I got my computer back a little more than a week ago, Apple was pretty good with the timing on its service, taking much less than the expected weeks, and in fact had the computer for under a day, and thus made sure that I spent four days from failure to having a functional machine, one of those days being spent reporting damage, digging through information, attempting home-brew repairs and the like. This is indeed a good thing, and is one of the reasons I am happy to be using an Apple. That being said my computer failed because of a hard drive failure, and any moder piece of computing machinery should be including some form of S.M.A.R.T, and having received no warnings from the motherboard, running fsck or much of anything else in the past days, when my computer had begun thrashing around a little, I am disconcerted and unhappy. That being said, I seemingly had also blown out the cable which connects my hard drive to the logic board, blown out the cable, what the hell.
A long time ago I used to read random books for fun, OK I still read random stuff for fun, books not so much, they take long, and I don’t have all that much time left from everything else, and sleeping. One of these random books that I read was this gigantic book on Operating Systems, well actually I read two in the pre-board 10th grade euphoria, and this was the bigger and more interesting of the two. Well perhaps my levels of interest are weird, because it really didn’t involve that much code, and umm I don’t remember enough about it to actually be able to find it on Amazon. If anyone who’s still in Exun visits this blog, that books somewhere in school, probably in Exun’s control, since it was donated to Exun, and it has a white cover. Well anyways, years passed, I came to Brown, I took a class on computer hardware and the like (the reasons for taking that class are a story in themselves), and we revisited a lot of what that book had spoken about, including virtual memory, which back when I was reading that book sounded really cool. Like really, think about it, you go from having limited amounts of memory, to lots of memory per program, you have a little overhead, but you can fit the world in your computer. Most modern operating systems use virtual memory, this is a good thing, usually, every now and then you get programs which start thrashing, and then you go on to cuss about the virtual memory, but know what, at the end of the day, VMem keeps things going, paging algorithms are an interesting, and not entirely solved problem, and they are fun. One of the things my big book mentioned, and seemed to think highly of was the Solaris paging algorithm. Know what, Solaris, and now OpenSolaris are both Sun projects, they are or were big, and though they don’t run on Macs (I am going on an operating system trial spree once I buy a new computer sometime at the end of summer, this one’s probably going to be running Linux or OpenBSD), they were big news. Know what else Sun makes, Java, they publish some of the best works on garbage collection and such, and some (people who are not me) believe that Java has gotten most of it right. Well Java’s cool, it is all cool until you try handling images, or other huge pieces of data, because as much as Java is cool, it works on a limited heap, and once you run out of it, it fails. Why can Java’s VM not allocate new memory, not give me some of the benifits of paging, even if it slows the program down. Why must I worry about not being able to fit everything in, and such things, why must Java not do such things. I am angry at Java, well OK so I am mostly angry at a lot of things, and am mock considering going and becoming a history concentrator, because I am pretty darn good at that. Java angers me, I shall not be using it next semester, I am happy about that. I have a project to complete in Java, this clearly sucks.
Hmm so post attempts at watching cartoons and weird discussions with my roommate, I have a list of things I’d like to watch again, or perhaps own on DVD in cases, and most of them are animated, old and things I sometimes still watch while at home. In the ways of this country, old cartoons aren’t broadcast very often, at least not on university run cable networks. TerraHawks, the Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin and perhaps the Looney Tunes would be much appreciated in case anyone wants to send them, old Bugs Bunny stuff would be appreciated too.
I took a short 5 minute break, like 20 minutes ago. Not doing too hot on keeping myself motivated on this math stuff, it’s like finally making lots of sense, and as we pass through more topological things, is even sounding like fun, it is just that I’d rather sleep, or read this fun book I bought when I wasn’t thinking about the effects of doing such things. It has been too long, want, or more like need break, yet must finish (start rahter) writing about Japanese Propaganda in the Pacific War and about semantic networks. I sat through my last Japanese history discussion section today, we discussed stuff about what we had learnt, and how it tied back to what Japan was today, which was fun, and somewhat disturbing. I’d like to do one of these informally about India, except not with people back home, some of them are scarily complicit, and it is hard to do it without walking over someone’s closely held beliefs. It was also sort of nice because it made sense with my questioning what I had learnt all of last semester, I can answer that this semester, and the answer’s deeper than Lie Groups, tensors, dual spaces, manifolds and generalized analytic views on differnetial form and stoke’s theorem. Those are important, but I learnt something which made me feel like I understand a little more, this is good, the next semester should be quite excellent with whatever I am doing.
I am TAing a course on computational models next semester, the first intro course I have TAed in the CS department, well sort of, and it promises to be fun. Oh finite state machines and turing machines.
So I actually finished the gigantic quantities of analysis I was faced with, umm modulo a question, this feels nice. Don’t get me wrong, analysis is fun, it always has been, it is just not that much fun to do it as homework when faced with other things. I am sort of ready for next semester’s break from math, oh well, at this point I have enough math done to actually be able to get myself one of those math degrees. Hmm math degrees 
Another two days have gone by, I really should put this up, perhaps. We had some fun earlier today with people from outside the house, that was a nice break from all the work. The CS project’s beginning to fall into place, sort of, there’s more work to do, but some of it is working well now. Oh well, sleep time.
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