Goodbye (CSC104) World!

It's the final week of school! Well, final week of classes. This will be my final post for this "SLOG". It's been a busy semester but I made it through! Project 2 is complete (I hope I do better on this one...) and now this blog is also complete. Now, all that's left to do is provide a solution to a problem that I encountered during this course.

So at the beginning of the semester, the professor asked us to determine an "algorithm" for the number of ups and downs you get on a piece of paper after every time you fold the paper in half. The first fold you get one down (D). The second fold you get up (U) D D. The third fold you get UUDDUDD. The fourth fold gives UUDUUDDDUUDDUDD. This looks pretty confusing but there is a trend. To show this, you can rewrite the third and fourth folds as U U D D U D D and UUD U UDD D UUD D UDD. From this, you can see that there is a constant D in the middle and a constant U and D that "surrounds" the D in the middle (second fold: U D D). So, for n=3 folds, you take the surrounding U and D surrounding the middle D and use those to surround both of them: UUD D UDD. For n=4, you repeat the steps for n=3: take the ups and downs surrounding the middle D and use those to surround the constant U and D. This becomes UUDUUDD D UUDDUDD. Hence, you can make an algorithm for this: For n > 2, where n represents the number of folds, you add the ups and downs surrounding the central down fold of n-1 to either side of the up and down folds found in n = 2.

Hm...that algorithm sounds pretty confusing. Not sure how else to say it though! Well, hopefully you guys understand it...

Anyway, hope everyone's doing well and good luck on all your exams! That's all from me. Goodbye!

Zzzzzz

Just looked at my mark for Project 1 for CSC104 and I must say I'm not too happy. My ecosystem.rkt is running perfectly but was marked for having failed tests and not  responding to a change in FOXES-START. Problem with this is that when I ran it just now it responded as it should and no tests failed. Unless I somehow uploaded an old version of my ecosystem.rkt (which I highly doubt I did because I remember saving it before uploading) I should have gotten a much better mark on it. Ugh.

On a happier note, I got perfect on test 2 for CSC104. Also, only 2 more weeks of school left. Sadly, my exams don't end until April 26...so late! But at least there's time in between each one for me to study unlike other years.

Anyway, that's all for now. Still mad at the mark for Project 1 but whatever. Peace out.

Tests!!!

Whoopeeeee! Finished two tests this week and feeling pretty good about them again. Now just to study for PHL test which is next Wednesday...

But really, I was pretty scared going into the two tests this week. Too much LoL! But in the end I guess it was fine :D. The first two questions for the CSC104 test were a bit of a pain though. Did not read over the hardware notes as much as I wanted to but I still think I did OK on them. CSC104 seems to be a very common sense/"just use logic" kind of course at the moment. I just put what I would expect to happen. For example, if you incorporate memory into the CPU instead of transferring it through a bus, I'd assume there would be more heat production because of the complexity and size of CPUs nowadays.

School is almost over! Just three more weeks and then l'examinations begin! Five years of university...gone by so fast. And I'm still not as fit as I'd like to be. On that note...time to do some Insanity workout!

Phew!

Phew! Almost missed another CSC104 quiz by not waking up! Haha...I can't bear to lose free marks like that. When I missed the quiz before reading week because I couldn't get up for it, I was just kicking myself for the whole day. Even though each quiz is only worth about 1.5%, it's still a pretty much FREE 1.5%. Eight quizzes, so a free 12%!

On a happier note, I managed to fix my ecosystem.rkt with the help of the prof. And I pretty much finished my Wikipedia assignment. Speaking of which, I never mentioned that we had to do a Wikipedia assignment. Basically, for this assignment, you would make an account on Wikipedia and then "help out" by fixing and/or adding content to pages that require looking over. I guess I might read over a couple more articles and copy-edit those as well just because it's pretty straightforward.

Anyway, another busy two weeks lie ahead of me. Two tests next week and one + an assignment the week after :(. So that's all for now!

ecosystem.rkt

It feels good not having anymore tests for the next few weeks! Although I still have a few assignments to do; one of which I'm having some difficulty completing at the moment. For CSC104, we have to make an "ecosystem" in Dr. Racket. You have a picture of a fox and a mouse, and over time the pictures scale according to one another. So, a large fox picture means there are very few mice and thus a small mouse picture, and vice-versa. But my ecosystem is not very ecosystem-like. Instead of continuously growing and shrinking in size, my ecosystem only "ticks" once. Anyone else having this problem? I'm not sure how to fix this...

Oh so sore...

Good afternoon fellow readers (mainly CSC104 students I'd assume :P). Man, it sucks being unfit and playing badminton after not playing for 3 years... My whole body is still sore from Friday's 4 hour session. I really have to start my Insanity workout again (and keep up/continue with it)! It sucks that my laptop's sound card doesn't work anymore; otherwise I could be doing it at home for reading week right now.

On a happier note, I almost got my first 100% in university with my CSC104 test! I was surprised the only spot I lost marks on was the programming part - especially when I said that it was super easy... Only lost 1.5 marks though so it's still okay. I'm sort of a techie person so I think I have an easier time grasping the concepts presented in class compared to others. For me, I can understand what a piece of code does without having to actually enter that code into Dr. Racket myself (at the moment at least...). It might be difficult for others though, so as a tip, I think it is still a good idea to run a certain code yourself just so you understand what values it consumes and produces.

A busy reading week lies ahead of me - an assignment due the week back and a test too! Gotta study study study! Ugh...

SNOW!!!

HOLY MOTHER OF SNOW; THERE'S SO MUCH! It hasn't stopped snowing since roughly 4pm yesterday and there's about 22cm +/- 3cm of snow on the ground now. The snow meant for Christmas has finally arrived! :D A decent way to end off my week of madness I'd say. Finished my three tests, and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty confident about all of them.  The only one where I'm afraid I won't do superbly well in is CSC104. Answers were posted right after the test and I think I did the questions correctly but can't quite remember... Overall it was an easy test - all of the programming questions were a piece of cake. Alright I'm going to go play in the snow now :D.

This is madness!

Three tests this upcoming week - all of which are pretty much back to back. Wednesday 9am, Thursday 9am and 6pm. Ugh, this is madness! Not really. After 5 years of university, I've gotten pretty used to weeks like these. Man, I wish I could use "check-expect" (used in Dr. Racket to see if the code following this was run correctly) during tests to see if I failed a given question or not lol! At least I feel sort of ready for two of the tests already - one of which is CSC104. If the majority of the CSC104 test consists of codes and what to expect from them then I should do reasonably well I think. Or if you want to think of the last sentence in standard form: P --> R, where P = "the majority of the CSC104 test consists of codes and what to expect from them" and R = "I should do reasonably well I think" (this is what I have to do for one of my other tests). The prof said that it will also contain questions regarding lecture slides; so stuff like algorithms and the history of computers. I should really figure out the algorithm for the number of ups and downs that are created as you keep folding paper in half. Okay, I think I'll do that now and then go back to studying...

Why do early morning classes exist?!

I hate early morning classes. I have 9a.m. classes every day from Monday to Friday and it just takes so much effort for me to get up for them. I guess it's my own fault for not sleeping earlier but I'm much more of a night-time person than a morning one. Falling asleep in class has been a habit of mine for the past four years at university (*sigh*); well I've already failed my 2013 New Year's resolution! Hahaha...

On another note, the programming language that we're using in CSC104 - Dr. Racket - is pretty simple and straightforward. It also allows you to copy and paste pictures as part of the code compared to some other programming languages like Python. For instance, if you want to put a picture of a penguin beside the vertically flipped version of the same picture, all you have to do is type the following into Dr. Racket:

> (require picturing-programs)
> (beside *paste picture of penguin* (flip-vertical *paste picture of penguin*))

Like other programming languages, make sure to keep track of all the parentheses. Putting a parenthesis in the wrong spot will lead to an error and adding one too many will also lead to an error. Last week's tutorial quiz was super easy; we just had to give the output of certain Dr. Racket input codes. For example, what do you think the output of the following would be?

> (+ 1 2 3)

I'm feeling pretty tired at the moment so I think I'm going to take a nap before my next class. Peace out!

p.s. The answer's 6.

Hello (CSC104) World!

And so it begins - the life of a new blogger. Well, in this case it'll be the life of another student in CSC104. Who knows, maybe this assignment will get me into this whole blogging thing! Maybe I'll start another blog on food, or on the video games I play (League of Legends anyone?), or on simple, everyday things like my work or my summer vacations; then maybe I can become a well known blogger and start making money like that! Haha that might be thinking too far ahead. For now, I'll just stick to this blog and see how it goes.

Let me give you a little introduction about myself and what this blog will be all about. I am currently a fourth-year student at the University of Toronto (don't judge me fellow CSC104 students! I'm old, I know!) and am going to graduate in June. I am taking a computer science course at the moment - CSC104: The Why and How of Computing - with hopes that it can raise my GPA a bit more. The professor is a pretty funny guy and I must admit, I quite enjoy his lectures. You won't hear me say this much for any other course! I loved how he demonstrated the concept of simple programming and algorithms with the peanut butter and jam sandwich! Anyway, back to the topic at hand; the professor notified the class that one of the assignments of this course will be to create a courSe LOG or SLOG (I can see why he chose the S instead of, say, the C). Hence, the creation of this blog. Over the next three months I will be keeping a record of the things that happen in this class, from exciting lectures  to stressful tests, as well as ways to overcome certain obstacles in this course.

Well, that's all for now. Have to go out and not waste such a beautiful Sunday afternoon!