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…
