Week Two

Date: 2002-04-05 16:52:21

I guess this means that spring quarter is now 20% over, even though it alternately feels like it's been going on for ever and it just started.

This quarter I'm taking parallel and distributed computing, with Dr. Aaby, VLSI with Dr. Aamodt (for lab, we'll design an ASIC to be fabricated, if we're confident enough that it works), and networking, again with Dr. Aaby. I brought TCP/IP Illustrated to class a few times and made sure Dr. Aaby got everything right that he was scribbling on the board. My senior project marches on; I'm nearly done with a complete TCP/IP implementation. I have a working implementation and a laughable -- but working -- http server. I started targeting the DSP this week and ran into an interesting issue: the DSP can access only sixteen-bit words, not eight-bit characters within them. So I'm going to have to tweak my code, which expects byte addressing. This creates an interesting design consideration: do I pack two bytes into one 16-bit word, which will take more effort on at least one end of my stack (and possibly both), or expand my integers to cover two words? I'm leaning to the former solution, but I need to consult with the guy who may be using my code when I'm done with it. Unfortunately, he hasn't yet responded to my query about his progress with Ethernet on the DSP.

Seminar (which means I show up once a week -- but not until the end of April -- to an hour-long session which will feature my project completion speech eventually) and rock climbing round out my quarter. Bethany's in my rock climbing class, which is fun. We headed to the wall last night and belayed each other while we tried to get to the top. Neither of us succeeded, but Bethany's friend Jody, who hadn't rock climbed before, made it to the top. I'm not quite brave enough to try jumping for hand-holds, even though I know Bethany can successfully belay me, thanks to the magic of the pole at the top of the wall around which the belay rope is looped. (I remember using a fun-filled equation to figure out the tension in each end of the rope based on the friction around a cylinder back in mechanics.)

Rage has undergone a few changes in the past week. By Wednesday I figured out that DNS was horribly broken, because the primary nameserver on the domain was the cobalt that sits on the same rack as Rage, which knew nothing about the domain. I figured out how to set up a slave domain, so now the cobalt (whose primary purpose is to run the epic web-hosting company Buildmeasite) gets its gets its updates from Rage, which I think fixed that problem. I moved everyone's home directories from their old location, on the hard drive that formerly existed in Core (which was replaced by Rage two years ago), to the larger Rage drive. The idea is that within the next month, Rage will get a much smaller case (1U is the hope; the current case is 4U, which costs entirely too much), so one hard drive was much better than two. This took place early Thursday morning, and I am unaware of any issues related to it. Next up was moving the mostly-deprecated domain x13.com from Rage to the cobalt, which occurred this morning. The hostname rage.x13.com is now deprecated; rage.festing.org is the officially-approved hostname. Mail may have bounced for an hour or two while I figured out DNS issues and tried to comprehend why the cobalt had figured out the A record for rage.festing.org but not the updated MX record for festing.org. I believe everything has been fixed; please let me know if anything breaks.