Archive for the 'School' Category

Commencement

Commencement

Today we celebrated our college graduation. It was a pretty boring event with some pretty shoddy commencement speeches. Personally, it was something that I attended purely for my parents; I’d have loved to keep up my trend and boycott graduation ceremonies, but I got suckered into this one.

Photos are online. Enjoy.

Senior Design Project Implementation: Accomplished

Yesterday at around 3AM, I was able to finish the implementation work for the BBB project – the senior design project that Lina and I have taken on under Laurent Michel. This was really the last large hurdle before graduation; now that the implementation is done, I am able to move on to finish up the various write-ups that I need to finish up and then get to studying for finals next week.

The end is near…

Spring Break Pictures Online

Spring Break 2006

Since Lina and I are seniors this year, we figured that we should go out with a bang and bring along two close friends for a cruise around the Caribbean. We took Royal Caribbean cruise lines to visit Aruba, Curaçao, St. Maarten, and St. Thomas, departing from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Needless to say, we had a blast!

The Downside of Taking a Break

Two words: Catch-up sucks. I have several hundred e-mails to catch up on, all sitting in my ‘Gentoo’ smart folder in Mail — not to mention my thousand-plus unread news items in NetNewsWire.

I’m slowly making headway on it all, and should be caught up after next weekend. Needless to say, I have something to do besides falling asleep in my less intense classes.

To those who are expecting replies from me but have not yet gotten them: I will get around to you, I assure you.

Cryptography is Come From Greek Word…

Is mean… ‘Secret’. Spent two hours today writing a proof (read: connection between two definitions) of Euler’s totient function. Although I see the function’s connection to cryptography, I’m not sure why I should be so concerned with its proof.

At any rate, I was able to understand and write a concise proof for it, and have moved on to part two (of two) of the homework, which I have declared as completely impossible. Half credit never sounded better.
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Farewell, Chemistry

Today I completed the last chemistry lab I should ever have to do. Looks like I’ll never have to crack a chemistry lab book again in my life. Never. Ever. Again. After my final exam five days from now, I should be done with chemistry forever. Somehow, though, I think the dreaded subject will come back to haunt me in some graduate career or the other.

In good news, I should have more time to enjoy the things that I really, uh, enjoy. Such as… Not chemistry.
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To Date or not to Date

Disclaimer: No, i’m not talking relationship advice.

When I began looking at possible database schemas for storing NetFlow data in MySQL, I was worried about space. I was working under different assumptions back then (the numbers I had for data in was 1/100th what it is now), and I was thinking that perhaps I could keep the whole database under the 32-bit boundary (for old filesystems, portability, etc.). Now that the 2GB barrier is clearly broken with the sheer amount of data I’m dealing with, I’m not concerned at all with disk space - hard drives are cheap, or so says my boss. What does this mean for the schema? No more CPU-disk tradeoffs in favor of disk space. But does that also mean I can drop additional disk space, and a bit of CPU, for coding convenience, maintainability, extensibility, and ease of use?
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Apple Goofed, Again

As per the description in a previous blog entry, I sent in my PowerBook for repairs last week. I got the machine back Wednesday last week to find not one but three new things about my dear computer.

  1. Apple replaced the hard drive. Somewhat of a let-down, but I did have a backup of most everything I needed, so it’s not a huge loss. A blessing in disguise, actually: I’ve been meaning to reformat the machine and have a nice fresh clean start, I just hadn’t gotten around to it, and was kind-of waiting for Mac OS X Tiger to be released.

    Powerbook Foot
    Powerbook Barefoot
  2. Apple managed to rip off one of the feet of my PowerBook, as per the pictures above. The first picture is what a normal ‘foot’ on a PowerBook looks like: a dark grey circular rubber pad mounted on a light gray circular piece of plastic. The second picture is what a missing ‘foot’ looks like: no dark grey circular rubber pad mounted atop a light gray circular piece of otherwise-very-empty-looking-not-to-mention-abrasive plastic.
  3. Apple also managed to put some very light abrasions dead smack in the middle of my PowerBook’s LCD. To the untrained eye, they’re pretty invisible, but I can see them fairly clearly, especially when doing graphic design on a pixel-by-pixel level. The abrasions cover about a square inch of the screen and are shallow enough not to be noticeable to touch.

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Enter NIC, Soon to be Watching You

mv Frontend NIC

The move is official, then. NIC is to be the production name of the Network Information Center we’ve been working on this semester. With any luck, NIC will hit the UConn Network this summer. Stay tuned for more - including Lina’s first post, coming tonight!

Lappy Go Bye-Byes, Reloaded

Yup, It happened again. Due to a problem identical to that described in a previous post, my laptop was sent in to Apple for repairs. This time around, I wasn’t able even to grab my latest work off of the drive, and of course, haven’t backed up in a while. I hope to have the unit back by Thursday, 2005.04.14. Sad story is, I wasn’t even able to grab my latest work off of the drive before the machine sputtered and died.

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