Design Patterns

After reading 359 pages of Head First Design Patterns today, I realized that I really didn't know anything above introductory level Java, and the only design pattern I knew was Model-View-Controller.

I could have gotten an extra, EXTRA, bonus point

I got my differential equations test back. I think I'm about one standard deviation over the mean. That's a huge relief since I thought I might have matched the mean (a grade of 2.7).

However, if I didn't erase the extra work I did after misinterpreting the extra section of the bonus problem, I could have gotten another point =(

Oh well.

plans for weekend

1. start coding
2. ...
3. end up with something useful

(plans for tonight)
1. finish math hw
2. finish ee hw
3. work on ee final lab

EE test aftermath

The EE test was suprisingly easy. Unfortunately, I made a couple of careless mistakes. I think the highest I can get in the class is about a 3.7 now, despite not missing a point until today. Our class is curved, and I haven't seen anyone miss a point prior to the midterm.

Additionally, I didn't even use my notes sheet, so making it was pretty much a waste of time.

After EE, I went to my differential equations teacher's office hour and fell asleep.

gmail + parents

I just gave my parents GMail accounts a few weeks ago.

My mom is pretty good with her account. Not much spam.

On the other hand, my Dad thought some spams were business opportunities. He also subscribed to mailing lists promising free money on completion of surveys. I wasn't too surprised that he had over 500 new emails today.

I taught my dad how to set up filters and mark items as spam. This weekend, I hope to educate the rest of my family.

I should start a neighborhood computer clinic...

Back to studying.

At the library

My EE test is tomorrow. Studying begins now.

I need to read instructions more carefully.

I started solving the bonus problem on the take-home portion of the midterm for differential equations at about 1am.
At 7:30 am, I decided to finish reading the rest of the problem.
At 7:31 am, I erase everthing I did since 1:30 am and smack myself in the forehead.
The question wasn't asking me to solve the problem.

The take-home ate my weekend.

Coding

Well, I think I've gotten as far as I can speculating about my project. It's time to do some real work.

Apple Store updating

I just visited the apple store (apple.com/store), and it looks like they're updating. Apple's main page is also showing off their 500,000,000th download reached on iTunes.

update: It was just scheduled downtime.

Differential Equations Aftermath

No notes, no book, no calculators allowed. 60 minutes.
I finished all but one of the problems in 15 minutes.
I had the test completely finished after 25 minutes.

I spent the rest of the time checking over my answers, and of course, I didn't check carefully enough.

There were 6 problems. I got 5 of them. I missed the third problem by mistakenly claiming that sqrt(-4) = sqrt(2)i, which obviously should have been 2i. That was an incredibly careless mistake. Even though it was just a mistake in calculation it also made the rest of my solution very wrong.

(The rest of the problem, besides finding the solution, was to use Euler's formula to get the real-domain answer from the complex general answer, which was not that difficult.)

I also missed the sixth problem.
The problem was something similar to the following:

Give the general solution for y.

y'' + (2y' * ln(y'))^2 + y ln(y) = 0

At first I looked at it and panicked because we never had to do a second-order ODE problem where we couldn't just use the characteristic equation to easily solve it.

...

I have to do the take-home portion now.

My next test is an electrical engineering test on Wednesday. yahoo...

The World Clock - Time Zones - selected cities

Like many of the other Google SoC students, I do not reside in the same time zone as my mentor. The link in bold (on the site) lets you make your own multiple-time zone (static) web clock.

(just thought it might be useful to someone)

Learning Eclipse RCP and JXTA

Things to do this week:
1. Study for electrical engineering midterm
2. Familiarize myself with the Eclipse RCP and JXTA
3. Talk to SoC mentor

Studying for Differential Equations

Diff. Eq. midterm this Friday. Study begins today.

This could be the final user experience spec

Time to start on architecture.

User Experience v.1

I think I've essentially completed the user experience portion of my program. In the above picture, I've only included the parts of the mind map that have changed since my last version. The picture will be uploaded to JIRA once I incorporate any feedback I get.

Windows XP Activation

Today I found a trojan on my computer, C:\Windows\system32\DRIVER\services.exe.

It was running as an unhaltable system process; so, I rebooted in safemode and ran a full virus scan. About 20 viruses were found in compressed encrypted folders (folders usually skipped during routine scans). Among the list of malware was my run.bat file in my dllcache folder (inside my Windows folder).

The scanner, McAfee VirusScan 8.0 with the latest definitions as of 5am this morning, deleted my run.bat file!

When I rebooted out of safe mode, Windows asked me to re-activate due to alleged hardware changes, of which there were none. I reconnected my network connection and pressed yes to everything. The whole process was suprisingly uneventful.

I recall when the Windows XP Activation scheme was first announced, people all over Slashdot were saying it was really horrible. It really doesn't seem that bad.

A funny sidenote: Since the first time I installed XP, everything except the motherboard and processor has been swapped out for new equipment, and today was the first time the XP Activator I had a significant hardware change.

Wildlife

A couple of young deer leaped by my window and then over to the neighbor's house. When I ran outside with my camera, they were already gone.

I began reasoning about how my program will work. As you can see, I'm a bit behind on my SoC project.

LaTeX

(not SoC related) I'm just starting out with LaTeX and the learning curve is actually quite shallow, except for certain bumps in the road, such as importing bmp files. I couldn't figure out why my graphicx package couldn't recognize bmp's while apperently other people used thier graphicx packages with bmp's all the time.

My first attempt at solving this problem, which is preventing me from finishing my lab report, is to download every latex plugin available online.

(Update: Downloading every package worked. I can now use bmp's.)

Bad Kevin!

I came home and just had a *peek* at Slashdot, which led me to yet another chain of limitless interesting tech websites and blogs. Now it's 1:16 AM. I knew there was a reason I took it off my bookmarks bar.

Finally getting started

Well, my "Head First Design Patterns" book came in and I've also started designing the user experience for Anyedit using mindmaps. I think I have the user experience branch about 1/3 complete.

I'm going to leave the architecture branch until I've familiarized myself with a few relevant design patterns.

In other news: I can't seem to get the trick behind differential equations (besides memorizing how to solve different types). I remember matrix algebra was a lot easier...