ThePanda

There are many computer languages I have never written anything in (Eiffel anyone, oh there are other too, though I dabbled in some languages in a glorious moment of being bored two years ago, and ended up just seeing what a lot of programming language code looked like, I remember none of what I saw, and the only thing I really remember is going through a weird Prolog tutorial, deciding it was a cool language, and then deciding it was umm weird/hard, I don’t know, I find my C legacy coming back to haunt me too often, C seems to do things a lot of languages seem to be unable to do, and as much as most people complain about it, as a languaage to hack code in, it is amazing. That being said I am not really looking forward to the large amounts of STLed C++ code I am going to be writing over the forthcoming Thanksgiving, like sure there are cool things I am doing over Thanksgiving, and with not too many people around, I plan on getting through some of my readings, write code for my research, turn in early, wake up at a reasonable time, things which this past month of stupidity have made me want to do. However this paragraph is waivering from my original topic, see the one language I have never really written any of, is Pascal, well OK that and COBOL, but not too many people use COBOL anymore, while pascal and the Pascal keyword seem to have much impact on the Windows API and the cult of we write reverse compatible code coders who seem to be controling the Windows API, and it is one of those languages people randomly like to bring up, and I kind of wish I had taken the time to learn more about it back when I was still into the learn new languages thing. So as a part of this CS project I have due soon we were supposed to write a compiler for a language named Blaise, which is simple (thankfully) and has no scoping rules. Now I am ok with not having scoping rules, it really does make the project significantly simpler, and seeing as I have been working on take home midterms through most of this week (I had one mid-term free day in between), I am not going to complain about having a simple project. But anyways, I waiver again, my roomate tells me the entire have declarations on the top of the program file thing is a very Pascallish thing to do, and I will believe him on this, he having written Pascall (and not in Hebrew as opposed to Prolog, of which he has used a Hebrew version), and I having not. Now for those out there who like putting obscure twos together, this would make sense, Blaise is a Pascal like language, and Pascal was named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. Me thinks that is cool, me knows most people don’t think it means much, but it’s cool…

I had my second serious concentration meeting with a concentration advisor this past week, different advisor, different concentration, this concentration thing was supposed to be simpler. I am looking at Math-CS now, and someday soon, perhaps over Thanksgiving I plan on penning my reasons for this shift, I promised at least one half of my parents that I would send out an e-mail explaining my current situation, and I guess this is a part of that current situation deal, but it seems like a hard thing to pen down now. During my meeting I was told that my advisor fears my education at Brown is not nearly as broad as it should be. This is an interesting accusation, it has some truth to it, I am not taking any non-concentration courses this semester, and I really enjoyed some of them, as much as I detest writing papers when I am writing them, I find the experience quite gratifying once I am done with this, and I have always spent time complaining about how living with people who do only Math and CS would be boring for a simple lack of discussions in other fields, and I guess figuring out other fields would be good. But I need to settle on a concentration first, and fill out those forms, I thought this was supposed to be easy enough for me, I though I already knew what I was doing, bah…

For those who don’t know about this, the O’Reilly Factor did a rather humorous piece on “debauchery” at Brown, covering SPG, and followed this up by doing an even worse job of covering it for over thirty minutes on his radio show the next day. Not only did he end up calling most students, Ruth Simons, most members of the Brown administration, and pretty much everyone else around a pinhead, but he managed to get large swaths of his facts wrong. If it wasn’t for the fact that the factual inconsistencies and stupid notions in the radio show make me angry, I think it’d be a fun thing to laugh about, and fortunately the debauchery issue is not doing much at Brown. I am still kind of unsure about what would happen if they had massive news reports about this back home, I have a feeling most people, including a lot of whom I was at school with would not be too happy about this “scandalous” revalation about Brown. Bah, it’s amusing, can’t help it, it is amusing… Also knowing like 3 of the people who were “sent” to the hospital, I am pretty sure no ecstacy was involved with them, or with most of the other people, it’s not cheap, people don’t use E, they were mostly too much alcohol, and while that’s not nice either, it does not inspire nearly as many woohooo looksie rich kids acting dumb comments as other things do.

Last year, a guy from Sun’s Solaris Kernel Group, a former Brown student, and a brother to one of our TAs paid us a visit in my CS class. CS classes are usually uninteresting events, but this was fun, he spoke of DTrace, a tool Sun was building into Solaris to help with debugging, and such things, and he spoke of the halting problem in the context of limited memory systems, and of kernels and operating systems in general. Somewhere in there he mentioned things about the IA-32 architecture which I did not completely agree with. We discussed this, he agreed to some of my changes, and I guess I made mistakes on the others, and then he called me a super-nerd. Now back hom this would have been bad, here it was just funny, and another addition to my stories. Well he’s coming back this year, and he’s interviewing for internships with Sun, and I have an urge to try out for this one, which brings me to my current dilemna. Do I remind him of the fact that this happened last year, sending him a funny e-mail with this incident, or umm should I be staid and umm just not tell him about this. I have a feeling both have their good points, and I don’t actually know which of these would be better…

This weekend has been very plaid, I have an exam to blame for this, but umm I had one last weekend too, I guess the relative difficulty of this class counts for something, that and an apparent inability to work for longer than 20 minutes at a stretch. I might try going to a place where I won’t have easy access to a computer later, try doing this there, fewer distractions. I am going to watch the new Harry Potter movie in an hour or so, I haven’t really watched any of the other ones, so this is like a new experience, though I quite liked the fourth book, so perhaps this would be nice, and fun. It seems funny how my weekends go, and how different the activities I engage in seem to be, I spent some time last night (and thus missed out on sleep) discussing economic policies, and other weird things, I spent some time before then, and sometime thereafter, discussing weird things of life, and umm the problem of being born into “academics”, which is how someone chose to describe mine and SCE’s state, and it was a somewhat weird depressing conversation, one of the many I seem to end up having about this topic, and yet I am going to watch this happy (one would hope) movie today, strange.

I might shift to sub-only status for the Help Desk next semester, I am yet to take a conclusive decission on this, but the more I think about this, it seems like a good thing to do. I am going to try and be a TA in the CS department, and shift to sub only status, so I can concentrate on things I like, and on having a weekend. I don’t know, on some days I really love the help desk, then there are these other days, usually dependent on who I am working with, and other factors, when I can’t wait to get out of there, and while it’s a nice way to earn money, it isn’t nearly what I want to do. TLD is going to head off to the warmer Californian climes next semester, he’ll be working for Google for a while, and this would effectively be the end of my current research project. It’s nice in some ways, none of the associated messiness of ending this anyother way, it however does shift my ship-by deadline up to the very near future, and is partially to blame for my spending Thanksgiving coding, but that is fun anyways. He offered me an Indipendent Study if I wish to engage in one, and I guess that’d be nice, I don’t know, I need to make a decission on this. I think it’d be fun to find other research to do, this was kind of fun… However I am still concerned about a perceived weirdness in the CS department when it comes to dealing with me, it’s like I am not really close to any of the “important” students at the CS department, and it’d be nice to be able to talk to them without being made to feel like an outsider, I know most of them well enough, and while not engaged in as many of the CS departments extracurricular activities as most people are, I know my way around, and I can code as well as most of them, perhaps better than some of them, but then again CS Departments aren’t exactly places for hackers to show off.

I watched the fourth Harry Potter movie, and am probably one of the few people who did not like it. As far as I am concerned, there are massive plot holes in there, things that the book covers, important things, not measley subplots which it was OK to avoid. Also the movie Dumbeldore does not do as many Dumbeldorish things as he should, bleh…

This has gotten much too long, more later…

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 8:28 pm and is filed under article, hope for the future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.