Week 13, Final Day!

Yay end of classes....but still lots of work to do today. Must finish the 207, write the 236 test this morning (which I did and was once again not bad - after not studying again. I did however not know anything about DFSA's but learned it all while writing the test...i think.) And finally writing up the slogs which kind of got pushed back to now since I've been working on last minute fixes to the 207 project and such.

Overall, the course hasn't been too bad. I'm glad both 207 and 236 are touching on regex as one thing i've noticed with people I know that claim to know programming is they don't realize how to use regex and what a powerful tool it can be as well. It's not an end all be all of course, but its great and most people don't know how to use it. Beyond that, I suppose its nice we touched on state machines though I haven't gone over any of the course material for it...so I figure I should do so for the exam.

And yes, I realize this blog has become insanely informal, but I'm now running on 50 hours of non-sleep and can't really think well enough to do much else.

Week 9, Test 2

Didn't study for this one either, but based on my mark seems I did equally well as Test 1, so I'm satisfied enough considering the amount of effort that went into it.

Week Seven, Problem Set #4

Meh yea this problem set wasn't really much of a challenge and I think I managed to finish it about 20 minutes before class...and it seemed right so we'll see what I get.

Week Six, Problem Set #3

12/5/2008:Yeaaaa... So I actually did solve this problem set but didn't want to hand it in during the Thursday and also did not want to go to the Friday lecture, so I was -supposed- to give it a friend to hand in for me but ended up not wanting to as i passed by their dorm...so yea...didn't hand it in...but here it is anyways in all its glory minus the actual proof because I can't seem to find that any more (I think I did it by hand on paper somewhere?):

Week 5, Test 1

Yea so test #1 this week, haven't studied for it at all, will see how I end up doing :)

(12/5/2008 Edit: Ended up getting 17/24, not bad at all me thinks. I didn't find the test too difficult over all but I don't really remember enough to give any more of an indepth insight...)

Week 4, Assignment #1

This week we had the first assignment due, which I worked in conjunction with 2 other people. We each focused on one or two questions, and then helped explain the solutions for the others to the rest of the group - this seemed to work out well. 

I mostly focused on the 2nd question which was about the menu problem for the restaurant. The following is my work on the solution using the Polya approach:

1. Understanding the Problem:
   Try to come up with a method to design a menu which suits the constraints given, then prove that it works.
2. Devise a Plan:
   Start with the simpler menu example given and then to 3 items, and onwards, finally generalize to 2^n, and then prove.
3. Carry out the Plan:
   First, I started by creating each of the possible menus using the set of items {L, S} given that any 2 consecutive days must only differ by exactly one meal.
   
   I then extended this to a set of 3 meals, {1, 2, 3} and created a menu cycle where they all differed by only one day. And then once again for 4 meals. At this point my lazyness kicked in and I decided I no longer wanted to write any more meal menus. So I began looking for patterns and realized that the menus, when extended for any n+1 could be represented recursively based on its previous element n. That is,
   
   n+1 = n + [\reverse(n) with the (n+1)th element added to each element in \reverse(n)]After some further testing (I actually ended up doing 5 meals...meh) it seemed to me that this was correct enough, so I wrote out the proof and that's what was handed in.
4. Looking Back:
   Looking back, the solution still seems correct in my mind however I'm not absolutely sure if the format in which I showed my proof is correct. So will have to wait for the assignment to be handed back before I can see the result....
   

1. 
   

Problem Set #1 and some other ramblings...

Well, here goes with my first official posting. This post is a bit late as Problem Set 1 was handed in last week and #2 is already coming up, but since I haven't even so much as looked at #2 yet and need a post for last week - this is it.

First, I just want to comment on using a tablet for school. I have decided to go this school year without writing on -any- paper directly if possible. There's several reasons to why I'm doing this.

• Last year, my bag (after 2nd semester) at almost all times had all or at least most of the following items inside of it:
  
  • My laptop
  • Laptop adapter
  • 1-2 binders (just full of paper, and not all of which was organized very well or even inside the rings for that matter)
  • mouse (x2), DVDs, extension cable, etc... (bunch of smaller stuff that doesn't really add much weight)
  • 16 port mini-switch (of which the AC adapter is pretty heavy)
  
  Now the problem was, with the binders and my laptop etc... my bag started becoming very heavy and was always huge. By eliminating the binders and replacing it with a very thin wacom tablet, it gave me back a lot of space inside the bag for other things and reduced the weight by a lot. It's actually kind of awkward sometimes with how light the bag feels in comparison.
• Since most of those papers in the binders were unorganized and sometimes missing, my notes kind of became useless. I never really looked over them for any of the classes. They just sort of accumulated until I stopped bothering to take them eventually. There was no easy way for me to find anything. With the tablet and one-note, I can actually *search* through my notes. I can seperate notes by titles which make sense and I can also type things up which are makes for much better searching. They're always there and I have them set to sync with my Desktop so they'll never be lost. Doing things like drawing diagrams is a lot faster and they look neater.
  
• I never actually bothered to buy paper, a new binder (since old ones are half broken), pens, pencils, or anything else of the like for school yet. So some time during first week I think I saw my tablet laying around and thought I could just use that instead. So I did, and I have been. This is probably the main reason, the others are just nice side-effects.

I also wrote up my first Problem Set with the tablet which is kind of interesting. I could copy/paste the problem set questions into the page and then write underneath it. I never had to worry about running out of space, fixing mistakes was easy and didn't leave behind any eraser marks or white-out to deal with. Though, printing the problem set out was a bit of a pain in Bahen. Mostly because the lab I went to originally didn't have a working printer. Gah!

Besides that, the Problem Set itself was quite easy, taking only about an hour or so to work through. Though still have to see how I did of course.

The first question was very similar to another problem we went over in class, so I followed a similar method in proving it. Nothing really special here.

The second question, I think I proved correctly however in hindsight I believe that I didn't word my concluding statement properly. Instead of saying that P(n) is true I said that P(n) => P(n+1) is true. I'm not sure if this is the same thing, as the statement I used is only a part of the induction formula. i.e. [P(1) \and (\forall n \in N, P(n) => P(n+1))] => \forall n \in N, P(n).

syndication test

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