Some Progress
After some eMailing to the xbox-linux mailing list with no success in finding a cure for the Xbox not booting automatically from the hard drive, I discovered that the Cromwell BIOS I was running was somewhat out of date. Flashing the latest (2.32) fixed the issue, and the unit now powers up and boots itself properly. The xbox-linux guys are a friendly and supportive group, I look forward to contributing to the project.

Another good discovery was that with Cromwell, as opposed to the Microsoft firmware, any arbitrary ATAPI CD-ROM drive can be used. This is good, because the built-in optical drive was causing no end of problems reading burned media. The flipside to this is that now that the unit boots properly, the usefulness of the optical drive is much lower. But it is still good to know.

The progress report for this project is due fairly soon. Now that the system is fully running, it would be good to start transcribing ideas about how the user interface should work in time to write about it. Then, the Christmas Break can be used to start implementing these things. Also, over the exam period, it would be good to start looking for important components like the touchscreen and the GPS unit.

These Are Trying Times...
The last few days of my life have been difficult, at the very least. My midterm marks suck, assignments are due constantly, and exams loom in the not-so-distant future.

The stress level multiplied by a factor of no less than ten, when yesterday the EngSoc RAID array containing everyone's data started misbehaving during a routine rebuild. At one point, it looked as though two of the four drives had failed, which would pretty much signify the end of what I've poured three years of my life into. Thankfully, we managed to recover completely from the incident with nothing but downtime, though it was really touch-and-go for a good several hours. I finally cracked a smile when in Music class, on the ninth floor of Loeb building, a mouse ran across the classroom and behind a cupboard. It was just one of those things...

Tomorrow is the last Quantum Mechanics midterm, and I'm counting on this one to do well. The last two were really poorly written. This one has significant overlap with my IC design class material, so I may do well. Certainly better than the 17/60 on the Software Engineering midterm. That class worries me.

Today, in a lame attempt at procrastination, the EngSoc folk took apart a Pentium 90 processor. It would have been good to know that the bottom plate could simply have been removed before the thing was smashed to bits. Those edges are sharp!