It’s been a (explative deleted) long time since I’ve posted here. I haven’t had a dependable internet connection in my apartment, and attending to personal obligations at work is a no-no, so my blog has gotten the shaft. I’m sorry, blog, it’s not that I don’t love you; I’ve just been busy, you know. No, I haven’t been posting to that other blog. I just read a few others. Oh, come on, you told me I could look at whatever blog I wanted to, as long as I didn’t touch. You are still my one, true blog. I promise.
Archive for the ‘programming’ Category
It’s been such a long time
Sunday, August 13th, 2006week 9
Thursday, February 16th, 2006Too much work + too little time = palpable decline of brain function. Between more wonderful grading (the most recent round of CS4 netted an average score of 58%), incredibly awesome projects (matrix inversion is hard), and highly-anticipated presentations (give a 15 minute presentation on, well, you know, something), my brain hurts. It hurts real bad.
another round of grading
Monday, February 6th, 2006Wow. Just…wow. Strout and I just finished another round of grading, for CG1 and CS4 projects, and…wow. The only way to describe it is depressing.
database project
Sunday, February 5th, 2006I really enjoy the concept behind our DBSI (Database Systems Implementation) project: we are to take an existing, open-source database application (such as tinySQL, SQLite, hsqldb, and many others) and add three distinct features to it. The features are meant to show our understanding of the topics we learn in class. This is a wonderful idea, but has a few (unintended?) side-effects.
why what we do is beyond useless
Friday, February 3rd, 2006One of my favorite moments at RIT was when Rhys Price Jones proved, mathematically, that computer science is wholly useless. Perhaps this is quasi-overstated, but please, keep reading.
more musings on C++
Thursday, January 26th, 2006I’m going to take a stab at explaining why I think some RIT students just don’t get C++. These things may be more widely applicable, but I’m not going to assert that – I only know what I see with the students I am grading, and some of it is rather painful.
Oh, the CS4 project
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006I’m grading for Strout’s CS4 (again) this quarter, and I have to say that I am somewhat distressed by the things I am seeing. Students seem to be getting consistently worse in a few important areas of the class and the project.
dude, where’s wtry?
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006Last post of the day, I swear. All this catching up is giving me indigestion.
Wtry, o wtry, wherefore art thou not yet complete? (more…)
wtry 0.2
Saturday, October 1st, 2005It’s been a long two weeks, but wtry is now in its final alpha stage (0.2). We’re almost v1.0 feature complete, which makes me (and hopefully some other people) happy. (more…)
wasted time
Friday, September 16th, 2005Welcome to this evening/morning’s quiz, folks. Here is the one and only question: what happens when you don’t make a good database/data storage design for a project up front? A: The last 4 hours of my life.