For the entirety of my classes during the month of January, I worked with Shawn and Evan setting up the server and router, as well as setting up my own computer and station to work at. I first decided to net boot Debian, but decided to install Mint 14, instead. I also decided to experiment with different operating systems and window managers, so I installed gnome, cinnamon, and awesome window managers. I installed Minecraft and attempted to set up a new ATI graphics card. It wouldn't work correctly because I didn't have the drivers, so I installed linux-firmware-nonfree to allow the operating system to access those drivers that aren't “freeware.” Other than that, I went to classes and worked on little things like fixing the dual monitor problem I had by using xrandr –output DVI-X –left-of DVI-Y. I also programmed my window manager to set up my monitors at start up.

Friday, February 1st

Today, we actually began working on our CPU and created at first a one bit adder, then two, and so on and so forth until we created an 8 bit adder. Using a carry in and two separate inputs, we were able to use XOR, AND and NOT gates to create each adder. We had a few problems with shooting the output back to the switches so we could see it, as well as the switches being too far apart.

Wednesday, February 13th

I worked on Joe's half and full adders a bit. I'm just finishing them up, then I am going to get working on the multiplexer and demultiplexer he is requesting.

Wednesday, February 13

Today I worked with Matt setting up the dns server for our router. I copied over some of the config files in our /etc/bind from the files that he gave us which were config files from his routers for the LAIR. I updated the files to include separate ip's for each of the people using this router (Evan, Shawn, Brett and myself).

Friday, February 15

Finished up setting up our DNS server.

• named.conf - The main file for all of the other config files in the bind directory. Includes the other three named.conf files
• named.conf.options - forwarders = If our dns server doesn't know how to service a request, it will ask the “neighbor” (the forwarded ip's) and see if they know. If they do, then it will send the user there, if not, it will go to their neighbors and check with them. Recursive turned on allows the process to be repeated until it is resolved. If it isn't on, it could and probably would stop at the first neighbor.
• named.conf.local - Defines the local zone files.

Week of: February 4 - February 9

I began work on the SDL tutorial on lazyfoo.com. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten very far, being distracted by the N64 and other classes :( I did create a git repository for the SDL directory I made! Woo!

February 20

I worked on the SDL Library tutorial on lazyfoo.com some more. I was able to complete the second one, and I messed with it a bit and created a tiled background that had 9 different tiles with the HELLO WORLD image in the foreground, equally spaced out in the middle. IT WAS NICE.

I am working on the SDL Library this morning. I haven't worked on it in about a week and I need to get that done!

I ran into a problem with some broken dependencies and packages, so I am working on fixing that. After trying apt-get clean, install -f, update, upgrade, all of those things, and nothing worked. So I tried aptitude install, and so far things seem to be going well. We will see how it turns out… It's stuck processing something, so I am going to wait on that. For now, I am going to work on the logic library for Joe's class.

While I was at home, I decided to check out a subreddit that Shawn told me about called r/unixporn. It is a really cool subreddit where people show off how they have customized their unix/linux distros and window managers. I came across a neat program called archey, which displays info on your system, so I decided to install it. It is really sweet! I also configured my .binrc file to activate archey when I open a new terminal. I LIKE IT A LOT

HPC Fundamentals

Well, this morning I woke up feeling like P-Diddy. I started helping Evan with the touch screen project. He couldn't get the USB to unmount from MacOSx and mount to the VirtualBox to update the touch screen drivers. We looked up some tutorials and some forums to fix our problem, and I came across a fix for someone else that worked for our situation. We just had to allow the VirtualBox to access the USB drive, then unplug the screen, start up VB, then plug the screen in, and DONE. All that is left (I think) is to update the linux drivers to operate the screen correctly.

I'm going to install the drivers on my laptop while he installs them on the VirtualBox so that I can get some hands-on experience with it and not feel like I did nothing! I found out it is already installed, so now I just have to edit some things to put up what I want to put up on the monitor and other things like that.

Systems Programming

I worked on the SDL Library quite a bit today, going through tutorials 5 to 11. Those tutorials covered key presses, adding sounds, picking up the mouse and mouse clicks, layering pictures, things like that. It was a good time!

HPC Fundamentals

A project has been brought to my attention where I could use wget to make a local mirror of a webpage and put it on a local webpage of mine so I can access it at any point in time. I will use www.play-hookey.com on my experiment since I am running into problems with the site at the moment.

HPC Fundamentals

While I was working on updating my .bashrc file to show my lady (T-Swift) at terminal startup, it was brought to my attention by Matt

HPC Fundamentals

I began working on the WiiMote Whiteboard today. First, I had to install the necessary firmware and drivers to run the bluetooth adapter. I then checked to see if I had the package linux-firmware-nonfree installed, which I did.

sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

An error saying that we are missing a file kept appearing, so Matt and I went into search mode. We found the file on this website, but we couldn't find out why it still didn't work. We actually had to change the name of the file, because it was

fw-0489_e031.hcd

when the actual file name we needed was

fw-0a5c_21e8.hcd

so when we changed that, the bluetooth was recognized.

HPC Fundamentals

I continued work on the WiiMote Whiteboard, the tutorial I am preparing is here.'

Computer Organization

I finally was able to completely change my already existing functions in Joe's class to one large class successfully. The problem I had was that I didn't actually create an object in the main function, which is why it kept giving me a “need primary something before '.'” error for each call of the functions in the main.

I had to copy a directory over to my local home directory, and to do that I used the scp command from lab46.

scp -r game josh@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:~/