Software Freedom Day and events thereafter
For anyone actually reading my off-off-Broadway blog, I'm going to fill you in on what's happened since my last entry.
Thursday the 18th of September was the ANUsOSUM (haha, anus...) Software Freedom Day. I was actually surprised at the feedback I got and the interest it garnered within the computer science faculty. The day started at 6:30 for me, as I figured I would need to get up a little earlier than I normally do to haul my boxes to uni. Luckily, I found a trolley that had been ditched about a block up, so I put the boxes in there instead:
After I got to uni, I was surprised to see a couple of people waiting around to help me start stuffing the bags full of free software and pen goodness. I still have a box of OpenSolaris CDs waiting to permeate their way across campus.
While stuffing the bags, we gave a couple of CDs away to people who seemed to be interested. One person asked if he could use it to download porn. Who cares about high quality software like OpenOffice and VirtualBox if you don't have porn?</sarcasm> Anyway, that's getting off topic.
We set up in union court, and managed to get rid of the bulk of the software and even a couple of the shirts that I brought
After a couple of hours in the sun (hey it beats software design tutorials any day), we headed over to the Sun sponsered BBQ, where we managed to catch the spill over from the engineering BBQ. I ended up with leftover sausages, three of which are still in my fridge preparing to be served over potatoes tonight :D
Anyway, with SFD in behind me, I could get started on my concurrency assignment, which involved making numbers run around a page searching for food. We had existing infrastructure with which to send messages and move around the labyrinth written in Ada, but were asked to increase its efficiency. I implemented a protected object, onto which the tasks queued and shared maps, providing they were on the same square. I was actually surprised at how well it actually worked, but I realised about an hour after I had submitted it and gone home I should have unmarked all the paths when maps were merged. It would have been much faster :/ Anyway, not much else to say. I managed to trash my Windows bootloader by providing the argument '/dev/sda1' to grub-install. I only fixed it two days ago, now I realise it was a stupid idea, as I've played the Sims for two days straight instead of getting work done. Oh Linux, how I love thee....
Posted at 05:00PM Oct 04, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]