Yesterday was yet another very busy day, it being the day that the 4th years had to hand their projects in (at 2pm).

The day before I’d e-mailed them all telling them if they needed any assistance out of hours that they should phone me up on my mobile. None of them did so dispite a couple of them having problems with printers and software during the night.

One of the problems was caused by LyX, the LaTeX based word processor deciding to send SIGHUP to the whole process group instead of just ghostscript after a picture was added to the document. Even after upgrade to the latest patchlevel it still did the same thing. So I hacked out all the kill() calls and got a version which worked well enough. Even though the 4th-year basically lost 8 hours of time she managed to get the project report in 3 hours late. As far as we are all aware, this was actually ok in the end, thankfully, seeing as the project is a third of the overall degree.

On top of this fun was more fun with Word and coaxing the colour printer to keep working. Sometime in the night the printer lost a spring on a door so it no-longer keeps closed, but it’s not an important one. Over the last week it’s been well overworked!

As for myself, I’m bored. At least the weather’s getting better this afternoon.