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See Portland up close

Jacob — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:42:17 +0000

I’m excited to share that Google Maps has expanded its street views to include Portland, Oregon. Google announced the addition recently on its LatLong blog. Portland is such an interesting city, I’m excited that people can explore all the many many miles of street view photos available. You can see the Portland LDS Institute Building, where I took classes last fall, or the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Please have lots of fun exploring Portland, Oregon.

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Last day of classes

Jacob — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 08:48:30 +0000

Today is the last day of classes for me. After my physics lecture tomorrow, all I have left to do is take my physics final exam on the 7th. This is the first December in about 4 or 5 years where I haven’t been completely stressed out. I’m excited too because I actually feel like I can relax a bit and enjoy the Christmas spirit.

I really don’t like going to wedding receptions. All the old people keep poking me and saying “You’re next,” as if that meant anything. Maybe I should start going to funerals and poking the old people saying, “You’re next.” I swore that the next wedding reception I would go to would be my own (I thought that would get me out of having to go to them for a long time). But tomorrow (which is actually later today) I’m going against my previously stated convictions and I’m going to one. The main reason is because I want to see friends who will be there that I otherwise would be unable to see.

Are people with freckles at higher risk for skin cancer?

Am I really ready to subject myself to extreme mental and social pressures again? Am I ready to go back to Provo? Maybe the question I should be asking inquires if Provo is ready for me.

Do any of my friends need a color ink jet printer? I have a brand new in box printer (Epson C86) that I have little use for and I’m wondering what I should do with it.

I made crepes last night for dinner. I made my usual recipe and a recipe out of my mom’s weight loss recipe book, and I could hardly tell the difference. Living at home has caused me to eat healthier, mainly because I have more time to cook, and more foods available.

I don’t know that I’ve ever told this story on my blog, but at the beginning of the term there was new student convocation where the Portland State president and some other people wanted to give some general pep talks and a few other things like that. But unlike BYU, Portland State’s convocation isn’t a part of their orientation program, so it wasn’t very well attended. To help motivate people to come, they advertised a bunch of door prizes and such. Well, the morning of convocation, my alarm went off and I was debating with myself about whether or not it was actually worth getting out of bed to go, and I decided that all I would get done is some extra sleep if I stayed home, so I went, and I sat through their boring speeches and stuff, and then they did the drawings for the door prizes and I won! I got a $250 gift card to the book store. The problem is that I’m only at PSU for a semester, so it isn’t like I needed a lot of books from the bookstore, so in addition to the one book I had to buy, I bought myself an iPod. Now I still have a little bit left over, and I’m trying to decide what I should buy. I’m thinking about a sweatshirt that says Portland State or something like that. Maybe I’ll also buy some general school supplies since those are always good.

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Embedded systems primer for Open Source guys

Jacob — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 22:15:31 +0000

I’m taking an open source software engineering class at PSU, and I have a presentation to the class about Embedded system programming, and how writing open source software for embedded systems is different than writing other types of open source software.

Many articles on the web introduce the Open Source concept to embedded system engineers, this presentation attempted to do the opposite: introduce embedded system engineering to open source advocates.

Embedded Open Source

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Physics grade

Jacob — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:41:18 +0000

It is already the last week of class for me here at Portland State. I just got my second mid-term back in my physics class, and I got a C on it, which compared to how well I felt that I did, isn’t that bad of a grade. It sends me into the final exam with a B in the class.

I feel that if I were to take this same class at BYU, the test would be more difficult and the grading also would not be so generous; so instead of sitting at a B, I would be struggling to find a passing grade.

I’m suspicious that perhaps classes at Portland State are easier, but because I’m only taking two, the sample size is not large enough to determine such.

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I’m an Oregonian resident

Jacob — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:32:14 +0000

After almost two months of work and waiting, I finally found out today that Portland State has recognized me as a resident of Oregon, which basically means that I pay less tuition. I’m glad they were so wise. I would hate to have had to use a picture of my webbed toes in an appeal.

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I got an A on my Physics exam

Jacob — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 06:26:09 +0000

I’m taking a solid-state physics class at PSU, and I just got the results back for the first mid-term exam today. I got 83% right before “the curve” and 93% after the curve, which means that I got an A. This is really good news because I could really enjoy an A grade in the class.

The thing though is, the exam wasn’t that hard. At BYU professors had the attitude of “Why should I test you on anything you’ve seen before?” This exam was fairly straight forward and mostly stuff that was familiar from the lectures or the homework. I really liked the straight forwardness of the exam and I wish my classes at BYU could do that.

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Linux development process

Jacob — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:37:07 +0000

Greg Kroah-Hartman came to my Open Source Software Engineering class today. Here are a couple of interesting thoughts that I’ve been able to gather from his presentation:

New patches are tested with Andrew’s mm kernel, and if they work out, then they are sent to Linus’ kernel.
Time between kernel versions should be about two months.
1475 unique contributors in one year alone
Grew kernel 6% in one year
2.6.18.y kernels are bugfixes only
Powerful to have a set list of rules so it is easy to say no to people
Day job: in charge of all SuSE kernel developers. All work remotely around the world.
Distros like to maintain an enterprise kernel for up to 7 years, which is crazy
E*Trade uses Gentoo because they can control it.
Modular kernel which little interconnectedness which makes it easy to have module maintainers who don’t
Tools: git, quilt, sparse
Linus’ main job: say no
Linux isn’t developed, it evolves. This means that there really isn’t a firm development plan.
Can’t go by time anymore with git
Signed-off-by is a blame path which create a reputation based system for submitting patches
The IDE module guy three times has gone crazy
Contributors have to defend their code
No development tree makes the engineering process more careful. Things have to evolve gradually with small changesets.
All the drivers are in the tree. This means that if you change an API function, then you can go and change all the drivers that use that API just like that.
People who work on open source projects are much more likely to get jobs, because you have currently shipping code.
Learn about licenses, they are very important.
Xen is a good example of running an open source project the wrong way. There are political and social reasons why.

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psu football

Jacob — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 01:26:07 +0000

of course i shouldn’t be surprised that things are not quite like provo, but this is hardly bigger than high school ball. tonight is portland state vs north colorado-and the 1st 2 noCol possessions ended in intercepted passes. more info after the game. Update:Portland State won, something like 45 to 3. I was mostly disappointed in the lack of energy from the student sections (only two sections). The game really wasn’t that interesting, but it was almost amusing during the first quarter or two how many Northern Colorado turnovers there were.

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