Monday, September 12, 2011

Windows 7 Installation Woes

My computer at home has been serving as my router for several years and the only way to run Windows on the computer was using a virtual machine.  Rebooting into Windows would have prevented the other computers in the house from accessing the network.  Recently I changed the networking to use the DSL modem as the router for the house, which means that I could switch my computer to dual boot.

I also have a Netflix account which I would like to use with this computer.  I have tried using VMWare and VirtualBox with limited success, so it was time to install Windows 7 on the computer.

My /home directory consumed nearly all of a 1 TB drive, so I used resize2fs to change its size to about 800 GB.  /home was in partition /dev/sda5, so the new partition was /dev/sda6.  So I started trying to install Windows.  It complained about not being able to locate or create a partition when it clearly showed the partition in the partition choices.  I then consulted the internet.

Friday, September 09, 2011

Visual Studio

I am teaching CSC 101 - C++ Programming I for the first time this semester.  It's a busy semester.  I'm also teaching assembly language for the first time.  Fortunately I prepared for the assembly language class fairly adequately in the summer.

I decided to bite the bullet and use Blackboard which is Southern Miss's approved on-line instruction tool.  I am preparing materials and quizzes for both my C++ and assembly classes.  In addition I am preparing lab assignments for the CSC 101 Lab class.  That's a whole lot of Blackboard.  In the past I have used Moodle as a an organizational tool for all my classes.  Blackboard seems to be roughly equivalent in capability to Moodle.  I prefer Moodle, but that may be biased based on experience.  One definite advantage to Moodle was that we run it on a local computer which is very seldom overloaded, while Blackboard is external and there are fairly common small delays.

I have previously decided that I would use Visual Studio for a Windows-specific version of my assembly book, so the experience learning to use VS will be somewhat beneficial to me when I tackle the Windows book.  I have yet to decide whether I will use masm, nasm or yasm.  I haven't tried any of them yet, but the deciding issue may be how well it integrates with the VS debugger.  I expect that masm will be better, but I don't yet know.  I would prefer nasm or yasm since they are simpler and I already know enough about them, but masm may get the nod due to utility.