A Few Thoughts…

I came home tonight to work on HTG things since the prof for Advanced OS has called off class the rest of the week and didn’t have the decency to give us any of the papers to read. I turned the machine on, connected to the network, and then went to check my email. Suddenly, the system freezes - which has never happened on my system (X has frozen, but never the whole system). I reboot, thinking that this is just some new symptom of the hardware.

I am greeted with a kernel panic. Hmm…this doesn’t look right, maybe a new kernel was installed and I missed it. Reboot. Kernel panic. Okay…verging on insanity, another reboot. And another kernel panic. But this time I booted to the “recovery mode” kernel (which really just prints out more info). For some reason it shows no memory! Time for memcheck.

Now, I only have 768MB of RAM in this system - it’s about a 4-year old Inspiron 8500. The memory is on the bottom middle, and gets VERY warm during normal operation, and down-right toasty during heavy usage. Memcheck alost immediately started tossing errors. Sure enough, a bit is dead on one of the chips. Now to figure out which one. I pull larger chip out first and test the 256B DIMM - no errors. This is not going to be fun. I put in the 512MB DIMM and….no boot. No POST screen, just a blinking caps-lock light. Of course, this means that it is definitely dead.

I could put a new DIMM in the thing, but I’ve been looking into replacing it anyway. So now it’s time to start looking….

TurboTax ROCKS! I started tonight, and with a few exceptions for business papers that I didn’t have with me, I’m done! And with a nice return too. I think it will finally be time to upgrade my laptop! Now…what to get….

A more precise title would be 7 down, 23 to go - referring to credit hours, not actual classes. But it’s close! Anyway, Compiler Theory (and lab) are now done. Kelly and I got a great score in lab, and the grades aren’t in for lecture yet, but I felt pretty good about the final. I can honestly say that compilers aren’t my thing. I learned a lot about them, and I think about different things when coding now that I know more about what is going on when I run the compiler - but we didn’t get to code gen or optimizations, so I can’t say I have the full scope of what’s happening - I have to take advanced compiler for that, and I’ll think about that one later.

For next quarter though, it’s time for ECES 847 - Advanced Operating Systems. I went to look up the textbook information tonight, and we’re just going to be referencing “Selected papers from conferences and journals.” Hint #1 that this will be a different class than I’m used to. Hint #2 - no tests, just a midterm project and a final project or research paper or 8-12 pages. I’m not sure if I should be worried or excited about the prospects of no tests! It will be interesting to say the least. I’m definitely looking forward to the topics of the class.

I’ll probably post more about the class once it actually starts - for now though, it’s spring break….which for me pretty much means catching up on all the things I’ve been putting off around the house for the past 3+ months. There are lots of papers to be filed, lots of cleaning (I think I may need to borrow a vacuum :), and general relaxification to be had. I will be speaking on Wednesday to the Look to Clermont class from the Clermont 20/20 organization at the former SDRC headquarters, which is now UGS, but will soon be changing names again (for the 3rd time in 7 years).

There’s a couple more server migrations for web hosting to get everyone onto the new servers. We’re up to about 8 clients now, and I have 2 more to move and a couple of prospects for new clients. HTG has a few jobs on the possible horizon, including one which would definitely give us a start we could not have imagined even 6 months ago. I can’t say much about it yet since we aren’t in any sort of contract to do the work yet, and I wouldn’t want to be giving away job prospects to others now! Let’s just say that it would hold us over for a while - and we could potentially hire a person or two to work part-time to get us to the delivery date so we don’t kill ourselves.

Well, that’s all for now - time for bed for me, there’s puppets and Sunday School in the morning. And I’ll actually be able to get to a Sunday Evening service for the first time in a while!