people and toys

It's been a while since I've updated, but there are good reasons. This is my last semester of grad school so I have a few projects to work on:
  • Advanced Operating Systems is a project every few weeks. So far I've written priority and co-scheduling components for a user space thread scheduling library that works on multiprocessors, and I'm working on code to implement a shared camera driver across UML instances
  • Networked Applications and Services has me working with 2 other people on a semester long project to analyze the social graph created by forum postings on Faster Mustache.
  • My final 3 hours of research for my master's project is spent on the data storage model for CPR. We now have a real time database, a plan for file archiving, and a plan for long term SQL accessible data archiving for the 300k or so rows that get added to the database every day.
  • And then 3 hours are spent working on IMS, specifically building monitoring and deployment management tools for the carrier side of the system.
  • And then, the usual 20 or so hour a week job working on other aspects of CPR.
Give that, my schedule is pretty full but there is still some time for other things. Two weekends ago was the third annual Gallery Developer Conference in San Francisco. It was a blast, as usual, and I took my share of pictures as well. The following week I got to attend a talk by Jim Lovell about his experiences in the Apollo program, followed by the GTISC Annual Security Summit with speakers such as Vint Cerf (one of the founders of the internet), the Information Assurance Technical Director from the NSA, and various influential people from the security industry. Then there are the toys. First came a Garmin 60Csx GPS receiver. It does fun things like tracking where I bike, letting me tag places, and uploading all of the information into Google Earth. One of these days all that information will have a run in with my photo library and there will be maps with pictures and so on. I'm looking forward to that day but it's a long way out. On a related note, I picked up a scanner: the Epson 4990 Photo. It's great and I've been scanning the shoe boxes of prints from 1990-2000. Eventually these will make it online, but I need to get together with some old calendars at my parent's house to figure out when most of them were taken. Lasty, I replaced my Motorola L6 with an iPhone. My only complaint is that the 1.1 firmware broke 3rd party application support, but all I need is a SSH client so if Apple would just do that, it'd be great. The firmware update is important to me because it fixed what I see as a major problem: With the 1.0 firmware, the UI didn't warn you if IMAP server credentials changed. This means that the iPhone mail client would send your user name and password to any mail server (read: hacker) that showed up in DNS on the phone as your mail server. Given the iPhone's ability to connect to any old WiFi network, this could be pretty disastrous. In other news, my leg is mostly healed up and I've almost gotten everything right on the newest addition to the bike collection: a Redline 925 and the collection of various parts I've somehow attached to it. (I had a bike shop cut the fork and press the headset for me since I don't have those tools yet.)

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