LINUX!!!!!!

So, yeah. Lately I’ve been having some computer issues with Win-doze X-Piece of Crap, so I decided enough is enough, and I’m going to use the other OTHER operating system. Unfortunately, Apple decided to optimize their OS for their hardware, so grabbing Tiger or Leopard was out of the question, so now I’m using Linux (Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10) and loving it. No antivirus, no registry, no spyware, malware, or adware, no Internet Explorer, no Windows Update that takes 3 million hours to run, and the word processor of choice is freeware and comes ready-installed (unlike MS Word which you can easily drop over $100 on if you don’t want to be sued by the Big M). Also, all the programs you’ll ever need are in the Ubuntu Repositories, so you don’t have to surf to some obscure site somewhere in the depths of the web to grab the program you need. Overall, I’m liking it. For anyone interested in making the switch, the CS Club gives out free Ubuntu CDs to anyone who asks, and since half the members of the CSC, along with the CSC itself, use Ubuntu (or some other distribution of Linux), the support for it on campus is quite good.

In other news, my work term is FINA-FRICKIN-LY ALMOST OVER!!!! I’m moving back to Toronto for 2 weeks as of tomorrow, and I CAN’T WAIT to get back. Work is really boring, and since I finally finished my last assignment yesterday, I have nothing to do. I get the feeling that going to work tomorrow will be more of a formality than anything else. To be quite honest, I spent Tuesday afternoon at work playing Portal from beginning to end, and one of my colleagues did the same today. That’s how much work they’ve given us in the past week. But oh well, I’m in Waterloo for less than 24 more hours…

So, for anyone interested, Japan 201 went great. Maruoka-sensei put a bunch of vocab on the test that she never taught us, which was kind of lame, but expected since it always happens. I think I did decently well in the course, and I’m looking forward to having Misato-sensei for 202 next term. Also, EASIA250 has pretty much been finalized now, so I’m going to go to Japan next May, which I’m also really psyched about.

Anyway, I think it’s bedtime for me…time to kill 7 more hours of not being in Toronto! Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

UW Math Blogger: Season 2

So, when I started this thing, I started it knowing that the Man Upstairs (TM, R, etc. etc.) was going to cut me off at some point, because he did the same thing to the guy who did it before me (and before him and him, etc.). But, y’know what? He hasn’t cut me off yet, and it’s already December, so I figure what the heck, I may as well start up again. So, until I am forcibly removed kicking and screaming, I’m going to keep this blog up, cause, y’know what, it’s really fun. And fie on you, Man Upstairs, you’ve had 3 months to lock it, so now I’m taking it back! Huzzah and all that.

So a bit of an update on what’s happened the past 3 months: Well, as it turned out, I did in fact fail MTE120. I don’t quite know how, but apparently I got 35% on the final exam. I spoke to one of the TAs who marked it, and he said that roughly half the class failed, and nobody got above 80% on that exam. Unfair exam, or lazy class? You decide. Anyway, so I’m going back to Prof. El-Saadany in January to complain, because if I can get a pass in the course, it’s one less course I have to take later (I’ll get to that in a bit).

I’m currently working at RIM (ZOMG RIM!!!) doing QA. QA sucks. Let’s get that out of the way quickly. When I applied for this job and got it I was like “hey, I get to break people’s programs all day cool!” Unfortunately, not so much. A closer representation is “Hey, this program is broken, and here’s a button that proves it. Hey, Lyle, c’mere and press the button!” Yeah. Not so fun. I’m totally not taking another QA job after this. Also, RIM has this thing where they give you a pay bonus, but you get no days off, and no, you can’t option out of it. So if you’re sick for any reason or have to go somewhere, you’re slightly SoL. Yeah. It’s pretty lame. But oh well, it’s RIM, and I can put it on my resume and be like “HAY GIES I WARKD AT RIM!!!” and they’ll be like “HAY LYLE UR HAIRD!!!” and it’ll be good times.

RIM’s not all bad though. The main RIM campus is located at Phillip and Columbia, which is basically the northeast corner of UW campus, a 5-minute walk from the Davis Centre (and of course those of you who haven’t been to UW are like “I have no idea what you’re talking about”, but that’s just another reason to come here!). That makes it really convenient to do on-campus stuff after work. Even though I’m not a student this term (technically speaking), I was in 3 clubs (until about 2 weeks ago when I quit UWGamers over a dispute with a member…long story). It was great fun. I was in UWGamers, where I prepared a Halo 3 release event (yay more resume!), CTRL-A (again), and (finally!) KonJa (Konnichiwa Japan). I spoke enough about UWGamers and CTRL-A already (except that CTRL-A is organizing a trip to next year’s Anime North, and I’m going out with them tonight to play Laser Quest against WatsFic), so I’ll talk a bit about KonJa:

KonJa is basically UW’s equivalent of the Japanese Student Association. Basically, anyone who’s interested in Japanese language, culture, or anything else can join this club (regardless of prior knowledge/experience in things Japanese). Many Japanese foreign and exchange students from both UW and WLU go to this club, so you can meet a lot of interesting people you wouldn’t meet otherwise. Once a week, they have a session where they teach a bit of Japanese language, and, while I don’t recommend doing KonJa over or instead of Japan 101, you can definitely get a good feel for the language by going to these lessons. Also, if you’re interested in that, the Japanese students are very friendly and more than willing to teach you if you don’t understand something. They also have quite good English (much better than my Japanese!) so they’re easy to understand (and, unlike a lot of other foreign students, tend to speak to each other in English a lot so as to not appear exclusionary). They also have other events like Laser Quest and a Japanese food cooking day. It’s really great, and I’m going to be doing it again next term.

Since RIM is so close to UW, I’ve also decided to take an on-campus course this term. I don’t remember if I wrote about it before, but I took Japan 201 this term. They say that Japan 102 and 202 are the two hardest classes, and I can definitely see why. 201 was really easy, I found. Kanji is a bit hard to learn since there are a lot of pronunciations, but once you get used to it it’s really not that difficult. What I liked about 201 is that you learn a lot of really useful stuff in it, like the “want” form (as in “I want [something]“) and the conditional form (“if…then…”), and also there isn’t nearly as much new vocabulary as in 101 and 102, so studying for tests is mostly about grammar, which I find easy. The hard part is listening to Maruoka-sensei for 3 hours. She’s not a particularly bad lecturer, but, as I mentioned in 101 and 102, she tends to switch randomly between English and Japanese while lecturing. It’s not as bad in 201 since you get used to it, but sometimes she’ll say something and it’s like “what did she just say?” I suppose it’s good because I’ve learned a little more vocabulary by listening to her, but it’s something worthy of note. Also, I got one of the TAs into ProfQuotes this term. Now my goal is to get Misato-sensei into ProfQuotes again next term, after she said she’d “be more careful from now on”.

So anyway, that’s about it. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

CS241: System.exit(0)

And so, my CS241 exam has finished. The exam was pretty easy; significantly harder than the midterm, but still easy. It was like Colin said: They didn’t test anything that requires memorization. If you paid attention in class, did the homework, and kept up with what was going on, it was pretty trivial. However, if you didn’t understand what was going on in class, things got really hairy really fast. Overall, it was a good representation of the course: it began with a little Assembly language coding, then got into DFAs, regular languages, and finally parsing, code generation, and C. It was pretty equal in distribution, meaning that if you knew a little bit of everything, you should do fine. I found it somewhat relaxing, actually, although the last question was a bit of a tough one considering how much C I’ve learned.

And now, a quick course overview:

I don’t really know how to judge this course, to be honest. On one hand, the concepts are really interesting and I think I learned a lot, but on the other hand, I hate compilers and am not touching CS444 with a 10-foot pole. To be honest, I think the course covers too much in too little detail. Most of the course is geared towards teaching about programming languages, which is good, but I think making you write a compiler is the wrong way to approach it. I like the idea of assembly language, but I would have liked to have learned to do more with it. A basic understanding of how Java or C gets converted into runnable code is interesting, but I found the execution a bit…lacking, I suppose. And the fact that C gets taught in the last week of class, expecting you to learn what they teach in about 3 classes and be tested on it for 1/8 of the final exam with very little practice is a bit silly. If it were me, I’d remove C from the course and just have another 2nd year CS course that teaches C (or, even better, a first-year course that would replace CS 125/133/134) in-depth, replacing that material with more course-related stuff. But it’s not me, and I have no say, so I guess whatever works will work.

CS241 is an easy course if you get it. In my opinion, there is no reason as to why CS241 must be a 2nd-year course, aside from the compiler aspect of it. Aside from that, it’s about memory management and the inner workings of the computer, which is really not that complicated. As long as you go by the old CS standbys of “one instruction at a time” and “do not kill the language”, you should do fine, regardless of your CS experience. The problem is when you fail to program properly and forget what certain instructions do that things start to get hairy. The DFA aspect of the course isn’t bad if you stick to small ones. Unfortunately there was a question on the exam that involves a huge immense ridiculous DFA which I guessed at because I didn’t have the patience to walk through it by hand (I did finish the exam half an hour early, so I had the time). Again, if you understand what’s going on in the course material, it’s not bad. If you try to memorize a bunch of stuff, be prepared to do it again next term. But that’s how it is with all CS courses, I’ve found, anyway.

So that’s the brief overview of CS241 in a nutshell. And now I sit here at the end of my first year the way I began; in my frosh T-Shirt and a pair of jeans, at my computer, typing something random. I’m leaving UW in about 2 hours, so I should probably get to packing my things. It’s a bit sad that I won’t have this blog to continue next term, as it’ll be passed off to someone else. And thus ends the blog of Lyle Waldman, First-Year Math Blogger. To all of you attending UW in September, best of luck to you, and to all who aren’t, you really should be.

Signing off,

Lyle Waldman

CIRCUITS: Crap, I Really Can’t Understand It…This Sucks…

Actually, it wasn’t that bad. The final for MTE 120 (Circuits) was this morning. I studied my butt off yesterday and went to see Professor El-Saadany and one of the TAs over the past couple days, so I was able to learn a lot before the exam. Of the 6 questions on the exam (no choice this time), I was able to answer 4 of them completely, and about 1/3-1/2 of each of the other 2. The questions on the final were not nearly as difficult as on the midterm, or perhaps I just learned the material better. They were, nonetheless, still tough, even if you knew your stuff. It was definitely the most difficult exam I’ve had thus far. But on the bright side, I think I passed, which is really all I’m hoping for at this point in time.

As always, a course overview:

Damn, this course is bloody hard. Seriously. The concepts aren’t that bad; the problem is that the application is so obtuse it’s ridiculous. Even if you know all the formulas, you still have to practise application, because you are sure to not get it on the first try. In addition, Professor El-Saadany didn’t give us half the information we needed to know (I learned after the midterm about a specific solution method we were expected to know for the midterm even though he never taught it).

On the surface, the course looks not bad; it doesn’t have that much material, and Professor El-Saadany says that any circuit can be solved with KCL and KVL. This is true. The problem is how to apply KCL and KVL in a particular scenario, which, imo, he doesn’t do a very good job of explaining.

Additionally, the class notes, I found, are worthless. When I was studying for this exam, I tried to look through my notes, and found that, although I took down everything he said, I was missing good chunks of stuff I remember having done in CDTs and labs. I ended up reading the textbook (which is also garbage, but I’ll get to that in a minute) to learn what I needed to know for the exam.

And the textbook. The textbook is crap. The textbook for the course comes as a 3-pack of books specially designed for this course (i.e. you can’t buy this package anywhere except at UW, so don’t even bother trying, although you may be able to find it used on Amazon or something). First of all, of the 3-pack of books, we didn’t even use one of them at all. I have yet to even look at the front cover of this book, even though it’s been on my bookshelf for about 3 months. Of the other 2, one of them is only used up until the midterm. However, you still need it, because there are formulas in its chapters that Professor El-Saadany doesn’t teach you but expects you to know (don’t ask me how; I’m still not entirely sure). Additionally, for someone who did lousy in the electric circuits unit in high school physics and hasn’t touched physics since, they expect you to intuitively know SI units and SI prefixes. For some that are common (milli, centi, kilo, etc.) it’s OK, but I’d never heard of “nano” or “pico” before this course, except through the old TV show ReBoot, and in none of the 3 textbooks (ok, the 2 textbooks, as I haven’t looked through the 3rd) is there a chart for these things, and you’re not even ever given one in class. Perhaps in engineering you learn these things, but as a Mathie taking one course, it’s really lame.

As for the third textbook, it wouldn’t be bad, except for a couple of things: First of all, the chapter questions are at the end of each *chapter*, not each subsection like in every other textbook I’ve ever seen. This means if your chapter has 10 subsections and each subsection is 10 pages, you have to flip back 100 pages to find out what the heck the question is talking about. This is a bit annoying when you consider that each chapter has an overarching theme, so you can’t remember exactly what fit where and what you are and aren’t supposed to know. Additionally, the textbook questions have a very limited answer key. Only a limited number of questions have answers attached, and these questions are seemingly distributed at random. As such, there can be entire subchapters worth of questions with no attached answers you can check when practising for a test or exam. Makes it a bit difficult to study. Luckily, Professor El-Saadany (and/or the TAs) post answers to the assignment problems on ANGEL (a system you will become very good friends with), so you can at least look at what they’ve done for those specific problems. Additionally, the textbook chapters, while they have no questions, are littered with examples. When/if you take MTE 120 (which I definitely do not endorse unless you really like circuits or are in Mechatronics Engineering and for some reason decide to see that that Mathie has to say), you’ll understand that some problems take a long long time to do. Thus, these “examples” can be pages and pages long, interrupting the flow of discussion in the chapter (as they seem to be inserted at random, even in the middle of sentences in the textbook). On a related note, sometimes the chapter, as part of a discussion, will say “See diagram”. The diagram, however, can be on the previous page, on the next page, or somewhere else in the chapter at random. This means that you have to constantly keep flipping pages back and forth, which makes it difficult to understand what’s going on. I could continue ranting like this about the textbook for hours on end, but I think the general idea has been conveyed.

So, in summary, unless you are a masochist, do not take this course. It makes for some very very bad times.

In other news, apparently enough people did badly enough on the Math 138 final exam that it’s being bellcurved. I don’t know how or by how much or if it will affect me at all, but I thought I should throw something in about it.

Now, all I have left is CS241 on Tuesday, meaning I have about 4 days to blow doing absolutely nothing. Tomorrow night is sushi, but otherwise I’m going to be really really bored for the next 4 days…and then HOME TIME :D:D:D:D:D:D

I’m not sure when The Powers That Be are cutting me off, so this may or may not be my last entry. If it is, CS241 is a really easy course and there’s really no reason for it to be required that you take 134/136 before it if you have a reasonable understanding of Java. If I get another entry, I’ll go more in-depth, but that’s the brief version in case I don’t.

So, until next time (or maybe not),

Lyle Waldman

NO MORE CALCULUS!!!!

Well, I’m officially done Math 138, and, with it, I am officially done with Calculus forever. And of course you know that as soon as I say that I’m going to wind up working for a company in a field where I’m going to have to end up doing multivariable integration or some crap like that, don’t you? Oh well…

So, yeah, Math 138 is done. The final exam…well, it wasn’t that bad. I knew most of the major details, but I forgot a lot of the minor ones (most importantly that there is a case when 0^0 = 1, which caused me to fuzz up the last question…I probably still got n-2/n on it though, so whatever). Given more studying time, I probably would have still missed those details; it’s stuff you think you can treat as trivial until they’re asked on an exam and you’re like “OH CRAP!”. Oh wells…I passed for sure, but given how I did on the first midterm, I might not hit my 80% goal in the course…whatever…no point crying over spilt milk, as the saying goes.

Anyway, that aside, a quick review of Math 138 (with a foreword: review obviously negatively biased by the fact that Natalitya was my prof):

Well, I’m not sure if it was the course material or my prof (probably a good mix of both, but I would lean more heavily towards the prof if asked to choose), but this course made me hate Calculus. It seems neat when you can do stuff like differentiation really hand-wavy using Chain Rule and such, but integration is a huge, huge, immense, monstrous, [add other long adjective meaning "really really big" here] pain in the butt. Like seriously. I want to find the person who invented it, and, if he’s not already dead, punch him in the face. Even if he is already dead I wouldn’t mind punching him in the face. Not even joking. Integration is basically trial and error until something works. You can go for 5 minutes or 5 hours trying to integrate something, and if you don’t try the exact right combination of functions in the exact right order, you’ll completely miss it. That’s not entirely true. There are techniques to make it easier. The problem is that the techniques are more hand-wavy than trial and error. There is no “for this type of problem, use this type of solution”. If you add an “x” where there’s a “1″, all of a sudden your integral completely flips on its head. I spent literally 15 minutes on my final exam today trying to integrate a stupid function and going through all the different methods I could use until I found one that worked. And the methods you learn aren’t even inter-related. The only common thread is that they all make the function “easier to work with” (whatever that abstract statement happens to mean in a particular context). In fact, that’s not even always true, as there are times when you can use multiple methods of solution, some of which make it easier, others of which make it significantly harder, although, of course, you don’t realize how hard it is until 20 minutes and 5 sheets of paper later.

Gah. Seriously. Integration. I want to kill it dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. Thank God (or whatever other Power That Be that you prefer to thank) that I don’t have to deal with this crap anymore since I’m in BCS (Bachelor of Computer Science) instead of BMath/CS.

Other than integration, though, the course really isn’t that hard. Most of it comes directly from stuff you learned (or should have learned) in High School or in Math 137. There’s a short section on Epsilon-Delta in the course, significantly easier than Math 147, although it was (unfortunately, as it would have boosted my mark) not on the final. Other than that, though, it’s pretty straightforward. They start talking about Taylor Series towards the end on the course, although they teach it basically as a formula you have to memorize and then plug values into on the spot. The formula is pretty short though so it’s not too bad.

Oh well; I’m sure if I’d had a better prof that the course would have been better. Professor Wolczuk who taught the tutorials seemed awesome; it was truly a shame that his Math 138 class conflicted with Professor Stebila’s 136 class.

And on that note, I found out last week that Professor Stebila isn’t a professor at all. He, like Nomair and Nataliya, is a PhD student. This is really surprising (although I don’t know why, considering Nomair’s track record) because he’s the best of the 3 Algebra profs this term (although I’ve only had class with Stebila and Hoffman, I’ve heard that the 3rd prof is also not great). This also unfortunately means that it is almost certain anyone reading this will not be able to take a class with him. Oh well. Once he gets his PhD (which, as he seems like a really smart and knowledgeable guy, I’m sure he will), hopefully he’ll become a professor so he can teach more people.

So, in short, I’m done Calculus. Now all I have to worry about is Circuits on Friday. Crap. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

2 down, 3 to go (Finals edition)

Well, today was my Math 136 final. It was a bit disappointing considering my Math 145 final last term, which was a bit difficult. The 136 one was pretty easy, to be honest. Mostly it was row reducing matrices and applying one particular theorem (known as the “Dimension Theorem” if you take Math 146 or the “Rank Theorem” if you take 136) repeatedly for great justice. There was one question that threw me off a bit, though; one of the questions was a 5-parter where the first 2 and last 3 were seperate. My answer for the 3rd question was slightly off, and the 4th and 5th parts were based on the 3rd, so I may have gotten part marks on that one (total of the 3 questions = 9 marks, my estimate for the question = 4 or 5/9). Otherwise though it was pretty much straightforward. In other words, I just wrote my first 94% final exam (Professor Stebila said that my Math 146 marks would only count if they raised my mark, and given that I’ve been doing significantly better in 136 than 146, it’s doubtful they’ll count) since all the marks for all the tests and assignments up to the date I switched were transferred to the final.

As always, course in review:

Overall, Math 136 isn’t a bad course, if you get a good prof. Having seen an awesome prof teach it (Stebila) and a not-as-awesome prof teach it (will remain unnamed to protect the innocent, since this person seems very smart and knowledgeable but just can’t teach well), I can see how some people might hate it while others love it. But, of course, as with pretty much everything, if the prof is good, you’ll have fun, but if the prof sucks, so will your time in the course, and, by association, your grade.

Not much is carried from Math 135 to 136, since 135 is Classical Algebra (dealing mostly with stuff like modulus and abstract concepts like that) and 136 is Linear Algebra (dealing mostly with matrices and vectors, very similar to Grade 12 Geo/Discrete for those who took it), which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. If you want to get really ready for 136, Geo/Discrete and Data Management are your best bets, since a lot of the same material is covered (not repeated, but the basis for a lot of the Linear Alg stuff is in those High School courses). Of course, as it’s the beginning of August, it’s probably too late for anyone reading this to go out and take those 2 courses, but just a word of warning for those who didn’t that you may need to study a bit harder than those who did.

In other academic-related news, I finished most of my Circuits lab on Friday by myself, causing me to miss the Greyhound bus home for the weekend (there was another coming 1 1/2 hours later, which I got, but it was somewhat annoying). Oh well…it was done, and I get some marks for it anyway.

Also, the CS241 bonus assignment ended last week. My final submission clocked in at just over 30 KB, putting me in 8th place overall out of 63 (or out of 17 who submitted) (although 6th and 8th place were seperated by under 1 KB in the end). Considering I started from over 75, I think I did well anyway and I’m happy with it.

Short of that, not much has happened around UW recently. I spent most of the past 3 days studying for Algebra, and, on a related note, holed up in my room. It seems being holed up in my room is going to be a going trend for at least a little while, until I go out for Sushi not once, but twice, next week (I’m organizing a trip with my ex-Japan 102 classmates to eat sushi as an end-of-term party).

Unfortunately, as I probably won’t have this blog for long enough to do it, I won’t be doing an “ask the prof what they think” section of this blog for this term, although given the response last term I don’t think it’s a big loss. Just thought I should announce that for anyone who wanted to see it.

Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

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

Musings from the Comfy Lounge

So I am writing what I believe to be my frist post from the Comfy Lounge in the MC (my previous posts have been almost exclusively written from the SLC Great Hall or from my room in V1, with the exceptions of the 2 or 3 I wrote over my work term). As I sit here, the first thing I think of is how much I need a new pair of earphones considering my left one crackles and breaks up and the case that came with them broke a couple weeks ago when I dropped it on cement by accident. But that probably doesn’t interest any of you. I’ll get to the point, as there are several:

First off, my CS exam went just as predicted. With the exception of the confusing question I mentioned in my last post, I lost 1 mark on the entire exam. I didn’t in fact, miss any pages (thank God!), although a lot of course material was mysteriously absent from the test. On the other hand, it seems there is a great divide in CS 241 between pre-midterm and post-midterm. Before the midterm the course was pretty easy and the homework was quick, but the last assignment (*technically* next assignment considering it’s due tomorrow although I finished it on Monday) took me about 2 or 3 hours (about 6 or 7 including time it took to debug my first program and figuring out how best to do the 3rd one). It’s still nothing time-wise compared to CS134, though, where every programming assignment took me a good 5 hours easy (due to sheer volume of code required and not much else). This week’s assignment had to do with scanning. Unfortunately I can’t think of a way to get into detail about exactly what that means without taking up a lot of space and annoying the tl;dr people (for those who don’t get the reference, “tl;dr” is short for “too long; didn’t read”). Next week’s assignment is on parsing (which is hard to explain unless I explain scanning first), and then 2 assignments on code generation (where you basically, with the help of a scanner and parser, read in a program in one language and output it in binary so it can run on a computer). By the end of Assignment 10, I’ll have written a complete compiler for an incredibly rudimentary language (a very small subset of Java called “WL”). I have no idea what Assignment 11 will be then, but we’ll see.

Continuing in chronological order, I’ve dropped Math 146. I wasn’t doing particularly poorly in it (my estimated grade overall in the course to date is about 75%), but the assignments were taking a very long time to do and were just doing generally nasty things to my schedule (particularly the part of my schedule where I’d prefer to be sleeping). As such, I’ve dropped (unfortunately) to Math 136, which will have less homework (time-wise) but will also be much less fun (given the absence of Professor Marcoux, who is awesome) and be absent of the people I’ve become friends with in the Advanced Math classes. Oh well…there’s always Facebook and MSN

From what I’ve seen from my friends taking Math 136, they’re doing now what we did in Math 146 in the first 2 or 3 weeks of class. Then again, they’ve also been doing for the past 2 months what we just started (Interjection: MAN, I HATE THESE BLOODY EARPHONES!!!…sorry). It seems like it’s going to be really easy though; on Assignment 1 or 2 in Math 146 we were asked to prove a theorem. In Math 136 on this week’s assignment, they were asked to give a counterexample to the inverse of the same theorem (yeah, a single example, no proof, no generality, nothing, just a single counterexample. Now you know why I liked the advanced sections…). Oh well…I’ll grin and bear it for a month, get my 90, and get out. Not like it can be too much worse than Math 138…

Speaking of Math 138, the first Maple Lab was returned. Basically a Maple Lab is an assignment using a computer program called Maple (which is free to use on the UW servers but can be purchased from the CHIP for $21) where they give you a bunch of commands and a set of questions and tell you to use the commands to answer the questions. They’re really easy, but really time-consuming. As it turned out, my printer somehow forgot to print the last page of the assignment, but Nataliya allowed me to redo that page for credit, which I did. She seems like a really nice person, but she really needs to learn to teach better…*sigh*…

Course material-wise, we (somehow) finished Epsilon-Delta in about a week (don’t ask me how you can cover E-D in only a week…we spent about 2 months on it in Math 147…) and are dealing with limits of sequences and series (which I believe we glossed over in Grade 12 at my high school and did using E-D in Math 147) right now. I honestly have no idea how we’ve managed to spend about a week on that, since the basic premise is “the limit of a sequence is equal to the limit of the function defining that sequence”. But oh well…

Breaking chronological order for a moment, as I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, the Circuits midterm marks were posted the other day (I didn’t actually get my exam back, but given my mark and the amount of questions I answered, I can pretty much guess where I went right and wrong, as my estimate for my maximum possible mark on the exam based on what I answered was about 3% off what I got). I passed by a fairly wide margin (compared to what I was expecting anyway). I’ve spoken to a couple people who have taken DHW in the past and they said ECE 222 (which I’m taking next term in lieu of CS251) is pretty easy, so I think I’ll stick with DHW (assuming I make it past Circuits). If the current trend continues, I’m expecting somewhere between a 65 and 70 overall in the course by the end, and I’m OK with that given the material and the marking spread on the midterm (after doing a quick analysis of the exam marks in MS Excel, I found I’m about 4 spaces short of dead middle of the class mark-wise, and considering a good chunk of the class is repeating the course, I’m satisfied with that).

I think the big problem with Circuits is that the assignments don’t at all prepare you for the exams. In the textbook and tutorials and such, they deal with very easy problems; you are given 4 or 5 elements, a voltage or current source, usually obviously in series or parallel, and there may or may not be a trick to it, but it’s very rudimentary. Then on the exam, Professor El-Saadany prepares a huge circuit with 15+ elements, 7-10 sources (both Voltage and Current, some dependent some independent), most of which are neither in series nor parallel, and then you’re expected to solve it. That’s probably the biggest problem with the course; the preparatory material doesn’t do its job. Oh well, we’ll see what comes of it at the end…

Jumping back to chronological order, but still on the topic of Circuits, something kinda weird happened yesterday. Every Wednesday I have a 3-hour session of class blocked off as a lab. 4 times during the term we have a real lab (the second was last week, in which I got a very good mark despite doing an assignment by myself that was intended for 2 people), and the other times we have what is called a CDT. Basically a CDT is a 3-hour open-book test where there are TAs who help with questions and such. A couple of the TAs are really good, but some of them are not so much. So anyway, there was a CDT yesterday. My group had finished 3 of the 10 questions and were about halfway through the 4th when there was a 30-second blackout in the WEEF lab (the main Engineering computer lab in E2), which shut off all the computers, meaning we had to start over, an hour into the session. Instead of making us do that, though, they decided instead to let us finish for the day. I’m not exactly sure how it’ll be graded (considering my group had gotten none wrong of the first 3 questions while a friend of mine had lost 10 marks of the 6 or 7 her group had answered, so it wouldn’t be fair to give a mark based on current progress). So I basically got a free 2-hour break yesterday afternoon. And for those wondering why the WEEF lab doesn’t have backup power, I wondered that myself before thinking “why do I care? I get free marks and a 2-hour break from class”

We got our midterms back in Japanese class last night. As predicted, I once again did well in it. I made sure it made up for the fact that I botched the first term test, and it did. I did make a couple silly mistakes (notably mixing up the words for “to walk” and “to open”, which are very similar…apparently you can walk windows…or something…I dunno…), which I attribute to screwing up 2 midterms in the 2 days prior. Next week is our reading test where we have to recite a passage from the textbook and we get graded on how well we speak. In 101, we had to memorize the passage, which is why I completely screwed it up, but this term Misato-sensei says we can read from the textbook and memorizing will be worth bonus marks. Learning my lesson from 101, I’m going to give up the bonus marks, since I think I can do a really good job of it if I read it over a couple times and understand what I’m saying and use the textbook as a guide to where I am at any point.

In other Japan 102 news, we’ve been given our final term project. It’s the exact same as 101: Write a short skit (10-15 minutes) on any topic you want as long as you try to use as much vocabulary from 102 as possible and use very little from outside the course. Unfortunately, one of my group members doesn’t see it the same way I do, so we’ve decided to try to take a Japanese fairy tale and modernize it so it can be more “meaningful”. I dunno…we’ll see how it turns out since 4 of my group members (out of 5) are in favour of the idea. I just hope we can do a good job of it, especially considering the story was originally written in native Japanese, which we are nowhere near. I equate it to trying to tell the story of Snow White to someone with rudimentary conversational English knowledge (and thus having no idea what the words “dwarf”, “witch”, “magic”, etc. even mean). But they didn’t like my alternative idea, so we’ll see how it works out. I just hope we don’t waste too much time on his idea if it turns out he’s wrong…

And that’s pretty much a quick rundown of the past week as it’s been here. As always, feel free to contact me at uwmathblogger@gmail.com if you have any questions or comments. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman