News from 2002

Fifth Season of UCSDementia

• Work on the next episode of Dementia is under way! See more of Mr. Rambler and the five new cast members on Wednesday of fifth week. Read more. (27 Jan 2002).
• New clips have been posted for all to see. They are the final cuts of what was there earlier. (1 Feb 2002).
• Final cuts of Darrick's pieces (Grape Expectorations, What They Said/What They Meant) will be posted after the show. (5 Feb 2002).
• Show aired! Final cuts of Darrick's two sketches have been posted. (6 Feb 2002).
• More clips are posted--random pieces from 5.0, Geisel exploding, and the opening credits.

No More Teenager-dom

Gosh, I'm no longer in the 'teenager' category...

First and Second Web Sites Posted!

While combing through father's computer over Winter Vacation, I happened to chance upon an archive of my very first website. After stewing over it for a month, I have decided to post it for all to see. Not that there's a whole lot to see, and it's not very good. But keep in mind that it was 1996 and that I was in junior high then--do not look for heavy polishing. View this Exhibit.

I've also decided to place the old archive of the DDD site (this site's predecessor) in the Exhibits section, in case you miss the old menus and the old look. Actually, that site is not very different from this one, aside from some slight reordering and the facelift. View this Exhibit.

What's Cooking Updated

I've modified the What's Cooking (page deleted) page to indicate what I'm really up to--it hasn't been a whole lot. It also might be cool to dabble in mathematical constructions and twelve-tone music...if I had the time.

Dementia VI

Writing and production has begun for Dementia VI! It appears that some sort of nature documentary was already filmed at the tail end of season 5, although details about the other sketches are, well, sketchy. Also, based on rumors flying about, certain members of the Dementia crew are working on some sort of big project to be released at the end of the season. More details as they come in.

Virtual Train Sets

The race is on! Woodley put out a train set for YZ-Windows, and now Darrick will have to follow suit! More details forthcoming...for now, look here for screenshots!

More Dementia V Clips

<snort> Train sets...hah! Darrick has far too much to do--final exams, reading the Aeneid for no purpose other than self-amusement and curiosity (seriously, even though nobody seems to believe it). Mandelbaum's translation, for those of you who dabble in that sort of thing. Oh yeah, I also posted more clips from Dementia V.

Spring Quarter

A new quarter is upon me! As usual, I've posted my daily schedule (offsite) for everybody to gawk at. It's unfortunate about CSE 141L-- evidently the department is not going to let me in off the waiting list, even after giving me the runaround several times. Morons. Oh well, I suppose I ought to ease up on the workload anyway.

Dementia VI Dead

Now dead. Look for a Documentia by Clay.

New Photo Gallery

Yo! I installed a new photo album management system to play with. Go look at it here.

Random Sentence Generator

At long last, Darrick has finally posted the first generation random sentence generator on his web site! It's a silly thing; turn on Java for full effect, and then click here for some mind-blowing...words.

Disk Benchmarking Tool

I've written a tool to measure disk throughput versus location on disk. Having gotten several friends to use it on their own machines, I've collected some sample graphs (broken) . Very interesting parabolic and linear patterns...hmm....

Moved to San Diego

Moved down to San Diego, into Costa Verde. Whee, what fun, and a month before school starts, too! :-) RoadRunner fast (for now, anyway; let's hope it stays that way.)

On Deck

CSE 120 (Operating Systems), CSE 141L (Microprocessor Design), CSE 131A (Compiler Construction, Part I), and CSE 111 (Object Oriented Design). This will be interesting. But at least I get four day weekends.

Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer

As the summer begins to shimmer its last rays over the horizon, I find myself staying surprisingly busy, despite this being the summer of not much to do. At the moment, I am re-reading some old favorites (Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (offsite)).

Moreover, I've been beefing up on some new things, such as file systems and, more interestingly, information retrieval systems. It'll be interesting to see what sort of strange ideas pour out of my head, and, more importantly, will I actually do anything with those ideas? Virtual train sets sounded cool, but alas were of somewhat dubious practical value, and thus they seem to have fallen by the wayside.

Also hosted the Summer's End party, where Sam showed us how to cook teriyaki salmon and we (sort of) celebrated roommate Clay's (offsite) birthday and Labor Day. Tanner visited, and all was fun! :-)

Measuring Disk Seek Times

Announcing a seek-time analogue of bogodisk; I ingeniously named it bogoseek. See the program (broken) or see the graphs (broken) .

Fall 2002 Schedule Posted

Enough said. Look here (offsite). Oh yeah: Sam created a multilingual (offsite) version of the Random Sentence Generator; now it supports English, Japanese, "romanji", and Hebrew.

So here's what I did tonight:

Burned hand on stove. Swore a lot. Banged head against various silly memcpy bugs and other heap-corruption nonsense. Gosh I hate C++. Programming an operating system (Nachos) is hard work. It's fun, but draining. Hopefully I'll never have to do this again in my life. (Just watch, I'll probably end up at some company doing OS kernel work...)

Final Exams and a HOSE

Now that that's over, I've finally gotten around to writing down at least a few ideas about a hierarchal metadata-rich object storage system for computers. Read more here.