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 i know this post has been a long time coming, however all things even incredibly long and hard assignments have to at some stage come to an end, as has the drought of posts on here.

I had one such multitude of these assignments over the last 2 weeks, more than enough to keeping me well and truly busy with uni work!

Its all over now, thank god. Submissions were mostly due on Friday at 11:59pm which is why i was able to make an appearance at Hannah’s last night and just generally enjoy a weekend full of plain old relaxing around the place.

About breakfast this-morning, all i can say is sorry! I guess i should expect to sleep past 9:30am when i dont get into bed until 3:45am due to, among other things films such as “Reservoir Dogs” and later a bad TellyMovie, “The Set Up”. All in all a good time.

On a lighter note i thought i would leave you with a site that i found quite entertaining, by entering dirty sentences and seeing how they turned out after being translated 10 times to languages such as French German and Spanish. Im sure we all have come across some poorly machine translated text on the web somewhere in our lives and this just goes to show that although machine translation is slowly getting there in terms of readability its still not up there with actual human translations.

Lost in Translation

Just patiently waiting to get my hands on Tiger(29th), while at the same time not looking forward to a Intro to IT assignment due on the 6th May. Its one big computer system advisory, which really sucks… Its really way to long and full of crap, recommending systems and infrastructure to a Company, that does not exist.

Seems simple enough doesn’t it, until you find out that it is between 30 and 35 pages long, includes Gantt Charts for the organisation and just royally sucks.

Anyway, back to the work and sleep!

Laterz Richard.

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

So-far, it has been good. meeting lecturer’s and the getting to know the layout of the program and its courses.

I picked up a 40GB iPod Photo on Sunday, to alleviate some of the boredom of the train so hopefully that will serve its purpose for years to come. Its really cool in that now i have all my photo’s on it to and people can just look through them all in their own time, even if the screen is slightly to small for detailed viewing!.

I still have about an hour till my last lecture for the day, Maths Methods for Computer Scientists, so i am just chilling in the Cafe/Hub at 08.04.

Its a really nice day today, which is kinda cool not that i know why….. But it just is…

btw : great party sat night marc :)

-sys- Richie.