Daily Log – 26 June 2008
A quick summary of today's highlights in my life.
- spent some more time finishing off drafts in my blog's database
- my professor didn't respond to my e-mail, so I e-mailed him again
- went out to eat Dim Sum and go shopping with my mom and sister
- rode my bike to the library, but arrived just as they closed, the smog was so bad that I was crying after ten minutes
- my bike kept breaking on the way to the library, discovered that if I switch into any gear higher then 14 while moving faster then a arthritic turtle, my chain pops off the gear
- read
The time is now 7:39pm, I'm going to watch "Last Comic Standing" with my dad and sister and then go to sleep.
A Debian Life
I've had this draft sitting in my database for over a month, and now I think its about time it was revealed.
---Initial Thoughts and Stuff---
I switched to Debian Lenny a few months ago and I think it may be the end to my distro-hopping. In addition to the current stable release, Debian has a testing release called Lenny and an unstable version called Sid. The stable version, which is at the time of this article is Debian Etch 4.0, is (obviously) the stable release and the recommended version for normal usage, the testing version contains packages that have yet to be accepted as stable but are in the process, and the unstable version is the bleeding edge development version.
I installed the unstable version of Debian because I felt that sacrificing a little bit of security and stability was worth it to have slighter newer programs in the repository and a newer kernel. Debian has always had a reputation for being rock-solid and secure, so even the testing version of Debian is quite solid (especially when compared to Windows Vista). I haven't tried out the unstable version but from what I've heard, its quite unstable and really only meant for developers, not really practical for day-to-day use.
To be true, my interest in Linux actually started with Debian several years ago, when I read about Debian in Neil Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line (the rather popular (and long) essay about operating systems and choices). It is because of Stephenson, that even though I've been distro-hopping for quite a long time and have never tried Debian before, that I have always admired Debian for its stability and development process. The Debian team has a tendency to release new versions in about the same time it took Microsoft to release Windows Vista, and its not because the Debian developers are lazy or stupid (not to infer that developers employed by Microsoft are). It is simply because the philosophy of the Debian team has been to release their software when its ready, and not before. It is unlikely that Microsoft will ever adopt such a mentality, since unlike Windows, Debian is open source and therefore, for the most part, free of impossible deadlines that inevitably result in programmers rushing to produce barely working, bug infested, code.
Enlightenment Shots
Some pretty screenshots of my Enlightenment desktop!
Click here to see my photos in higher resolution (and then click the slideshow button near the top)
New Site Design
I began a major rehaul of my blog's visual appearance two days ago, and I've been tweaking it up until now. My new theme is based mostly on Designer-daily's "Gone Fishing" theme. I decided that my old theme, which was another stock theme from the wordpress themes database, was too "light-colored."
Old visitors may notice that my blog is now significantly darker in color, though still blue. Also, my old "Pure" theme was built to accomadate monitors that have a maximum horizontal resoultion of 800px, whereas my current theme is slightly wider then 800px. In the past I have always tried to make my webpages render nicely on older computers. Now of course, I doubt that anyone still has a monitor with 800x600 resolution, and if they do they probably aren't reading my blog.
I made some changes to the stock "Gone Fishing" theme.
- I changed the default font-type to Verdana, which in my opinion is a prettier font (for some reason, on my Linux boot, Helvetica looks like a flock of birds crapped on Times New Roman)
- Changed some font sizes around in the main CSS stylesheet
- Shrank the right sidebar significantly, thus making the main column much wider. Who the hell needs that much space for a side-navigation bar?
- Dumped the default banner which depicted a sketch of a fish's mouth, and replaced it with my own custom banner. I really needed an image in there to spiff things up and I thought the fish was kinda ugly, so I stuck in Tux the Linux penguin.
Keeping the stock theme was out of the question, not because I think its ugly, but because I don't want people looking at my blog and seeing a "canned blog."
Make Me a Syscall
I was working on a assembly language project for my computer science class one night, and was having a devil of a time debugging it. The program was supposed to read data from a file using system calls (syscalls) (and then do some more stuff) but for some reason, my program refused to read data from file. I spent over an hour tracing through my code, trying to find the probably obvious bug. My code around the "bug" looked a little like this:
...
move $a0,$s0
move $a1,$s1
li $v0,14
...
I realize its a little hard to understand out of context, but what happened was that I set up all the registers properly but never actually made a syscall!
College Killed the High School Star
I was fairly smart and successful in high school. Albeit, I wasn't the best in my class, but I was within spitting range. When I was sixteen, I had a really nice internship that payed much more then minimum wage, and when I was seventeen, I had another really nice internship that payed slightly less but offered full medical coverage. I was the president of the Robotics team, vice-president of the Academic Decathlon team, a section leader in the jazz band, and was in so many clubs that I often had to chose between which meeting I would attend.
Now I go to a university that is recognized world wide for its academic excellence, and I'm pretty sure I've gotten dumber. Living up to my blog's name, I'm failing like I never have before.
In high school the lowest grade that I ever received was a B+, but in my past year of college I have managed to get two Cs. My grasp on Ampere's Law is rather tenuous, and my understanding of multivariable vector calculus weaker still. During the school year, I stopped attending church regularly and fell away from God. Unlike in high school, the only group that I'm still active in is marching band. This summer, I was not able to secure a high paying internship so I'll be settling for a minimum wage job and the few bucks I get for managing the marching band website.
Daily Log – 25 June 2008
I'm going to try something new starting today. Every day I'm going write a brief post on anything noteworthy that happened that day, just for the heck of it.
It is currently 4:40pm.
- woke up after sleeping about six hours, for some reason I can't seem to sleep very long anymore, i always wake up at 7am
- flipped through various books, including Ursula K. Le Guin's The Fisherman of the Inland Sea
- worked on the band website and on my new blog design
- found out that I got an "I" (Incomplete) in my computer science, no idea how this could be possible and have e-mailed the professor
- watched some stupid Chinese soap opera with my sister
- planning on going swimming later, and then maybe washing the car
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