Not for want of subject matter, I assure you.
Writing Porfolio
Passed!
So, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. The last big worry is the Spring schedule, and I’m not sure when that comes out…
I had all sorts of frustrations with my Programming Language class today. I went to school an hour early to use one of the Windows labs because we have to turn in Windows executables which I think is a really stupid requirement. Providing a windows executable has absolutely nothing to do with my ability to code in the specified languages.
Anyway, the COBOL compiler worked fine, after I spent half an hour figuring out how to use it. The FORTRAN compiler didn’t work on my source file, and the ADA compiler refused to work at all. I spent an hour futzing with it with no results. This is precisely why I don’t use windows.
I have perfectly valid source code that compiles and executes beautifully on Linux, yet I’m supposed to waste hours of my life with lab computers that aren’t maintained correctly? Ridiculous.
Rye Grass Smiley
My senior year at the University of Mobile, I schemed a plot and persuaded my buddy Cris to help me carry it out. I spent the night at her dorm room, and we got up very early and donned all black clothes. Unfortunately, we hadn’t set our alarm early enough, because it was already light by the time we got up. We were the only people up and about, except for the security guard patrolling in her little car. Unfortunately, this made us stick out. Fortunately, security at UM has never cared about much of anything.
We went out to the quad in the middle of the university. Cris stood in the center, while I played out several feet of twine. Then I walked in a circle as far as the twine would let me, holding a plastic bag of rye grass seed in one hand and sowing about a foot wide swath with the other. Next I shortened the string and made another arc of seed. Then we eyeballed a couple of dots. When the security car would drive by, we would drop the twine and act like we were chatting.
When we returned from winter break, we admired our handiwork from the third floor of Weaver Hall:
I think groundskeeping had tried to blur it by planting more rye seed around it, but our face definitely had the taller grass.
(Cris and I were senior class president and vice-president at the time.)
50 Cakes Update
Last Christmastime, Amanda made a chocolate, coffee, peanut butter cheesecake; I can’t remember what we decided to call it exactly. She also made two mini cakes for Berck and me, so that counts as two cakes.
She made Irish car-bomb cupcakes this last visit, but they actually involved Scottish and Mexican heritage, so I’m not sure what that makes them. All I know is that they were (and are…we haven’t finished them yet) delicious. That counts as cake number 5. 45 to go.
And so the semester goes.
Well, so far my least enjoyable class has been Operating System design. The textbook is wonderful (Tanenbaum!), the material is something I’m very interested in, but the professor is absolutely boring. He’s a grad student who doesn’t appear to have taught a class before, so I’m hoping he’ll get better as the semester progresses.
The best thing he’s mentioned is that our first project will be to implement a new system call in Linux, and the second project will be to implement our own process scheduler for Linux. This sounds like a substantial amount of work, but should be fun. He’s alluded to other projects as well… Since I hope to some day submit a useful Linux kernel patch, it’s good that I get to spend class time playing with the kernel.
My algorithms class looks like it’s going to be a lot of work. The first assignment involves some mathematical proofs, some theoretical analysis of algorithms, followed by analyzing an algorithm theoretically, coding the algorithm in a language of our choice, then analyzing the performance of the algorithm experimentally and compare to the theoretical analysis. And this is just the first assignment.
Probability and Statistics is, thus far, terribly easy. The professor promises it’ll get a lot harder. Three semesters of calculus are listed as pre-reqs for the class, so I would hope he’s right.
I still think programming languages is going to be lots of fun. Computability, Automata and Formal Languages is also pretty mathy, but the concepts aren’t too difficult and there haven’t been any assignments so far.
I’ve been trying to get ahead on work so I won’t have to do any while Ben and Amanda are here this weekend. Since it’s still the beginning of the semester, it shouldn’t be too hard.