Yay! I walked out of my apartment this morning, heading the 3/4 mile over to my MA353 lecture, and it was snowing!
First snow of the season!
Of course, the happiness about it has been wearing off after walking back from Physics 008 around 1:00...
Unfortunately, Project 3 was not the last Compilers project. There are 2 following it, Project 4 (AST->IR), and Project 5 (IR->Assembly).
But so far, Project 4 seems easier that 3. In fact, there's only a handful of bugs, and the IfThenElseExp stuff to finish up.
In any case, the wierdest thing about working on these projects has been how you start with the spec and given code fragments, and have no idea what's going on. At all. But then, after a few hours, it's all clear what it's supposed to do (or it just all happens to work, and you can celebrate anyway).
HELL YEAH!
WE TOTALLY OWNED ON THIS PROJECT!!!!
52 man hours...HA!
It's done early, and works in even the most strenuous situations we can devise (and yes, we broke many things many times getting there).
Kudos go to my partner Kevin for being totally awesome, and Prof. Hosking for providing such a wonderful framework that took many an hour to puzzle through. And now sleep sounds good, since there have been waaaaay too many long nights this week.
So the midterm was a late one. Over in The Hall Of Music (long walk from present residency). And its fairly cold out.
So I took the midterm. It went badly. But it was finished.
Then I left the exam. And it started to rain, not heavily, but lightly — just lightly enough so that a poor CS/Math student would notice it after a bad midterm.
So now I'm sitting here and eating saltine crackers while playing mind-games and thinking it's really chocolate cake.
Hmm...haven't posted in a while. Meh...been busy. Anyway, I was sending an email to Taylor ( http://mysite.verizon.net/taylor_venable/) and realized that other people might want to know how I'm doing. So I've taken excerpts from that message and am including them below. Disclaimer: I tried to clean up most of the wierd references that no one else would get/clarify some things, but there may be a few spots where I forgot to...so just post a comment if you have any questions.
I sat down and picked courses for next semester early this morning (like 1 AM), and there just wasn't room for Algorithms, so I get to put that off another semester. Yay! Anyway, it looks like I'll be taking Operating Systems, with <sarcasm>My Favorite CS Professor</sarcasm>, Numerical Methods (CS 314 - requirement for Math major), Information Systems (CS 348- hopefully it'll be a fun course), Introduction to Logic (MA 385, another Math major requirement), and Multimedia Writing (ENGL 419...yay for PowerPoints, Web Pages, and Videos). I didn't actually want to take ENGL 419, but I sent in my FUTURE to my advisor with 421 (Technical Writing), and she replied back this morning that I had waited too long (again) to sign up for classes, so she was putting me in 419 (okay, so it wasn't quite worded that way). Oh well...at least it'll be something different.
Last week sucked...Compilers homework due, then cramming like crazy during the weekend for the Compilers Exam, then ECE homework, then ECE prelab (which I screwed up, and so had to waste an hour figuring out how to fix...oh, and the TA showed up 45 minutes late to lab, so that cut down on the available time anyway), then a Math assignment that I was up all night working on and only got half the problems on.
This week is going to suck, since I've got an Econ exam, then ECE homework due, then ECE prelab, then Math Exam, then Math homework, then ECE exam (next Monday). I'm REALLY beginning to hate how the Linear Algebra II Prof thinks it's a GREAT idea to have these huge homework assignments due 10 hours after we have our exams.
So yeah...right now I'm in the middle of MidTerms, round 2. Fortunately, it's not going to be nearly as frustrating as MidTerms, round 3, which happens the week after Thanksgiving. I have no idea why everyone seems to have gotten the idea that 3 exams are better than 2, but that "we shouldn't disrupt the previous schedules we had for exams, so let's put the extra exam right before Finals". But that's the way things worked out.
Anyway there are some bright spots. CS 397 was cool today; rather informal, loosely directed conversation that resulted in the professor sending some interesting links for us to read through (I'm passing them on at the end of the paragraph). I definitely like Prof. Hosking, and think he does a good job of both 397 and Compilers. Work was fun this weekend; got to patch a bunch of servers, work with a blazingly fast new one, and changed configuration so that I don't need to constantly worry about the Exchange DB growing too large and bringing everything down with it. http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.htmlhttp://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html
Okay, so there was this big ECE 270 exam tonight that I was kind of worried about. Well, it's over (for me at least). I don't think it went that badly…but it has definitely left me with an eerie feeling. Maybe it's just me, but 75% of the exam was the same as the practice. Oh, the numbers were tweaked a little, but the same equation applied; the same problem solving methodology was used. The other 25% actually required you to apply a little bit of knowledge, but not much. Anyway, I finished it in a little over half the time allotted. And that was even having done a bunch of problems twice, and having double checked every answer. Anyway, I think I got ~ 70% on it, since there were enough numbers that I probably miscalculated/used the wrong value for something, and I wasn't that confident in the first half of the stuff before the exam.
On the whole, last week pretty much sucked. Too much work, too little sleep, too many things just going wrong.
Anyway, this weekend is looking better. Didn't get as much sleep Friday night as I should have (especially considering that I'd only gotten 5 hours in the last 2 days....), but I managed to get halfway through Firefly. I then finished up the other half Saturday. Definitely a fan now, and sad that it was cancelled. Kind of reminds me of Farscape, but without the aliens. The best description I've heard of it is a "sci-fi western", which definitely makes it a unique series. I went and saw Serenity last night (it's Firefly on the big screen), and liked it a lot. It was diffferent than the series, with more action, big explosions, more unexpected events (:(), and on the whole it worked well.
Anyway, I went to see it by myself, which wasn't that bad last night. But then this morning I woke up and was feeling lonely, so I did what anyone who's feeling lonely does...Server maintenance! umm....errr...okay, so maybe not everyone does that...let's try again: Log analysis! errr...okay, so that second try at something that people do when feeling lonely didn't work out so well...how about Write a Blog Post! Yay! That one fits!
I did do server maintenance (hence the site being down for a bit this morning), and log parsing. (Now would be a good time to stop reading if you're squeemish about the fact that I can look at the log files on my server...and then post about it)
So, here's a big "Hi!" to people outside my network who have visited my site in the last month (excluding search engines/bots, and in order of most hits per client ip):
- Taylor
- Liz (you can tell who uses RSS maybe?)
- Me (Remus Sun system)
- Some person in Tarkington
- Emil
- Me (Borg Sun system)
- Mom & Dad
- unknown IP
- unknown IP
- Annie
- Blake
- some client in Physics 44
- Me (Purdue Wireless)
- unknown IP
- some guy in Cary Quad
- some person on HomeChoice in the UK
- some person on Telestra
- some person on Concentric.net
- bunch of unknown IP's
- some person on Palestine OnLine
- unknown IP
- some person or people (there's A LOT of IP's from this one) using Time Warner Cable
- some person at Pfizer (you're probably looking for my Dad, not me...he does chemical stuff, I'm a student/IT guy)
- a bunch of unknown IP's
- some person on Charter Cable
- some person on DXI Networks
- bunch of unknown IP's (again)
- some one from Sympatico.ca (is that part of MSN now?)
- and finally, a bunch of unknown IP's
hmm...now that's got me wondering...how many of those hits were actually with my site as an intended destination?
Okay, so ECE homework is a lot more frustrating than it should be. So now for a quick break, with my quote of the day!
"Go XML! It's the glue that binds the universe together...forget that gravity crap." — me
This weekend I got drafted into cat sitting for my parents. It hasn't been that bad so far (tomorrow's the last day), except for their constant need for attention. I thought cat's were supposed to be nice, independent creatures that could occupy themselves...
Things I got done:
- Took recycling to recycling center
- Cat sitting
- Watched a bunch of movies
- Slept a lot
- Unified Solaris-Windows Server authentication and authorization infrastructure working!
- Exchange DB at work offline defragged to bring it back to safe levels (15.8 GB -> 13.7) (for the time being...Please hurry with SP2, MS!)
- Cleaned my brother's computer of virii & boot problems
Things I didn't get done:
- Finish the reply to Taylor's next-to-last email (sorry...I'm working on it!)
- Finish the reply to Taylor's last email (no, I haven't forgotten about you...I've just been backlogged with tons of crap)
- Get to the grocery store to get bread, milk, & soda...grrr
- Complete the ECE 270 homework
Oh well...there's always next weekend...and beginning of this week (maybe).
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About the author
Jeffrey Stults is a software developer currently in Portland, Oregon. He is contactable at:
stultsj@ntldr.net
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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
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Jeffrey Stults, Jr.
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