From the wonders of xkcd

This morning I had my first lecture for the new semester.

159.734 Intelligent Systems.

The lecturer enters the room and announces that he is taking the paper because the lecturer who was meant to be taking it had moved to a different uni in Singapore and then announces how much he does not like the paper and how we know just about everything in it already.

Therefore he will be renaming the paper to 159.736 Studies in Operating Systems and we will be doing an in depth study of one operating system in particular: Google Android OS.

I just about fell off my chair when he said this. Not only do I have a brand new cellphone, one of only a handful in the world running Android, I am now doing a whole paper on it at uni. How cool is that.

At the moment there are going to be two assignments for the paper one on building a device driver under Android say something to run bluetooth. And the second assignment will be building some awesome app for the OS.

I now wonder if I can claim my new cellphone back as a course related cost. ROFLOL.

Okay today was interesting.

I am very tired and now thinking about how much of a challenge I have for me over the next seven weeks on a project that looked so simple from the outset.

I was meant to start work at 8.30am this morning and I had no idea how hard it would be to get carparking and stuff like that. In the end I arrived at 8.10am before anyone else. Doh! Anyway my manager arrived at around 8.20am and we got stuck in pretty quickly.

First things first involved setting up a computer for me. About 10 minutes later I had a computer and desk and 22in moniter to work from and a network login. And by 8.50am I had my first hello world program compiled.

Initially I turned down using visual studio in favour of remaining with gcc. However I quickly discovered that I needed it for some project files and got it installed. (this then came back to bite me as I spent half the afternoon waiting for service pack one to install).

I am also trying to get used to using a huge moniter but not having dual screens. I think I prefer my home set up with 2 19in screens.

My morning consisted of a lot of googling and reading to determine if I could use some LGPL code in a closed source application. In the end we determined that if the LGPL code that was used remained LGPL and open then we could.

My afternoon consisted of trying to get my head around some C code written 20 or so years ago.

This isn’t easy. All the variables are just two letters and there are very few comments in the code. I think it will take me the rest of the week to fully understand how the code works. From then I will need to start working on updating it and making the project.

Is it Vista?

Is it Ubuntu?

It is seamless virtualization with Virtualbox. Pretty cool aye.

Here is a challenge for you: http://www.hack-test.com

I am on level 11 and stuck. (A google search got me to level 12 but I still want to be able to solve level 11).

How high can you go?