(Whining and self-pity commencing)
The past few days have been a blur of sleepless nights, absurd amounts of coffee, self-questioning and a pitiful amount of code.
We’re currently attending a course called Operating Systems, it’s compulsory for my bachelor and if it hadn’t been I would have been a mile away. It’s one of those infamous courses that sets students back a full semester, I know of at least one guy in our group that solely has this course this semester. The courses’ home is Stanford, which doesn’t surprise me one bit… It’s high quality and won’t let anyone slip through. I’d show you the grading equation but I don’t want too much pity and will leave it to my nightmares (basically they take the minimum value of two different exercise every week, meaning one could do well on one and have a bad day on one and merely be graded by the bad day. I know, I told you the equation).
The operating system we’re working with is Pintos, and it’s a pain. It’ll just randomly tell you it’s panicking with pretty much no tidbit of why. In the pintos manual the words “undefined behaviour” are repeated an unnerving amount of times.
“Oh we’ll just put that element in the list…”
PANIC
“Ah, I know what to do, we’ll assert it’s the correct form of an element before doing anything else”
PANIC
“Um… well if it isn’t an element… let’s try something simpler”
PANIC
.
.
.
4 hours later.
“So it was a list element all along. What the … else could it be?!”
Existential crises commences as one realizes that one has no idea of what on earth is going on.
It’s 11 pm and the night hasn’t even begun.
PANIC
Trivia from the writers
Why the name “Pintos”? First, like nachos, pinto beans are a common Mexican food. Second, Pintos is small and a “pint” is a small amount. Third, like drivers of the eponymous car, students are likely to have trouble with blow-ups.
(Nachos; Pintos is derived from a former system called Nachos)
ps. I have to add that we attempted a screen shot for this post where pintos does it’s usual panicking… it just kept compiling and running. I have no words. I think I’ve lost all hope.
1 Comment
Excuses and Operating Systems with some Djikstra seasoning · April 9, 2015 at 10:00 am
[…] Monday – no exaggeration, we track time with toggl (great time tracking tool by the way) – on PintOS. I shed a tear at one point, took a power nap on the carpet in the seminar room we invaded and did […]