Fall semester is in week 2 now and classes are starting to show their colors. I dropped the physics department’s solar system class, PHYS 2021, and the lab. They’ve been replaced with a TA class for CS 1316 and the 1 credit hour intro TA class for first timers. TAing has been fun so far and I’m glad I did it. CS 3210, Design Operating Systems, looks like it’ll be a fun class. It’s half lecture half lab, so we’re going to get our hands dirty with the kernel and such. CS 3220, Processor Design, also looks fun. We’re programming on real hardware, yet again getting our hands dirty. Finally CS 3300, Software Engineering, is interesting so far. The class is actually defining the requirements for the first project and then each group is working on a separate part, much like it would be done in the real world. CS 3300 seems like it will be the most work, there are a lot of document write ups, group meetings, and coding. Ok, it’s 3am and I work at 10am.. time to go.

My girlfriend, Andrea, and I vacationed in the Smokey Mountains for a little get away a week before classes started. We stayed in a cabin on Deep Creek. The creek wasn’t too deep, but it was fun none the less. The national park was just a mile from our campground where you could carry your tube up the path next to the creek and tube back down to the car. The creek has some whitewater parts that ended up throwing me off my tube, but a lot of times the tube got stuck on the rocks

The views were incredible, we were surrounded by mountains, streams, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. Our cabin was about the size of my kitchen and apparently slept 4 people. There was a futon and a bed above the kitchen, but I would guess it would be cramped with 4 people. It was bearable with 2 people and a dog. Mia (the dog) loved the creek, but hated staying the cabin alone while we went tubing and hiking.

We also saw some kids using one of the waterfalls as a slide. We probably would’ve joined in, but we didn’t have our swim suits on anymore.

All in all it was a good vacation, but I think next time I would like to tube on a deeper creek/river and stay in more suitable accommodations.

I decided to use my CSS / PHP / Photoshop skills and create my own wordpress theme. This design was originally created for my portfolio site, but I figured I might as well use wordpress for easy content management and add the pages I wanted for the portfolio site on top of the blog. I even busted out the old flash skills. Hope everyone enjoys it.

On another note, I will be heading to the Smokey Mountains in NC for a little cabin vacation then off the Andrea’s friends baby shower. I’ll try to update with pics from the mountains and any other happenings while I’m gone.. then it’s back to school.

I’m a Mac user, but my development environment at GTRI is all Windows XP. I used to be an XP user, so this was ok, but I really want to be able to use my Mac as well for development. I had previously setup Synergy on my laptop to share my mouse and keyboard with a Linux box I had at home, but hadn’t used it since I upgraded to Leopard. I needed to setup the Windows XP box has the server and the Mac as the client. Leopard seemed to hate Synergy at first, but after a quick Google search, turns out it can’t be run in the background.. so it needs the -f flag:

synergyc -f [host address]

Once this was setup, it worked great. Thanks Synergy!!

Update: When transferring keystrokes over a network, the client machine’s packets could easily be sniffed leaving a huge security hole if you’re doing anything with sensitive data using synergy. The software does not have authentication or encryption, but synergy has addressed this issue with a nice work around. http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/security.html gives all the steps needed to encrypt/decrypt the packets on behalf of synergy using ssh.