Staff Letters: Phil

...Master of Puppets is pulling your strings...

You know what I did for Halloween? Studied. ::sigh::

So short list of accomplishments for the month:
For Microprocessor Design (EE457)
Design the control unit for a MIPS procesor.
Remake huge portions of the Data Path Unit of a MIPS processor.
Take a midterm, that was really hard, and think I did well.
Do a 10 hour lab.
Do a (seperate) 37 page lab.
For Writing 340
Write a paper
For Artificial Intelligence (CS460)
Write Tic Tac Toe Artificial Intelligence (or was that last month? I can't recall).
For Southern California Linux Expo
Various Modifications to credit card processing
Script for nightly sales summaries parsed in odd ways through tons of files
Setup, plan, man, and various stuff
Personally:
Switch main desktop to Linux

So that's the short of it. Yes, my main desktop is Debian Linux. I was worried about switching my work day from 40% Linux to 90% Linux, but it's turned out to make my day about 30% more efficient. There's been a few snags, but that's to be expected.

SCALE went well. It was today. I just want to say that Robert Love and Patrick Mochel are VERY cool people. They're both Linux kernel developers who gave talks at SCALE, and they're both really down to earth cool people. I got to talk to Robert a lot more than Patrick, and that was definitely a privilege.

I have the LISA conference this coming week. That will be fun. I am presenting a paper I co-authored. The problem is finding the time to figure out what to say!!! Oh well, we'll work it out. My paper will be available on the net as soon as I get back from LISA.

I'll be posting a webpage one year about my switch to Linux if I get around to it before I forget it all. It was an interesting move, and I learned a lot. Definitely a superior OS, even on the desktop. And the 2.6 series kernel from what I learned about it today is going to blow everyone out of the water.

So if I learned one thing this month it was that I spread myself way too thin.

Warning: Technical content follows in this paragraph. My software, IPTState, nearly got kicked out of Debian because there wwas a memleak in ncurses which my software uses and everyone thought the memleak was in iptstate. Special thanks to Steve Augart for stepping up to my call for volunteers and finally proving the bug was in ncurses with solid evidence and saving my hide.

Well I need sleep. Bad. Good night.
Phil

GOOD

Going to LISA
SCALE turning out well

BAD

School
No sleep

MOVIES

Sneakers
Donny Darko

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