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April 29, 2007
Stupid Seg Faults
I really loathe segmentation faults. My "AugmentSingleMember" program that I started writing on Wednesday was riddled with them, and I couldn't figure out why. Then on Friday morning it dawned on me what the matter was, which put me in a really good mood because I didn't need to have anybody else look at it. So I (mostly) fixed it, but then outsmarted myself in my fixes, and managed to make my program regress and get more seg faults. Argh! So I was pretty frustrated all during trivia and everything on Friday night, and all day Saturday too, until I finally discovered the root of the problem at about 9pm (yes, I was debugging code on a Saturday night...). While I was glad to get my code working 100% correctly at long last, it was annoying that I had backtracked on Friday afternoon after having been on the right track Friday morning. Oh well. But getting this code finished was huge, I'm pretty sure it's the last piece of software that needed to be developed for me to be able to do the rest of my analysis. I think I should be able to get almost all of that done this week, which would be fantastic. And necessary since I have only four weeks to go until my thesis has to be finished.
On Saturday morning a group of us from PSCG made the trek over to Waffle Shop, one of the best eateries in State College (or anywhere, actually), for a farewell brunch for Stephanie, who's heading back home to South Africa on Sunday. Oddly enough it was only the second time I'd ever been to Waffle Shop, and I definitely splurged on blueberry pancakes. And sausage. And probably five cups of coffee. I think that had to be more coffee than I'd ever had before, it was enough to keep me wide awake and not in a food coma the rest of the day. :-) But this semester's gone by so quickly, that's for sure. We'll be sad to see Stephanie go, but hopefully she'll decide to come back here to do her Ph.D.!
Did anyone else yesterday who was watching the NFL Draft take some sort of satisfaction from Brady Quinn not being drafted in the top 3 like he was projected by all the "experts," and instead falling all the way to #22? Brady-face has been tremendously overrated by the media the last couple years just because he's the "golden boy" QB from Notre Dame. He's good, don't get me wrong, but he's just not a top-ten pick in my opinion. I think it was a good move for the Browns to trade up and get him where they did, though. And I was thrilled with how the Vikings drafted, picking stud RB Adrian Peterson from Oklahoma in the 1st round (a dynamite pick, that guy is an amazing talent), and then 6'6" WR Sidney Rice in the 2nd round. It's been years since the Vikings have had a grade-A draft from top to bottom, their brass really had it together this year. It's the most encouraged I've been by the Minnesota Vikings organization in quite some time, that's for sure.
Posted by Jared at April 29, 2007 11:50 PM
Comments
Jared, aren't you programing in FORTRAN? I guess I didn't know that you could get Segmentation Faults in fortran. Shows how little I've used it. I hope you downloaded my screw program for your frustrating times with the terminal. Do you use a terminal or some studio? As a warning for your future developments, your quote "While I was glad to get my code working 100% correctly " will probably be proven wrong. Unless its uner 100 lines of code and has a very limited use you'll always find things you need to fix or improve.
Hope you're doing well. Haven't gotten too many blog hits coming from your site, work on the advertising a little will you? Thanks :)
Dave
Posted by: Dave Folwer at May 1, 2007 01:28 AM
Yeah, I'm programming in Fortran 90. When seg faults happen, it's usually because your program is trying to access an element of an array that doesn't exist or hasn't been allocated. Those can be tricky to track down, to say the least. And I guess it might be a bit of a stretch to say my code is working 100% correctly, since it's about a thousand lines long. I should've just said that it doesn't give me errors anymore and appears to be doing everything that I want it to do, as far as I can tell.
The hits and traffic to your blog will gradually start coming, don't worry.
Happy Birthday, too!
Jared
Posted by: Jared at May 1, 2007 03:43 PM