Japan 102: Owatta! (and other stuff)

Well, it’s been almost 2 weeks since my last post, so a lot of things have happened, as always does here at UW. First and perhaps most importantly, Japan 102 is over (*cry*). The presentation went surprisingly well despite us finishing the script, practising it, memorizing it, blocking the acting and voicing, and polishing it in a grand total of about 2 and a half days. It probably would have gone better if we had practised more and if we had actually used the classroom door as an “offstage” since there was a lot of rustling at the side of the stage when people (most prominently myself) forgot when their entrance and exit cues were. There were a few snafoos here and there, but overall I think we did a good job of it. Also, it turns out I didn’t mess up the second (or third, depending on how you count) term test; I did lose marks for one question to which I had the right answer but changed it, which kinda sucked, but I still clobbered the class average by a significant margin. Misato-sensei put one question on the test that I don’t think anyone in the class got because it was from vocabulary we *technically* didn’t learn; the word “musical instrument”. I tried to fake it by using Katakana, which almost worked, except, of the 14 characters in the word (Mi-yu-u-ji-ka-ru-i-n-su-to-ra-me-n-to, for those interested), I made 1 mistake (I put a “ro” instead of a “ra”). Oh well, I came close.

The final exam for 102 was…interesting. It was 6 pages, 3 sheets double-sided, with a 2-hour time limit. A lot of it was on course material, but there was a good chunk of it based on things from 101. Knowing that Japan 111 doesn’t cover the same material as 101 (111 is an alternate course geared towards people learning Japanese to do business in Japan) and that there are some people in my class who either took 111 or skipped 101 completely, this was a bit surprising because it put them at a ridiculous disadvantage. So just a tip: If you’re planning on skipping 101 and going straight to 102, grab a copy of the 101 textbook anyway to make sure you’re up to speed on what you need to know.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Japan 102, and I can’t wait till 201 in September. Apparently quite a few people are going to be following me to 201, so I won’t be alone in the class. I’m also trying to organize a celebratory outing with my classmates from 102 (since there are about 20 of us in total) for some point, but we’ll see how that goes.

Speaking of 201, I picked up the Kanji book for 201 this morning to take a look at in the next month and a half before 201 starts. It seems a bit scary, to be honest. Some of the Kanji are a bit counterintuitive, but a lot of them do make a lot of sense. Also, in the first few chapters anyway, the Kanji are based off things in real life (although of course they’re based off what would have been contemporary in the feudal era of China, so it doesn’t carry entirely), so it’s easy to tell the meanings of each one. I don’t think it’ll be too hard, but I’ll have to study it quite a bit…oh well, that’s why I’m taking it over my work term, so I have plenty of time to study

As with last term, I’m going to e-mail the Japan 102 profs to ask them if they have anything they’d like to add to what I’ve said. Hopefully I’ll get a better response this time…

Anyway, as to the other courses:

First off, Calculus. Oh, Calculus. About a week and a half ago we started on Taylor series (which was what the Maple Lab was on). Unfortunately, Nataliya spent the first class of introduction to Taylor Series blazing through material she knew and thought we should know, without even turning around from the board for people to ask questions. As such, I was completely lost for the entire class, and, sicne I was lost for the introductory class, I figured it would probably be a good idea to just wait until the tutorial and let Professor Wolczuk explain it, since he’s much better. Unfortunately, Professor Wolczuk assumed we had learned the material in class already, so I’m still pretty much screwed. Oh well, I’ll learn it for the exam and then promptly forget it when I make my brain flush over my work term to make room for my 2 CS courses and Math 239 which I’ll likely be taking next school term (plus Japan 201 which I’ll be doing next term). It seems pretty easy, but just a lot of memorization. At least Professor Wolczuk is doing the exam review, which reminds me that I have to write that on my calendar so I don’t forget.

As for Math 136, I had a new catchphrase as of last Tuesday-ish: “I hate MATLAB with all the passion of the fiery pits of Hell”. Yes, I know it’s a bit long and obtuse and forceful for a catchphrase, but it was nonetheless a catchphrase. What I like about Maple is that in Maple at least you can go back and change your code if you realize you made a mistake. Not so in Matlab. Matlab is to Maple as working in pen is to working in pencil: If you screw up, you have to start from scratch. While it only requires a simple copy and paste, when you’re a good 2 hours into an assignment and make one small typo, it becomes a bit annoying. In addition to that is the fact that you can’t save your work properly in Matlab (or at least when I did it, it wouldn’t reopen itself for me) and the fact that the Matlab labs (or at least the labs with Matlab TAs) have computers that likely haven’t been replaced since the days of punchcards (or else student.cs really needs a reboot), whereas you can buy a full copy of Maple of your very own for $21 at the CHIP. So yeah. Matlab = pain. I did get the assignment done, though.

Class for Math 136 has been over for about a week already, but Professor Steblia is doing exam review in class this week. We have an assignment this week which covers (or is supposed to, from the looks of things, cover) the entirety of the course. Luckily I got an extension due to my 14 hours of studying for my Japan 102 final, so it’s not due till tomorrow morning for me (don’t try to pull any tricks to try to get extensions; you need a damn good reason to get one of those in University). The assignment wasn’t bad, but there was one question which was a bit obtuse in its presentation that I had to ask some of the PMC (Pure Math Club) people to help me with. I might ask Professor Stebila about it tomorrow.

As for CS241, I lied when I said I was going to skip Assignment 10. I managed to finish my compiler by sheer force of will (and the not wanting to do A11 this week, what with Japan 102 final and all). I also entered myself into the bonus, which is based on generated code size of a large program. When I began, my first submission generated about 75 KB, but I have worked my way down to about 35 KB. My record for highest place was 4th for about a day, although I currently sit in 8th, my lowest position yet (even when I had 75KB I think I was in 7th at the time). The competition is already over though and has been for some time; the top 2 people in the competition both have code size under 5KB; in fact, the sum of their code size is under 5KB. 3rd place is currently sitting at about 11KB, so the contest is barely even close. Nomair and Colin said that bonus marks would be given to the #1 position and anyone within a reasonable margin of him, so the top 2 will be getting the rewards in this case, unless someone else manages a miracle in the next 17-ish hours until the bonus ends to put themselves in striking distance of those 2.

Interestingly enough, Colin is giving up tomorrow’s tutorial to allow the top 2 competitors to talk a bit about their optimizations. I’m particularly interested in hearing the 2nd place person talk since his compiler works by using a compression algorithm to shrink his code, so he has less back-end work to do, and he promised he’d detail that when he gave his talk.

Assignment 11 was about basic C++; it was mostly a review from high school for me, although I’m going to do the assignment eventually (although not on time since I have 100% on the assignments part of the course) just to make sure I’m ready for the final exam.

And last but not least, Circuits. Oh, circuits. Actually, circuits has been getting a bit easier. We’ve started to do AC circuits, which are actually really easy since it’s just the same basic rules except with complex numbers instead of real numbers. That’s pretty much it. I actually get it this time around, so I’m optimistic for the final. Then again, me being “optimistic” about Circuits means I don’t think I’ll fail; nothing more. Oh well, that’s why I have Japan 102 and CS241 to drag my mark up. Next term I get to take ECE223 which I heard is pretty easy.

In other Circuits-related news, they split the 4th lab up into 2 parts, so we had 2 weeks to do it. Unfortunately, we still had a CDT both weeks as well (I believe I’ve explained CDTs in a previous entry), so I had no time to do it. My group got an extension on it till tomorrow afternoon (again due to my Japan 102 final), but we’ve barely started..oh well…

Short of that, there’s not much more to say except that tomorrow is my last day of classes in 1st year! That means I’m going to have this blog for about 2 more weeks…oh well, all good things must come to an end

Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

NO MORE TESTS!!!!

Well, another week has come and gone, and with it went the last 2 of my 8 midterms. Thank God. Now only 2 weeks till Finals :S. Wait. 2 weeks till finals? Holy crap is already almost August! That means I have about 31 days left of this blog and then I’m done! Oh well…

Anyway, this week has gone pretty well, all things considered. For some reason the Powers That Be decided it would be a good idea to give me 4 assignments and 2 major term tests all in the same week. As such, I was completely screwed. Once again, the Math 138 course coordinators decided it would be a good idea to give us another Maple Lab this week as well as the second midterm. While this one didn’t take very long (about an hour once I got the bugs worked out), it was on something we hadn’t done in class yet and I knew virtually nothing about, so I didn’t really understand it. Oh well. It was done and over with.

The Math 136 assignment this week was on vector spaces mostly. While there were a couple of proofs, they were mostly review from Math 146, and Professor Stebila said they don’t expect the same caliber of rigorousness that is expected in Math 146. The 136 assignment had many more questions than the 146 ones, but still took me less than half the amount of time to do, so it looks like my switch worked out. This week I have a MATLAB assignment. From what I understand, MATLAB is similar to Maple in its functionality. However, I’ve never used MATLAB before and never plan to use it again, so I have to do it in the computer labs. Oh well…

In Math 136 we spent the past 2 classes on Dot Product. Yeah, Dot Product. The thing you probably spent about 10 minutes doing in your Geometry/Discrete class in Grade 12. And it really doesn’t get any more complicated than it was in Geo/Discrete either. Luckily Professor Stebila is a good prof so I don’t fall asleep despite the class being at 9:30 am (I’m really not a morning person).

The CS241 assignment this week started code generation. Basically, those of you who know a bit about CS will know that the computer can’t understand even a fraction of the multitude of languages out there in their raw form. In fact, the computer can only understand binary. Thus, my assignment for last week and this week is to write a program that takes a program in the language we’re dealing with and convert that syntax into binary. It’s actually not that complicated, but it’s a bit hard for me to wrap my head around. Luckily Nomair and Colin have prepared a handout that covers most of the functions I have to write, and they’re good at explaining what I don’t understand. However, this week’s assignment took me a total of about 8 hours (although, granted, I spent a lot of that time fooling about with debugging scripts, so it was probably closer to 6 or 7). I get one mulliganned assignment in CS241 (only the best 10 of 11 count), so I may skip out on next week’s assignment, as it’s about twice the length of this week’s. I don’t know how much more difficult it’ll be though now that I’ve got all the ground work figured out, plus I have my JAPAN 102 final the following week, and I’m not sure I’d like to do CS homework that week. There is a bonus given in CS241 for the top n people (n is an as-of-yet undecided number, but talk is it will be 3) who get their compiler to run as efficiently as possible (in runtime and size of code generated), but I know a couple of people who really want the bonus and I don’t have the time or effort to put into it, so I’m not going to bother. I made my code run a bit more efficiently when I took 2 lines of code from one method and stuck it in another which cuts the generated code down by at least 4 lines (generally significantly more), but that’s about the most work I’m doing to that end.

So now to the tests. I had my second Math 138 midterm on Monday and my third Japan 102 midterm on Wednesday. As such, I was completely screwed. I spent about 3 hours Monday afternoon reviewing for the 138 test, and, as always happens, I spent a lot of time studying something that turned out to not even be on the test. Oh well…I did really well on it but I’m convinced that I should have done a bit better if Nataliya wasn’t so picky about my wording and methodology (I lost at least 2 marks on the test for answers that were 100% correct but not phrased to her liking). And I thought I was done with that stuff when I dropped 147…oh well…

As for the Japan 102 test, I didn’t spend a lot of time studying for it (about half an hour), because I felt I knew the grammar well enough. As it turned out, I did know it pretty well, but there were a couple things I forgot on the test, including one particular phrasing that constituted well close to (what felt like) 1/3 of the test. I kind of guessed at it logically (which usually works in Japanese) based on what I thought I remembered and what made sense in context, but I’m not sure. I think I did well; not nearly as well as the second midterm, but definitely satisfactory.

In other Japanese-related news, the presentation is going. Yes, going. Not going *well* or *bad*, but going. The presentation is due in about 5 days and we have yet to start practicing (or even completing) the script. Unfortunately one of my group members decided that since he has an almost-complete Japanese vocabulary (or else a really good dictionary), that everyone else in the class does too, so he could use words we haven’t learned. What he forgot is that we lose marks based on how much we do that. As such, and since he’s in 3rd year and has 2 difficult CS courses, it appears it’s now on my head to do both my part and his part of the work. I’ll do it, but I’ll be really mad at him, especially since he complained perpetually last term about how little his group members in his CS350 class were doing and how he had to do everything. Oh well…

In other other news, the final CTRL-A show of the term is on this weekend, which I went to yesterday and am off to now. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

Effing Circuits (Part 2) and other stuff

Well, it’s been a whole week since my last post, so it’s about time I make another, despite the fact that I slept really poorly last night and, as a result, had to skip my Algebra class this morning because I couldn’t wake up (yes, I’m a bad person that way). So I’m going to try to make this short but still get my point across.

First, the catchup: In case it wasn’t blatantly obvious to me to start with, Math 138 is nowhere near Math 147. Professor Zorzitto would cringe if he had to sit in on my Calculus class this morning, where Nataliya “proved” not one, but two things by “proof by picture” (i.e. she drew a picture on the board, said “QED”, and left it at that). Having taken advanced math for a term and a half, that just makes me cry, especially since one of the things she proved by picture could have easily been done without proof by picture, and would have taken less time and effort to do too. Oh well…

Math 136 so far seems…well, I don’t know. I’ve only been to 1 class and haven’t had an assignment yet. Professor Stebila (who is not as good as Professor Marcoux, but is a far cry from complaint-worthy) seems to be really nice and knows his stuff. I e-mailed him to get caught up on a couple things, and now I think I’m pretty much up to speed. At some point I want to go over the midterm to make sure I’ve got everything (although from what I’ve heard a lot of it was covered in my Grade 12 Data Management course, which I highly HIGHLY advise taking if you are in a position to do so).

In my Japanese class, we had our term-ly oral exam today. Last term, Fumie-sensei gave us a choice of 3 readings to memorize and present, where each reading was about half a page of hiragana. I completely botched it because a lot of the grammar changed by the sentence and some of the vocabulary was new, plus it wasn’t something I made up on my own (I think I would have done better if it was something I had written myself). This term, Misato-sensei let us read from the book, but she didn’t give us a choice of passages to read, with bonus marks given for memorization. Having learned my lesson from 101, I decided to forego the chance at bonus marks (3 out of 20) and went for the textbook. I translated the hiragana to romanji (English characters) and read those for the test. I don’t think Misato-sensei noticed (plus she was testing us mainly on our oral skills and not so much on the reading skills anyway). Anyway, as such, I aced it, despite not really practicing all that much (although not much of the vocabulary was new anyway). Next week is the second of 2 term tests (or the third midterm, although it’s only worth half as much as the real midterm), the following week is our presentation/project, and then the week after that is the final, so it’s going to be a busy month for Japan 102 for me.

And now to the real topic of the post. Circuits…man, I hate that course SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much…Seriously. Gah. What happened *this time*, you ask? Well, to explain, I kind of have to start from the beginning. Over the term, we have 5 labs distributed amongst the 3-hour Wednesday sessions. The second lab was supposed to be the week before the midterm, but it was moved (I don’t know why), which also caused the 3rd lab to be moved to today. As such, I was planning on doing the pre-lab over the long weekend to get it out of the way (yeah, I did homework on the long weekend…I really had nothing better to do…). When I looked on ANGEL (a website you’ll become very good friends with) to see if the lab manual was up, it wasn’t. So I figured “OK, maybe the profs are out partying or whatever, it’s the long weekend, so what, it’ll be up later when they come off their hangover” (although knowing the profs for this course, I’d say that’s incredibly unlikely, but possible). As of Monday night, the lab manual still wasn’t up. So I woke up Tuesday morning, checked ANGEL again to see if I could do it in my long spare, and it STILL wasn’t up. At the end of Tuesday morning’s lecture, I asked Professor El-Saadany what the deal was with the lab manual. And here’s the punchline: the prof of the course DIDN’T EVEN KNOW the lab manual wasn’t up. Had I not said anything, we would have had a 3-hour lab today with no pre-lab and no instructions. What’s more, the lab manual went up Tuesday afternoon, right at the end of my long spare, and it was an incredibly hard one. Luckily I have a friend in 2nd year Computer Engineering (which is an option of Electrical Engineering) who’s taken a Circuits course of his own, so he helped me out, but failing that I wouldn’t have even been able to do it. And it wasn’t only my own incompetence; most of the people I talked to in the course felt the exact same way. A guy who lives down the hall from me who apparently got close to 80% on the midterm needed my help (and, by extension, my friend’s help) to do this prelab. And he got 80 on the midterm. It was a really bloody hard prelab. As such, we (me and some of my res-mates from MTE) were discussing the prelab last night and we came up with a method to do it which I didn’t like at the time, but it turned out to be right, causing me to miss not only Algebra this morning, but the first half of Calculus as well to do this bloody prelab. And this would have all been avoided if they had posted the lab manual 2 weeks early like they did for the last one. And now I know why I’m not in Engineering.

Anyway, it’s 11:30 now and I’m really tired, so I’m going to bed. G’nite all! As always, feel free to e-mail me at uwmathblogger@gmail.com with any questions or comments you have! Until next time,

Lyle Waldman