Nitros9 started as a disassembly and reverse engineering of a commercial RTOS for the Tandy-Radio Shack Color Computer that dates back to the early 80’s. A few Really Smart People started hacking away at this source and improved on it to come up with Nitros9. The entire thing is written in hand-coded and highly optimized Motrola M6809 assembly language. My project is to convert the whole thing to C.

There are many reasons why I am working on this. I wanted a challenging project to help keep my programming skills up. Over the past few months a friend and I have been tinkering around on our own Intel x86 kernel. I thought that the very simple design of Nitros9 might be useful to this project, so I’m doing this to really learn how it all works.

I have no idea if rel.c actually compiles or works yet, but the first milestone in a new project will is exciting. I can always come back to it later if it doesn’t.

The next step is to move on to the heart of the kernel.

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1. Ensure that you have unregistered MobileMe on your Mac. Go to System Preferences -> Internet & Network -> MobileMe and click the Sign Out button.
2. Log onto your MobileMe site and cancel the account from there.
3. Here’s where my iPhone got stuck. My iPhone thought that MobileMe was still there. I had to go into Settings ->General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings in order to completely rid it of MobileMe

Once this was done, I could again go into iTunes and Sync my Mac’s Address Book with my iPhone. Now I won’t have to memorize everyone’s phone numbers to know who is calling…

I have already spent one summer at Sun Microsystems Labs working on a project in Self. There I learned about the message passing style inherited from SmallTalk which is also used in Obj-C. As for Interface Builder, the GUI allows you to drag pointers to connect objects– this again is similar to Self or SmallTalk. OOP concepts are pretty much omnipresent these days, and having worked in both C++ and Java over the last few years makes this pretty straightforward as well.

This should be an interesting journey, and hopefully a fruitful one.

The sub sounded loose and flabby. The base speakers sound better by themselves. One nice feature of my Paradigm Studio Reference 100 v.3 speakers is they don’t have super subwoofer bass but they do have punch when it’s needed. Just the right amount to satisfy me most of the time.

I’m starting to resume projects that I haven’t worked on in a few years, so look for more frequent updates in the near future.

To answer the first question, the story is rather complex. In June of this year I participated in the 2007 graduation ceremony, even though my course work was not completed at that time. Most schools will let you “walk” a bit early, if you only have a handful of classes to complete (one in my case).

I took the last remaining course for completion of my degree at Foothill College. Taking classes during the summer is never easy. You might ask: How hard could an Ancient History class be? Well, start with a 12-week quarter. Summer courses are 6 weeks long. But this class is only 4-quarter-units, so it is only 5 weeks long. This class ended a week early, so we are down to 12 weeks of content in 4 weeks. No assignments were due in the first week, so the next 3 weeks were absolute and utter hell: a 6-page paper was due every week. That doesn’t seem bad, but the bad part for me was that this 6-page paper was actually three 2-page papers on three different subjects. I had a lot of trouble staying focused, and even more trouble staying on topic. Well, in the end I survived all of this and my final official grade was A-. The professor doesn’t like +/- grading, so an A went into my academic record.

Before the quarter was over, I ordered a transcript to be sent from Foothill to UCSC at the end of the quarter. This was sent about a week after the official end of Foothill’s quarter. This was around August 17. About 3 weeks later I was wondering why it hadn’t shown up on the UCSC computer system yet, so I called the UCSC Registrar’s office. They reported that the transcript had been received and is being processed. They said it could take up to about a month to go through.

It showed up in the computer system on October 23.

Back to graduation.

Since all of my course work was completed as of Summer 2007, I applied for graduation at the beginning of the Fall 2007 quarter, on September 22. This means that during this quarter the paperwork for my graduation will be processed by the Registrar’s Office, the College Nine Undergraduate Advising Office, and the Jack Baskin School of Engineering Undergraduate Advising Office. Only once my paperwork has been reviewed by both advising offices and then sent back to the Registrar’s office for official sign off and data entry will this process be complete and the computer system will show that I have earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. I expect this to occur towards the middle to end of December.

There will be much rejoicing and merrymaking when this point has been reached.

The date when my physical diploma will show up is still unknown. All I know is that it will be a few months after I have actually graduated. This puts it around the beginning of Spring 2008.

I don’t care about the piece of paper as much as I do the electronic version showing up in my web browser.

Stay tuned.

A detailed description of where all this time goes follows.

Lecture
MWF Courses; Duration 1:10 hours x 3 days = 3:30 hours per week per class x 2 classes = 7 hours
TuTh Course; Duration 1:45 x 2 days = 3:30 hours per week = 3:30 hours

7:00 + 3:30 = 10 hours, 30 minutes of lecture per week.

Required Lab and Recitation Sections
Required 1 hour graded lab
Requred 1 hour recitation section
Total: 2 hours.

Running total: 12 hours, 30 minutes.

Homework
Conservative estimate: 2 hours per class x 2 classes = 4 hours.

Running total: 16 hours, 30 minutes.

Projects and Lab Work
Lab work conservative estimate: 10 hours per week
Programming Projects conservative estimate: 15 hours per week.
Total: 25 hours per week

Running total: 41 hours, 30 minutes per week.

Total
41 hours, 30 minutes per week.

The only real issue was that I was trying to make this and get a cup of coffee going at the same time.. think the coffee needs to get finished first. The recipe states that you should soak the matzah until “soft but not soggy”. Because I wasn’t watching it carefully, the matzah got soaked too long and became soggy to the point where it almost falling apart. The fortunate part about this mistake is that it’s still edible even in this state. It just means that the matzah can’t soak up any of the egg.

I’m going to try again either tomorrow or Tuesday and force feed some of it to my housemate…

Happy Passover.