A Few Thoughts…

I think working at Xetron has spoiled me some. Sure, if you talk to me I’ll complain from time-to-time about the political issues in the company, but that’s probably present in all companies. What I mean, is that the pace of the work, and the expectation for picking up new material quickly has really pushed me to the point where classes like the one I’m at are really only useful for the materials which are given to us.

Since I’ve done some device driver work (very little, but some) before, I knew a little bit about the topic which I was coming into. Apparently, the little work I had done was at a large enough scale to cover a lot of the topics I didn’t already know from my architecture, compiler, and OS classes from grad school. So today I find myself sitting in the class thinking mostly about the work that is piling up back at work.

Timing of this trip has turned out to be less than optimal as I now have a rapidly approaching deadline to hit back home – woohoo for overtime I guess. I have one more trip out this direction (though for a much shorter period of time), and school starting before the deadline, not to mention 2/3 (of my 3 person team) will be gone for one of the weeks as well. So, we’ll see how quickly we can get things done I suppose

In other news, the presentation of the material in this class is somewhat less than what I expected. The book we were given is nice, though I would like an index for quicker searching. The materials the presenter is using doesn’t match our book however (he’s the author of the book, and so teaches from his “beta” copy), and is in exactly the same docbook-eque format. Now, I’m all for using some format like docbook for books (go figure), but for a presentation? He’s constantly scrolling around the screen, which after 4 days is kinda making me sick – and I can’t directly follow along with the book because, as I mentioned, it’s not exactly the same – though a lot of it is.

At least do what a lot of my professors have done – make landscape pdf pages of what you want to show, then go full screen and use the page up/down do move through the content! It’s much more presentable and can still be generated automatically from the source (not sure about docbook, but certainly from LaTeX). The other things that’s bugged me is the out-of-order presentation of the material. We’ve been jumping around to different chapters, making it hard to get an idea of what builds on what (if at all), and where we’re at in the progress of the course. Not a huge deal, just something my engineering brain doesn’t like to deal with. Anyway, if this is par for a RedHat course, I won’t be finding myself at another one anytime soon.

I’ve had the chance over the past few days to have more access to the internet than normal – a lot more access. I’ve become very used to only getting on the internet for a few minutes a day while at work (unless I’m researching something), and then to check my email and things at home (which doesn’t take very long).

Currently, I’m in Baltimore at a device driver training class. The class for the most part is interesting, some material I already knew from the little device driver work I’ve done. After two days I certainly feel more comfortable digging around in kernel code, but the classes seem very long to me. Part of this can probably be attributed to the fact that I don’t know anyone else in the class. Anyway, the lack of discussion on my part leaves me with time, staring at a computer with an internet connection. After about 20 minutes total during the day to ready the news, I’ve got nothing else to do. And just like in high school, the labs don’t really appeal to me, since I can’t find much practical use for most of them in my daily activities.

Anyway, this break is almost over, and we start discussing race conditions and synchronization methods – a topic which I have fairly extensive experience with, despite most of my professors saying that most people don’t do concurrent programming (and almost no one does them correctly). There will be some new things – spinlocks , and the kernel lock and such, which should be interesting, but I think I could probably get most of it from the book. Oh well – maybe next time I can get someone to come to the training with me…