June 11th, 2007 - June 15th, 2007

So here is the big news for this Month, ive been awarded a scholarship by the AUC to attend the Apple 2007 WWDC in San Francisco. I cant really believe its happening as its seriously the coolest thing to happen to me for ages!

I will update everyone with more information once I actually calm myself down a little, but its enough to say that i’m excited!

Looks like ill be jetting off to California in a few months. So Happy!!!

(Well ok in reality those dates arnt free, there smack bang in the middle of my exam period, but im stoked and as if i care about exams being at the same time)

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

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 today was interesting. I went to Uni in the morning, and then work in the afternoon and evening.

However that wasn’t the interesting part, that came later while I was walking from one location to the other. In my hasty walking I stumbled across what appeared to be a scene straight out of Texas, hit by a rampage of civil disobedience and disaster.

Turns out I was looking at a film set for Nicholas Cage’s latest movie Ghost Rider!

Have a look at some photo’s I took here.

-Richie