Made a few study friends for Electromagnetics, namely, Steven and Ryan. Received my first quiz grade in Thermodynamics. I’m not entirely happy, but I’m not entirely upset either. Adam pointed out a few bugs in my Wiki-comment system. It looks like I’ll have to spend some time this weekend reading Mastering Regular Expressions.

Met with the Electromagnetics Teaching Assistant in the early afternoon to work on a few problems. Adam and I had a late lunch at Little Dino’s. Finished Problem Set 2 for Electromagnetics. The var partitition filled up on chronos, leading to some rather unusual system stability issues on Linux.

I learned that Linux a executable can be run even if its noexec bit is set by directly calling /lib/ld-linux.so.2. I also found a useful page describing common mySQL gotchas – features which work as advertised, but not as expected. Some of these are a little scary, actually.

It’s the last day of the long weekend. Worked on Problem Set 2 for Electromagnetics in the evening. Ryan pointed out a bug in greedy pattern matching algorithms for the wiki-style comments, which I promptly corrected. Regular expressions are hard.

Discovered the College E-mail Addresses finder. The entry for Georgia Tech was woefully out of date, however. For the remainder of the day, I wrote code for the online journal software. I modified the journal comment system to support a subset of the wiki-style tags using the PCRE functions in PHP, and also added a working user management system to allow members to comment on entries. Lastly, I added a comments tag to the RSS feed.

The supported wiki rules for the comment system follow:

• New paragraphs are created by skipping a line.
• HTML code is not allowed by the wiki system, and is converted to a safe, plain-text representation.
• Surrounding a phrase with asterisk (*), underscore (_), or equals (=) will bold, italicize, or codify a phrase, respectively.
• A hypertext URL is of the form [ TB | [http://www.barik.net](http://www.barik.net) ] and results in the link TB. A URL without a name is not allowed.
• Lists, headings, tables, and other features are not supported, as they are typically not used in comments. I may, however, add in list support at a later date, as it’s a nice, non-trivial exercise in regular expressions.
• Only one post may be made per journal entry. This rule is enforced by the wiki system.

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a bit of television, and it’s harder than I thought to do any real work over a long weekend. I decided to add some new features to the online journal, including the initial stages of a comments system, as I finally found a solution to the database query problem that has been plauging me for the past month. It was actual a simple matter of using a left join. I guess it sometimes helps to look at things with a fresh eye. Hopefully the working version of the comments system will be completed by tomorrow, sans security features.

As usual, I made a small mistake in units on the Thermodynamics quiz and therefore most likely bombed it. I must be dyslexic or something. Discovered a free PGP timestamping service, which allows a user to corroborate the date of a signed document. In conjunction with traditional non-repudiation techniques, timestamping becomes an important mechanism for validating time-critical documents. I also stumbled across the once defunct PGP key path finder, a utility which gives the shortest path through the web of trust between a pair of keys.

The Schaum’s Outlines that I ordered from Amazon arrived in the mail today. I highly recommend the outline series to any college student. They are inexpensive texts with a wealth of well-organized information and sample problems to help master important concepts. Books are available for just about any discipline.

I opened the Thermodynamics textbook for the first time today. Chris and I met in the afternoon in the library to work on Thermodynamics problems. We covered basic heat and energy topics and completed a few exercises involving the conversation of mass principles.

It’s was a long and busy day. I returned my Computers and Society textbooks to the Engineer’s Bookstore, as Ben offered to sell me his texts for only ten dollars. I spent the afternoon working in the library on Electromagnetics, and read chapter 11, Causal Arguments, from WACE. In the evening, I helped Adam work on his Microelectronic Circuits homework. I’m surprised how much I still remember from the course.

The weather was surprisingly warm this afternoon. By far, the greatest accomplishment of today was getting VMWare working with the Linux 2.6.1 kernel. I expected a lot of trouble, but the process went smoothly, and required only a patch, in addition to a few minor modifications to the install script. Finished reading chapters one and two of A Gift of Fire, one of the required texts for Computers and Society, and finished the wiki entry for the class.

Mundane work around the house. I’m still burned out from last term, I guess. Adam and I made spaghetti for lunch. Rearranged my room. Fixed a small bug in the e-mail entry journal code caused by variable shadowing.

Finished watching the Ai Yori Aoshi anime series. It has a memorable, heartwarming storyline and a great ending to boot. But then again, I’ve always been a sucker for the romantic-comedy genre. I’ll fill this in with a review of the series later. Much later.