Kronborg Castle

When the school term is over I want to travel in Europe for 3-4 weeks. I haven't really planned much though. I want to go to England, France, Denmark, Germany, and maybe Scotland and Italy.

Kronborg Castle is one of the cool sounded places that I'd like to visit. It is 45 minutes north of Copenhagen or so, in Elsinore (Helsingør). The castle was build over 400 years ago ago to protect the sound between Denmark and Sweden (although there were fortifications at the site since the 1400s). Among the castle's claims to fame is that it is where Shakespeare's Hamlet takes place.

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.