Pete's Log: stupid pete
Entry #1046, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 22 years old.)
I find it necessary, from time to time, to prove to myself that I'm just not that bright. Today the time had come again. I did, however, prove that the 2.4.5 kernel recovers very well from running out of swap space. Much better than the 2.2 kernels that I intentionally ran out of swap space for experimental purposes.
I think the way I treated malloc today can only be described as "abusive" ... the term "beating the crap out of the machine" comes to mind as well. First of all, I had both netscape and mozilla running at the same time. Wasteful, but fair enough. Then I had dozens of eterms open, as well as emacs. Not a problem, usually. Then I was running a kernel compile inside of vmware. Stupid, stupid Pete. But that in and of itself wasn't too horrid. I then proceeded to run dselect and perform debian updates at the same time. Stupid, stupid, stupid Pete. The machine chugged along slowly, swap space nearly exhausted. At this point I decided it would be a good time to switch virtual desktops, forcing a bunch of programs to be loaded back into memory, as well as a new desktop background to be loaded. Oof. malloc hung for nearly five minutes before the kernel decided to kill off vmware and mozilla in order to reclaim some memory. vmware did not die particularly cleanly. ugh. But the system returned to a stable state, and I promptly rebooted it, as a precaution of sorts. I consider myself lucky that my vm linux install still functioned when I launched it again. The moral of the story: I have a swap meter in my gnome panel for a reason. I should pay more attention to it...
So anyway, that's the excitement for today. I've been spending my time of late working on Mona. We had a Mona code review yesterday. And I've been battling to get Mona installed in a linux vm. It's not going as well as I would have hoped. Then once I get that working, it is my assigned task to get the "user" or "export" transformation working. We need this working by Wednesday, when we leave for usenix. So this shall be my weekend. It's amusing that in the code it's called the "user" transformation, but all the Mona papers refer to it as the "export" transformation. Who needs consistency anyway?
Oh, and I saw my advisor today for the first time in about a month. Heh.