in the name of zero

how come i’m bored? i did nothing but sleep, eat and watch shows for the last couple of days. this afternoon even, i watched v for vendetta together with my brother. maybe this stump i’m experiencing has something to do with the enrollment for the first semester that is quickly coming up. honestly, i don’t wanna go to school this year. this morning, i saw my class schedule for the first semester and it’s super! i only have three subjects and my last class ends at 1:30 in the afternoon. no evening classes! weeee! i wonder if i’ll still be in school around 4:30 pm (activity hour) to chase chicks. i’ll be free starting 1:30 and waiting can be a pain. my schedule temps me to walk home early. i wonder what the ateneo fiesta of ‘06 will be like. perhaps the same at last year’s. this is steph’s last year of studying too. she’ll be pretty busy so i guess i won’t see her that often from now on. i suppose i’ll spend more time at my room than in school this schoolyear. i’ll be missing out on some regular school events. at least events that are not mandatory.

also, i’m excited to see the new batch of computer science freshmen for this school year. but before that, i wanna see the freshmen accounting batch. the accounting department always seems to have the best picks among girls. we cs get the geeks. everyone else, the chicks. sad. and it’s actually giving my “salami” a slow and painful death each year.

[ things i’m looking forward to: ]
first semester day!
- coz most of them freshman chicks still don’t know their way around the campus.
chrismas and new year!
- coz it’s cold and everyone is happy.. and there are lights all over the place.

[ things i’m looking forward to but not too excited about: ]
acquaintance party
- coz all of the best girl picks are in another acquaintance party. and computer jokes are not the least bit funny.

condor hero ending
- coz i won’t see crystal liu anymore every night. i promise not to skip episodes till the very last.

school fiesta
- my high school pals and other close friends made the fiesta happy every year. now, they are all working. i’ve no more reason to go.

valentines ‘07
- need i say more?

march-graduation
- i wanna graduate! but i don’t wanna march or attend events and ceremonies or any other formal gathering for that matter.

yearbook
- i won’t look good no matter what kind of digital manipulation they’ll do on my picture. so i’m planning to skip the pictorials.

[ closing remarks ]
let’s just get this year over with shall we?

i had to verify how to handle saved processors registers as they are essential elements that a fault-trap-handler must deal with. so i made a simple program that pushads registers (program state at the very least) then calls a c function that reads the stack. hopefully, i can apply what i’ve learned in this activity in making my own interrupt-exception handlers sometime in the future. :p

see intel software developer’s manual 5.12.1 exception- or interrupt-handler procedure.
also see 5.15 exception and interrupt reference
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please welcome my new category. gluttony. where i’ll mostly talk about food.. hihihihi

i love jollibee’s spicy chicken joy!!!! my usual order: chicken joy, extra gravy, go-large, extra rice and lastly, chocofudge sundae.

food for the gods.

[ pink profile ]
ok, i felt like updating my friendster profile waking up around 1:30 am from a second bad dream. thanks to some guy name michael and his edit friendster dot com thingy! the google add is soo badly placed though and it wrecks the decors. very stupid friendster design (and slow profile updates too. changes reflect only after a couple of hours/days)! i changed my name, and i also added a super cute new lynlyn picture that i absolutely adore!

[ chinese characters in gentoo! ]
yeah! well, i found this really cool site about liu yi fei, but it’s in chinese. the fonts were quite ugly at first (appeared as boxes) because i had no support for chinese fonts in my box. and since i’m such a big fan!, i decided i’d give the site some justice and view it with chinese character support. (although still quite pointless because i couldn’t even understand chinese, much less read chinese.) did i mention i’m trying to learn how to speak chinese? (at least the basics of what they use here. fukien i think. but i dont know) i figured it’ll just be like learning how to do assembly. only much harder. :p

i’ve never tried adding fonts other than the usual letters found in the english alphabet. so i tried shooting in the dark for starters:

steph@heaven ~ $ eix fonts | grep -i chinese
     Description:         Chinese TrueType Arphic Fonts
     Description:         Standard traditional Chinese fonts made by Minister of Education
(MOE), Republic of China.
     Description:         Kuo Chauo Chinese Fonts collection in BIG5 encoding

well well! portage has three chinese fonts available! i checked them out in detail and they are called:

arphicfonts - Chinese TrueType Arphic Fonts
twmoefonts - Standard traditional Chinese fonts made by Minister of Education (MOE), Republic of China
zh-kcfonts - Kuo Chauo Chinese Fonts collection in BIG5 encoding

emerged preview them but they’d cost a total of 30+ megabytes of download and that wont work for me since i’m doing dialup. so i settled for one. arphicfonts

heaven steph # emerge arphicfonts

the fonts were installed in /usr/share/fonts/arphicfonts and because they were true type, i have only to add the font path in xorg.conf as it has builtin support for truetype (so long as you have the correct modules loaded. Load “freetype”)

before and after screenshots of liuyifei dot org.

weeeeeeee! the after shot is much lovelier huh? i’m happily browsing the galleries now. i’ll only turn on the chinese font line in xorg if i view this site. at any other time, that line will be commented.

friday 5/27/06

[ what are interrupts? ]
interrupts are events/alerts raised by certain things (keyboard interrupt for example) that alerts the processor to give attention to it. it’s a way to conserve processor time because it eliminates the need for constant polling just to determine if processor attention must be given. simply put, whenever a special port, i/o, device needs the processor to do something, it only needs to raise it’s hand and it will be attended by the processor. similar to a classroom. a special routine handles each kinds of interrupt and collectively, they are known as interrupt service routines but how is the processor able to determine which interrupt service routine to call for each interrupt? this problem is solved by what is known as the interrupt descriptor table.

5.10 IDTR interrupt descriptor table

“The interrupt descriptor table (IDT) associates each exception or interrupt vector with a gate descriptor for the procedure or task used to service the associated exception or interrupt.“

like the global descriptor table which is a collection of segment descriptors the interrupt descriptor table is also a collection of segments, specifically, gate descriptors which fall under three kinds:
a) task gate descriptor
b) interrupt gate descriptor
c) trap gate descriptor
the size of these descriptors is also 8 bytes (64 bits or quadword) long. see: intel manual figure 5-12 IDT gate descriptors
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i’m searching for an mp3 last night. sharon cuneta - pangako (shut the fuck up i’m not gay). but i couldn’t find any decent sources. i was able to nail a source this morning. only to find out that it’s the wrong song. sucks.

god damn! the series of blackouts (i thought was over) has sent my gentoo box fscking all over the place. the blackout frequency has increased and i think my hard disk or any other appliance we have at home can’t take anymore punishment. fucking annoying. and those bastards at the power company always keeps on repeating the same old reasons and promising the same old promises. sometimes they don’t even answer their fucking phone. tonight, i was about to lose it. i even went to my mom’s room to ask for medicine for relief (anti-depressant.. anti-stress .. whatever). unfortunately, we don’t have drugs like those. i slept at our living room coz my room transforms into a sauna whenever there is no electricity. it was hell. especially since there were lots and lots of mosquitoes. drenched in my own pool of sweat around 10 o’ clock, i thought about mentally undressing some girls out of hopelessness, but i couldn’t put my mind into that concentrating zone because it was hot, itchy, and my balls were sweating as if they were faucets.

anyway, the lights are back now, i do hope we won’t have anymore blackouts. luckily, today is a saturday. no condor heroes. also, i’m doing further kernel studies for stephy. paging and memory management. next post about osdev - interrupt descriptor table and the interrupt service routines.

sweaty,
- me

[ out of topic ]
tonight i sing the happiest lines! life is slowly returning to normal. free days ahead. the blackouts seemed to have stopped for good. i’m able to watch gokusen now. but i’m more concerned about the condor hero episode. yang and xiao found each other again and things are going smoothly for them apparently.

[ back to topic ]
memory segmentation in protected mode is defined by a set of descriptor tables and each segment registers contains pointers to these tables. the first table is called the gdt (global descriptor table) and the other, ldt (local descriptor table). i’ll focus on the gdt today since this entry is about it afterall.

[ short intro ]
the gdt contains a set of information about segments that is global. that is, all applications can see and access it. it defines base address of segments, access privileges, type and information on how that particular segment is supposed to be used. that said, the gdt is a list of segment descriptors that provides the processor with details of a specific segment.
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i fucking missed one episode of condor heroes!!!!!! so i made another haiku yesterday while i was eating dinner. here goes.

eating fish
with soy sauce.
missing them-
chinese chicks at school.

man i tell ya, my city sucks.

[ music ]
i’ve been listening to the corrs - would you be happier? nonstop recently whenever i sit in infront of the computer to work. cool song.

[ newbie ]
we’re scheduled to have a seminar this week about “researching” and other skills needed to make a successful thesis. this is gonna be a long week.

[ stephy kernel ]
yeah! so i guess it’s the only hobby kernel in the world that has a nick name. *giggle* i’m nearly done with the crude_console message system rewrite. though i still need to make a lotta helper functions like the libc-stdio vsprintf() and family that utilizes va_arg. hopefully, i’ll have a general purpose message interface and kernel message interface by the end of this week.

a little roadmap to self:
1 finish the print() system.
2 add more libc functionality (fuck) and give a shit about going non-ISO.
3 global table descriptor format review
4 interrupt descriptor table/interrupt service routines/interrupt request services
5 programmable interface controller
6 text lynlyn often coz she’s soo cute.

— these should keep me occupied for weeks —

i guess i’ll go and buy a “don’t kill yourself” book now.