Category Archives: Products

Pending Review

In the last 24 clock-hours, Ben and I have put in (combined) over 24 man-hours on our CS537 project, I believe, but I think we finally found the last bug. I’m so glad, as the process was extremely frustrating.

The idea of our project is basically just to implement a correctly-synchronized scheduling algorithm in a multi-threaded system of “Stations” and “Channels” by using Java monitors. We ran into a lot of bugs over the past 24 hrs, ranging from coding typos to design flaws. In the end I doubt there are more than 10 lines that either of us wrote that haven’t been rewritten.

All that’s left now though, pending Ben’s review to see if he can get it to break, is to fix up the commenting and make sure it adheres to our (rather stringent) style guidelines.

Awesome! Now on to CS/ECE 552, where I am sure I will put in another 12+ man-hours by its Tuesday due date. 🙁

On the upshot, I finally had a reason to try out Skype to work with Ben on this, and it’s really pretty cool. I’m sure everyone reading this who would be interested has already tried it, so I won’t say anymore about that, other than that I’m impressed and probably should have tried it a long time ago. Oh, and that it’s a lot cheaper than spending 4 hrs 18 minutes at a crack on your cellphone.

The mouse IS the better mousetrap

I was trying to clean my laptop screen today with my “Klear Screen” cleaning solution (bought two years ago from Scott’s recommendation, works awesome. www.klearscreen.com), and I could not seem to polish off this one particular smudge.

Let me back up. The cleaning process is:

  1. Turn off monitor. Well, I didn’t want to shut my laptop down, so I settled for turning off the backlight, leaving the contents of the screen just barely visible.
  2. Spray once for 14″ or less, or twice for above.
  3. Spread solution to corners of monitor with corner of micro-chamois.
  4. Immediately begin polishing off the solution with remaining surface area of micro-chamois.
  5. Once no solution is visible, the monitor is clean.

Use once a week for best results (Hm, I’ve used it about half a dozen times in 2 years…)

So I was stuck in step 4, because I couldn’t seem to polish off this one spot. Upon closer inspection, that spot was my mouse cursor. Oops.