* yawn *, I probably should be writing this a little earlier in the day. Since arriving back in Phillips, my internal clock has been slowly adjusting to EST. Just like my trip to Istanbul, I couldn't sleep on the plane. Unlike my trip to Istanbul, I couldn't sleep the night before.
I'm afraid I don't have much to say about headlines in Turkey (although there is a cool article here on Turkish-Russian relations). To be honest, I was too preoccupied with finals and homework. I didn't do as well as I would have liked in Operating Systems, but the credit will transfer, and I'll have one more pre-requisite to the Networks class at UMass out of the way. Also, I did get an AA (the highest grade possible) in Turkish History for Foreigners. Finally, I do plan to order Cellat through Onar Films and donate it to the Cinema Snob.
On another note, I'd like to talk about some of the work I did as part of Operating Systems. As homework for the course, we had to write two Linux kernel modules and some appropriate documentation. My laptop crashed not long after I wrote this section, but I was able to recover the source code, the makefiles, and one of the README files I wrote for the class. The first module, for those of you who use Linux, replicates part of the functionality of the pstree command. For those of you using Windows, it generates a list of all the programs running on your machine. The second module is supposed to run after an I/O bound program (proc2) and a CPU-bound program (proc1) have already started execution. It then collects some statistics on their use of the CPU. To run this module, run proc1 and proc2 in separate terminals, and then insert the proctest module using the same sudo command described in the mypstree module. You can then find the statistics that proctest collected in your /var/log/messages file. If you want to play around with it, try interacting with the I/O bound program while proctest collects data and see how the data changes. IF YOU WANT TO TRY EITHER MODULE, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND DOING SO ON A VIRTUALIZED LINUX DISTRO! Go to VMWare, download VM Player, and insert the module on a virtualized Linux distribution. I developed both modules on an image of Ubuntu version 8.04 using kernel version 2.6.20. The proctest module will likely not work on a more recent kernel, because it references members of the Linux kernel's task_struct structure that have since been phased out. I am not responsible for any damage to your computer caused by these modules.
To wrap this all up, I remember reading something in UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, with a bunch of jokes about the kinds of people who write op-eds in student newspapers. One of them was the self-explanatory Mr. “I studied abroad and it changed my life”. While I have been beginning quite a few sentences with “In Turkey...” these past few days, I wouldn't categorize the last few weeks as a life-changing event. First, I have been learning about this part of the world ever since the Eurasian Politics course I took at UMaine in the spring of 2008. Part of my mind has been there for the past two years, and so I wasn't shocked by, for example, pictures of Atatürk everywhere, seeing the inside of a mosque for the first time, and...well, finding whoopie pies in Istanbul was a little surprising.
Second, one thing that four years of study in the social sciences teaches you is that, while we may all have different languages, histories, religions, and cultures, people are people. I think a lot of Americans, especially college kids, look at foreign countries as so foreign that they forget that they are inhabited by human beings. It's probably a bad idea to conclude this journal with a quote from an OK late 90's ska song, but it's the most concise way I can think of to make my point:
“Do you think it's strange
That there's a way
Of how you looked and how you act and how you think
pretend they're not the same as you?”
-Less than Jake, “All My Best Friends are Metalheads”
sudo rmmod travel_journal
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