she has called in all three of the apartments around her.
It was really funny because the officer was quite nice and didn't seem to care that we were making a little noise - he was probably fed up with the old lady calling all the time. We offered him a piece of cake, and he accepted and stood around talking to us for a bit. :)
11/23/02, 4am -
And it begins...
3 days until the filesystem is due. It's going to be a crazy three days. We're going to be putting in a ton of time on the project, and I also have to study for a philosophy exam. I've been going with 6 or 7 hours of sleep for a couple weeks now, which is less than my body requires as a minimum. The next 3 days will be like 4 to 6 hours a night. I'm going to collapse when I get home for thanksgiving break :) Too bad I still have a lot of homework to do over break.
I went to a French ballet production today in Byham Theater downtown. It was based on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It was my first time to a ballet, and wasn't exactly what I had imagined (probably better), but I liked it. Stravinsky's music was really cool, and there were some cool lighting effects in the first performance. And the movement of all the performers was interesting. The only thing I didn't like was that they bowed too much at the end - they bowed like 30 times (ok, a little exaggeration) - it's like, ok, enough already, we're getting tired of clapping. :)
11/20/02, 2am -
Last week we were told the grades for our kernel. Terrence and I got a 100. Kesden said our kernel was perfect, and that he couldn't break it. That is so awesome that I can not express it in words.
This is the project that I said (on 10/26) might be the most important course project I ever do at CMU. I poured entire weeks of my life into the kernel. It's good to know that it was worth it. :)
I have posted some OS related photos here.
11/18/02, 8:00am -
I'm in the cluster now. I've been here since 12 noon yesterday. That's 20 hours. We did an all-nighter because we have tons of coding left to do and aren't going to make the checkpoint today.
So I don't think I'll go to sleep, I'll just go straight to OS lecture at 10:30. I actually don't really feel tired (the Red Bull may have helped with that), but my brain is fried. I can't think well enough to do much anymore, so I'm going to have to find some way to revive my torpid brain.
11/13/02, 1:15am - Police Blotter
11/13/02, 12:55 pm - An actor named John Davin set off an anti-theft alarm in the Baker Hall Psychology Computer lab. The student turned himself in and was not cited. An officer was dispatched to deactivate the alarm.
Hehe. Yes, I am now on record with CMU Police! I walked over to Baker planning to start work on my Psychology experiment design, which can only be done in the Psych computer lab because that's the only place they have the software. I punched in my keycode to get through the locked outer door. Then I pulled open the cluster door (which is not locked) and a loud blaring siren started going off. Yeah, I rushed out of there pretty quick. :)
I had forgotten that cluster has an alarm after 11 pm or so. They had no signs posted, none that I noticed anyway. That's pretty stupid I think. Do they really think we can get our homework done before 11 pm? Oh, well, at least it got my blood racing. :)
11/11/02, 3:30am -
This semester has been so different from any others. I think it has brought me very close to my limits. And that's great; it's good to know where your limits are. High school was lightyears away from my limits. I suspect that was true for you too, if you also went to a public school.
This upcoming week is going to be crazy. In about a week, our filesystem for OS is supposed to be pretty much completed. Things aren't going too quick so far, and I think the filesystem is going to turn out to be more work than even the kernel. On top of that, I have a Tartan issue to put together, a psychology experiment to design, a philosophy paper to write, and an OS homework assignment to do.
So yeah, it was nice knowing you.
11/9/02 -
Do you like my squirrel? I found him outside Wean. The leaves are from in front of Cyert. The feathering and image fading actually took a pretty long time because I wasn't familiar with how to do it in Gimp. But I'm happy with the end result. I call it "Squirrel On A Bed of Leaves." Very original, huh?
4:11am - I have just witnessed Eric's AIM idle time go from 99:99 to 100:00. That's 100 hours of idle time! He's been away from his computer for over 4 days. That's amazing. I'll probably never again see an aim idle time of 100 hours... so I think that was worth staying up till 4 for. Actually I didn't stay up for that, I just had algo, OS, and philosophy to do.
On a side note, we're out of toilet paper, so I think I'll start using napkins and paper towels. Don't have time to go get more, must work on OS all day. :P
11/4/02 - Philosophical Contemplations
Lately I've found myself getting more and more nostalgic when I think that some of the best days of my life are behind me (the past 2 1/2 years), and that the remaining 1 1/2 best years of my life are quickly flying by.
I have a strong intuition that I'll never again have anything like my college days. I can see myself as an old man of about 32 ;) looking back with poignant nostalgia on the good times I had from 18 to 22.
Sure, there will be good things about leaving college and starting a real working life. But, everyone knows that adults have less fun than college students. ;)
The problem is, I can't become a permanent college student either. That would certainly cause a funds problem, and worse, all my friends will eventually move on.
10/31/02 -
Aftermath of the Kernel:
Now that I have finished the largest project I've ever worked on, what have been the effects? Well, Terrence and I spent well over a hundred hours in the cluster over a three week period, with probably 50 hours just in the last four days. Our project came out to be about 4700 lines of code (but that's including white space and comments - it was 3000 lines of just code).
The experience of it was everything I expected OS to be, and more (more meaning more work). Some of my meals were odds and ends because I didn't have time to go for a real dinner. Caffeine and sugar became my two new best buddies.
By the end I felt a desperate need for exercise, sleep, fresh air, and a couple apples.
I got the first three of those today, but the apples will have to wait until tomorrow. :)
10/30/02, 6:30am -
Kernel is done! (yes, my kernel is a turkey, all you grammar freaks)
and my 2000 word philosophy paper on artificial intelligence is finished.
It's getting light out now...
I guess I missed the part of the night where you're supposed to sleep.
Well, 3 hours of sleep before I have to go to OS lecture...
10/29/02, 2am -
Ahhh... kernel is due in 22 hours! Today (which is actually yesterday now), I reviewed and debugged over 4000 lines of code (it came out to 56 pages when printed).
Coding marathons are sort of like running long distance.
At the beginning, you're strong and fast.
But you're not necessarily at your most efficient yet - it takes a little while to "get in the zone."
And then, if you run really long, you start to wear down. The pain numbs your brain and your form may deteriorate. Efficiency drops gradually until eventually you're going much slower than you were at the beginning.
That's what coding is like for me.
I've coded for over 15 hours today. Mentally I feel about the same as I would feel physically after having run a 26 mile race (even though I've never run that long).
10/26/02 -
The kernel is due in 3 days (Tuesday at midnight)!
This may very well be the most important class project I will ever do at CMU.
Therefore, I want to spend every hour of the next three days on making the most stable, correct kernel ever. ;) Unfortunately I also have to do things like eat, and sleep.
10/17/02 -
CMU is a place where you work a lot and are always very busy.
But this semester has brought new meaning to the term busy. "Free time" has also acquired new meaning - it doesn't exist anymore, or is a concept I just laugh at :)
Last semester was very busy for me - I was taking 6 classes. But this semester (even though I'm only taking 4) has blown away last semester. I have much more work than last semester - mostly because of OS.
On particularly busy days, I often have every single minute of the day allocated to some form of work... I take breaks only to allow my brain to recover, or for occassional social activities on the weekends (which I will not cut... I think I have already cut all nonessential activities - and socialness is not nonessential, as some cs majors would claim).
What's worse is that OS often fries my brain - after coding for 8 hours straight, or being stuck on a single bug for 2 hours, my brain stops working correctly.
My IQ drops by about 50 points.
And this is quite a problem because then I can no longer figure out OS. And downtime is very bad; I can't afford even 15 minutes of wasted time. And no, writing this was not 15 minutes of wasted time. It was 12. :)
10/7/02 -
Here's what Terrence (my OS partner) said on his webpage about writing the kernel (which is the core of an operating system and our current project):
"I imagine it is like being God (if you believe in such things); creating something from the nothingness that is the uninitialized computer state except that it takes longer than six days and we don't get to rest on the seventh day :)"
*So* true :)
10/6/02 - Today while returning from getting my hair cut, I stopped at Soldiers & Sailors. They had the musuem open for "Living History Days" which was this weekend. It was actually pretty cool - I got to see lots of rifles, muskets, revolvers, bayonets, machine guns, uniforms, and other military equipment from the past wars (WW1/2, Vietnam, Korea, Civil war).
Then when I went outside after exploring the musuem (for free - no admission charge), they were doing a Civil War reenactment. They had funny tents set up on the lawn and lots of people in old style clothes. They fired the cannons at each other for a while (lots of smoke and noise) and then fired at each other with their rifles.
I took photos.
Oh, and on the way back I saw some old folks picketing against abortion. They were all over 60... of course they don't care if abortion is outlawed. They're way past the time when they would actually need it.
10/1/02 -
Over the weekend, 649 protestors were arrested in Washington D.C. at a peaceful protest of IMF/World Bank policies. This included 21 CMU students.
Over 3700 police officers armed with pepper spray, tear gas, wearing riot gear, and some on horseback, descended upon the 2000 protestors in DC.
They surrounded large groups, refused to allow the protestors to leave, and when the protestors questioned police as to why they were being blockaded and arrested, police did not respond.
The large majority of the protestors were non-violent and had committed no crime. They were not told their rights and were abusively treated during their arrests.
The Tartan featured two awesome photos of CMU students, which came from other papers. Also, read the article on the protest.
One of Mark Egerman on the ground and being restrained by several officers.
Another of Sarah Sandusky facing down two intimidating police officers in riot gear.
Man, I would have *loved* to have been there as a photojournalist just to take pictures. Those photos were the shots of a lifetime.
9/30/02 -
Do you believe that you have free will? Do you have the freedom to make decisions that are not predetermined by any outside factors? In philosophy class today we discussed free will vs determinism. Determinism is the theory that our choices are predetermined by uncontrollable factors, or motives in the words of D'Hollbach.
I believe that we do not have free will. I agree with D'Holbach that all of our actions are determined by motives - either internal or external influences that compel us to follow the action that we do. You might say that you have free will because you have the freedom to choose to throw yourself off a bridge, or down architect's leap in Wean. However, if you were to do this, assuming you're a rational being, you would have done it because you believed it to be in your best interest... perhaps to prove that you have free will (ah, the irony).
Something motivated you to throw yourself off the bridge - your inner feelings, past experiences, or the influences of others (you wanted to prove to them that you had free will).
On the other hand, if you decided not to jump, that would be because you decided it was in your best interest to not do so.In either of these cases you did not make a free decision. You were compelled by your motives to jump or not jump.
However, I'm not yet completely sure that we don't have free will, so I challenge you to convince me otherwise. Or just play devil's advocate.
9/29/02 -
One of the intriguing ideas raised in the movie One Hour Photo, was that no one ever takes pictures of sad people.
We never capture the sad moments in our lives; only the happy ones. Most people only want to remember the happy things, not the bad things.
If an alien race were to find our planet after we have become extinct, they would think we led lives filled with happiness, punctuated only by the occasional violent war.
The main character in the movie, who happened to be a psychopath, wanted to capture the sad moments of people's lives on film. In some ways, I'd like to do the same thing. I'd like to have snapshots of both the best and worst moments of my life. And that doesn't make me a psychopath. :)
I even think it may be more important to capture the sad moments in our lives, because I think we learn more from hardships than from happiness.
You can't appreciate the sweet without the sourer ( - Vanilla Sky).
9/28/02, 2:30am - My brain is now mush. Mush. It has imploded and liquified. It turned to mush about an hour or two before midnight, when the OS proj was due. My thinking abilities were severely hampered and I could not figure anything out. An hour before the deadline I was stumped by a bug. So Kesden (the prof) told me to go run stairs. So I ran up the stairs to the 9th floor, down to the 1st floor, and back up to the 5th. It may have helped a little, but didn't restore my brain enough. Kesden and Justin (a TA) helped figure it out though. We turned in the project, but it had a significant bug that we didn't catch so we're taking a late day and are going to finish it today.
9/27/02, 2:40am -
Doom doom doom. Been working on OS day and night for the last week (and started two weeks ago) but it's still not going to be enough.
Too much to do and not enough time. Only 21 hours and 20 minutes left till the deadline.
9/20/02 -
At the TOC today, I was talking to one of the recruiters at the NVidia booth and he asked me some C questions to test my programming knowledge.
I don't think well on the spot and got an easy question wrong. The question was basically: if you do {int foo = 3; return &foo;} in a function and then use the int* return value of that function in main(), is there any problem with that? I should have said that yes, that won't work because you're referencing a local variable which can be overwritten as soon as you leave the function it's local to.
Of course, as soon as he told me I realized that and realized I had missed a silly question. I told some of my friends about the question later in the day too.
Now, Terrence and I have been trying to find a memory-related bug in our OS code today. After probably 2 hours of trying to track down the bug, I realized that I was storing a pointer to a local structure and trying to use it in a different function. I was doing the very same thing that had been shown wrong by the NVidia recruiter! <insert random thought> Gack!!! I feel stupid.
Those NVidia people were smarter than I thought... They must have known I was going to have this problem and that's why he asked me that question.
<random thought:>The very same breakfast pastry that I was consuming at that very moment.
9/10/02 - Yay! Just finished the shell, our first OS assignment. :)
OS has been taking up all of my time for the past week. The work is so much that sometimes it nearly drives me insane. However, my sanity is kept in check by my insane OS professor. ;) I took that picture. He was charging at me with a 4 by 4. I escaped just in time. :)
8/30/02 - I've finally added a page about my beautiful new laptop, which I have named Artemis.
8/11/02 - I have just returned from a week long family vacation in Cape Cod.
It was lots of fun... we went swimming, on bike rides, go-kart racing, and boating. Photos are up here.
I'm coming back to Pittsburgh on August 20. :) Looking forward to seeing everyone!
7/17/02 - You may be wondering: What is John doing in his spare time this summer?
Well, when I'm not sailing, biking, working, chilling at the beach, or at the gym, I'm working on my new pet project: 3-D Tic Tac Toe! See this page for more info.
7/11/02 - I went sailing yesterday with Kevin, Mark, and Christi. It was a fantastic day for sailing. Clear blue sky with a few clouds, not too hot, and best of all: very strong winds. The wind was about 15 to 20 knots - so it was a fun ride, with big waves and lots of ocean spray. :) I have some pictures up!
7/9/02 - I am now officially a skipper! I got my sailing certification after passing the check ride yesterday. So if you want to go sailing, you have to come visit me in Newport, RI!
7/8/02 - Just got back from a trip to Montreal! It was my first time in another country. Everything there was in French. Check out the pictures.
6/18/02 - "In the last 15 years alone, software defects have wrecked a satellite launch, delayed an airport opening for a year, destroyed a Mars mission, killed four Marines in a helicopter crash, induced a U.S. Navy ship to destroy a civilian airliner, and shut down ambulance systems in London, leading to as many as 30 deaths."
This article in the Technology section of MSNBC, titled "Why software is so bad ..." is essential reading if you're a computer scientist, and even if you're not. It's a very well written and interesting article about the major problems with software design as it currently stands.
5/25/02 - Added a page about my walk/run on Cliff Walk today.
5/23/02 - I'm in Newport, Rhode Island now, working for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. See my Summer page for details and photos (photos of our house, work, sites around Newport, etc - will be updated as I take more photos over the summer).
5/7/02 - *Can't wait until this semester is over.* Must survive one more week...
5/1/02 - Tom Murphy, a PhD student at CMU, is being threatened by AGFA Monotype, a font company, for his program which changes one bit in a font file. This is perfectly legal of course, and is useful for font designers like Tom, but the company is claiming that it is an infringement of the DMCA (check out my DMCA page, back from the old days of Dmitri Sklyarov) and is threatening to sue him. So I am now mirroring his page and program here. Go there for all the interesting email correspondance and to download the program. It will be really cool if we get lots of people to put his program on their website. AGFA Monotype should be seriously embarrassed for doing something so silly. And then they should have to monetarily compensate Tom for wasting his time. See the Slashdot article.
4/22/02 - Carnival is over, but fortunately I got lots of photos to remember it by. See Booth photos, Buggy photos, and Fringe photos!!! Fringe won 2nd place in men's and women's buggy :) C team (the team I was on), came in at a time of 2:22, cutting off 4 seconds from last year's time.
4/17/02 - I have started a page of Carnival photos! Nothing too exciting there yet, but I'll be adding more as Carnival progresses. For those non-CMU people who don't know what Carnival is, check out the CMU Carnival page, and my buggy photos from last year.
4/8/02 - Lots of new photos posted! See the Photo index page for photos from Vermont, where I spent spring break with my family (skiing, rock climbing, Ben & Jerry's!), and lots of photos from the NY Auto Show, which I went to yesterday with my dad. Oh, and by the way, there are *no* McDonald's allowed in Vermont!
3/30/02 - Yay, it is finally spring break! I'm going to Vermont on Monday with my family. We're going for five days and will get to go skiing and do some other cool stuff maybe. But I'll have to survive for FIVE days without a computer! Do you think I can do it? I'm not so sure... Well, it will pretty much prevent me from doing any work. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing though.
3/26/02 - Hey, if you haven't done so yet, check out this week's Tartan! I put a ton of time into SciTech last week so you should check it out :) It's on the web, but I recommend picking up an actual paper cause it has color this week!
3/16/02 - A page of photos added. I've put the photos on my own server because I'm running out of AFS space. So if my computer is off, they will be inaccessible... but my computer is on most of the time.
3/14/02 - More nerdy updates (should be the last one, hehe): My new motherboard arrived yesterday (pictured above and here) so my computer is now back in it's case and is no longer at risk of being shocked by the static electricity I unwittingly generate. And the new motherboard is blue! I bet you wish you had a blue motherboard...
3/10/02 - The picture above is my computer in it's present state... except it's only about 80% my computer... The motherboard is Terrence's because my motherboard is definitively dead. New motherboard should be arriving in a few days.
3/9/02 - NOOOO!!! My computer is broken! I was playing Serious Sam, when suddenly my computer turns off and won't come back on... I suspected the video card so I cleaned it out but it still didn't work... So I tried it in a different computer and it worked. Then I tried the video card from that other computer in my computer and it didn't work. So it may be that the AGP slot is fried... but I don't want to buy a new motherboard... this could put my computer out of commission for several days or even a week - I don't know if I'll be able to survive... Send emergency packages containing motherboards to SMC 1511, PO Box 2888.
3/8/02 - An essential part of developing your college cynicism: go read about corruption in the media industries and in the government (both in one article!).
3/2/02 - I'm 20 today! Yep, two whole decades behind me. This is what you should get me: anything on this page [from Ryan's site]. I'd like one by next week. Thanks. ;)
3/1/02 - Let this be a warning to all you human batteries out there... I touched my speaker's volume control today and a static shock went through my hand into the control - and the speakers stopped working!! I plugged headphones into my soundcard and those didn't work either, so I thought I had fried my sound card. But then I tried switching the card to another slot and it worked. So it's probably just a PCI slot that got fried. Which isn't as bad as losing my speakers or sound card cause I have 3 extra PCI slots (2 now).
2/25/02 - I have decided that Guns N' Roses "November Rain" is possibly the best song in existence. I have a really good 112 MB, 8 minute long version of their music video. :) Thanks Morpheus! I would have bought it to support such a great band, but the music industry is retarded and doesn't offer internet downloads yet. Oh well, they'll be gone eventually... 'Cause nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. ;)
2/22/02 - There's a really funny Newsday article (about some British art award) that mirrors my thoughts on "modern art." I've posted it here and it's also on Newsday. This article should be especially interesting to my friends in England ;) I'm going to work on my artistic masterpiece now... "Dorm Room with Lights Going On and Off and Garbage Too."
2/15/02 - Compare this new website to my old one. The new site is much better, in my humble opinion. :) Let me know if you can think of any improvements though!
2/15/02 - Ta da! New website! Yay! Okay, so it's not that new, just a design/layout change. I've been wanting to get rid of frames for a while but the Andrew servers don't have PHP, which would make it easy. But in a flash of inspiration while in the weight room the other day, I realized that I could just write a Perl script to convert my html files into the correct form. So now I have a nifty script that I use to correctly construct files when I make changes.