Titus and I had a discussion about the nature of projects such as Wine and Crossover that seek to allow users to run Windows software in a Linux environment and whether or not these projects are a “good thing” for Linux. I see such products having an important role during migration for users who are unwilling to part with all of their Windows applications and games. At this point, most popular Windows applications do have a good Linux equivalent but games are still a big draw to the Windows platform and Linux’s only answer is WineX and a handful of big cross-platform titles. I guess I see these projects helping to fill a few gaps for the Linux desktop. As someone looking at Linux mostly from the other side, I can say I’m interested in this type of project and I would like to see them at a more mature stage of development.
On a more mundane note, I knocked out two more exams today. That leaves two more.
Today feels like the end of vacation or something. I’ve had a very enjoyable visit with family and I’m feeling better today than I have in weeks (not 100% mind you, but better).
I wanted to try out the Mr. Clean AutoDry carwash that I picked up yesterday at Wal-Mart. The product claims a spot-free finish with only air drying. Well, drying takes half the time and I’m happy to report that Mr. Clean’s product seems to work as advertised. I washed the car in moderate sunlight, followed the directions, and left the car to air dry. The result was a clean car (my own sloppiness nonwithstanding) with no apparent spotting (yay!). The initial investment cost is moderate and the filter is only rated for three washes before replacement. It remains to be seen if cost will outweigh convenience.
After saying my farewells, I hit the road for Atlanta once again. The trip went by quickly and without event (a far cry from Friday afternoon). As the evening deepened, I turned my attention to finishing my 3090 project. By Monday morning , I had a satisfactory implementation of the assignment.
The garage sale went well. We made $366.27 total and got rid of a bunch of junk. Half goes to my cousin Vance and half goes to me to fund our respsective overseas trips this summer. Vance will be going to Japan in June.
We all had lunch at the Ruby Tuesday’s next to I-85, Exit 51. The food was good but the service was slow. My grandparent’s returned to Dothan after lunch while I ran various errands with my Aunt Kathy. We stopped by Hastings, Wal-Mart, Sno-Biz, and Books-A-Million. Sno-Biz seems to be the hot spot to find young co-eds in Auburn.
Vance had Kill Bill, Vol. 1 so I finally knocked off my list of movies to watch. The movie can be quite over-the-top at times but it has a style all its own. I imagine it will be one of those acquired tastes like Tarantino’s other work Pulp Fiction.
Attendance in Ancient Greece was strictly optional, as today we did show and tell. Some of the projects that others had done were actually rather impressive. I’m now convinced of the mediocrity of my own project.
The usual two hour break following Ancient Greece provided a convenient window for simulataneous C++ debugging and cramming for the Instrumentation Lab final. The latter eventually won out and as a result, I felt pretty confident about my exam results.
A rare cancellation of Japanese class opened a small window for me to try to beat the afternoon rush out of the city. My destination was Auburn, Alabama, and my aunt’s house. In the end, an earlier start didn’t do me any good as traffic still was already crawling on the bypass by 4 pm and there would be not one, but two different traffic jams on I-85 South due to wrecks and rubbernecking. After much too long a drive for such a short trip, I did eventually arrive safely in residential Auburn. The rest of the evening was spent visiting with family and making runs to various points of interest in the Auburn/Opelika area.
Classes for the day were little more than formal proceedings. I turned in my last assignments for Instrumentation Lab and listening and critiqued a few more Japanese presentations but there wasn’t much of substance there. One student did pull a rather amusing attempt at bribery at the beginning of his presentation so the day was not without its moments.
The looming deadline for the final C++ project, on the other hand, was more troubling. Successive generations of code morphed an amorphous mess into a workable implementation of path finder algorithm, but I encountered a troubling problem. While my program compiled and ran without a hitch on my laptop, it would hang if compiler optimizations were enabled. This is a problem when we’re supposed to be performance-minded and I have yet to find a solution.
