Titanium-foil?

I haven't published a new post in quite some time. A lot of new events have unfolded since my last post, some good, some bad.

I'll be joining the military (U.S. Air Force) in the coming months. I've spoken to a decent recruiter and have filled out the necessary paperwork, in my mind it's a done deal. I'm still deciding which career path I'd like to take, but I've narrowed it down to a few. I'll most likely be aiming to go into the cyber-intelligence career fields.

I decided that before I actually go to basic training, I wanted to fulfil a few personal goals that with help me through the military and better myself. One of the goals is to get in shape (physically) enough that I won't struggle too much with basic and potentially drag a team down with me. I've improved quite a bit in the month I've been training and feel that it won't be long until that goal is met.

I've been working on a great project with a friend on IRC (#elitecafe). The project is called OpenLibC (Open-source C99-compliant C library), and has progressed quite a ways in the small time it's been worked on. It's being coded in C (GCC/ICC) and AT&T-syntax assembly (GAS).

I also did some work on a really awesome, up-and-coming operating system project called Pedigree. To give some perspective, most (~90%) hobby operating systems never see the light of day or accomplish anything more than a partial C library and a few common x86/x86-64 drivers. Pedigree is very advanced in the realm of hobby operating systems and has had some publicity in the past year in a few places (namely Reddit). I helped add in FPU/MMX/SSE support for user-space applications. I hope the project goes far as it has a ton of potential.


I tried out the beta for Ubuntu 9.10 x86-64 with grim results. Booting normally, I couldn't even get past the splash screen to the installer without it freezing the entire system. After some trial-and-error, I was able to get all the way through the installation in a non-graphical mode, but was met with a lovely freezing splash screen on reboot. After some more tinkering, I was able to get into a shell of the installation and found that the system would completely freeze (no input at all) upon starting the X server (Xorg). When I tried to debug the situation, I found out that 9.10 no longer needs the infamous /etc/X11/xorg.conf for X configuration. I now uses a built-in detection scheme and only uses the configuration file as additional parameters/options. All-in-all, after hours of trying to figure out the problem, I axed the endevour and re-installed 9.04. /fail