Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.

October 09, 2004

The Day of 3 Distros

I know I haven't updated this in a while. I have been extremely busy this week, but with some of the most exciting work I have ever had in my life. In the course of today I have reformatted my laptop's (not my Mac) three times, and had 3 different Distributions running (FC 2, Knoppix, Ubuntu). Ubuntu is great and nice to use, though updating everything using apt-get somehow ruined my wireless card driver. Well, it stopped my working, and...
Posted on October 9, 2004 09:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 25, 2004

Finished 108B & Skipping 154

I just finally finished my EE 108 B Project, after falling asleep yesterday and therefore not finishing it as planned. Unfortunately I finished it too late in order to be able to finish CS 154 on time, so I decided to take the option of dropping the problemset. Now I am working on finalizing the details of my second president's scholar project, which I will talk to Julie about tomorrow morning. This will include a large number of books and...
Posted on May 25, 2004 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 06, 2004

Towards Scalable Multiprocessor Virtual Machines

From the description alone, this sounds amazing. The basic goal is to schedule physical processors in a multiprocessor machine, to virtual processors in several multiprocessor, virtual machines. They are trying to maximize physical processor usage, while minimizing waiting times due to locks. They use something called time ballooning, which is similar to the memory ballooning in VMware ESX Server, I am not entirely sure how exactly this works, but it seems like a neat idea. Of all the papers yet,...
Posted on May 6, 2004 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 03, 2004

Too Many Midterms

Having 6 midterms in a quarter is not the worst thing in the world, but it is not the greatest either. While my first 2 (Math 51 and CS 240) went exceptionally well, the latter two (EE 108 B and CS 154) could have been a lot better (I have not gotten grades for those yet). I was able to answer most questions on CS 154, but could not answer parts of 2 questions, which were worth a lot of...
Posted on May 3, 2004 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2004

Math 51 Redux

Taking Math 51 again is a strange experience. We fortunately do not have to use Matlab which was one of my biggest reasons against retaking it (I don't even really know why). And given how little attention I paid to everything the first time I took it, I find it surprisingly interesting. Wednesday is the date of our first midterm which unfortunately is only worth 20% rather than the usual 25, but that should not matter too much. I am...
Posted on April 18, 2004 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2004

CS 240 Rocks

I spent a large part of last week reading every paper ever read in a prior quarter of CS 240. I learned a lot and am very much strengthened in my determination to continue in Systems. CS 240 is probably the best class I have yet taken at Stanford, even if it is a bit intimidating at times. I really like the discussion based format, because there is too little interaction in the CS department in general. I also like...
Posted on April 12, 2004 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2004

43:30 Hours Until the Deadline

Can Sar: man, this day is tough Curt Hoyt: lol, i have no idea why i am awake Can Sar: i don't know if i can finish this Curt Hoyt: finish what Can Sar: 140 Curt Hoyt: dude you're can sar He's right. This will be a long weekend....
Posted on February 21, 2004 03:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2004

Working on CS 140

How can men stand against such reckless bugs?...
Posted on February 16, 2004 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 10, 2004

The Midterm of Pain

Today's CS 161 midterm was the hardest I have ever taken at Stanford. I know that the mean will not be too high, but that will definitely not enough to earn me a good grade. My main problem was that I did not have enough practice with the underlying Math, and understanding the actual algorithms did not help too much. Fortunately the midterm is only worth 15%, but I will have to start acing all the problemsets and ace the...
Posted on February 10, 2004 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 06, 2004

The State of the Code

We "finished" CS 140 last night. Unfortunately we realized that we had a bug about an hour before it was due and did not have enough time to fix it. When NachOS runs out of memory, we crash instead of just having Exec return -1. This is incredibly stupid, but I hope that the grade will work out anyway, since this does not happen too often. I will probably fix this bug sometime today....
Posted on February 6, 2004 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 23, 2004

Assignment 1 Submitted

Yesterday Travis, Tristan and I submitted our first CS 140 assignment at 11:57. Though the assignment could have gone a bit better overall, we learned a lot. We will start the second assignment today. It is called User Programs and looks quite difficult. Before I can get started on it though, I will do some reading for Anth Sci 3 and watch CS 161 lectures....
Posted on January 23, 2004 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 10, 2004

CS 140 Has Begun

The first CS 140 assignment went out today, and things are looking better this time around. Travis finished most of part 1 (Alarm Clock) of the assignment, though we might have to do some refinement still. I will be going to see Return of the King tomorrow at noon, but will work on CS 140 in the morning, and try to get a good grasp of how to implement Join. I spent about an hour getting Tristan up-to-speed on the...
Posted on January 10, 2004 01:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 08, 2004

Inspiration Now Begins

As of now I am officially starting to be motivated and inspired again. This was mainly caused by Sedgewick being mentioned in CS 161 lecture. I went to his site and read this paper, and was suddenly inspired about CS again. I am looking forward to finally getting my 161 textbook on monday or Tuesday (the book was delayed)....
Posted on January 8, 2004 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 02, 2003

Some Progress

Travis and I just submitted CS 143! Now I have a bit of 242 to finish till tomorrow, and most of the CS 143 problemset and a paper for STS to finish till Thursday. The essay is extremely important, because it makes up 25% of my grade, and should only be between 950 and 1050 words in length. I will probably start early tomorrow, and hope I can finish 242 quickly so that I can really concentrate on the paper....
Posted on December 2, 2003 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 30, 2003

Optimizing Integers

Optimizations have turned out to be more difficult than I thought, especially because the runtime environment was not designed for them at all. This makes many things quite complicated, especially because we only have 3 days to implement everything, and only want to spend about a day on it. Right now it seems like we will only optimize integers and booleans, and maybe strings. I have figured out how to do integers, but will need to make some modifications (easy...
Posted on November 30, 2003 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2003

Submitted!

We just submitted CS 143 PA4. Tomorrow we will start optimizations (the extra credit assignment). I woke up at 4pm today, and have a lot of work to do now. But I am very glad that the compiler is finished....
Posted on November 28, 2003 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2003

Success!

It seems like I have fixed all known bugs in our compiler. Our write-up for CS 147 is also almost finished, and I will make some final changes to it tomorrow. I also have to make a nice looking graph for our 147 project, but it should not take too long. I have quite a lot of sleep to catch up on, which I will probably not do tonight, though I will definitely get nine hours of sleep. Travis and...
Posted on November 28, 2003 02:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 27, 2003

Compilers: The Story Continues

Quite unfortunately Travis and I were not able to finish CS 143 on time. An hour before the assignment was due, we realized that our compiler failed most of the test cases. We stayed up till 2pm and tried to get everything to work before Travis left for thanksgiving break, but did not succeed. Though we fixed many errors, some still remain, and I will fix these tomorrow, and then submit the assignment by midnight on Friday when Travis returns....
Posted on November 27, 2003 03:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 23, 2003

And Now: Test Code

I am finished with most of the actual CS 143 code and will now start writing test code and try to find and fix bugs. Travis is still working on case which seems to be very very difficult. I also just finished all 4 DVD of LOTR, and now need to find something else to watch while programming. I think The Matrix and LOTR are no my favorite movies of all time, but more about that later....
Posted on November 23, 2003 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 22, 2003

More on Code Generation

Things are going quite well, but today will be a day of massive architecture restructuring. We now have working function calls, if statements, I have a good feeling about all of this right now, and I hope that this continues to work well tomorrow....
Posted on November 22, 2003 03:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 21, 2003

Sweet!

I just finished loading attributes. This means that we can use both attributes and formal arguments in our calculations. I hope our speed of progress continues, because we now have to handle one of the most important steps of code generation, implementing the first code that uses labels. This assignment is lots of fun, but very very challenging....
Posted on November 21, 2003 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 20, 2003

Rocking CS 147!

Great Kudos to Tristán for doing an absolutely amazing job on CS 147. Our personal trainer prototype is now almost completely ready for the demo tomorrow morning. It includes Speech Recognition, Displaying of a Camera Feed from an iSight and amazing images. We have most of the necessary screens finished, and though things will be added for the final presentation, this week's version is amazing. I will post pictures tomorrow after the demo. CS 143 is very difficult, but we...
Posted on November 20, 2003 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 18, 2003

More Work, but It's Going to Work Out

Both the CS 242 Problemset and E40 Prelab are due tomorrow, but I think that will work out quite nicely. We are slightly stuck on CS 143 right now, but we are going to office hours and got some good news today. We were planning to finish the project by Friday evening and then start doing extra credit. This put us into the uncomfortable situation of having to compromise the code generator itself in order to do optimization. Fortunately the...
Posted on November 18, 2003 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2003

Codegen Madness

Yesterday Travis and I started working on the last CS 143 programming project: our code generator. This assignment requires us to learn MIPS assembly, write headers and implement the assembly for an Object Oriented language. I have wanted to learn more about assembly for such a long time now, that I think this will be one of my most interesting assignments at Stanford till now. Right now we have made quite a lot of progress setting up all constants and...
Posted on November 17, 2003 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 03, 2003

Crazy Cool Coding

After spending most of Saturday trying to figure out what we had to do for part three of our Cool compiler (type checking), we finally started coding Sunday morning. As of yesterday evening we are pretty much finished with type checking for classes. Our type checker makes sure that every class a class inherits from is actually defined and there are no direct or indirect cycles in the inheritance tree. It also checks that no classes are ever redefined, and...
Posted on November 3, 2003 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 01, 2003

CS 143 Compilers

I'm just watching the first CS 143 lecture online. The sylabus is already set, with all the dates of when assignments go out already known. The professor is new at Stanford and taught at Berkley for 10 years. He seems really nice and like most of my professors this quarter seems to have a good sense of humor, which I very much like. We will be working on a compiler for an Object Oriented Language called COOL (Classroom Object Oriented...
Posted on October 1, 2003 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2003

Changes

I'm changing my schedule. CS 140 is extremely hard, and I feel like I am not yet up to the job. I am taking a lot of other classes, and I think that it is too early for me to take it. Our team skills are not yet good enough yet, and we do not have enough system programming experience yet. Instead of CS 140 Travis and I are now taking CS 143 Compilers. The class interests me just as...
Posted on September 30, 2003 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2003

CS 140: Me and the Grad Students

CS 140 has started and it is not easy. The class is definitely not intended for most undergraduates. Although there are some seniors and juniors, the course mailing list is full of graduate students or SUN engineers looking for teammates. I think that my group will somehow survive, but it wont be an easy ride. Today I have been working on changing the scheduler from a simple Round Robin Scheduler to a preemptive priority based scheduler. This might sound very...
Posted on September 30, 2003 01:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2003

Starting on CS 140 Reading

After I finished the Bach book (a review will follow some time today), it is now time to start reading the lecture notes, which does not appear to be too much work. It's been quite some time since I read the text book for the class (2 years), and I have an older edition, so I will have to redo some of that work. But most of my CS 140 preparation will now consist of reading Nachos code and playing...
Posted on July 23, 2003 02:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 09, 2003

Finals

It's 40 minutes before my CS 107 final. I finished IHUM this morning at 5 and after this I don't have anything till Wednesday morning. I will update the weblog as soon as I come back from the final. I sent an email to Xanga today, because many of my friends use it, and their RSS is broken. Because of this I cannot view it in NetNewsWire. I know that Xanga's RSS is still experimental, but making RSS validate is...
Posted on June 9, 2003 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 21, 2003

Academic Advising & John McCarthy

Professor John McCarthy told us today, that he would accept two of us as his advisees. Given that he has not done this in a long time, and has only one PhD student, this is a great honor. I am seriously considering the offer, but I'm not entirely sure, whether it is exactly what I want. Unfortunately, I do not have too much time to decide. Any advice?...
Posted on May 21, 2003 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 13, 2003

BTree and C++

BTree is quite a difficult assignment I must agree. I am very glad that the iterator part was made optional, because I have been getting tired of working on this assignment. I finished most of the assignment and tried my hand at writing the iterators, and while I think I could finish them without too much work, I have gotten tired of it. I am very much looking forward to programming in Java again. Although I love C I think...
Posted on May 13, 2003 04:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 10, 2003

Shared String and BTreeMap

I just finished Shared String, a string that is exactly like a normal one, with the only exception being that lexically identical strings will share their memory. The assignment was quite simple, although it took me some time to figure out that I cannot call one constructor from another, like in Java. Fixing that only took a few seconds. I now have to do BTreeMap and it promises to be difficult. The assignment was so long that Professor Cain said...
Posted on May 10, 2003 01:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 05, 2003

Midterm Madness.....

I got both my CS 103 B and CS 107 midterms back. The results were mixed. Both midterms were only worth 20% of the final grade, which was a good thing. In CS 107 I barely scored above the mean, because I mistook an array of 2 short pointers as 2 shorts and generated the wrong assembly code for them. I also messed up some things with char **. Low level C is still something I need to practice more....
Posted on May 5, 2003 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2003

CS 197 Final Project

I have to do a small (tiny) final project for CS 197: Unix Mainframe Consulting, and even though it is not even assigned yet (it will be in about a month), I just feel like starting it soon, because I have a nice idea. Apparently lots of people have problems with uploading text files onto the Solaris machines, and then not being able to view them correctly because of line ending issues. My program will help people with this....
Posted on April 26, 2003 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)