GoneWacko’s Blog

I have internets!

After 2,5 months in Finland, I have finally been connected to the world wide web.

It was actually enabled yesterday, but because I went to celebrate Vappu in Turku with friends from my street, I did not actually get to use it until today.

More on the said festivities in a later post.

Twitter

Sander (one of the Dutch guys I’m working with here in Finland) has lately been responsible for getting me to use all sorts of Web 2.0 things that I really shouldn’t be using.

He is not actively telling me to, but in a horrible case of I-want-what-my-peers-have marketing, I find myself signing up to such things as LinkedIn and Twitter.

In the case of the latter service, it has so far not really proven too useful for me, because the only person I follow/following me is Sander. Who I sit next to every day. For 8 hours. And live next door to.

So if anyone is using the aforementioned services, feel free to add me as a buddy or start following me or whatever the action of subscribing to my person is called.

In other news, I STILL don’t have internet at home, even though the two weeks that would be needed to get me connected ended on Tuesday.

Slow day at the office

So yeah, I’ve not actually blogged from the Scandinavian country of Finland; I know. However, currently it’s all a bit slow at the office. The only work we’ve got at the moment is putting some finishing touches on the documentation, and preparing for a presentation which will be taking place next week. Oh how I long for the time when we get to start writing awesome code.

I have two reasons for not blogging about my work placement:

• I (still) don’t have internet in my apartment, which is horrible but also an experience on it’s own; It’s training my skills of solving problems without Google.
• I’m making a special blog about Finland; I’m writing this in Django so that I have something to do when I do not have internet. And for this reason, I’ve been meaning to keep all the interesting stories and anecdotes for that special blog

The blog in question will ’soon’ be found at an as of yet undisclosed location (to prevent it from being indexed or visited by people who will only be disappointed).

I’d just like to point out that I’m well; The work is fun, the boss is awesome, and the other international students in my street are all very nice people.

The Calm Before The Storm

Last Friday I had my assessment of the current semester, and the outcome was that I needed to fix a few minor items in my portfolio in order to pass, which I shall be doing over the next few days.
Apart from that, I’m pretty much free of any obligations such as school work for the next three weeks, meaning that I’ve got plenty of time to make the necessary arrangements for my work placement in Finland. This time of leisure will be short lived because when I arrive in Finland I will be working full time for the first time in my life D:

Things that need doing include:

• Looking at insurance options
• Looking at how I can prove that I’m able to finance my stay in Finland
• Buying new shoes
• Having a drink with the people I’ll be going with

I also still need to put the finishing touches on my school project (which I don’t count a school work because it’s not that much work and it’s fun to do).
In the end I’m not overly proud of the product we’re delivering, but I did learn a lot about how not to do stuff (which surprisingly enough does not include ‘using JSP’ as a bad practice).

I don’t know why I’m even writing this blog entry, I guess I figured I had something interesting to say when I started writing but now (after spending about an hour rating movies on Flixter, through Facebook) I can’t quite remember what it was.

Semester’s end

Yesterday was what everyone in my school calls Portfolio Day or Oh-God-Not-This-Shit-Again Day. It’s the day on which everybody has their deadlines for proving that they are competent on whatever they’re studying during that semester.
This semester I’ve been learning about Object Oriented Programming and Design, as well as writing Distributed Applications.
After learning about these subjects for 3 months I’ve now spent about 3 months (9 weeks + christmas holiday) applying these topics in a web-based application for a real company.

So traditionally the night before the day on which we have to submit our portfolios is subject to half the school pulling all-nighters to get their work done. This semester it was no different, and I was up for a good 38 hours. ‘Tis times like these where a mild form of ADHD and a condition where I don’t produce enough Melatonin, the hormone which causes drowsiness, really help. I’m able to stay up for 40 hours or more without too much of a problem.

Unfortunately I’m not feeling very secure about how my portfolio will hold up under the scrutiny of my assessors, but I should get plenty of chances to fix what’s wrong with it, luckily. At least the fact that the portfolio’s have been handed in means there’s less stress. Normally this also means that I now have a few days off, but no such luck: I still have another week in which to deploy the product we’ve produced and fix the last couple of issues we may stumble upon.

After next week however, I should have about 3 weeks of free time before I travel north-east to Finland! Exciting times are ahead and I’ll have tonnes of stuff to take care of. I have to buy a ticket, new shoes and perhaps somewhat warm clothes (although so far the temperatures in Salo, Finland are pretty much comparable to the temperatures in the Netherlands). I also need to figure out if Finland has different wall sockets from us and such.
Yesterday I’ve received word that they’ve made housing arrangements for us, very close to the university campus, in a residence where all the university’s international students are placed. So I think it’s going to be quite good, with people from all over the world in very similar situations as us. Should be a lot of fun!

New laptop and Finland

Last week, my laptop mysteriously died on me. It seems to be under the impression that it’s powered on, even though it’s not (the LED is burning). It’s also acting as if it’s drawing power from a wall socket, even though it’s not (the LED is burning).

So after looking for a nice laptop to replace it with, my dad and I ordered it last Saturday and it arrived today. It’s an HP Pavilion dv9595ed (although these version numbers seem to vary in meaning per country). For info on what’s inside, check the specifications page (In Dutch, but you should be able to make sense of it anyway). You can also check out the product demo flash animation.

Apart from the 2 GHz Centrino Duo and the GeForce 8600M GS (shared memory ) I also quite like the

• Support for 802.11n, which is good because that’s what we’ve got at my home
• 320 GBs worth of hard drive space (5400 rpm)
• Integrated fingerprint reader

Yesterday I received confirmation from my school that I should be going to Finland for my work placement. Woo! There is no concrete assignment yet, but that’s being worked on. I’ll probably go to Finland somewhere around the 18th of February, for about 20 weeks. Exciting stuff!

Work Placement in Finland

Fooled you! Completely disregarding what I may or may not have written the other day, I’ve decided to write about something not-entirely-technical anyway. I probably will until I figure out what I want and how I want it.

Anyway, I’ve been planning on going abroad for my work placement for quite some time. A good friend of mine went to Finland about 2 years ago I think it was, and he came home with such good stories that I’ve always wanted to go to Finland ever since. I’ve somehow always thought that Finland was a pretty cool country. The land of Metal, cold weather, and incomprehensible languages.

Anyhow, I recently started to do the things needed to get there for my work placement which will be from February until June. At the moment the plan is to go to a company called doRego (or some other variation of the capitalization of that word) which is a company in Salo, some 2 hours west-north-west of Helsinki. The aforementioned friend went there, too. The plan is also to go with a classmate and good friend (Roel).

Recently yet another friend of mine (Jan-Jaap) bought an XBOX 360 and we (Roel, Jan-Jaap and yours truly) have been enjoying a great many games like Assassin’s Creed, Halo 3, etc. So now I’m saving money to buy an XBOX 360 myself, which I think may come in handy in Finland if we ever get bored (which should not happen because there should be a lot of international students there to socialize with).

I’ve also been thinking of taking my PC along. Doing some quick calculations (two screens of 5 kg each, plus a case which I’ve estimated at around 15 (may have been a gross overestimation) would amount to a total shipping cost of 270 euros, with UPS). Although that does seem to be some sort of express delivery where it gets delivered the next day, so maybe it’s cheaper if I tell them to take as long as they want.

How do I make money for buying xboxes and paying shipping costs, you ask?
I’ve been working as a (Visual Basic 6.0) programmer, which is great fun and lucrative! I’ve just finished writing a printing system (which took ages to write because I tried 3 different methods and found out they all Failed Badly™) and now I’ve started to work on a way for the application I’m working on (Dutch website: Voetbaltrainingsuite.nl) to be internationalized. It’s a bit of a makeshift solution at the moment though.

I shall no doubt be posting more about (and possibly from) Finland in the coming months, because I’m quite excited about going there

Driving Test ✓

I’m going to hope that my RSS feed/wordpress shows that checkmark sign correctly.

Anyhow, I passed my driving test. Apparently I drove for a very long time - 40 minutes. I was driving the last car to return to the center

I thought I drove pretty well, but he didn’t seem as impressed. Then again I hear the guy’s not the easiest one to have as your examiner, so I’m not going to care about his opinion too much :-p.

Now I just have to finish school, which will be somewhat of a bitch because the deadline’s Thursday and there’s still a bunch of stuff that needs to be done.

Holiday Plans

Some 4 weeks from now, this school year is over, and my summer holidays will start.

It’s quite amazing how quickly the past school year has gone by. It feels like it only just started! It almost frightens me to think that I am almost a 3rd year student. Back in high school it took me AGES to get to that point! Or at least it felt like ages.

Anyhow, with holidays come holiday plans. Firstly, I’m pretty certain I shall be flying to Great Britain on the 29th of June to attend the TT-Forums Meeting in Birmingham on the 30th.
Orudge has spoken of the possibility that I could come up to North Wales with him, although we’ve not discussed this option in great detail yet.

Furthermore, my sister is currently doing a work placement in Oxford, so I’d be able to go and visit her while I’m, sort of, in the area.

When I get back I’ll probably spend the rest of my 2 month holiday sitting at home, unless some of my friends suddenly come up with plans or something
I’ll have plenty of time to play games and write some code for whatever I want.

Although I’ll probably end up doing a lot of the former and very little of the latter. This has been the case for the past 2 summer holidays, and I don’t really forsee it changing too much.

Zug Zug

Work Work Work. The dreaded portfolio day is tomorrow. The time of the semester where all the materials you’ve collected during the project or course are to be collected and handed in.

Unfortunately this means working one’s ass off, because one has not done enough during the actual project and thus has to do all the stuff he hadn’t done yet. In most cases, it means working all night, not getting any sleep.Every time I keep telling myself “next time I’ll start one week in advance”.
But of course I never do

Of course by the end of a semester I tend to be fed up with the subject, so I suppose portfolio day also means the end is at last nigh.

Next semester I’m going to be doing Develop an Information System. From what I’ve heard, it seems they’ll be using Visual Basic.Net with MS SQL Server.
The former is icky, so I’m hoping I can also persuade my teacher to allow me to use C#, as was also suggested by some of the people I’ve spoken to lately.

Grand Night Out

Yes, it is true what you may have heard, I went out!

The school’s campuscafe organized what was called a kroegentocht which is a ‘pubcrawl’ in English, according to Owen.
What it came down to was that we went to the center of Arnhem with 75 people to go to 5 different cafes/discos/pubs.

Being the nerd that I am, I had never actually properly gone out, so it was my first time, too!
Great fun was had, and plentiful amounts of beer were consumed.

Notable events:

• I had a pint of genuine Guinness at the Irish Pub we visited. Good stuff!
• We went to ‘The Cave’ (if I remember correctly that’s what it was called, anyway). It sucked. 100 or so people in a very cramped basement, no room to move or anything.
• We went to ‘The Move’, which was just great. I completely fucked up my throat by singing along to My Generation by Limp Bizkit and Chop Suey! by System of a Down. Very much to my liking indeed.
• We went to ‘Aspen Valley’, which was so-so. Your typical popular music and/or ‘après ski’ place.
• We went to ‘The Level’, which is supposedly THE disco of Arnhem. It wasn’t really my kind of music, not to mention that the prices were absolutely ridiculous. It costs €0.50 just to take a piss there :O
  • Fun Fact: We decided to go outside when one of the guys got so drunk he started to grope moobs.

So yeah, that was nice.
Of course the next day I was supposed to be at two conferences with projectleaders and such, but I decided not to. I had to wait for the first train back home (which left at 5:22 or so), and then I had to walk home because the bicycle-storage-thing I stored my bike at hadn’t opened yet. Suffice to say I was in bed around 6:40 and not in the mood to get up at 10.

Also, I did not have any hangovers, yet I was really quite tipsy last night, so that makes it fantastic. One of my friends said he didn’t have a hangover, he ‘just threw up because his food hadn’t landed well’. But you and I know better than that, don’t we?

Stuff.

‘Stuff.’, Probably the best title I ever thought of.

Well then, what’s been happening:

• I (barely) passed the first of two blocks of my current semester. The fact that I ended up having a crapload of work to do on the last day - due to my highly developed skill of postponing stuff - and finding out I didn’t make one of the assignments, didn’t help. After a so-called reparationassignment to fix my portfolio, I passed and now get to work on the project, where we’ll be making a game with 32 people.
• 
  Click to Enlarge

  SecureW2 works with Windows Vista now, which means the wireless network at school will also work for me. Thus, I installed Vista again on my laptop to see how long I can bare with the annoying security warnings. I can certainly verify that it seems to be working :).

• I had some other stuff that I was going to talk about, but I forgot what it was, so I can’t talk about it. Bawwww.

And that was that. I’ll try to think of stuff to write about, soon.

Update: It just so happens that I managed to figure out how to disable what is apparently called UAC. No more stupid security warnings

Queue the fat lady

Wooo, first schoolyear’s over

After a bit of uncertainty I have now officially finished my foundation course. I was already assured of passing this year some months ago when I reached my 37,5 credits of the total 60.

I ended up getting a 90 for Product Quality (which is the highest you can get - the school uses a weird system of 10/40/70/90, where 10 and 40 are ‘insufficient’) and a 70 ‘with repairs’ for Network Infrastructure.

The ‘with repairs’ meant that I had to come to school next Wednesday to repair the portfolio, a.k.a. fix something. Because Bram, a friend of mine, is celebrating his birthday next Wednesday we both weren’t in the mood to go to school for repairs. Hence we asked if we could hear the teacher’s ‘concerns’ over the phone instead.
He replied with “Can you come on Thursday?”, which was obviously not an answer to anything we had asked him. So I replied with “What do repairs mean (in my case)?”. To which he suddenly replied that he just had a comment that one of my assignments was documented with too much detail, which would not have been necessary, and that I didn’t have to repair anything after all.

What the heck

Still, that doesn’t explain why the guy I worked with got a 90 and I got a 70 with repairs

Oh well, my “p” (propedeuse, or foundation course) is all mine, so I’m happy.

Schoolyear’s over

Well, that’s the end of the schoolyear coming up soon.
Yesterday (Friday, 9th of June) I handed in my last portfolios. Next Monday I’ll hear what’ll happen: Pass, Doubt or Fail.

In the case of doubt, the assessors are either uncertain whether the portfolio (and thus my knowledge of the subjects) is sufficient, or it if they’re uncertain which grade to give me. In such a case, I will have to come to assessments this Tuesday - which are sort of oral exams.

I’m not very certain about either subject, because they’re not my best subjects, but also because the teachers might be aiming too highly. Hence my expectance of two Doubts. Still, I’ve passed the year in none the less, so that’s nice.

Starting next year I’ll only have the subjects I chose. One subject per half year:

• Create a game
• Object Oriented Programming
• Create an information system (database related programming)

But first the assessments and then 8 (or more) weeks of vacation
Plenty of time to work on software and, most importantly, get the hosting company running properly. We went to the Chamber of Commerce the other day to get some information about starting a company. Got some interesting information about tax cuts and subsidies as well (two of the four of us are blind), so that’ll be great.

This semester

So I finished my schoolproject, got my 15 points (of the 60 required to finish my foundation course).
Now the fourth and last semester for this year has kicked off, and it partially bores me. This semester I’ve got two subjects: Network Administration - but so far it’s about the organisational difficulties of fusing two companies - and TAD, of which I do believe it means Technical Automation Development. Basically it’s a combination of Product Quality (Assurance) and Technical IT, where I have to program PLCs.
The latter subject is somewhat interesting, but it’s also a bit tedious because we’ve not got a lot of documentation.

Click to Enlarge

Haven’t really worked on my map renderer as of late, although I did improve some features shortly after posting my last entry.
The biggest improvement is that the renderer now correctly renders all walls and fences. Furthermore the tiberium is rendered semi-correctly: The more tiberium surrounds a tiberium tile, the higher it’s value. I’m probably not entirely using the correct algorithm, but it’s close enough.

And I’ve been doing some experimenting with various GUI libraries. I tried OcempGUI, a toolkit for creating GUIs ‘inside’ SDL surfaces. But I was not satisfied with the look of the widgets and some widgets I did want to use (TreeViews, ComboBoxes, …) are not in it. And I wasn’t in the mood to write those widgets myself and/or restyle the other widgets, so I decided to use GTK.
I’ll have to rewrite my rendering code so it’ll render to a GdkDrawable, but I think it’ll be worth the effort, somehow.

The last month or so

Wow, I didn’t blog for almost a month! And I didn’t even get a single message about it, either. I feel so unloved! People forgot about me on tt-forums after 30 minutes as well But more on that later.

I’ve been busy working on my project for school, an auctioning site a la eBay. Turned out pretty shite, because

• we were forced to write it in Java Server Pages, with the administrative application created in, *shiver*, Microsoft Access
• the people who were making the website were, well, incompetent, really.

The code is horribly inefficient, the design is terrible (I think the fact that the average page contains between 4 and 6 <html> tags says more than enough…) and the functions are anything but safe from hackers and idiots alike.
The administrative bit of the project turned out great though, regardless of the horrible tools we had to use to create it.
So I’m glad that’s over now, I just have to hold a presentation regarding the product and talk my way through the assessment. The latter will probably be quite interesting too, because one of the now-ex-team-members was so incompetent and so lazy that we gave him so much criticism that he ended up going home crying. After which we had a lot of meetings where people that were supposed to be looking at it from an unbiased point of view pretty much said it was all our fault and we would have a lot of trouble with our assessments.
Still, I think I’ll manage.

What else happened over the last month?

Click to Enlarge

Well, I’ve been writing a program in Python that renders a command and conquer map. I’m quite proud of it and it’s proven to be extremely educational to me, so that’s nice. I made it better today, by finally making it relatively fast. The problem is that I wrote it very sequentially and never stopped to refactor, so what started as a program that just read some data from a file, became a horribly slow and inefficient renderer. Managed to cut the execution time from ~18 seconds to 8 seconds and then from 8 seconds to 2.2 seconds, so that’s nice. I mean to expand/fork the program into a map editor for C&C (and possibly Red Alert). I might even devote a page (or a scripts entry) to it one day! Kudos to Thomas for giving tips and helping me
(Note: All the bits on that image that look like glitches are in fact not glitches, All the stuff that looks silly is just outside the actual playing area of the map. My guess is that it was either a bit of a visual aid for the level designers or a way of making sure units could move in or out of specific areas of the map, although that makes little sense to me)

Furthermore, I recently left TT-Forums, after nearly 4 years of loyal membership and something like 2-3 years of being a fearsome moderator. I was growing more and more annoyed by some members and members I used to have respect for were starting to disappoint me, so I finally decided to leave once and for all. My intentions to write a confronting and impressing goodbye speech failed miserably. That plus the fact that a lot of people appear to be thinking that I’ll come back have made my departure a very light subject, which is not what I had expected or hoped, selfish as that might sound.
But I’ll still be in #tycoon, unless people start annoying/disappointing me there too, after which I will not have anywhere to go and lead the life of a hermit.

Choosing my semester(s)

Argh! I was typing quite a nice post but then I accidentally pressed CTRL+W and lost it all

Anyways: Today I received information about the various semesters I get to choose from. Managed to pick a few which I like (of the 14 available semesters!), of which I’ll probably have to choose three:

• Develop an OO application
• Game creation (in my case, programming the 3D engine and the AI)
• Network programming (on a relatively low level)
• Information System Development

So now I’m not sure which semester to drop, because both Network Programming and Information System Development seemed very interesting, also because the speaker said that both subjects were rather important in the business world. And that means a higher chance for me to make some cash

Clearly I’m going for the Software Engineer ‘function’ Especially the first and second semester seem quite cool, because they were defined as ‘the hardcore programming’ - which I hope to be doing later - and because both semesters are given by cool teachers

LAN Party!

Even though for a few hours it looked like black ice was going to ruin all the fun, I still managed to get to my classmate’s house yesterday in order to have a small LAN party (which I spoke of a week ago or so)

So far it’s quite fun. Just hanging around, talking, playing a game, leeching, and watch a movie or two.

I was happy to conclude that Rob’s parents appear to be very kind and open-minded people with a good sense of humour, which is always a good thing. Plus Rob’s mom prepared a bloody good lasagna

As said, day one basically turned out to be boring until around 1:00 PM when we decided to get in the car. We originally planned driving to Silvolde - the town Rob lives in - at 12:00 AM, but the black ice hadn’t quite thawed yet by then. Then, when we arrived here, it took some time to get installed (having brought my PC and laptop + every peripheral device and cable apart from my switch), but that wasn’t a big deal. Rob cleaned up his computer-room just for the occasion. The room really lends itself to small-scale LAN parties. There are plenty of wallsockets along the… wall.
Just as I was putting the final touches on getting myself installed there, Rob’s friend Roel arrived with his laptop to join us.

Day one was especially fun in the evening, when we started to drink beer (Grolsch). We had mainly had energy drinks before then, so I had very little trouble staying awake all night (yay for having the exact same drink as red bull for only 25 eurocents per can :)). Around 6:00 AM Rob and Roel decided to get some sleep, but I thought I’d be able to stay awake with ease.
I did in fact stay awake, but I did somewhat regret my decision around 8:00 AM when I did get a bit tired.
At least I’ll sleep well tonight, which is a good thing because we have to be at school Friday morning for the introduction to our next semester and the first project it brings. Then when that’s over (around 10:35 AM), we’ll probably end up going to the swimming pool.

And then I’ll be on my school’s open day, also together with Rob, which is where my parents will pick me up again.

Plans for the coming week

So now I’ll have a holiday until next week’s friday, when my first project kicks off with a two hour long introduction.

As it looks at the moment I’ll be having a small LAN party on Wednesday-Thursday and then a birthday celebration on Friday, all at the same person’s house.

Then, on the Saturday after that, I’ll probably be helping at my College’s open day, telling people how luverly the school is and what I’ve made during my game course. And no it’s not sarcasm.

Until that time I’ll probably tweak my game so it’ll look cooler at the open day, and I’ll try to finish projects I still had to finish.

Semester’s End

Aaaand another semester comes to an end.

The last days of a semester are usually the busiest ones. It all starts with the deadline. You suddenly notice how your assignment is anything but finished and you have to hand it in in two days.

So far I’ve had two semesters (I’m in my first year) and in both cases I’ve worked the entire night on the day before the deadline. So I had 3,5 hours of sleep Thursday night morning.

But now everything’s been presented/handed in and I can relax.

If only that was true.
Because now there’s still a chance I have to come on an assessment, as I happen to have explained at last semester’s end.
If I indeed have to come to an assessment I’ll pretty much be screwed, I think, because I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out MS Access… What a crappy piece of software that is

What’s fun though is that next week I’ll only have to go to school on Tuesday - if I have to come to an assessment - and the week after that my new semester starts, but the first lesson is on Friday :O

So I technically have a 2 week holiday again now.

Holidays

Well, it’s what we call Autumn Holidays here in the Netherlands.
One week of chilling out

Or perhaps not.
Firstly, I have to work on my portfolio for school so I can advance to the next ‘block’ which will feature Relational Databases and SQL as a course. I’ve already read through the book (interesting read) so that shouldn’t be too hard.

Furthermore, I’m working on a project for a classmate (or actually his father) where I have to convert a program to a web application, so I’m quite a busy bee.
None the less I think I’ll have some free time.

In another news, I’ve lately been using usenet a lot. Newsgroups are great for… aquiring things. Hmmhmm.
I wonder if my ISP will notice the increase in bandwidth usage.

Oh, and I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger”, even though I already had the Preview installed for a month or so.

Cool bands

Well, lately I’ve been listening to WoW Radio. To TotalBiscuit’s shows to be precise, Blue Plz! and Ironforged.

Blue Plz! is a show where TotalBiscuit discusses what’s been going on in the World of Warcraft, with a good bit of humour in between, and every now and then, a song.
Ironforged is part of the show Downtime Downunder, which broadcasts when the servers are down for maintenance in the US.
This show features only non-mainstream metal music. And it rules! You can make requests and TB has a huge collection of songs I had never heard of before.

Through the shows, I’ve found some cool bands I had not heard of before.
Lately I’ve been playing Dragonforce, which is some extremely cool speedmetal.
And today I found Lacuna Coil (the name does ring a bell but I had never listened to it before) which is pretty sweet as well, from what I can tell.

And now for something completely different.

I recently came to the conclusion that I actually enjoy going to school! How rare. I’m just having a great team in school, which is nice.
Although I’m slightly getting swamped in work at the moment (mainly because I tend to not do very much at school itself :P)

“Blog update is the plz”

Indeed I haven’t blogged in some time.

I mainly blame the fact that me going to college has already become routine after 4 weeks.
Still, some things did happen that are mentionable.

Firstly, I FINALLY received my 2×512 MBs of extra RAM and installed it, which brings my total RAM to 1.5 GBs. I can’t say I’ve noticed too much of a difference yet. (still have to try World of Warcraft in Orgrimmar, but I’ve not played WoW in some time) I did find out that I can now shut down my PC within 2-4 seconds time. But if that’s all then it has not been worth the investment

Also, school’s been fun. I always take a (pretty long) network cable to school, even though there’s a wireless network, so we can connect laptops to each other with a 1 gbps connection, to share music and play games. Great fun.
And one of my classmates even has a router in his locker at school, but we’ve not used that yet.
Very amusing if you have nothing to do for 4 hours.

Also, I’ll probably be broadcasting on Zernebok Radio which is an Icecast server that Owen has recently started and is the early stages of possibly becoming something.

Born to code

Well, today was fun.

Not to seem arrogant or egoïstic, but … well… I rule.

Firstly, I had no experience with Java, at all until last week.
Today, I already wrote a somewhat sophisticated function which other classmates had tried to make but had not managed to. Which meant that I got plenty of attention from people wanting know my secret.

After that, the guy next to me (who happens to live close to my home town so we tend to travel home together) had a strange problem with his code. I couldn’t see why it was resulting in exception errors so we asked the teacher. He couldn’t figure it out either. His code was nearly the same as mine (well, not the sophisticated part, but the easy copy-from-book part :p) and my code worked fine.

Then I just tried the one thing that I noticed was different, even though the book didn’t say it was necessary (it didn’t mention it at all). That fixed it

Still, I consider it to be luck and the fact that I have experience in other programming languages, because, overall, Java still seems a bit unlogical to me at times. Also, it sucks that the “(expression) ? true : false;” thing doesn’t seem to work in Java.

Binary

Today’s Embedded Applications theory lessons were about how a computer calculates.

Nothing too new but still quite interesting. For example, I didn’t know that you could convert a decimal number to binary by just doing <decimal> modulo 2, then dividing <decimal> by 2, and then loop that, prefixing the new answer before the old one(s), until <decimal> is 0

Interesting.