Assorted Math & Technology News

When I started studying at the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics, Comptuer Science was a (very large) department. About halfway through my studies, it became the School of Computer Science. I read a couple days ago that David Cheriton, an alumnus and professor at Stanford donated $25 million to the School so the University renamed it to become the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. (How does a university professor become a multimillioniare you ask? They finance Google in 1998 with $200 thousand in seed money, which is, of course, the definition of ROI).

I heard from my Mom that the Ontario Government is planning on dropping Calculus from it's high school curriculum. That's not very wise.

Lastly, The New Yorker has an interesting article, Blackberry Picking, about patents. In particular, it addressed the RIM v. NTP proceedings. It's concise and very well written. It's worth reading.

More Photos

I put up photos from my convocation as well as my camping trip. So that brings my photo gallery "up to date".

Busy, Busy

This has been a really busy weekend. Saturday was my convocation. (I'm now a graduate with a Bachelor of Mathematics - Honours Double Combinatorics and Optimization & Computer Science Cooperative Program With Distinction - Dean's Honours List...or something like that). I had a lot of fun seeing my various friends although the ceremony was a little long.

Saturday as dinner with various relatives and Sunday was lunch with various other relatives. e.g. My cousin (who is back from a year of teaching in Iraq) came down from Ottawa with his girlfriend. Sunday night I went out with friends who were in town for Convocation and Friday I went out with other friends who were also in town for Convocation.

On Friday, we saw the movie Supersize Me. I thought it was really good. It is a documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDonald's for a month. However, it is much more sophisticated than that. Rather than bashing McDonald's, it examines the state of people's health (wrt exercise and diet) in the US. He travels around interviewing various people, e.g. a law professor involved with law suits against McDonald's, a lobbyist for the food industry, a very obese guy who was getting his stomach stapled, the 3 doctors and 1 nutritionist who supervised him, etc. I'd recommend seeing it.

Tomorrow I'm planning on going to a talk at the Fields Institute in Toronto.

I also posted some photos from Liechtenstein and Austria on my digital photo page. Eventually I'll finish adding photos from my trip to Europe and then I'll add some from Convocation.

Graduated

I just checked Quest. I'm now officially graduated:

                       - - - - -   Degrees Awarded   - - - - -

Degree        :  Bachelor of Mathematics

Confer Date   :  2004-06-19

Degree Honours:  With Distinction

Degree Honours:  Dean's Honours List

Plan          :  Combinatorics & Optimization, Honours, Co-operative Program

Plan          :  Computer Science, Honours, Co-operative Program

Photos (Again)

I've added a few photos I took the past month. A couple from Waterloo start here and three from Easter start here.

(It's Good) To Be Free

My last exam was this morning. So I'm FREE! Forever. Well not quite. But I'm done my undergraduate degree aside from showing up for convocation. (Assuming that I pass, but I think that's a given).

I haven't really done anything cool yet. Mostly just sleeping. (Between cramming, not being able to sleep, and having a 9 am exam, I only got a few hours of sleep last night). I started reading Daniel In Japan. It's an interesting write up about how his trip is going. But it is longer than my attention span right now. (That whole lack of sleep thing). I think I'll go watch the Leafs win. :-) Go Leafs go!

Stuff

I have less than a week of school left now! The Psychology final is on Saturday and the Distributed Computing final is on Tuesday. Then I'm free. My plans are to go on a European for 3 weeks in May.

Rogers (my ISP) finally stopped blocking their customers from access the nasa.gov domain after working "as quickly as possible" over 3 weeks. [sarcasm]. So I can finally access the Astronomy Picture Of The Day again.

I've also heard that Amazon's search engine, A9 has launched. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting.

2 Down 3 To Go

Cryptography and Nuclear Science are over with. I think both finals went okay. The next one is Network Flow on Monday, which seems a long way off. I think I'll slack off tomorrow instead of studying. I sacrificed too much sleep to cram for Nuclear Science, so I'll sleep in nice and late I think.

Flying Dog

I've added some photos from Thursday. They start here.

No More RPC

I just submitted the CS 454 assignment. 3788 lines of code plus a couple of documents about how wonderful it is. [Well hopefully the TA thinks its wonderful :-)]. That is the end of my computer programming assignments as an undergrad student...Wow...That is a very nice realization (as I'm tired of being sleep deprived while chasing down segmentation faults..). :-) Time to make plans for going out tonight.

The return of f0(int, int) is: 15

Just under 32 hours to go...the middleware layer actually works now! Well it works for a procedure that adds 5 to 10 and gets 15. My to do list is down to 4 things plus testing (and fixing bugs...well hopefully not) and writing all the documentation. Not too bad. I think I'll take a break...

Blood-Shot Eyes

Man, my distributed computing assignment is driving me crazy. It is due in about 46 hours and I still am not done coding (so I can't even test)...too many crazy errors and too many pieces...I'm almost done...have to write 3 more things before I can get the client and server talking, plus my to do list has 4 other things that I should...plus I need to write server-side skeletons and write a real client and server that I can use for testing...(and I haven't even thought about the write up that need to go with the RPC layer)...Procrastination is a bad thing.

Studying Sucks

The psychology midterm is tomorrow night and the cryptography midterm is Wednesday, so I'm coped up in my room cramming...It's not very fun. There are only so many multiple choice questions that one can do from the psychology study guide before going insane. I'm getting most of them right though, so I think I'll be okay. Plus, I just got an e-mail saying that the Network Flow assignment due date was extended to Friday (as the server that it was on has issues so people were having trouble downloading it). That's means I'll be able to get a reasonable amount of sleep Wednesday night. (My previous plan was to start it after my Wednesday night class...but every other week I've done that I've ended up sleep deprived).

Time Flies

I can't believe reading week(end) is over already. :-( I did too much homework to relax enough and too much slacking to get enough homework done.

Probably the most interesting thing I did was going Friday night with a bunch of my friends to an African-cuisine restaurant downtown. I don't think any of us were impressed. The service was really slow. I had a beef dish with beef chunks, sauce, and according to the menu, there were a few vegetables in there too, but there were so few, they were hard to find. It wasn't warm enough either. (Cold food isn't usually good food). The salad consisted exclusively of lettuce and tomatos - nothing else. And I don't like tomatos. The bread was interesting. The plates were pizza dishes and the bread covered the entire plate. It was kind of like a pancake, but cold and rubbery. For the portion-size and the quality of service, the prices were too high too. To be nice though, it was better than the last time we went to Jack Astors...

Other than that I've been working on Distributed Computing a lot. Aside from the midterm on Wednesday, there is a big programming assignment, where we have to implement a RPC middleware with a binder process and a bunch of other bells and whistles. It's not too terrible, except I couldn't find a partner, so I'm doing it all myself. (Hopefully the TAs will be cool with that). I figure I'm about 40% done. Most of the socket stuff is out of the way (I forgot how crazy some of socket stuff can be!). I have the server talking to the binder and vice versa, but I need to write the part where what they say is meaningful. (I think I'm into the outside-in programming methodology - kind of a blend of top-down and bottom-up!). For the client, I can rip-off (i.e. reuse) most of what I've already written as (I think) I've made it all nice and generic.

Nuclear Science

I survived the nuclear science midterm. 24/25. :-) That's not too bad, considering I was making educated guesses for about a quarter of the questions. Multiple choice is so nice. :-) Hopefully the rest of my midterms will go just as well.

Reading Week(end)

Thanks to reading week(end), I'm done for the week! No more class! :-) [Alas, most other faculties have the entire week off...but 2 days off is still nice]. I think I'll slack off for the rest of the day and be lazy...watch lots of TV or something like that.

The registrar's office posted the final exam schedule. Once again I have a mediocre schedule - the 6th, 7th, 12th, 17th, and 20th of April. Nice and spread out so I have time to study, but they cover almost the entire exam period (which is the 5th to 22nd), so no chance of escaping early. :-(

New Photos

I put up some of the photos that I've taken this year. Most are from my grandmother's birthday party on Sunday, but the set is fairly assorted. I took a few in black-and-white try out that medium. I think they turned out fairly well for a first try. (Expect the JPEG format doesn't seem to compress black shirts very well when they are in black-and-white...)

Midterm

Argh! The Nuclear Science midterm was tonight. It was a lot harder than I was anticipating...but it was multiple choice, so as long as there are a lot of E's in the answer key then making educated guesses is sufficient. ;-)

Time to start the CO 351 assignment which is due in 11 hours and 19 minutes. Ram says it is very hard. I hope not...

Procrastination

I reorganized my digital photos a bit. There are a few new photos. Most were on my old site, but I think the ones of the Westlake Centre fountain and traffic on Battery Street are "new".

I haven't taken too many photos this year, but later in the week, I'll put up some real new ones [unless all my assignments/quizzes/midterms take up all my time - I have 1 quiz, 3 assignments, and 1 midterm to worry about this week. :-(]

Night Class

Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have night class. Night class can be a bit of a drag because I have to travel back to school for a second time on those days. Plus the lectures are about 3 hours long, which is way longer than my attention span.

Last night was Psychology. It seems every unit has some kind of unethical experiment. Last night the lecture was about dreams and learning. Apparently Pavlov locked dogs in cages, starved them, and cut up their digestive tracts before teaching them to salivate when he rang a bell. Watson taught a little kid to be afraid of white fluffy things such as rabbits and Santa Claus beards by giving them a rabbit to play with then sneaking up from behind scaring the kid. The experiment ended when the kids mother stopped taking him to day care...

Here's a interesting article by Bruce Schneier that I saw. It is about identification cards and security. He makes a few good arguments against over stating the value of IDs. [Nevertheless, IDs have their (limited) uses].