I left with Juan, Sanjay, and Stephen to meet with David, Luke, Beckham, and Mike B at The Highlander, one of the few bars in Atlanta that I’ve seen with some pretty excellent food, since I’m not much of drinker myself. It’s right below Dupree’s on Monroe. Admittedly, parking was a bit of a bear because of the Atlanta Jazz Festival.

I searched for techniques to detect programs that infinite loop given both a specific input and an estimated time of completion. Moshe Jacobson on git.unix.linux stepped up to the plate and provided some useful bash code that might just do the trick. For a completely different approach to the problem, Patrick O’Leary suggested the fault tolerant shell, ftsh. This research shell makes failures a first-class concept. I dropped by Alex and Elysia’s new apartment in the evening for tasty ribs, salad, and ice cream. They moved in just a few weeks ago. It was nice to get out of the apartment for a bit and just hang out.

Picked Adam up from the airport yesterday. This morning we stopped by PROMOVE and looked at a few apartments in the South Cobb area, including Post Valley, Oakley Run, and Calibre Lake, The roommate style apartments are especially neat. Adam’s kin arrived at our place shortly after and I was treated to lunch at Nuevo Laredo Cantina. Graded Problem Set 2 for Languages and Translation, and fixed a bug in the archive date generator for the online journal.

I’m in the market for a cellular phone that has good signal and a clean user interface. Other auxiliary features, such as Java and instant messaging, are not particularly relevant. Since my last purchase, a lot of new technology has arrived at the consumer level, and it’s worth taking a look at from a power and RF engineering perspective.

Most all cellular phones today use a Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM. It is a cellular standard for digitally encoding and transmitting voice over mobile telephony systems. The University of Waterloo has a thorough overview of GSM. Howstuffworks also has good information on cell phone operation.

• My current cellular phone is a Nokia 3360. The battery is a NiMH at 640 mAh. This yields three and a half hours of digital talk time and one and a half hours of analog talk time.
• The Nokia 3595 is intended for those who just want a cell phone and don’t need fancy features like built-in cameras and MP3 players. The 3595 is a dual band phone. The battery is rated for five and a half hours of talk time. The phone weighs 3.76 ounces. IGN provides a good review.
• The Sony Ericsson T226 offers up to eleven hours of talk time. Like the Nokia 3595, it is a dual band GSM phone.
• The Samsung SGH-X427 is very lightweight (2.82 ounces) and compact. It lacks an external display, and has a somewhat bulky external antenna. I think of this as a feature, though the authors of AccuReviews disagree.

If you have any suggestions or recommendations, feel free to post a comment. I’m currently looking at renewing my contract with Cingular.

Juan and I just could not figure out how to correctly interface with the DBK201 adapter board during senior design, so I went ahead and added the relevant manuals to the wiki page. Most of recitation covered pointers, arrays, and variable scoping. I introduced the students to cdecl, a useful utility that makes type declaration transformations between pseudo-English and C. I was also informed during the TA meeting that I’ll be writing a diff-based autograder for befunge. I’m not looking forward to it.

Accomplished quite a bit today with respect our senior design project. Upgraded homer to Linux kernel 2.4.26 since the IOtech drivers do not compile under the 2.6 kernel series. Debian is now able to successfully interface with the DAQ board, and that’s an excellent start. Reviewed environment variables and assertions in Linux, and discovered the SGI online man page browser in the process. Finally, watched Spartan; the plot was a little too contrived to be believable.

I noticed that Mark Lusher recently updated his entry for the Atlanta Blog Meetup. I formatted homer, the DCSP machine, and installed Debian/unstable on it in just under two hours while in the senior design lab. I also set the default window manager to fluxbox to save on system resources. During office hours, I wrote a fully functional Befunge interpreter in C. It’s actually the current homework assignment for students taking Languages and Translation this semester. It’s a neat assignment has that a relatively simple state machine implementation. Learn more about Esoteric programming languages.

Downloaded and burned Fedora Core 2 (tettnang) via the torrent server at Duke University. FC2 will install from the first ISO image or using the CD-ROM if legacy emulation is turned on in VMWare 4.5.1. If the host system is running at a color depth of 24, FC2 will most likely fail to start X. The current solution is to manually edit the xorg.conf config file and change the color depth to 24. Restart the computer, and you’ll be prompted with a license agreement. You’ll now be able to continue the install, which should go smoothly. All done.

But all this was ultimately for nothing. It turns out that the DCSP machine does not meet the minimum system requirements needed to install FC2. As such, we’ll probably install either Debian or Red Hat 9 on it tomorrow. I did manage to successfully compile the DCSP code on my Debian box, and added IOtech DaqBoard 2000 drivers to CVS.

I get distracted very easily and I need a hobby. Upgraded the Linux kernel to version 2.6.6. I was able to get the Java Azureus BitTorrent Client working for the first time. It’s quite a step up from the Python text-mode client that I’ve been using for so long. I also wrote up some notes on advanced Linux programming; the goal is to finish the text by the end of this week, and then move on to some cryptography research. I covered Chapter 1 and Appendix B. Finally, I graded Lab 1 for Languages and Translation.

Winding down. The network is incredibly flaky today for unknown reasons. On top of that, Debian magically broke as a result of a grave Samba bug. And if that wasn’t enough, lvm continues to exhibit strange behavior on system reboots, forcing an fsck. As a result, I didn’t accomplish a whole lot today.

I did, however, manage to electronically consolidated my loans through Citibank. The progress should take six to eight weeks to complete. I also configured access to the CVS repository on helsinki for cs2130 on chronos.