One of Each

I handed in my Advanced Processors coursework today, what a relief. I can now focus on the group project coursework which the presentation day is on the 6th of June, so not long away. I also have an exam on Monday, yay... So still lots to do but I'm getting there.

I had a bit of time to work on OGE. I've ported the Zip file code so now OGE can handle zip files through the file system. I haven't had much time to test it but it should work as I haven't changed much from the old code.

I've started writing some code to allow you to get a different thread to call any function with specified data. In the old code, we had Extensions but these felt a bit to hard to use and fiddly. Once I've finalised it and checked with Steven, i will clean it up and add it to the utilities. I'm not yet sure if Extensions will be needed at all after this, i will need to look at some use cases.

Time dragging by

It feels like I've only had a few weeks left for months now. Each day seems to go by quite fast allowing me to get a lot less coursework done than i need to but the weeks are going so slowly.
My coursework for advanced processors, which is to write an IEEE style research paper is a nightmare at the moment. Mine is on multi-core processors. We have a ten page limit, no minimum although i would prefer to have 8 or 9 pages in the end.

I'm currently on 2 and a quarter pages, with 20 references, and its taken me a few days, which i have till Wednesday to hand it in. It keeps feeling like it will all be OK and ill finish with a lot of time to spare but then suddenly it will feel like I'm never going to get to 5 pages in that time, let alone 8 or 9.

I can't wait for all of this to be over and to start my holidays, i really need the break. I can only imagine what next year will be like...

Configuration changes to OGE

I've had a bit of time since finishing my last bit of coursework and starting my next (ugh) so i worked on OGE's configuration/options code. There we're a few main features i wanted to add so i had to spend some time working out how to fit it in. I had tried previously but it came out a mess.

I still have quite a bit of work left on this but currently I have expanded oge::Option to allow:

• very basic tracking of what options have been added have been added
• tracking whether any values of an option have been added/changed/removed

These are very simple so don't allow complex tracking but will allow only the modified parts of an option hierarchy to be written to a config file. This can be used to have a read-only main config file and a user chosen or hardware dependant/specific settings config file. Only the settings that have changed compared to the read-only file have to be saved seperately.

I'm also working on the abstract option file parser and an XML implementation.
It seems to be going well at the moment and i'm hoping it won't be too long until i've finished and can commit but i've got a lot of coursework to do sadly.

I also realised i only have 24 days left of uni this year!

Lots of small changes

Since i finished some coursework that was due in today, I've managed to spend a bit of time working on OGE. Instead of making loads of changes and then committing the whole lot in one go, I'm now trying to commit more regularly with smaller additions. Various files have been moved around, data stream helper classes have been added, small changes and documentation to threading code have been made. Steven also ported the old serialisation code and is working on logging.

There is not much left to add to the utilities so very soon work will begin on the core which should be much more interesting. This will lead nicely into my summer holidays.

Looking at OGE now, it's so much cleaner and more organised than our old code. The utilities (at least in my opinion) is turning out very nicely and i at least will find it very useful when working on projects in the future, I hope others will also find it useful.