Archive for November 12th, 2003

Holy shit! I’m doing my homework… er at least I’m looking at it. I can’t even understand the question, let alone come up with an answer. So, I figure.. fuck it… I’ll Google it. Lo and behold, only 1 hit on the entire internet. The Queen’s Unversity of Belfast, Ireland is the only place that shows up this question. And it’s on their required test for graduation for a degree in engineering. WTF is that all about? Kinda makes me think that this shit is a little bit above the level of a junior int the “School Internet Technology” at Illinois State University. This teacher of ours would make Darth Vader say, “Damn! The Dark Side runs strong in this one!” Oh well. I’m just gonna keep pluggin away at it. I’m gonna try to take as much out of this class as possible, hope for a C, and take it over if I must. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

My Wednesday is gonna be a rough one. I have 2 tests, a quiz, a lab report, and homework all due on Thursday. Looks like I’ll be sleeping existing in the halls of Old Union tomorrow night. Thank –insert diety here– we’ve only got about 2-3 more weeks of class. I don’t know if I could take it any more than that.

On the bright side… I struggled all damn weekend to get the stupid Sparc “emulator” working. I quoted it because it is not truely an emulator. It’s a bastardized, this is how the Sparc register system works, imitation of an emulator. I first attempted to write the damn thing using a class containing an array of integers that represented the registers and a nested class inside that one to represent each window. What a fucking mistake that one was. I was choking on them big ol’ donkey balls. I had pointers pointing at everything from the kitchen sink to the moon. I’d try to put the window on the stack… and I’d get 1 of 2 things back: the right number and shit…. and we was fresh out of the right number. The problem was that since my window was really only an array of pointers to each of the members of the real array, that when I put the addresses on the stack the data values were being written over. So when I restored the window, they were pointing at the correct registers but the correct data was visiting Jimmy Hoffa.

So, Tuesday morning at 8 am… program due at 12:35… I started coding it all over again from scratch. This time I created a doubly linked circular list with each node representing a register. I then simply pointed the current window pointers and the window invalid mask pointers at their respective locations. Then when I needed to put the window on the stack, I simply put the data stored at that location on the stack. It worked like a fucking champ. From scratch to function in less than 3 hours. I spent the rest of the damn time trying to figure out how to make one of those –insert diety here– -forsaken Unix makefiles. What the fuck kind of sick ass joke are those!!!! Lets just say I learned real quick, and that I got the damn thing turned in on time. Oh glory!

I’d have to say that getting that program done was the highlight of my whole week. I really need to get back to my training. I’m getting weak and fat again, and vanirtjones is getting lazy on me. ;-p I need to wup that boy back into shape.

Well… as they always say in the movies…. That is all.