Thursday, January 26, 2006
Minor Kblog/Kmemes updates
Just a little post to point out the new menu (--->) stuff I've added and moved around. Basically added a little feed of stories I've dugg on digg.com (Great news site and slashdot killer XD) and moved the badges etc to the bottom and the links to my stuff and blogs and crap to the top, as well as adding an email me link and stuff (although really I'd rather you left a comment than emailed) ^_^
Uh... not much else to say really. Hopefully gonna work on a website and a new blog and all sorts of fun things at some point in the future, but the way this term is going I probably won't end up doing that until summer... I have played around with the perl CGI module a bit, check out my random crap here and here :P (easter egg: on the first one try "mp3" XD)
Uh, gotta run to a lecture XD Later everyone, leave comments~ ^_^
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Tough Term...
Sorry for not updating in so long... I swear if Izumi-chan didn't poke me every so often and say "you haven't updated your blog in a while..." I never would XD;; (consider that a shout out :P *huggles*) Anyway, what's been going on lately... Well, mostly university to be honest >_<;;
Firstly, massive (well 5 weeks and 3 people) project on the Linux 2.4 kernel... Basically writing lots and lots and lots of horrible C code that isn't allowed to use any library functions, only kernel functions, and every time we want to test it we have to recompile and reboot off the USB stick which (using KNOPPIX coldplug) takes about 15 minutes each time -_-; Just so you can pity us, here's some of the code we have to write:
Code
void kill_bad_process (struct task_struct * p) {
long oldflags = p->flags;
long oldflags = p->flags;
printk (KERN_INFO "Starting kill_bad_process");
p->counter += ( 5 * HZ );
p->flags |= PF_MEMALLOC | PF_MEMDIE;
if ( ( ( cap_t (p->cap_effective)
& CAP_TO_MASK (CAP_SYS_RAWIO))
&& !(oldflags & PF_MEMDIE) ) ) {
force_sig (SIGTERM, p);
} else {
force_sig (SIGKILL, p);
}
return;
}So yeah, big project... Figuring all that stuff out from the crappy specification we've been given and looking through the other /usr/src/linux/mm/ files trying to trace down where things like p->flags are defined... meh! Other than the project I've had a million and one lectures, some at 9am which is just evil when I live an hour away from uni this year! This term's lectures are Compilers (parsing and source trees and crap), Software Engineering Design II (Human Computer Interface), and then three of Introduction to AI (not as cool as it sounds >_>), Computational Techniques (maths, this is the one i'm not doing), Concurrent Programming (Java and anti-deadlock-graphs and crap), and Architecture II (Processors and Assembly language)... So yeah, bitchy term. For those of you who don't know Assembly language, here's some examples of that (mainly cos that code box above looks cool and I want another XD):
Code
matrix_mult:
push ebp
mov ebp, esp
push eax
push ebx
push ecx
push edx
push esi
push edi
mov eax, ebp
add eax, 10
mov esi, [eax]
mov eax, [esi]
So yeah... tough term >_<;;;
On a more positive front... I sort of bought a laptop XD; Should be arriving soon, and it's a lovely 13" Sony VAIO... For a long time I was in love with the 10.6" one and now I can't decide whether the 13" one will be bigger than I'm expecting... I want a nice small laptop I can put in my bag and carry everywhere, and the one I got should hopefully be exactly that... And if I decide it's too big I suppose I can always put it back on eBay and buy a 10.6" one later ^_^;
The other positive thing (yes, there are only two -_-) is that tomorrow I'm gonna go to the Gildpact Magic: The Gathering prerelease... The last one I went to was Invasion in September 2000 and I haven't played much since 2001/2002 so it's definitely gonna be great to play again ^_^
Uh, not much else to say really... hope you've enjoyed my nice long entry with random code entries and rantings ^_^; じゃねみなさん〜
Monday, January 02, 2006
Long Overdue Post
Finally an update about me going home for Christmas... Which is ironic because I'm now back in London :P Sorry it took me so long, I dunno what it was about being home but I just wasn't in the mood to write anything... Maybe later on in this post it'll become apparent why, I dunno what I'm gonna write yet, let's see :P
Well I wen't home two weeks ago, was pretty nervous about it since there was some sucky stuff going on and my time at home last Christmas wasn't great really (is anybody's first Christmas home after their first term of uni good?) so yeah... But actually it was really really nice to be home. That's my excuse for not writing anything in the first few days of being home, it was too nice being home :)
Then of course I got my hard drives... Mmmm, Christmas presents. I got two 400GB hard disks, installed them, and set about installing Windows XP and Gentoo Linux... Give me a moment to rant about Gentoo... Gentoo is just amazing, with Slackware (my old distro) there were so many problems that I never got around to doing half the things I wanted to, but with Gentoo setting things up is just so much more intuitive, installing everything (fluxbox, xmms, opera, gaim, etc) that I normally use was just a matter of a few 'emerge' commands, and once I got that done I was free to get all sorts of things working at last... ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) means sound works in flash, including on Google Video) and I even got Japanese Input working at last! わい〜 すごいですね？ ^___^ Just love it so much! Back to the hard drive stuff... Here's some info for ya:
kaoru@localhost /home/kaoru $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 46G 11G 34G 24% /
udev 442M 192K 442M 1% /dev
/dev/hda6 46G 33M 44G 1% /home
/dev/hda7 182G 86G 87G 50% /home/kaoru
/dev/hda1 49G 4.8G 45G 10% /mnt/windows
/dev/hdb1 367G 343G 5.3G 99% /mnt/media
shm 442M 0 442M 0% /dev/shm
400GB -> 367GB when formatted in ext3, ouch -_-; And yeah it's full... Gotta watch some stuff and then burn it to disc :P
Aaanyway, enough going on about that... Christmas was pretty good, I didn't get much but had a nice roast beef dinner and a couple of great Gameboy Advance games, Gunstar Future Heroes (similar to the original, and therefore amazing) and Puyo Pop Fever (yay Sonic Team) which are both pretty damn addictive and very fun... So there goes my lectures this term XD
Now to write out (for the second time, but only one person can read where I wrote that so :P) why I didn't write a blog entry after Christmas... I was really busy. Which is really weird, because I got nothing done... :P I dunno, it's kinda hard to explain, I was lazy and slept all day and chatted online all night, and yet every time I actually wanted to do something (like write here, work on my website, read some O'Reilly Linux Kernel Edition 2, work on my other website, take photos for dA, draw for Izumi and K-Li etc) I was always busy with something. Sorry everyone, I'll try to get some stuff done this week! >_<;;
New Year's Eve/Day was good, went out with James and John, met up with Sean, Dave and Ben, and saw loads of people out :) It was a great night... Not much else to say about that, just happy new year everyone~!! Hope everyone has a good 2006!!
Which does kinda bring me to a point... end of the year obviously makes people think/talk about how the year went... Did anybody have a good 2005?! I don't think anyone did :/
Well I'm done writing, and this post is waaay too long already :P Leave some comments~!
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