Monthly Archives: December 2006

Chillin’ and Dreamin’

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Elation!!! I finished work for yet another course, Business of Computing, and an assignment for the Foundations of Research course. So all the work for my Computer Science courses out the way, I can concentrate on the assignments for my two other courses. Staying up all night, sure wore me out but nothing a make-up nap did not help.

Right now, I am sit chilling and relaxing. I can finally concentrate on my “other” projects. Well after I finish my assignments and write my exams, but you get the point.

Taking about my side projects, I am pleased to say the justCheckers project is moving along well. I am impressed the amount of attention project received lately. A lot of this attention comes from the increased ranking on SourceForge.net. The ranking seems to increased, thanks to migration to Subversion and the recent updates to the site. I set up a wiki that should speed up development of specifications. Maybe we will see a new release soon too.

In other news, Arnold Rosenbloom – my professor for many past course including this semester’s brand new Informational Security (CSC347) – will post my article on RSA cryptography and its demise thanks to quantum computation. I plan on resurrecting the SiteChunks project. Also as promised last Friday, I will post an update to the Self-Experiment: Fast Personal Context Switching, later on today.

Groogy Weather, Groggy Me

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Greetings again, and sorry about missing two day of updates. Dealing with stress, putting up with administrative nonsense, writing assignments, attempting to dance around illness and living with the sudden wacky cold-wet weather, puts me in a mood where I rather not even poke my nose from under the blanket. On the bright side, everything is falling into place.

The instructors of two of my course, kindly set the hand-in date for my course work until December 20. That gives me some breathing room, and lets me concentrate on the three assignments due on Friday. Next week I get to study for exams and work on the later assignments.

Carmen Hung, the new leader of our CSC454 or Business of Computing, handled getting everyone to work on the last assignment wonderfully. The paper still in the works, weighs in currently at a hefty 41 pages, and 24% of our term work. The business plan is coming along, not as fast as I wanted it. Still no complaints, as yesterday I came home late and crashed. I spent this entire morning getting over my tiredness “hangover”. When I finish blogging this entry, I will stock up on caffeine again.

Katarina Halan, classroom friend and almost my girlfriend, let me work with her on the CSC347 or Information Security assignment. We spent about 16 hrs on Sunday working only on the assignment. After hours of hacking, half-working and actual coding we finished the assignment. Thanks Kat for yesterday’s coffee “date”. Sorry about the Tim Horton’s coffee, next time I will buy some good coffee from Second Cup instead.

My last assignment after the “Business” course, deals with the unfortunate CCT209 Foundations of Research course. I am so behind in that course, it stopped being funny months ago. My group started on Monday, but since my e-mail to them, I saw no work. I guess I have to juggle this assignment and writing the business plan. Bother. Guys, you better get on the ball soon.

As for my open source project and my other blog, One-Time Trash Pad both I place on hold until I meet Friday’s deadline. I have too much at stake to deal with any side projects. If I don’t update this blog anytime before December 20, please do not be surprised. I will try my best, but no promises.

Until then wish me luck. I need all the luck I to overcome the stress, the weather and my own sluggishness.

Gee… I Feel like a Tree

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No I mean it. I feel like a tree, and everybody wants a piece of me. Turns out that for all my well made plans, all of my last assignments happen to be group endeavours. And even with my best laid plans, it seems that the meeting times for my groups coalesced into a single time.

Right now I am in a lull between work. And hoped that today would be the day I relaxed and finished my writing portfolio. Not the case. Right now I am working on a network security assignment, on standby for my business of computing group and trying to get some writing in. Oh and in about an hour and a half, I scheduled a meeting with my library assignment group. Bad idea.

If I can get one assignment done, from beginning to end today, I will be ecstatic. I fear this week will be the week of sleepless nights. So coding, writing, research and even more writing. I will be lucky if I don’t get RSI from all this typing.

And I remember a time when Sundays were considered days of rest and reflection. The good news is that the writing block is gone. Mostly.

Quiet Morning

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This morning seems so quiet. The lack of any real sounds, with the notable exception of the wind, make everything seem so un-alive. Its quite disquieting actually.

The only real sound (other than the typing of keys) is the sound of mental lemmings, walking around. That my friend, is the sound of writer’s block. Coming up with a main theme for an article, placed me into such a state. In an effort to shorten, and ease up on my articles, I had to cannibalize parts from three different articles, and plop them all together. I feel like a literary Dr. Frankenstein. And my article in its current form, plays the part of a half-zombie, half-robotic chicken monstrosity. Oh wait. That would be the robotic chicken… oops, wrong show. Anyways, with the current state of the article makes the lemmings inside my head want to throw themselves off a mental cliff. I mean walk off. Cause thats what lemmings do.

Lemmings aside, I resuscitated another of my projects yesterday. Yes justCheckers will return in all its Java-ish gory err… glory soon. On the topic of justCheckers, Chris Bellini, an important contributer to the project, just turned 30 yesterday. Happy birthday and I am glad you shrugged off the coming age. Is that a grey hair? *ducks*

The marathon of finals continues! Only 9 assignments, 3 exercises, 4 classes and 7 days to go. And the previous experiment seems to be paying off. Better run off now, and take care of my mental lemmings.

Self-Experiment: Fast Personal Context Switching

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Time for a self-experiment, where I get to play the part of the guinea pig. And you get to observe the final results. Speaking of time, this university semester I felt rushed and busy like never before. I found myself with six assignments/exercises a week, and in a constant lack of time. In response I started going to time management counselling. Armed with calendars, todo lists, activity logs, my trusty PDA and advice from Mindtools.com, I felt I could do no wrong.

I discovered a problem that kept holding me back from achieving more. At home, with all things going on, my time become extremely fragmented. The fragmentation frustrated my attempts at coming up with a coherent schedule and sticking to it. And getting into the mood and mindset of performing school work – assignments that I tried to avoid – felt like climbing Mount Everest again and again. However when I interrupted and continued games between chores, I did so without missing a moment. Why could I do one well but not the other?

When you look at my situation, it resembles the life of a CPU. Why a CPU? Take a look at your computer. Your computer with one CPU can multitask well. The CPU seems to work on many things at the same thing. In reality, one CPU can only do one thing at a time, but the operating system switches the tasks for the CPU. Under Linux – the OS I use and understand best – every program (process and thread) becomes a task. The OS allocates a certain amount of time for executing a task, and then switches between them. Whenever the OS switches, it stores a record of what task it was working on, how far did it go into the task, and any extra information it needs to restart the task later. The OS then starts or continues another task. Eventually, the OS gets back to the stored task, retrieves it, figures out what to do, and executes the task until the next switch. So what?

Well, I often have to drop one thing and pick up another. Just like an OS, I switch from one task to another. Yet when I re-start my previous work, I sit trying to get into the work again. Being the distractible type, I get fed up and wander off to game instead of homework. And I need continuous blocks of time to do work in. So what to do?

Remember how the OS stores some information of its work in one task, before it switches? Well this week’s experiment is do the same. Before I go off on another task, I will write down the following:

Task: (what was I working on)
Working on: (which part or section I was working on)
Self-Progress: (how I am progressing through this section – well, badly, struggling, etc.)
Next work: (what I need to do next)
Notes: (any important things I need to jot so I don’t forget them)

Well this work or is useful? I have a pad of paper and pen ready, and we will see. Next week, I will post any interesting developments and results of this self-experiment.