Well the last 5 days have seen me down at Philip Island, once again staying with Hannah at her holiday house. We spent our time cooking, drinking, eating, drinking, watching Monty Python DVD’s, drinking and just generally socialising at the beach and over at Donny’s house.

The weather on the whole was fine, and although being quite cold for most of the time we got in a few walks/late night strolls and had a couple of fires. Unfortunately we didn’t however end up having another beach bonfire that we found so fun 9 months ago, and by all accounts less happened in general than during our last trip down to the island last summer.

I would post some photo’s however i left the camera at home and in reality couldn’t be fucked using it down there even if i had had it with me.

Till next time Richie.

Another Monday morning and another early exam, seriously what is up with having exams that start at 9am? I live at-least an hour away from RMIT and i dont like having to get up at 7am just to go sit an exam.

Computer Systems 1, one of the better subjects for the semester, full of interesting topics and situations, i quite enjoyed it.

From number and logic systems and to Assembly Programming fro the Motorola 68K, it has been an interesting challenge keeping up with all of the course material, assignments and the exam, which went quite well. I did maybe 2 days of full on study and went into the exam confident of success. On the whole it went really well, and am not at all worried about my results for that subject.

I’ll leave you with some examples of questions from some past paper’s.

2. Convert the ASCII character ‘D’ into a suitable Hamming code that can detect and correct a single error. Use EVEN parity. Write your final answer in hexadecimal.

4 marks

Last time I posted I mentioned that it was 9 days till my next exam, and in all accounts the last 7 days have seen me do fairly little study(none at all), and a whole load of mornings that just disappear totally to sleep (seems to only happen when you stay up till 4-5am).

The next couple of days will hopefully see me put my head down and do some hardcore study for my last exam this semester on this coming Monday. Best be off and maybe, just maybe i will do some study for all you peeps, before heading out to JK’s for a dinner party of sorts!

Richie

Another day another examination, Seems to be the way just about now.

Today its Introduction to IT, with such questions as:

19. The most powerful computer system is a

a. super computer
b. main frame
c. mini computer
d. micro computer
e. PDA

(the answers A if you didn’t guess.)

Anyway it should be fine… not to hard at all.
and then after that exam 9 days to relax and prep for my last exam Computer Systems.

Today is the day of my Programming Principles 1A Examination, which shall be quite an enduring session.

One of the worst parts of the whole examination is having to write out code by hand onto paper, without having the luxury of a compiler to tell you of any slight mistakes you have made in any of your code. Not to mention the fiddle little bits of Java or any language for that matter that just seem so cluttered written out by hand in pen.

Now most people know that my hand-writing is not the greatest ever, its just slightly messy and when you combine that with the code complexity issue above you end up with pages full of code that looks like crap, no matter how functional it may actually be. Why is that indenting never seems to work when your doing it all by hand?

The worst part however are the braces ( { } ) that you need to use for so much of Java, they turn out horribly deformed when i draw them by hand mainly due to me trying to centre the little peak like kink in the line that never works out.

Steve Jobs today announced that they were dumping IBM as there Micro-Processor supplier after any number of production and milestone delays. (Can anyone say 3Ghz.)

They will instead be using Intel microprocessors and by this time next year, will have there first Intel powered machines to market. Apple previewed a version of Tiger, running on an Intel-based Mac to the over 3,800 developers in the keynote and confirmed rumours of a division that had been maintaining mac OSX for x86 architecture for the last 5 years in parallel to the official ppc release.

“Mac OS X has been living a secret double life for the past five years” (Marklar).

The design for Mac OS X has always been processor independent and cross-platform capable by design. The technology to let existing PowerPC applications run on Intel is named Rosetta and performs dynamic translation transparent to users.

Interesting times ahead for the Mac or so it would seem!

Today is the day of my Semester one Mathematical Methods for Computer Scientists Exam at RMIT worth a staggering %70 of the subjects mark.

Held in the Upper Storey Hall from 9:15-12:30 its one mammoth exam filled with joyful 3D Vectors and matrix Transformations.

What I will have supposedly gained from this Course (everywhere else its known as a Subject).

How to:
1. apply the core mathematical skills such as arithmetic, algebraic manipulation, elementary geometry and trigonometry to a range of problems.
2. apply the techniques of integral and differential calculus to formulate and solve problems involving change and approximation; formulate and solve first-order differential equations.
3. recognise the properties of the common mathematical functions (polynomials, exponentials, logarithms) and their combinations commonly found in computer science (e.g. in algorithmic complexity theory, information theory).
4. apply the techniques of vector and matrix analysis to problems involving three-dimensional geometry, motion and transformations in three-dimensional space, such as would be used by a subsequent course in computer graphics.
5. use the Java programming language to write (and modify) small programs which apply common mathematical methods and algorithms to a selection of simple problems;
6. analyse and report on any interesting phenomena; critically evaluate the performance of each algorithm/implementation.

Well the other night (Sunday), I went with Jan up to the Forum Theatre to see Warren Miller’s latest and greatest Extreme Winter Sports film! All in all it was fantastic with a whole load of incredible scenery and wide open planes of fresh powder snow in extreme abundance.

The oohs and aahs start in the opening scenes, featuring shots of hardcore skiers and boarders climbing into helicopters then plummeting down the high slopes of gigantic mountains at rocket speeds.

The 55th of Warren Millers films, in the industry he is most certainly the daddy of extreme sports action films, and no matter how you put it it was most defiantly entertaining!

As a bonus for attending we were given 1/2 price lift tickets at Hotham &Falls Creek, which will sure come in handy!

Thoroughly enjoyed, although it was just slightly to American for my taste, and would have been nice to see a little more of Europe.

Check it out here.