Spent the entire day studying for my two exams tomorrow. It’s just one small part of doing well in college. I spent a large part of the night at David’s apartment studying for Circuit Analysis. I think I gained a lot from it, and feel confident that I’ll do well in the exam tomorrow.

Embedded Microcontroller final exam in the early morning, followed by a quick nap back at home. That leaves two more exams to go, both on Thursday. I spent the remainder of the day studying hard for my Biology exam, because I need to dedicate all of tomorrow to Circuit Analysis. Made a nice chicken alfredo dish for dinner. I also checked balanced my checkbook, a long overdue chore.

Something nice needs to be written about Tracy here.

My last day as a CS1322 Teaching Assistant, perhaps for good. As they say, it’s time to move on to bigger and better things. I spent the morning proctoring a final exam for the class, and spent the remainder of the day working in teams to grade nearly three hundred exams. It’s a really exhausting experience, and I’m glad I got it over with early on in the week, before final exams begin for me.

There’s something about Sunday that makes my productivity go to zero. I spent the evening off and on studying for biology. As far as MLP, the sci.math FAQ is quite interesting. Finally, inspired by the recent Red Hat envy of late, I decided to get TrueType fonts working in Linux. A good anti-aliased font to use for xterm is Andale Mono. I’m looking forward to the end of this week, when I’ll have a chance to code and make updates to my journal software. It’s come a long way.

Adam, inspired by the latest Knoppix live CD distribution, decided to install Red Hat 9 on his computer. I tagged along for the ride. After all, I rarely turn down any offer that allows me to gain more experience with computers and electronics. Every bit helps.

Adam has a relatively new and unsupported wireless ethernet device – a Siemens’ SpeedStream SS1022. After some searching, we discovered and decided on the rather unstable wlan-ng module RPMs, since they seemed to be most compatible with his operating system. Much to my dismay, the modules would not load (unresolved symbol errors), and after much work, we eventually decided on compiling the Linux kernel 2.4.21-rc1 source from scratch. It took several painful hours and an inordinate number of reboots to get all the kernel options correct, but by the end of the night, we were finally able to get the wireless device working.

It’s the last day of classes for the Spring 2003 term. I discovered a rather large database exploit in my journal software that allowed any visitor to modify the database; it’s thankfully been corrected now. Among the many new web site updates: a life quality factor, and an advanced search feature, both of which are still largely works in progress.

Upgraded VMware to version 4.0.0. The newly-optimized x86 core, improved multimedia support, and superior usability improvements make this first-rate software product even more impressive.

The recent release of Red Hat 9 was a revolution in usability and user experience for the Linux desktop environment. Today, I finally had an opportunity to see what all the hype was about. It’s certainly well-deserved. The latest release of Red Hat 9 has a beautifully designed installation; it took a little under twenty minutes to have the system fully up and running. If you’re new to Linux, or want an operating system that just works, Red Hat 9 is the way to go.

An eye appointment in the evening. Larry Wall’s rename utility proved quite useful in putting the finishing touches on the Hands on Atlanta Internet Explorer build. I’ll drop it off at the office Monday. Studied biology in the afternoon, and took a short break to update my web page using the OS X machines in the multimedia center of the library. I have a new color scheme and a nice new logo now, thanks to Adobe Photoshop.

College student by day, impromptu network administrator by night. Configured IIS for the Hands on Atlanta development machine. For anonymous access to work, I added permissions for the IUSR_COMPUTERNAME account. Modified the VMWare configuration by bridging vmnet2 to eth1, which allows me to access the laptop (Foxtrot). Added Foxtrot successfully to the W2K domain, and deployed a custom Internet Explorer configuration on the test laptop, using the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK). It seems to work.

Began work on the Office XP unattended setup, using the Windows 2000 Group Policy object, a component of Active Directory. I also learned how to make acronyms using HTML, and in the process discovered a bug in my journal code.

The Gnu Circuit Analysis Package, gnucap, occupied the larger part of my day. It’s a spice-like simulator that supports circuit analysis using netlists. Burned the Knoppix Linux distribution to CD-RW and ran it on the test laptop, which as of today, still has no name. I’m surprised that the Knoppix CD was able to detect the PCMCIA network card and mouse properly.

It’s the last recitation of the semester. We spent the evening on graphical user interfaces, followed by a review of the topics for the final exam.

Sunday was so unproductive that I decided not to write about it at all. I started studying early for final exams, casually reviewing my previous tests and notes. Adam and I went shopping to stock up on groceries. I installed several symbol libraries for xcircuit, a program for drawing publishable-quality electrical circuit schematic diagrams.