I'm really disappointed with my final product for assignment 1. I'm willing to bet big money this is reflected in the marks. It wasn't until today when I was going over it for good when I started to feel incredidbly uncomfortable with what I thought were originally good, solid proofs. I guess there's always next time.
September 2008 Archives
As part of the slog requirement we're supposed to comment on other slogs that classmates are running. I understand the idea behind it: take someone else's viewpoint on a problem you might not have thought of. Make the slogs more interesting by encouraging conversation. Unfortunately finding slogs that are updated by students who have a little more than bare minimum interest in the project is a huge challenge.
I was going to watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and go through some other slogs, but the sound is completely off on the system I took from my parents (Thanks Dad), and I'm too lazy to switch the cables to a backup DVD player, especially considering that sometimes the backup doesn't read the discs properly. In retrospect, the solution to set up my computer to play it properly will end up taking more time.
My goal is to find slogs that are updated semi-regularly, with at least some sort of insight into the class that I missed, or at the very least, something amusing to read. I'll let you know how I do.
I finished problem set 2. I'm a little unsure about the induction. I know I got the answer, but I'm afraid I'll lose marks when it comes to my complete induction. I'm not sure if I needed to expand on my induction hypothesis. Only time will tell. I do like how I showed part b). I thought it was clever. Hopefully the person marking it feels the same way.
I also want to find out if we're allowed to post our answers along with the solutions. I'll have to ask Prof. Heap tomorrow.
So, I'm starting to think I might have made a seriously flawed decision when I thought I could handle a 10am lecture. I have a bad habit of sleeping through my alarm. I remedied the problem today by setting 4 separate alarms. They did their job and got me up and into my lecture, but that doesn't change the fact that I spent chunks of it completely oblivious to what was going on.
Last night while I was trying to fall asleep I read some of the course notes. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and hope that the reason some of it made absolutely no sense was because I wasn't fully functioning. I'll try again later today and see if I make any progress on the principle of well-ordering.
For those who are interested, here are the links to the current assignment (A1) and problem set (PS2):
A1 (pdf)
PS2 (txt)
Note: Question 4 of A1 is no longer due next monday, but will be handed in with part of A2. PS2 is due friday. I don't even understand what it's asking for right now. That might be because every time I've looked at it, I wasn't awake yet. Yes, I know. 10am lectures.
My friend Ori was in town today getting some stuff done for his grad school application. I was lucky enough to get a chance to have lunch with him and catch up.
In reality it was me cramming food in my mouth during the short break I had between two lectures, while he explained to me the simple steps I was missing in trying to answer the questions for assignment 1.
Question 1, like I thought it would be, was a simple issue of me forgetting something we were taught in elementary school: breaking geometric shapes into smaller pieces. You would think that with all the times I've been taught recursion I would have been able to make that step.
Question 3 is still bizarre. I have no idea what Well-Ordered whatever is. I do know where I can take the formula for the golden ratio, given our assumptions about n1 and n2. Hopefully that will help.
When I went into the office hours last week, I asked if there was somewhere I could get math help because question one is scary. Like, you're a little kid and it's the boogey monster in your closet scary.
Last night while I was at a party, there was a round table discussion about how lame it is that school cramps our style. In that moment I knew exactly what my problem with question 1 was: I have no idea how to go about measuring angles.
To be completely honest, I'm not 100% sure I need to be able to measure that. It just seems like I would need to. We've already been given that the sum of interior angles of a triangle is pi radians. That's our base case. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to go about proving the induction step. Not being able to measure the angles in a useful way seems like a big stumbling block. Even if it's not the block I'm treating it as, I just hit a bigger block: I have no viable alternative right now.
Back to the drawing board.
I spent most of the week trying to find Problem Set 1 posted on the website after I read that it was due on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't find it until this morning despite several searches on the website that returned up nothing. Now I'm getting random posts with the words 'problem' and 'set' in them, including the one about the problem set being posted. Obviously, the bulletin board system and I don't get along.
Lucky for me, the problem set was only two questions long. The first question was about the unit digit of 4^(n), very similar to the example of 3^(n) given in class. The second question was a simple induction question about the number of pairs in a set of numbers {1, 2, ..., n}. I was also lucky enough to have a light bulb go off in my head during the officer hours today. I hope the light bulb goes off again later when I'm trying to do Assignment 1.
I haven't been in a mood this sour in a long, long time. I can't stand a single one of my classes. Not one. I knew that I wouldn't like MAT223 (Linear Algebra) or MAT235 (Calculus for Science) or ECO227 (Statistics). But I was hoping that my computer science courses would be fun. Fuck, I was EXCITED to take them.
Fuck. That.
CSC236 runs on this retarded assumption that you just came out of CSC148 and CSC165. It's been two years since I've taken those (and four years since I've taken a computer science course that I was actually still interested in by the time I finished it). I just spent an hour working on either an assignment or a problem set and got no where.
Added frustration comes from the fact that if it's a problem set, it's due on Friday, and that only means the assignment is going to be even harder. If it is the assignment that's due in two weeks, it means there is a problem set due on Friday that is no where to be found.
For the first time in a long time I was actually screaming in frustration. I want to hit something. No, what I really want is to drop this course. But that won't do me any good. I'll just end up another fucking year behind. I should have listened to my mother and just stayed at UWaterloo, suffered through my degree, and got the fuck out of there as fast as I could. (Notice an obscene amount of cursing? Completely unusually. That's how frustrated I am right now. You'll also notice that I'm not posting this on my slog, because the last thing I need is to actively encourage my instructors and TAs to think that I'm a completely idiot).
If by chance any one out there is good a problem solving, or is masochistic and wants to try and beat their brain with some of these problems to help me out, or both, please let me know. It would be greatly appreciated. And I promise not to take my desire to hit something out on you. Really.
Umm, what? This is going to be a long semester.
I have to keep a course slog for my CSC236H Theory of Computation course. It's located here, at Blogger's slog 236. I'm going to try to be totally honest in the posts. I will be crossposting everything here. I won't be posting a link to here there. I don't mind if you guys read and comment there, I just don't know if I want everyone in my class commenting here yet.
This is SLOG 236, my course log for CSC236H at the university of Toronto. I'm four lectures into the class right now, although I missed today's lecture due to sudden freak cold. I haven't been enjoying it much. It's not a course I would have chosen to take - not at all. It's a required course for my Computer Science and Economics specialist, and I'm more keen to take the economics courses. Computer Science happened to be something I did well enough in when studying in high school, and that doesn't always translate into good marks in post-secondary. I found that out when I was at Waterloo.
That said, I'm going to try and get into the material more. I think I'm going to need to start waking up earlier so that I'm fully functioning when I get to class. The material is like one big puzzle, and I'm sure that if I want to I can enjoy it more than I do right now.
The recovery program I managed to get working to recover the data on my hard drive worked like this:
7 hours of searching the drive, and sorting files into directories based on file type.
11 hours of copying the files onto another drive.
Infinite hours of me resorting all the files properly. I started with pictures a few hours ago. I'm only now getting into pictures from 2007. sigh.
SMS System
I complained about the SMS system earlier, and I might have mentioned that you can't call a contact from the SMS screen. That was wrong, I fail hard. There's an option at the very top of the conversation to call the contact. I still don't like that you can't forward messages and that you can't see time stamps.
Mail App
I'm using it, I don't like it, but it could be worse. I guess it's hard to compete with Google's thread view.
Call Log
You can't delete an individual call, just clear the whole log. This links up with a bigger issue I have with the iPhone: the inconsistencies with a lot of the software. I don't understand why the phone log isn't treated in the same way as Visual Voicemail (which is super cool), or even emails/sms. What if I only want one call cleared? Or just missed calls cleared? These seem like simple things to add to the software.
And that's the one thing that gives me hope. The software is easily updated. I didn't read the press coverage, but apparently Apple released what was needed to develop app backgrounding. Hopefully this will allow things like the Facebook app to get better. There's something esle I claimed that I was wrong about ealier, but I can't figure out what it was. It completely slipped my mind as I was typing this.
I'd also like to say that the phone still is pretty sweet. I don't regret getting it over the Bold. There are a lot of software issue they can address, but only two real hardware issues (that they can't): the ring volume/vibrate power and battery life. Man does battery life suck. But I deal with it
Update: Sending links
I said you can't send links for pages you're viewing in safari via email. I lied. You can. Blackberries still do it better, but at least you can send them. The reason this option was probably not available to me before was because I wasn't using Mail on my phone, so there was no email address to send with. That or I'm a fool.
I argued earlier with a friend about the way SMS works with the iPhone (and the fact that it apparently has no MMS). My friend said he didn't like the way the BB treated text messages like emails. I don't see why that's a problem. The iPhone shows its like iChat. Completely with out time stamps. Match that with the fact that since it treats it like a messaging client, it only shows the most recent thing on the display, so you can't go back to check previous messages. Or forward them. Of course, it also doesn't recognize the text in a message as a link or number, so you can't easily view what you're sent. Include the lack of copy and paste and suddenly it becomes a bitch.
I'm just going to bed now. As I was walking to my building, I noticed the baristas at my starbucks getting ready to open the store. That's so gross.
Previous reasons can be found here: Things I don't like about the iPhone.
The Facebook App.
The facebook app for my 8800 acted like an inbox, telling me when people poked me, posted on my wall, tagged me in photos, commented on my photos/videos, also commented after me on other people's notes/photos/videos/posted items, invited me to events, invited me to groups, sent me messages, etc. It had options for me to post on someone's wall quickly, poke them quickly, access their profiles, or go to the mobile site. The iPhone app doesn't do any of this. It, like many other iPhone apps, is just a fancy way to view the mobile site over again.
The will tell me if I have a new message, because there is an inbox button. The home page is cooler than the status updates on the Blackberry App, because it will show things like pictures people have posted. But it doesn't include updates on wall posts, or anything else that might make sense being shown on a home page. It also doesn't have a link to the mobile site. I'm trying to play around with the options, but like every other thing with the iPhone, the options are always hard to find. And when you do find them, they're usually absolutely useless.
Update:
