Update: To see information about October conference, see the Conference Info page on LDS.org.

The 178th Annual General Conference of the Church will be held on Saturday and Sunday, April 5-6, 2008. Speakers will include the First Presidency and other General Authorities and general officers of the Church. There will also be a General Young Women Meeting on March 29, 2008 at 6pm MDT.

The General Conference sessions will take place at:

• Saturday Morning, 10am MDT
• Saturday Afternoon, 2pm MDT
• Priesthood Session, Saturday 6pm MDT (broadcasted only to select meeting houses)
• Sunday Morning, 10am MDT
• Sunday Afternoon, 2pm MDT

Sessions last two hours each, and can be viewed at select meeting houses, select TV, radio and satellite stations, or on the Internet. Video streams are available at LDS.org, BYU-TV, and audio available at LDS.org and on KSL Radio.

Special highlights of this General Conference will most likely include the sustaining of President Monson as President of the Church, and the calling and sustaining of a new apostle.

Online text transcripts in English will be available the Thursday after General Conference, with additional materials in English and other languages being made available at later dates.

A WIRED.com post (also posted to Slashdot.org) gave 5 reasons why it stinks to be an engineering student. I’ve decided to list each reason and give a letter grade to BYU on how they appeared to do while I was in the program. If you want to rant about your education, here is your chance. Higher grades indicate a better student experience.

5. Textbooks Quality: B-. I’ve had some great textbooks which the professors used well and still are used by me today. I also had some classes where I was provided only with an electronic copy of a manuscript that the professor was putting together.

4. Encouraging Professors: C+. The WIRED post presented the problem as, “A professor that would rather be tending to his research will walz up to a blackboard or overhead projector and scribble out equations for an hour.” About half of my professors seemed to do this to some degree, and several of which had severe problems with this. There were a few professors who seemed burdened to be having to teach an undergraduate class, they would rather be working on research, and you would never see them attempt to interact with students outside of the three lecture hours a week. However, there were some professors who made every effort to get to know their students by name and do whatever it took to help them succeed.

3. Quality Counseling: B+. I found that there were many great counselors who were very skilled, approachable, and available. I only gave a B+ grade because in my experiences, I found that these counselors did better with course work academic counseling and were not so pro-active at personalized career counseling. I also didn’t give an A grade because those seem to impossible to earn at BYU.

2. Reasonable grades: C-. Engineering classes are just plain harder than classes in other majors. I always found it amusing when taking a class from a different department (not math) and was able to put in less work for a better grade when compared with an engineering class. Anti-grade-inflation tactics are well employed in engineering classes, where students compete harder for lower grades than students in other disciplines.

1. Interesting assignments: C. The complaint being, “Every assignment feels the same.” Homework assignments were often many page, green engineering paper, math problems. Varied labs and coding assignments made things interesting sometimes, but it seemed like the hard work-out problems from the text book were never-ending and downright miserable compared to the homework I saw my non-engineering friends do.

Bonus reason, girls: D. I’ve been in classes where there were no girls at all, and I’ve been in classes where the only girl was my sister. On average, there might be one girl to twenty guys. Without even touching on the limits this puts on dating, having fewer girls around just adds less excitement and variety.

Overall GPA: 2.17. If these grades get any lower, engineering classes would have to be put on academic warning status. These grades aren’t to say that engineering is bad, or to discourage people from entering an engineering field. Its just illustrating that engineering is hard. BYU’s use of student teaching assistants could especially be a source of many problems, especially as these TAs create an inappropriate buffer between the students from the professors.

I’ve written my first semi-major Linux device driver. I won’t say exactly what it does other than write data out to hardware.

Generally, it is well NOT accepted to write to files from the kernel. If you ask how, people will tell you “don’t.” I completely agree with all of the reasons provided, but I decided to do it anyway.

The hardware I’m writing data to isn’t readily available. I wanted to be able to test my code well without having to have the hardware available. So I wrote in some non-release, non-production code that writes data to a file instead of to hardware, but only for testing purposes. When in this simulation mode, the user can interact with the driver and data gets written to the file instead of to hardware, and then the file can be checked for accuracy.

User writes to driver -> kernel driver handles write -> driver writes to file

Easy enough? I thought so until I tried writing to the driver as a regular system user. I chmod’ed the driver so that the user had full privileges to read and write to the file. When root would write to the driver, everything worked, when the regular user would write to the driver, the kernel would crash.

The problem was that the user didn’t have write permissions to the test file that the driver was writing to. I thought the kernel level driver could write to any file it wanted, but apparently, the user’s permissions to the file permeated through the kernel driver. Changing the files permissions fixed things so they didn’t crash any more.

The caps lock and scroll lock lights blink on the keyboard when the kernel crashes. Not quite fireworks, but still kind of cool. Development in a virtual machine is key, so that you really don’t crash your computer, just the virtual machine.

I wanted to leave my comment for this ZDNet article here, because I would have to register to leave it on their site, and I hate registering.

I work right across the street from both Intel and AMD (why they have buildings that stare at each other is beyond me). AMD is expanding their building, which I would think indicates more planned growth, at least in this area. AMD really needs to keep it together and keep the competition up, because I love the better processors that come around because of the competition. AMD would be wise not to count on anything positive from their Intel law suit, mostly because suing people isn’t a good business model.

Here is a quick list of apps that I frequently use on OS X. I believe all of them are free and open source. many of the applications are development tools that I find useful.

• Adium - Instant messenger built with libpurple.
• Firefox - Web Browser
• NeoOffice - OpenOffice.org port
• Smultron - a nice, simple code editor. Integrates well with Cyberduck.
• Cyberduck - A SFTP client. Please read my full review.
• Quicksilver - a fast application launcher
• Komodo Edit - my new favorite small code IDE
• The Gimp - graphics editing program that requires X11
• Platypus - packages python/perl/php/shell scripts as double-clickable OS X applications.

Those are my favorite, most used apps. You should also check out this list of mac apps, some of which I’ve used either on the mac or other platforms, others I plan on trying soon.

I’m just starting to learn how to take videos with my digital camera and place them on the Internet. Here is my latest experiment from my latest hike.

Today I hiked the Wells Gulch trail in Lory State Park, Colorado. It was a good little hike, with plenty of variety. Hiking on an overcast day in March, spring hasn’t quite emerged yet, so a lot of the great spring color and wildlife wasn’t present. There was, however, still some icy spots which made things more interesting.

One thing I like about the weather in Fort Collins is that the actual current temperatures can actually be higher than the high for the day. Right now, for example, it is 55 degrees, even though Google only said the high was going to be 42.

Tomorrows predicted high is higher than todays predicted high, I wonder if that means that tomorrow will be warmer than it was today, which would be nice because I want to go hiking tomorrow.

On a New York Times blog, Stephen J. Dubner asks why people comment on blogs, although unfortunately, he didn’t provide any more insight over simply raising the questions.

It is a good topic, and I would love to know what causes people to leave a comment so I can facilitate more comments on my blog. I do know why I often don’t leave comments:

1. Login Required. I hate having to create an account and log in just so I can leave a three sentence comment. The effort is too great.
2. Nothing of value to add. While the post might have been great or insightful, I personally don’t have anything I could write that would add value to the topic, and I’m not going to spend time to sprawl garbage out on your post.
3. If I’m going to add discussion to your presented topic, I might as well write it on my own blog so I can maintain ownership of what I’ve written.

If you have any reasons why you do or don’t write comments, please feel free to leave a comment. No login required.

Additional thoughts added March 21: Apparently, users on ZDNet are discussing talkbacks, which is what they call comments over there. I’ve been reading more and more ZDNet posts because I’ve seen them come up in my Personalized News Google Desktop Gadget. Every once in a while I want to add a comment to either add value to the discussion or to challenge the writer. When I hit the register screen, I give up, mostly because it looks too big scary. More than once I’ve written a slightly longer comment not knowing that I needed to be registered until after I tried to submit it.

I don’t know that ZDNet should eliminate registration altogether or allow fully-anonymous comments, but I do think they should make it easier by:

1. Forcing authentication/registration before the comment form is shown
2. Simplifying their new user registration form
3. Allow alternate forms of authentication such as OpenID

I also have to admit to rarely reading other users’ comments. Although when I do make a comment somewhere, I like to read the replies to my comment.

The Acid tests are various tests for web browsers to see how well they can adhere to standards. If a web browser was a computer science project, these would the tests the teaching assistant would run on your project to see how well you did and to assign you a score.

The Acid3 test was recently released, and I ran it on a few web browsers I had installed here. Here is how they performed:

• Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows: 49/100
• Safari 3.0.4 on Windows: 38/100
• Opera 9.26 on Windows: 46/100
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 12? (It was so screwed up I couldn’t hardly see the score)
• Flock 1.1 (based on Firefox) on Windows: 52/100
• Firefox 1.5.0.12 on Linux: 50/100

I also ran it against Konquerer on Linux, but it kept crashing. Other people are reporting other various scores with various versions.

Update March 7. I’m a little confused about how the tests work. For example, I’ve run it multiple times on the Flock browser, but I’ve seen three different scores come out. I’m confused how the same test can yield different results at different browsers on the same browser. I want things to be more deterministic.

Update March 25. I ran the tests against the new Safari 3.1 on windows, and it scored an impressive 75/100.

Update March 26. Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Windows scored for me today a 53/100.