Redhatter’s Web Blog

Ahhh, so nice to be rid of most of the assessment. I put in my last bit of mid-semester assessment today, and for now, I can relax.

After this week though, it’s onto SWOTVAC (the week-long “holiday” proceeding the examination period — for the purpose of exam preparation), then it’s crunch time.

This year’s been a bit of a fiasco academic-wise, having failed a maths subject the previous semester… and one engineering subject right just now is not looking wonderful right now. (Okay, I won’t fail… but the marks will still be pretty ordinary)

Part of this was due to an assignment on programming the Motorola M68HC11 8-bit CPU. This was susposed to be a group assignment, but since I have autism, I prefer to work alone. I also have found it very difficult to build up much of a network in amongst my engineering peers. I’m beginning to build a network around on the IT side — it’s taken 2 years, but it’s starting to happen there. Needless to say, technical hitches ended up delaying this assignment, and so it’s ended up eating up time for other assignments… so much, I’m stuck rushing some UML diagrams for one of my C++ assignments.

We’re already looking into some tutoring, not just for myself, but for others too. I did ask Disability Services about this, but they basically said, “Sorry, we don’t offer that”. I’ve since got wind of some funding though, and I’m hoping we can get something set up. All things going well, we should have a framework up to assist not just myself, but anybody studying Engineering (and possibly IT), with Autism/ASD, to gain assistance.

I’ll be talking with people and setting the ball rolling tomorrow, we’ll see what happens.

Yep, after 2 power failures, weeks of anticipation, and much hair pulling on my part (good thing though, I need a haircut anyways), the full set of stages is finally built and uploaded. You can find them on my devspace in the usual place.

These haven’t undergone much in the way of testing… so it would be greatly appreciated if some brave souls could give these a try and report back on how they go. All going well, we should be able to get these pushed out to mirrors by the end of the month.

I’ll also start knocking up some new netboot images shortly. The new images will differ from the old ones, in that you will no longer have to download and extract CoLo into /nfsroot. I’m planning to produce images which can just be untarred directly into /nfsroot, and contain all the necessary files for boot. It’d also be nice to rid ourselves with the past time of mucking with the shell. All going well here, I’ll be re-writing that section of the handbook, and things should become significantly more simpler.

But we’ll see — for now I’m breathing a sigh of relief, but soon I’ll be back into the slog that is end-of-semester exams, so I don’t have long just now. Likely, this will be a summer holiday project. (Yes, for those of you playing along in the Northern Hemisphere…temperatures are warming up down here in Brisbane.)

As always, I’ll keep you posted on further notices, and I’m usually online if people wish to contact me.
Regards,
Stuart Longland