Sunday, November 20, 2005

Sleeping Barber's Concurrency Problem

Hehe well instead of going to bed I may as well Blog it up a bit, hehe I am really having a good time with this thing. Kinda surprised that I am making time to keep up with this during school... thanks to everyone who is still reading this!

So today was pretty nuts, my parents and my sister Norma and I went out to a bagel place for breakfast again and then I came home and continued working on my CS assignment. It took a long time but since I went to bed at a decent hour and got up at a decent hour (yeeahhh!!) I was done a whole truckload of work by 3pm. That was AWESOME. Then I headed over to the Fine Arts building for "a break" i.e. just working on something creative and artsy for a bit, that was good times. I finished my Fine Arts Assignment and fixed the rendering errors. Then I biked home, did 3 hours more of programming, biked back to school, collected my renders, compiled the renders into a video, posted it online, and then biked home! Then, you guessed it, I've been working on CS since then!! It's about 12:40am now, and I got home from school again around 6:30pm. Wow what a long day!!

Oh I forgot to talk about what I am actually doing for CS. This is my Concurrency class, and I am working on 4 different implementations of the Sleeping Barber's Algorithm. I finished the Semaphore and the Internal Scheduling implementations and it was harder to get the program actually running and compiling than it was to get the main part of it working. I had a silly error and we are using uC++ (a language that my professor wrote), so the compiler didn't quite catch my error. It was a silly mistake, and took me at least 2 hours to track down. uC++ is sweet and has some pretty awesome new control structures that we learned, but it's a bit tough to try to debug concurrent programming when you get a random runtime error and have absolutely no idea why it is happening!! Haha yeah that took a while, but I am pretty happy that I got it all sorted out now.

This makes you very thankful for the kinds of compilers that are usually used in development and how good they are to you - Eclipse I think actually has suggestions in the "Tasks" part of their compiler, like "You probably missed a semi-colon here" or something like that. I think I remember some really awesome compiler errors/warnings that made my job as a programmer much, much easier!!

I did for sure make time for The Simpsons, as is necessary for me to stay mentally stable/sane. It was really reeallllly funny tonight, oh man something crazy about Homer running for Mayor and he had this insane Salamander Suit on for almost the entire episode, it was hilarious. Ohhh man I love that show!!!

Anyway, good times as usual. I worked super hard today but it has paid off nicely and I am looking a bit more organized and prepared for all the stuff I have to do next week. School is going to be done pretty soon and then off to California again and I can't wait for that!!

Lots of fun stuff coming up after school is done for the term and I am really looking forward to it, there is still tons to do at school but it's not that much longer now. Just gotta keep at it for another few weeks. :)

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