Category Archives: University

My time at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Emptiness

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Another day at work. Sweat. Tiring work. Exhaustion. My only relief are the paycheck and that my normally temperamental machine functioned well, nay, flawlessly. Almost no sleep takes its toll. Damn hot humid weather.

Met a few new students… actually, they attended the same high school as me. Managed to talk to Kat from work. She seems nice enough… but I am not in the mood. Not interested in girls nowadays… nope… I think I’ll bury myself in my personal projects for awhile.

Started reading Creation Rediscovered, after a long hiatus. Figured might as well let God into my life. Can’t hurt. Might as well give Him a chance.

Great news! Finally paid off my university debt. Now I owe no one (except OSAP) anything. Have to save up for next year…

My 22nd birthday is coming up. I feel old and worn. Nothing cheers me up anymore… sigh…

Going to sleep in the basement now… maybe I will get some rest tonight. So tired.

Note: No luck. Prefer a soft bed with a soft, ambient light in warm room to a hard cot in the middle of a cool, dark basement.

Follow the Green Sprites, Man.

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Yay! Another day ended. No luck with meeting up with Kat, but then again today was a wet, slushy, and mushy day for a walk. Even in an enclosed mall. Again, I played the part of house-son (a.k.a. a son who gets all the jobs of a housewife, with none of the rewards). Wee!

Domenic, my good friend in Michigan just wrote me an email. He is in the middle of his exams, so I guess he will coming back to Brampton soon. Awesome! Good luck on your exams.

Highlight of the day: Darwinia. One of my friends managed to acquire the full version of the game, and lent me a copy. I like the whole atmosphere, and retro style of the game. It has just the right mix of RTS, RPG, and strategic wargame, for me. While sometimes the battles can get quick, and rather messy, at least I get to pick them. I managed to finish the first two islands so far, and have enabled links to the Mine, and Generator level. Should be fun.

Wednesday, will my first day of work… “safety” training. In order words, waste of time mostly. But I apparently will get paid for it which is execellent. Other than that, nothing new. Played a round of FZERO today, and noticed that I have become better at it. Almost finished the last race of the Kings’ League. Kept on getting blown up halfway throught the last lap, which was a shame. Oh well, I guess I will have to make my own clone this summer. Should be fun.

Serenity before the Storm

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[Excerpt from the Art and Zen of Mlaren Racing]
Beware the violence of the sandstorms of Sand Ocean. While the courses seems easy, a sudden sandstorm can blow over leaving many stranded. One must be one with ones vehicle, and be one with the storm. Never exert against it, but flow with its intricate motions. The wise take heed and prevail, while others eat the bitter sands of defeat.

So the exam looms ever nearer… And so does the anxiety. I just don’t feel this one is going to go over smoothly. Please, please, just so I can pass this course. That is all I ask, God. Hence the above passage. The looming sandstorm is just there… waiting and brooding over it next victims. The course is not too bad, but I have done awfully throughout and the professor is known to give evil questions on tests, etc. A massacre in the making… 😉

Still working on the black-ops as usually, concentrating on the visualizations naturally. Not too much progress there. But I will continue on it.

Yay! Chatted with Dima and Sarah yesterday. Funny story on how they met… a mistaken MSN entry. And naturally with any chat with Dima, it degenerated into a crazy, drunken parody about us, Matrix, pink bunnies, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and more. Thanks Dima! That was fun.

Life is the same as always… boring, a bit depressing. Hey, always look on the bright side. Two more passages and a few struggles, and then summer. A week and a half of relaxation is something to look forward to, and maybe a meeting with Katarina. Mmm… I have decided to go wireless with my network. Should be fun… I still have a bit of cash left. So I will grab a wireless router, and an archery set too. Just a bit of research needed, and I plan on getting a nice, (ok half decent) compound bow. Love archery…

Anyhow, as the storm looms on the horizon, I have to brace myself for its wrath. Wish me luck!

Blogging from the back of a Webmail site???

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Well here it is my first blog from email. Why? Because I can.

Progress has been made in putting up a working Autotool build script for the revision-sim project. I got a bit lazy, but I plan to write up a few GNU standard docs and work on a code layout. I have to do a
similar thing for the visualize (data structures visualizations) project. Yup, those are my planned black ops for the next little while.

As a side note I have to decide upon a network setup, since I will be getting high speed Internet. I would prefer an ethernet based net, but I last thing I want is miles of Ethernet cable snaking its way around my house like a crazy, thin, blue snake. Most likely I will pollute the environment with a wireless router. Of securing such a thing is a bitch. Not to mention having to put schemes on my machine.  The one thing good from this experience will be some knowledge on networks, and being able to test all firewall, and thingies like that.

I got to meet Sarah, my best friend, Dima’s friend. So he was not making it all up. Go Dima go! 😉 Anyhow I have to run off and study…. err… hack some more. 😉

Automagic Code Generation…?

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Another morning. A bit wet but perfect for mlaren racing as the soil gets nicely packed and allows for better traction. Now if only I had the time to start upon that project…

As my systems programming and data structures exams loom ever closer, I continue in my quest of understanding the material better by hacking a few applications. I finally found one idea to test my knowledge of thread programming using the POSIX compliant thread libraries. It will be a simulation of a small development team using an revision control server. One of the servers will be use a locked commit (e.g. Visual SafeSource), and the other will use the better method (e.g. CVS, Subversion). Should be interesting…

For my other system programming, I plan on making a useful pipe, and redirect program. PNP (PNP is Not a Pipe) will let you to execute a command, and pipe or redirect the output to another program or file, while enabling you to see all the output being displayed to the screen.

As for my data structure work… I will get on it as soon as I can.

Talked to Kat yesterday shortly, but that definitely made my day. I promptly ruined my day by being lazy, which made my folks irk. Today, I plan to balance work and study a bit better, and not be such a lazy bum. One good thing was that I started on a Herculean task of figuring the GNU Autotools. Bizarre is the best thing to say, and I am so not used to using any of them. Like I understand Makefiles, and Ant build scripts perfectly. However, all this automatic code generation is making my head spin (not mention my headers).

Well I guess I better get back to hacking… lot of work to do, and so little time. *Climbs back into the cockpit of the mlaren for around lap.*

Drifting in the Ether for While.

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…just passing by partner.

Funny how I have been missing my daily dose of Internet recently… Busy at home is my excuse, but it is a bad one. So I am back for a short while… mainly to grab a look at a few things. Recently I have had that awful mix of boredom and excitement that happens before an exam. Only four days, and two exams and that is it for spring semester 2005.

Some of my friends asked me if I will be taking courses in the summer. As much as I would like to, (honestly summer can be a fun time to learn) I am out of funds. So it is off to work we go for me. Never figured out why does dwarves were so flipping happy.

I miss Kat. Have not talked to her in what seems ages… make that almost two weeks in person. I know I shouldn’t do this… but I really like her for some odd reason. Sigh… oh and don’t give me any of that “oh… l’amour…” because I WILL twist your neck off…. 😉 Most likely we won’t meet up for the summer… so I am sort of depressed about that. We haven’t even chatted online for almost the same amount of time. 🙁 Hope that changes… we I guess we have two shared exams one on Wednesday and Thursday. That is something to look forward too.

Ok it seems that everyone has something to say about the new papacy. So I guess I should add my 2 political cents (*looks around for political officers*)… Being very much conservative (read as: dinosaur for all you liberal-minded hippies ;)), I think that Benedict XVI will do a great job. A friend of the last pope, and well versed in doctrines of the faith, I think this papacy should be a great continuation, maybe even sharpening of John Paul II’s papacy. I really don’t understand all the whining of all those liberally controlled media and activists… if you don’t like the Roman Catoholic church, well that don’t go to it. Want your church? No problem go ahead. Just don’t change ours. Enough on the subject of the new papacy.

I plan to get cracking on the visualizations for a few algorithms and data structures from my course. Should be a fun look into Java, threading, animation, and maybe a glance into understanding these algorithms. Anyhow, I am off need to stretch out my fins, and bound around the etherbeach for a while, and grab a few things. Yes, I view life from the perspective of a playful mudskipper. Why? Because mudskippers are kewl!!! And so are jellyfish.

Bye!

Delirious Joy

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Had my first exam today. Just as I predicted a practical cakewalk. Funny for a course I spend 0 hours studying for too… The questions were simple enough, a bit of guessing but overall great!
I am so happy that this course is over.

So two more exams to follow. Data structures… (youch!) and systems programming (yummy!). I am going to start studying for them tomorrow morning. Mostly visualizations of the algorithms of the data structures in Java, and a multipipe/redirect program. Stay tuned folks.

I have put off my toy projects: justCheckers and Insomia. As soon as my last exam is over, and when I finally get high speed. Yes, I have been using this slow dial-up connection for developing… get over it. Then I can get things into full swing again. Wish that I had my own Subversion/web server too… unfortunately if there is truly a cap on how much I can upload/download… then my Apache server is not going online.

Other than that… just another day in the life of me. OH and my blog page keeps on getting redirected to Blogger…. now noone can see my rants except for me. 🙁

Hanging in the Balance

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What a day… rainy, and very trying with most of the family sick… sigh…

Tomorrow is my first exam of this semester. Looks fairly straightforward, multiple choice + 2 scenarios, all for a UI Design course. Funny how the course itself seems to be a mixture of common sense and corporate marketing lingo… (Translation: bs). I have not really studied for it, but then again it is open book. 😉

Talking about corporate lingo, watched the third part of The Corporation. Very insightful film, and even thought some of the commentators were left-leaning, they do have some good points. Some aspects are downright frightful, and in a curious manner, interesting tidbits of history most people don’t even know about. Unfortunately, they didn’t come up with ideas that are radically are different then what I know already. Consumer pressure (the companies have to follow what the market wants anyways), governmental supervision (yeah right), and rebellion (last ditch desperation); all of these I knew about. I was hoping for something more insightful, subtle and cunning.

Finally, as for my hacking projects… I tried writing an SDL/pthreads program. Now the SDL part came out no problem, but the pthreads took over my system. Mind you 5 treads, that update the position of an object (used bounding rectangles that I moved and they blitted onto the screen); shouldn’t take over that much CPU. I think it has something to do with the redrawing of the screen. Also moving a particular object proved to be impossible by my implementation. In the end, I got a lesson in SDL… and now I have to find a simple application for threads. Yes, I know about SDL Threading… but I needed to practice pthreads specifically. Was going to post it online… but the whole code is a bit messy, and needs reorganization, and fine tuning.

Oh well, tomorrow is a busy day, exams and all. Wish me luck. 😉