Hilary Term 2007
Well its the start of another term here at Oxford. Calculus is nearly over, except for one last sheet of impossible Laplacian Equations.
Functional programming is also over, and although I can’t say I’ll miss programming in Haskell, Richard Bird’s witty lecture humour will be sadly missed.
Discrete Maths is now over too, but I don’t have anythign to say about it.
Unfortunately the noose that is linear algebra hasn’t loosened and we have it for another term, although with a new lecturer who has started off nice and gentle. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Newcomers to this term include Procedural Programming in Oberon with Mike Spivey, who so far seems like a good lecturer. Next year we will get to build the Oberon compiler that we are using this term to process the (relatively) simple Oberon syntax.
Another new topic is Data Structures and Algorithms, which is so far has been calculating Big O notation and efficiency. Not the most interesting of topics, but beats calculus hands down.
Finally, my tutor Joel Ouaknine (who I haven’t had any tutes off yet) is lecturing Logic and Proof. So far the logic part is familiar with truth tables and such. And his logic (AND/OR-based) sudoku solver looks quite ingenius, not to mention speedy.
Away from academia I have bought an old IBM Thinkpad T21 because I was bored, but neither me, ubuntuforums.org tutorials, andrew or anyone can mange to NAT bridge the connections. We managed to Xubuntu-ize it before the DVD-rom arrived by doing a hard drive transplant into another laptop (Andrew’s old Pacbell) using a cheese slicer to undo the minute screws.
Donor is moving house tomorrow and has painted over his pink room another colour (so he says). Hopefully ntl will connect his internet fast as we need IM to survive in this day in age.
David North has been elected Magdalen JCR computer officer just to discover the JCR Rooms database server is broken and the rooms ballot is approaching fast.
As you can tell I must be really bored because I’m really struggling to come up with enough news to talk about, just like the Market Rasen Mail.
Oh yes, I haver bought a fully Linux plug-n-play PCMCIA Belkin wifi card for the thinkpad but since my Broadcom chip doesn’t work in Green’s Cafe I might try the Belkin there.
I have even managed to convert him to Ubuntu part time.