a little ninja

Cats, mice, noms, threads, locks,
Arrange, coordinate, debug,
Op'ratin' Systems!

I'm having a fair amount of fun with the OS class now that Nate and I are almost done with the first assignment.  Synchronizing data is a kind of interesting problem.  The assignments that we had for this week were to implement locks, CVs, and semaphores (which are three ways to protect shared data in multithreaded environments), and to code a problem related to Harry Potter (the new book's come out!  there are 2 copies of each book and 2 librarians and 30 readers who each want to read some subset of the books) and one related to cats and mice (the cats and mice are pseudo-friends: they share 2 food dishes, but only one species can eat at the set of dishes at a time; the cats will eat the mice if a cat and mouse try to eat at the same time).  There's just one issue related to even and odd cats for the second problem that we'll probably iron out this afterlunch.

I was excited yesterday when Chas asked me to set up the wireless on his little Linux box.  It's running Arch, which is a Linux distro that I've never dealt with before.  Just in case you ever find yourself setting up wireless on one of those things, I found their wiki about it very useful.

Coming soon: the GRE!  I registered this morning.  Eep.