noogz.net

posted: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:41 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: life, tucs, lca09, lca, uni, exams, | Comments: 0

Time for me to enumerate a few things that have happened of late (in reverse order of occurrence, naturally), since it now seems like the time to do so.

Uni

I handed in my Computer Science term project today, which, I suppose means that my academic year is now complete. I'm fairly happy with how the semester's progressed, every unit that I studied (including the two that I chose on a whim) has been excellent, which is more than I can say for previous semesters. Analysis (Real analysis to be specific) was absolutely fantastic, and I'll be doing my best to enrol in the follow-up functional analysis unit (I've had it suggested to me by several people, and I'm convinced), and it's certainly made the maths major I'm now enrolled in seem like a very good idea.

As far as I can tell, exams went well, but I won't know for certain until results are released next week (I'm very confident with my two maths units, Graphics is a different story (though I don't recall doing as badly as the lecturer claims the class as a whole went)).

TUCS

In other (though slightly Uni-related) news, TUCS (The UTAS Computing Society) had its Annual General Meeting for 2009 last week, and as well as discovering the joy of barbecued* Woolworths' Quantity Burgers (they're excellent, really!), I was elected society president for 2009. The rest of the exec are also a truly awesome bunch of people, so the future certainly looks bright.

TUCS has run some excellent events in its inaugural year: our tech talks were, in general, wildly successful, amongst other things. Thanks to that, we've become what appears to be one of the most active societies on campus. I'll be doing my best to make sure that we can replicate, or even better that next year. (If you're a speaker, or know any good ones, and would like to give a talk, let me know!)

In related news, we also took delivery of some particularly awesome TUCS-Branded T-Shirts just after exams -- we're particularly happy with how that went and will probably do it again next year.

(*I will definitely be approving funding for a new barbecue for the society... the current one is truly dreadful)

LCA

Last week-ish, I had dinner with some members of the Linux.conf.au organising committee. Though much of what was discussed must be kept under wraps (it's thoroughly exciting, I promise!), I can tell you that the conference is shaping up to be most excellent, and if you haven't already booked your ticket, I suggest you do so as soon as possible!

That is all for me for now, more news as it comes (I hope!)

posted: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:02 | filed under: / blog/ | permalink | Tags: meme, book, | Comments: 1

Well, I've decided to do the Book Meme from PLOA and Planet Debian etc... Just recapping for those of you who haven't seen it yet (not many of you):

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

And mine is:

It is possible to prove that if such a nontrivial square root of 1 exists, then n is not prime.

-- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition.

posted: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:06 | filed under: / blog/ programming/ | permalink | Tags: sockets, python, | Comments: 2

Whilst doing some coding today for my semester research project I found a need to check for incoming data on a socket without taking any data out of the stream. Here's the code I came up with:

     
cp.sock.setblocking(False)
try:
    cp.sock.recv(0)
    stuffwaiting = True
except socket.error:
    stuffwaiting = False
cp.sock.setblocking(True)

This code works finely on Linux -- you can only receive data if there is data to be received (even if you want to receive no data). Unfortunately, the code doesn't port to Mac OS -- you may receive as many bytes as there are in the socket's buffer -- if there are no bytes in the buffer, you can receive 0 bytes. Therefore, the following fix is necessary:

     
cp.sock.setblocking(False)
try:
    cp.sock.recv(1, socket.MSG_PEEK)
    stuffwaiting = True
except socket.error:
    stuffwaiting = False
cp.sock.setblocking(True)

So, my question for Lazyweb is: is there a better way to do this?

posted: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:37 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: merging, | Comments: 8

A question for my interstate readers: Has anyone seen the following lane structure outside of Tasmania?

(If anyone wants to guess what the correct procedure is in such a situation, you're also welcome to do that)

posted: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:02 | filed under: / blog/ | permalink | Tags: lca2009, | Comments: 4

LCA 2009. I'm registered. Are you?

posted: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:16 | filed under: / blog/ programming/ | permalink | Tags: mehffort, progcomp, acm icpc, acm sppc, | Comments: 3

The 2008 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest Results have been confirmed: my team's come 3rd overall (as expected). We find out whether or not we've achieved a wild card position in the World Finals in December.

posted: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:11 | filed under: / blog/ | permalink | Tags: mehffort, progcomp, | Comments: 0

For the benefit of those who were intersted, Mehffort is a portmanteau of meh and effort, and is a very popular word in the semester 2, 2008 Maclab dialect of English. It is used to convey one's lack of motivation towards a particular task. In context:

• Me: Paris, help me come up with a witty slogan for the TUCS T-Shirt.
• Paris: Mehffort.

As proud denizens of the Maclab, my ACM ICPC team for this year decided to adopt the word as part of our team name.

posted: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 10:56 | filed under: / blog/ programming/ | permalink | Tags: acm icpc, acm sppc, progcomp, | Comments: 1

The ACM ICPC South Pacific Region was on yesterday, and was great fun (as usual). My team this year, the Mehffort Musketeers consisted of Alex Berry (who'll be competing in the Google Code Jam regionals soon as well), Michael Ford and myself.

For the benefit of people who did the ICPC this year: I solved problem A, C and I; Michael solved B and D, and Alex solved E, F and H. Here's some general commentary on the problems that I solved:

• Problem A was very simple, and the shell of my solution was complete within three minutes of the contest starting. Unfortunately, the entire problem was not defined until halfway through the test data, which led me to finishing it a bit later.
• Problem C, which seems to have been the problematic problem this year (as far as judging's concerned) was relatively straightforward, though I had two rather annoying bugs that took me about an hour to week out... it happens, I suppose. Solved on the first submission, which I'm happy about.
• Problem I was a longest path problem, that was relatively straightforward depending on what sort of algorithm you chose to solve it. I've heard reports of people using the Bellman-Ford Algorithm and failing -- as far as I can tell, such an algorithm would work on problems except where there existed a cycle not involving the endpoints of the path taken in the problem. I used Floyd's Algorithm and had it solved first time. Simple.

As alluded to earlier, we solved 8 problems, and we're currently the only team to do so with the testing data used on the day (this means that we're in a provisional first place), however, there are many teams who are likely to get problem C rejudged, and following that we'll likely be third. More news to come.

posted: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:21 | filed under: / blog/ | permalink | Tags: lhc, geekery, | Comments: 1

I found this very useful news service today, at HasTheLHCDestroyedTheEarth.com. May you find it informative.

posted: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:54 | filed under: / blog/ computers/ | permalink | Tags: debian, linux, | Comments: 1

So the new version of Debian is to be known as Squeeze, eh?

Does anyone else think of a certain 1970's British New Wave group?