A Three Hour Tour

It is no surprise to any college student that final exams suck.  They don’t just suck, they suck like a heavy-duty industrial vacuum cleaner rewired by Tim “the Toolman” Taylor.  Well, not really.  Further proof I shouldn’t ever think of being an English major.

The first of my three finals this quarter was for CS 33, the introduction to (MIPS) computer architecture and assembly language.  The final had very time-consuming questions on it – not hard ones, just time consuming ones.  For instance, I had to find the five errors in an eight-page program.  Pure evil, especially when four of the five were near the end!

The next final was the exact opposite – Math 33A, Linear Algebra.  I finished in an hour, checked my work, and turned it in.  Easy stuff.  Which was good considering the final started at 6:30pm and could have gone until 9:30.

Now I have a day off until I get to enjoy the thrill of waking up at the ungodly hour of 6 am to get ready for my final at 8.  Differential equations.  Good stuff.

For anybody out there who uses Gentoo Linux, try using emerge -atv package if you don’t already. It will print out all the packages that will be merged, including dependencies, and ask for your confirmation first. This is good for checking out USE flags.

Here are some packages to try it out on:

eix

A package database, very fast, and useful to see what’s available, what you have installed, and what use flags are in effect.

gentoolkit

Contains euse, a simple but incredibly useful script to update your USE flags.

euses

Ever wondered what that USE flag does? This program will tell you.

pciutils and usbutils

Two very useful programs that tell you what devices are attached to your computer. Indispensible for kernel configuration.

This is probably old news for longtime Gentoo users, but for anyone getting started with Gentoo they help a lot.