Long December
Dec. 29, 2003
Since my last post, I've been insanely busy. This past semester's finals week was possibly my worst ever, thanks to a morphing project that never actually worked. To make it worse, we had a nasty snowstorm come to Urbana for finals week, freezing everyone and making everyone sick.
On a happier note, I never have to take Operating Systems again. I've become convinced that the reason OS is taught so poorly at all universities is Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. This book is praised at universities for its quality, but I think it is seriously lacking in real OS material. It contains tons of information about systems material which is only tangentially related to OS, such as JPEG compression and RSA encryption, but little about what I would consider to be real OS topics, such as advanced scheduling algorithms, filesystems with metadata, distributed filesystems, etc. Most of the material covered under these topics is outdated or, even worse, wrong. With luck, this will be the last time I rant on this topic here.
After finals week ended, I slept fourteen hours and then graded the Algorithms finals. Then we were off to beautiful, sunny Florida for a relaxing Christmas break. We spent the first week, including Christmas day, with my mother-in-law. Now we are staying with my parents until we head back to Urbana and I take my practice qual.