School

Trains is going well. mag and I have the beginnings of our kernel going. We can boot, locate another program loaded by Grub, set up the GDT and initialise the data segment, and then successfully call main. We even got our syscall interface sort of going tonight. Baby steps. It's interesting, this kind of stuff, because it's just so fiddly. It feels like a major accomplishment just to jump into another program that prints "Hello world." It's kind of humbling.. you really get to appreciate all the work a modern OS does. Of course, it's also the kind of thing that you generally only figure out once, and then it works.

Also, I now truly understand what people mean when they say the x86 ISA is awful. It's really powerful, but it just feels so cobbled together. There's almost no pattern to it at all.

Thankfully, my other courses are all easy :)

Life

I have a vitamin B12 deficiency, which is why I've been feeling tired and unmotivated lately, according to the Health Services doctor. So I'm probably getting some test thingy done to see whether it's an absorption problem, because the doctor tells me my diet looks alright (could be better, but it's not a disaster). Both my sister and my dad have B12 absorption problems, so that seems likely. But they don't just start giving you shots outright, before confirming that it isn't a diet issue. Fun stuff. Apparently if you do need shots, you need them for life. There's something to look forward to.

Been hanging out a lot with mag and, to a somewhat lesser extent, drheld, since I work with mag a lot and drheld lives right across the hall. They're fun guys.

Applied to a boatload of jobs using that piece of trash called JobMine. They finally fixed the bug that caused you to have to click on 18 things before you get to the only usable menu, though! Amazing! Anyway, I have an interview with CORE Digital next week, and that's 1 for 1 so far (i.e. all my other applications are still up in the air). Went to an info session for Amazon the other night, they sound pretty interesting. But they broke the cardinal rule of info sessions: they ran out of food! Oh, other interesting note: mag and I ran into ilguiz at the Amazon session, who I had never met before.

And Waterloo sucks. For all those who didn't know. So stop posting pictures of Montréal on your blogs, all you PlaNit people! It's bad enough that I'm here; the last thing you have to do is remind how much Montréal kicks ass. Sheesh!

October 04, 2004 (link)

Life is strange

I offer conclusive proof. I came across this today. I wrote a stupid little article about UNIX 6 years ago when I was in high school. Now it seems osviews.com paid somebody to read it, and you can listen to it online. I had forgotten the whole thing, until I saw my name today while Googling stuff for real time. At least they spelled it correctly.

October 07, 2004 (link)

Montréal

I'm coming to Montréal this weekend. I have 3 interviews on Friday, the last one ending at 3:30, so for a while it was looking like my only options would be to catch the overnight train, or come on Saturday. Then I realised I could fly, and it only ended up costing $80 more than the train. Screw you and your lousy schedule, VIA!

So if any of you PlaNit people will be around and want to hang out, let me know. I realise it's not the best time, since a bunch of you are (ironically) probably coming back here. Hoh well. I refuse to sit in Waterloo on my own all weekend.

Trains

I present you with PortOS, so-named because, uh, I dunno:

Task switchy goodness

As you can see, we've been using Bochs a whole lot while working on this, and it's pretty nice. When the machine halts, Bochs lets you examine the contents of memory and registers, and then continue as if the "hlt" instruction hadn't been there. So you can easily throw breakboints in your code by doing inline asm ("hlt");

Bochs also doesn't eat your cursor, like VMware does. If there's one thing I absolutely despise about VMware, that's it. Tons of other apps that do similar things, like VNC and RDP clients, and Bochs, don't have to eat your cursor. Why does VMware insist on doing it?

I have no idea how Bochs performance compares with VMware. It's probably a lot slower. But people claim it can give you a pretty reasonable Windows 98 setup, so it's probably not that bad.

October 15, 2004 (link)

Trains

Going well. Handed in our 3rd assignment today, which was IPC. A fairly primitive but still useful send/receive/reply mechanism. It was a bit more "down to the wire" than I would have preferred, since I had an insanely busy week, but in the end we handed it in with a whole 30 minutes to spare!

Life

I had a good time in Montréal last weekend, seeing a few of you NITIots and hanging out with my sister. Geaawd I miss that city.

Since then, though, it's been incredibly busy. I had 12 interviews this week, all of which went pretty well. It amazes me, though, how many companies will interview for development positions without asking any technical questions.

In many interviews for fairly senior (for co-op) positions, such as 3D software developer for Alias, the only questions I was asked were HR-type questions. (eg. "Why do you want to work here?" "Tell me about a challenge you faced.") I don't really want to get into the merit (or otherwise) of questions like that, but I do think hiring somebody to do software development and having no idea about their abilities in that area is insane. And just going by résumé and marks is mostly useless. Almost everybody sugar-coats their résumé, and marks are pretty much completely useless; I know lots of extremely bright people who don't have stellar marks.

Anyway, I have a few more interviews next week, including one with Google. Yay!

Going to get pished tomorrow at Oktoberfest. Surprisingly, it's my first time; in first year I was underage and in second year I was too lazy to get tickets for anything. Should be fun, and will constitute a well-needed break.

October 22, 2004 (link)

Yay!

I'm working at Google next term. Schweet!

UltimateSpringRolls

dcoombs, sfllaw, drheld, mag, jlavoie and I went for some UltimateSpringRolls on Tuesday. Well, I suppose mine weren't the precise variety of SpringRolls deemed "Ultimate" since I had the vegeterian variety. They were freaking delicious, though.

Coombs about to dig in to some UltimateSpringRolls

The rest of the meal was also delicious of course. Thanks Niti!

Trains

Since I had 3 midterms this week, I actually (gasp!) did some stuff for some other courses. But yesterday we turned on interrupts and wrote a name server, and there'll be much hacking this weekend.

Matt

The crazy guy is freakin' old today. 22 for crying out loud! We're all going drinking at the Huether tonight, where I will do my best to convince him to have a beer float.

October 29, 2004 (link)

Trains

The third kernel assignment was due Wednesday. Unfortunately, we discovered a bug in our clock server at the last minute. We fixed it and got the assignment in on time, but it was way more rushed than it should have been. Sigh.

The complete kernel is due next Wednesday. We just have the serial server to write before then, which shouldn't be too bad, because all our other stuff seems pretty solid. I want to try to do some groovy tty-like stuff so we can alt-f1, alt-f2 to different terminals. We also seriously need execv. We haven't done it yet mostly because we've both been pretty crazy busy, but having no execv sucks.

Life

Had a pretty boring weekend last week; I mostly just worked on real-time and did some stuff for my other courses.

A while ago, I gave various people accounts on my machine, socrates. Apparently, they like actually use them, as I've been inundated with various sysadmin requests lately. So I also did some of that last weekend, which was ok, because I wanted to fix up a few things anyway. When I bought the box in 2001 it was very expensive and I hoped that my friends would be able to get some use out of it, so I'm glad it's happening. I might actually get a real domain and some real hosting sometime, since residential DSL + flaky free DNS isn't exactly reliable.

Mandatory ranting

It was the last freaking straw with Evolution the other day. Its stupid "I can't talk to your IMAP server" dialogs are seriously pissing me off. They pop up, take focus, and then when you click ok, they just pop up again a few minutes later. Grr! Not to mention hitting escape in an e-mail compose window cancels the message. For a vi user, this is extremely annoying, and I can't seem to find a way to disable it. There are some vi bindings for Evolution, I think, but c'mon. By the time I'm using vi bindings in Evolution, I might as well just use mutt.

I seriously need to check out 2.0; maybe they fixed this stuff (though I doubt it). The network error messages should totally be notification icons. Just put a little mail icon with an exclamation mark in my notification area, and make it go away when you can talk to the server again. Most of the time, I know when my connection is gone; you really don't need to tell me every 5 minutes.

If I ever have time, I'd like to cook up some patches to this effect. In some ways, I really like Evolution, but stuff like this makes it really frustrating to use day to day. I think a lot of other people feel this way too; they try it, and it looks nice, but then stuff like this just makes it too painful to use.

Heh, and there was a funny thread on evolution-hackers the other day about quitting. According to notzed, quitting is "definitely the most complicated process in the entire application." Yeah. We can tell. So complicated, in fact, that it never even happens! Maybe if you didn't spawn 50 processes, each with multiple threads, it wouldn't be so hard!

Ok. I'm done now. Phew.

Software pricing

Came across this blurb at Joel's about groupware pricing. An interesting read, maybe some things to think about regarding ExchangeIt.

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