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Monday, May 12, 2008

News on Monday Morning

Sleep last night was lousy. I couldn't fall asleep at first because I felt very uncomfortable. I was cold and then hot and then cold again. As usual at Dana's house, the air was very dry. Eventually, we are going to break down and buy a damn humidifier, but yesterday was not that day. The weather last night was terrible too, that might have been the worst of it. There was a lot of wind, although not nearly as much rain as was expected. At least, i didn't hear the rain.

The power went off twice, and when the power cycles off then on, the TV in Dana's room turns on and play's static. At several points, the transformer outside Dana's window started shooting out sparks and making a noise like a paintball gun on automatic mode. I suggested somebody call Peco, but I fell asleep again before I found out if anybody actually did. I was worried about a downed powerline, but Dave took a walk around outside (and on the roof) before he left for work, and didn't seem to see anything. I didn't see anything myself before I left the house, although I didn't go so far as to climb up onto the roof.

I got several cool update emails this morning. First, my SVN access to Parrot has finally been granted. It turns out there was an integration problem between two different systems on the Perl.org servers that prevented my account from being added correctly. This error has now been fixed. I made my first commit this morning, an update to a documentation book that's severely outdated. They have a half-written book and no authors currently working on it? It's like they were expecting me. Of course, working on that book doesn't detract at all from my work on the [[Parrot Virtual Machine]] wikibook I've been working on diligently, and I've even gone so far as to explicitly dual license all my contributions to that book under Artistic v2.0 and GFDL licenses.

I also got an invitation this morning to become a member of http://www.parrotblog.org, a central group blog that's all about Parrot. I signed up for an account at http://use.perl.org too. Parrotblog is lower-volume, so I'll use that to post weekly updates. Use.perl.org is higher-volume and easier to get lost in, so I will probably post there daily. This brings the total number of blogs to which I am a contributor to five. If practice truly makes perfect, I'm going to be a fantastic writer before not-too-long.

Today and tomorrow are going to be spent on campus tieing up my last loose ends. I have to print out two new copies of my thesis titlepage and bibliography for the graduate school, and the title pages need to be signed by my advisor (at the very least) and my committee members too. If I can't find them all within these two days, it will be a shame but is not a show-stopper. I also have to tie up my last two final projects: a simulation of a 1970's era OFDM communications system, and a Verilog implementation of a 64-bit IFFT module. For the IFFT, I don't need to implement all the floating-point arithmetic functions or the CORDIC functions either (I can use pre-built modules for those), so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle. The OFDM system is idiosyncratic enough to make simulation and testing difficult. I expect to spend most of my time in the next two days working on OFDM.

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