Shorty

This is a quick post as I feel a need to brag a bit about my recent accomplishment, but first a short list of what’s been going on.

• Midterms
• Papers
• Programming Assignments (I wrote a compiler)
• GRE Test
• Apply to UCSB’s Computer Science 5th year Master Program
• And now finals

Yes it’s finals week and tomorrow I have two and thus I should be studying, but anyone that’s read these blog entries may notice that I usually write around times when I should be doing something else.

Anyways in addition to what was listed I began testing various python windowing toolkits and I expect to write a lengthy comparison of the following:

• pyGTK
• pyQT
• tkinter
• wxpython

My comparison will include information on development of each of these in windows and in linux, and how the end result appears on both. It should be fairly decent and hopefully will attract some more random googlers to my site.

And now the big news, or at least what I feel is big. I am running on my own compiled linux vanilla kernel version 2.6.20.3 to be exact. This was yet another project to distract me from studying for finals, however I think this one may pay off. I made it my goal to get a patch into the linux kernel by the end of this year. Though from what I’m reading this sounds to be somewhat difficult given many good patches are rejected, I’m confident I’ll find something to do that will get in there.

Now this may be a premature assumption however I feel that contributing to the linux kernel is a great way to boost a resume, and especially a great way to learn the inter workings of linux.

On a side note I want to post a few things about my build process. Since I use Ubuntu as my main distro I decided to use the make-kpkg command rather than make for the builds. The benefits of this are package management and automatic installation, thus allowing me to easily undo an install. The main tip I picked up which most people appear to have wrong is the following:

Don’t use the /usr/src directory for your sources. The directory is owned by root and the kernel should not be made with root privileges, thus using /usr/src is not recommended. Create a ~/src directory and work from there.

Also in order to make use of a multi core processor in make-kpkg one must run the following command:

export CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=4

This calls make using the -j command (number of jobs) which cannot be passed to make-kpkg. Since I have a dual core computer 4 is a good number of jobs as it allows each core to process two jobs. I can’t really say if 4 is a better option than two but it certainly is faster than 1 which is the default.

Anyways I guess that’s it. I’ll try to get that python windowing toolkit comparison up soon.