My C++ teacher is killing me

As I’ve mentioned before I am taking C++ online. Which isn’t cool. On my homework I’ve been doing good. I had one assignment he told me I misunderstood… which I’m real sure what that means grade wise. It did what he wanted it to, just not the way he wanted it to. I did turn in one homework late and wrong, but he drops two of the homeworks, so I can afford to bomb an assignment or two. I’m extremely worried though because I poorly on the midterm. The class average was a 72.5 C. Which isn’t sexy. Thats really bad. Teachers shoot for at least a class average of a B, anything below that and odds are they aren’t teaching very well. If one or two students do poorly thats the students fault, if the whole class does poorly thats the teachers fault. More often that not anyway. So right now I’m worried about my grade in the course. I was shooting for an A, and I was on track to getting one until now. Shit happens I guess.

Enjoy the Penguins!

My Paludis Story

Paludis. Its a very nice program. So far I’m enjoying using it. Though still not ready for mass consumption Paludis does what its claims to do and does well and most importantly when compared to Portage its a whole lot faster. Portage is getting better. I will grant them that, but there is a lot about Portage that you don’t realize sucks until you get the chance to use something else.

Currently I’m still bootstrapping. Well actually that’s a partial lie. I finished bootstrapping and even installed my system utilities I need in order to continue on to setting up a whole system based off of Paludis instead of Portage, except I apparently didn’t bootstrap correctly. I take that back, I think I did what I was supposed to do but because Paludis still likes to bicker with some programs my bootstrap didn’t come out totally correct. I don’t blame Paludis though, I don’t think it was Paludis’s fought. I have seen nothing to make me believe it was Paludis that failed. Once you get Paludis bootstrapped correctly though it seems to fly without error. The bootstrap cause me problems, but the installation of programs after that completed (even incorrectly mind you) has been very smooth sailing so far. No programs have failed yet. My only problem is I can’t chroot in my own chroot. It says I do not have a /bin/bash. So I’m reinstalling sys-apps/coreutils in hopes that will straighten things out. In fact it was coreutils that gave me crap while I was bootstrapping the first time. So it comes as no surprise that once again coreutils is giving me lip.

Its time for Latin class though, so I will post more later! Enjoy the Penguins!

Wolvix – 1.0.5 Offically Released

I just posted about Wolvix this morning around 1:30AM and I’m already posting about it again. The version I downloaded and reviewed (if you can call that) was 1.0.5 Beta. Now less than 12 hours later the official version of 1.0.5 has been released. I’m currently downloading it now and its running very slow. Perhaps I should try the other mirror. [Five minutes later] Just tried it. Didn’t help. Either way though I suggest you download the new version since it has been deemed stable. I personally plan on making a few modules of my own since I can’t find them on the Wolvix site or on the SLAX site. I’ll report back on how that goes. Do it!

Enjoy the Penguins!

Wolvix

Paludis

Paludis. You might of heard of it if your a Gentoo fan. If your not a Gentoo fan then you probably don’t care. For those that make it past the second sentence though I have installed Paludis on my laptop. So what is Paludis. Paludis simply put is a Portage replacement. Which always leads to the most elementary of questions, “Does Portage need to be replaced?” No. Not really. In its current state Portage isn’t broken and actually works well. The key to Paludis is that things could be better. There are things Portage does poorly, things it probably shouldn’t, and to beat it all, Portage in its default state is sloooowww. No exaggeration there at all. Any Gentoo user will agree.

The brainchild of Ciaran McCreesh, some guy from the UK, Paludis is written in C++ with an interface written in Ruby. Though the code for the Paludis is still way out of my league I have spent some time looking over it. Most of it is fairly advanced, but still well written and well commented, so if you’ve had some C++ experience, it shouldn’t be hard to pick up. I personally don’t understand a lot of it. Way over my head.

with If you go to the Paludis website you’ll notice right off the bat that McCreesh is very pessimistic Paludis. When I first stopped by all I could think was “why is that guy so pessimistic about his own code?” After having installed Paludis I realized he wasn’t being pessimistic, he was being realistic. Everything you read on the site is true though. Paludis is fast, very fast compared to Portage. Paludis also breaks… a lot. The install guides on the website are also out of date and need to be updated. It’s mainly the syntax that is out of date, but that was enough to cause me at least 20 mins of trouble.

Finally I predict that when McCreesh finishes Paludis it will spread quickly through the Gentoo community. And why wouldn’t it? Beats the socks off of Portage. I’m in the process of bootstrapping Paludis as I write this, and though I haven’t finished it, when I do I’m going to reinstall with Paludis instead of Portage. If you know C++ and you have a good understanding of ebuilds and Gentoo I see no reason to, at the very least, try Paludis. I think you’ll like it.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Paludis

Wolvix – My new favorite

I’m a Gentoo guy. I really like Gentoo, and I have very few complaints about it as of right now. I see room for improvment in some areas, but overall I really like it. So why is a Gentoo guy’s favorite LiveCD based off of Slackware? Because no good Gentoo liveCDs exist, not counting the install disk, which I don’t honestly consider much of a liveCD.

Enter Wolvix. Wolvix is actually just just a SLAX clone, but there are enough subtle differences between SLAX and Wolvix that I actually like Wolvix better. For example, Wolvix uses XFCE or Fluxbox instead of KDE or Fluxbox. This is important. I like KDE for what KDE is, but anyone who claims that KDE is lightweight is out of thier mind. I feel that XFCE is much better suited to the liveCD enviroment than KDE is. Fluxbox is probably the best choice really, but I feel like XFCE provides the best middle ground. Your lightweight, but your still nice looking and functional. So as of right now Wolvix is my new favorite LiveCD. It has replaced SLAX which replaced Knoppix. Knoppix is like a desktop replacement on a DVD. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but to me is totally unrealistic. Why carry so much crap? In the dictionary beside bloat there is a picture of a Knoppix liveCD. Go ahead look it up.

Enjoy the Penguins

Wolvix

Blogger is getting better

I’m using Blogger Beta instead of the regular Blogger and you can’t beat it. Blogger beta is so much better than regular Blogger it is not even really funny. The addition of tags for your posts, the addition of template moderation page, the Edit Posts tab has been totally redone and is now 10x better. When I first started using Blogger its interface was a bit out of date when compared to WordPress, but now Blogger is starting to catch up. If you use the beta, I’d even recommend using Blogger now.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Grad School Update

So I’m looking into applying for graduate school. I don’t really want a big school anymore. I thought I would, but after further consideration the thought does not really appeal to me right now. So I’m looking at some smaller schools that I think will still provide me with a good education in Computer Science. I think my biggest hindrance right now is my lack of Computer Science degree. I know people get graduate degrees all the time in majors their undergraduate degrees aren’t in, but I somehow feel that even though that may be true, I am still at a large disadvantage. I have no doubt that 90% of the applicants to these programs are have a B.S. in Computer Science, it would only make sense that they did. Either way though, I have had my transcripts mailed to three schools, I’ve officially applied to two schools, and I’ll be taking the GREs in November, so wish me luck!

Enjoy the Penguins!

Open Source + Learning = Fun

http://www.ceet.niu.edu/faculty/coller/video.htm

Check out that YouTube video. Students at what ever school that is (I didn’t really pay attention or care) are using the Open Source racing game/simulator Torcs to learn mathematics and programming. Sounds like a good time to me. I wish Marshall would do cool projects like that. Instead I’m writing programs to tell you what time it is. Boring!

Enjoy the Penguins!

Pointers and C++

C++, what would the computer world do without it? Not a whole lot probably. What would I do without it? Probably a great deal, but yet I still insist on learning the god father of all (computer) languages.

So tonight at about 1:30 AM I finished my homework assignment on pointers. I personally felt like the assignment itself was poorly written, though I suppose I could guess well enough what he expected me to do with it. Seeing as how this is my first time with C++ I can imagine it is hard to come up with simple crap programs for us to write just to demonstrate concepts with the language. Our previous assignments have made sense, I can almost always think of a better way to do it then the way he makes us, but again, its for the sake of learning the language, not the best way to do it. That comes next. This time we were supposed to learn how to use pointers. Which I find to be a complicated monster to learn on your own. I suppose I should explain that last statement. I’m taking this course online. So there is no classroom instruction, no one on ones with the teacher for him to explain it to me and demonstrate to me how to use it. Its just me, two text books, and short how to he’s written online for us to look over. If anyone out there plans on taking some computer courses, don’t do them online, its not a good idea. This will be the first and the last one I take online.

I think I got the program correct. If nothing else it satisfies his two biggest requirements. It a) compiles and b) it does what it is supposed to do. Well, it does it for the all the examples I threw at it, which I will admit was not a great deal. I’ve been posting my homework all tar-ed up on my free Google web page. Its coming along. Still not very good in my opinion, but I’d like to see someone do much better considering its free and they (in my opinion) try to limit what you can and cannot do a great deal. I don’t know if anyone has actually downloaded any of my tarballs, but they are there. Since I’ve never actually given out the address to the site on my blog, I suppose now is just as good as time as any. So enjoy and don’t be to harsh, I have very little experience with HTML and website design is not something I pride myself on.

http://oliver.steven.googlepages.com/home

Enjoy the Penguins!

Theme switch.. again

It may not seem like it to other people, but to me it seems like I switch themes constantly. As you may notice its now black with white font. And I’ve only got one side bar. I felt like two side bars just cluttered the page. I also think that the black background makes it easier on the eyes when reading. Especially on really bright displays. The theme is one provided by Blogger, though I played with it a little. Most obviously I made the font larger to make it easier to read. I removed the “recent posts” section. Which I see as worthless. If you want to see my recent posts scroll down or click the archives, its not hard. I retained the same links as I had before except for my “Friends Blogs” section. It was more or less pointless anyway. The offer still stands though if anyone wants to trade links, I’d be more than happy to reinstate it, until then you won’t see it. I kept the text ad at the top of the page (Google Adsense) but I got rid of the banner add at the bottom. I found it annoying and it generated a nil amount of money anyway. Apparently no one scrolls down that far. The CC licence is still there though. I might actually change my licence though. Just make it totally free to anyone as long as they give me credit. Right now its free to anyone unless they want it for commercial purposes. I cannot swear to it, but I feel like the page also loads faster and cleaner. Another plus.

Overall the change was a lot smoother than I originally thought it would be. I suppose having done this several times already you tend to learn how to prepare and go about it. I’m also much more familiar with how the CSS for blogs is laid out now and I find I can more quickly find the pieces of code I wish to edit. Hopefully I can keep this theme around longer than the last one. I get tired of switching. I have Blog Theme A.D.D. or something. Leave your comments and suggestions!

Enjoy the Penguins!