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Archive for the ‘uni’ Category

Frustration

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

My full results have finally turned up on the uni intranet. Highlights: 6 modules (70 credits) from level 3 and 4 modules (40 credits) from level 2 at >70%, weighted average 67.7%. Soooo close to a first :(

I think bad time management cost me the grade. I should have done some work towards the project and/or the report for a School of European Languages module over Easter, but was lazy and didn’t. Then a couple of weeks later I had deadlines for both on the same day; I chose to work on the dissertation (which was obviously more important as it’s worth 20 credits vs. half the mark for a 10 credit module), but if I’d picked the report, the mark wouldn’t have been capped at 40% and the weighted average would have been over 68%. Then a couple more percentage points on another module (most likely TPL, Software Lab, or German General Language III) would have got another 10 credits at >70%, which would have got me a first on the preponderance principle (within 2% of a classification boundary, if you have at least 120 credits above the boundary you get the higher classification).

Posted in diary, news, uni | 2 Comments »

Parse error

Monday, June 25th, 2007

I just got an email from Virgin Media. The first part I noticed was:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

I immediately thought, “What on earth? Surely they don’t expect customers to stick around with such extortionate call charges.” Then I noticed the context, and realised that it possibly should have read:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call it from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

The actual wording was fine, but the way I started parsing it made me interpret it in completely the wrong way. “It” in the actual wording means “our broadband helpline number”; but initially I parsed it as the dummy subject of an impersonal sentence, so I thought it was saying all calls from a Virgin home phone would have those charges. The altered wording adds an “it” referring to this helpline as the object of the embedded verb phrase, making my interpretation the only sensible one.

In the real world, I did two interesting things today. First, I went to the CS office to pick up my degree results: I was awarded a 2:1. I then went to talk to Dr Berger about applying for an MRes; this I have now finally done, as well as an EST bursary which would require going to Munich for a few months (no downsides there!). I mentioned the result, and he said it was disappointing, because the overall score was about 67%, only a couple of points off a first. Annoyingly, I won’t know for certain what pulled me down for some time because I was only told the overall classification, not marks for each module. Even the average I only know informally, because Uli told me. But the bad marks are apparently on the German side, so as a CS student I’m better than I look on paper.

Posted in confused, diary, language, news, uni | 2 Comments »

Type inference rocks

Monday, May 28th, 2007

I just wrote the following snippet of code for my dissertation:

intNatI :: Int :~= Nat
intNatI = Iso {
            to   = fromInteger . toInteger,
            from = fromInteger . toInteger }

The components to and from have totally different types (to is Int -> Nat, from is Nat -> Int). Yay for type inference! :)

Posted in beauty, code, Haskell, uni | No Comments »

An analogy

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Suppose everyone communicates via scribes, who write in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Microsoft is the only company who trains them.

Now there do exist some talented linguists who can figure out approximately what they’re writing. That’s what the Rosetta Stone was about, except in this analogy there’s no Demotic or Greek alongside, only the hieroglyphs and a scribe to tell you what they mean in English. Unfortunately, after they send the scribes away, the linguists can never be sure that they’ve got it right, especially since Microsoft can change the language as they like simply by changing the curriculum. As soon as new scribes start writing in this new language, the old scribes will stop being able to interpret some messages you receive because they don’t know about the changes in the language.

(more…)

Posted in computing, rant, uni | No Comments »

Digression^WDissertation

Friday, October 20th, 2006

My final year project initial document is due in tomorrow, and I've finally got round to doing it.

...

Okay, I've done some of it. A front page, an abstract, an introduction with a slew of references to papers I haven't read, a skeleton structure and table of contents, and a bibliography. All in the loveliness that is LaTeX which thankfully makes these things effortless.

I might manage to get a draft done tomorrow. Then again, I might not. In either case I'll be asking Dr Berger for advice since I certainly need some help to get things into the right form!

Makes me wish I'd picked a project that I knew something about before my first meeting with my supervisor :) (Though I have some comfort from Sean in that I'm not the only one who doesn't quite understand the obscure, advanced, abstract mathematics my supervisor is spewing at me in meetings.)

As a final note, I'm writing this from the SUCS room at half past midnight because due to the usual bureaucratic incompetence of large businesses, the ISP my live-in landlady has picked didn't send us our ADSL modem until yesterday (which of course nobody was in/awake to collect from the postman, so we had to wait another 24 hours to go and get it, assuming that is really what it is). If an internet connection existed at home now, I would be using it instead. (Because my bed is much more comfortable than the worn out desk chairs here :)

Posted in diary, news, uni | No Comments »

Computer, IPv6 and Music

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

Good grief, it’s been far too long since I last blogged.

I got myself a computer a week or two ago, an Asus A6K laptop. So I finally have a computer to call my own which I can use here, wohoo. Not bad either, Turion 64 and GeForce Go 6200, not quite top spec (especially the RAM, only 512 MB) but an order of magnitude better (and more portable!) than my desktop PC at home which (particularly with its 19” CRT monitor) is too huge to take on the plane. I managed to install Ubuntu on it (courtesy of this hall’s other resident geek Yaakov, from Connecticut) dual booting with XP Home (which was bundled). The first thing I tried to do with it was install Operation Flashpoint… but to my horror I found I’d left CD 1 in my desktop’s CD drive. Argh! Oh well, at least I have Neverwinter Nights to fall back on.

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Posted in computing, diary, music, play, uni | No Comments »

Labs at 8:30 am

Tuesday, November 15th, 2005

<pre>try {
    work();
} catch (SleepDeficiencyException e) {
    sleep();
} finally {
    go_home();
}</pre>

Posted in funny, random, uni | No Comments »

Mmm, cancelled seminars

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

It seems my lecturer for today has been taken ill or something, so the two seminars I had today (Phonetik & Phonologie and Grammatik, both lectures about “DaF” (Deutsch als Fremdsprache)) have been cancelled. Yay.

So what am I doing to pass the time? Well, when 13:30 rolls around I will stick my foot in Frau Gschnaidner’s door and get her to sign the forms that I will send back to Swansea so I can finally get my grant. After that I will carry on with what I was doing yesterday afternoon which is converting Milliways to using wchar_t internally using iconv(3) to convert from the local charset. Sounds dull but it’s something to do, and does all the people using the bbs account a favour, who since I hacked in half-arsed support for UTF-8 have been unable to see any messages containing any non-ASCII characters.

Apart from the above mentioned seminars I have picked one lecture on Roman history (very ancient, something like 250 BC) and the equivalents of three of the four courses I missed last year (networks, databases and Java, but not computability theory). I’ve not yet enrolled for them though, since (despite the Germans’ reputation for orderliness) there is no central enrolment system. Well, apparently there is one for WI (Wirtschaftsinformatik) but I haven’t figured out how to use it yet.

Annoyingly I caught a cold on the weekend, which fortunately recovered well enough for me to go to the lecture at 8:30 yesterday. Ugh. I had a lab for that module at the same time this morning but I couldn’t be bothered to go to it. Largely because I couldn’t find the room last time I tried to find it, and anyway it’s probably not on yet after just two lectures (the first one I missed because I was using an out of date lecture plan).

Posted in diary, uni | No Comments »

Woot, internet connection at last

Monday, October 10th, 2005

Finally got round to enrolling at the uni today, which means I have now got a username and password for the uni’s computers. Hence this blog entry. I’ve also posted two more, for last Tuesday and Wednesday, with the appropriate timestamps. I can’t be bothered to do more right now so I’ll finish it tomorrow.

The only other thing I did today was attend another orientation lecture, this time about how to pick courses. It seems the system here is rather ad hoc – instead of enrolling for all your courses in the same place at the same time you have to enrol on each one separately. I’m hoping to do something different with my year than the usual slog of CS and German, but until Swansea’s German dept tells me, I have no idea if that is allowed.

I must get round to buying a mobile, if for no other reason than that my bank wants a phone number for doing foreign transfers (currently my German bank account has nothing in it). I’ve also seen a rather nice laptop in the shopping centre, but it’s a tad expensive so I’ll have to wait for my Socrates grant before I can get it.

Posted in computing, diary, news, uni | No Comments »

Day 1, Wednesday 5 October: First contact

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

Woke up – relatively late for the hostel on account of being knackered, relatively early for me on account of having gone to bed early due to being knackered. This was a bout 7:30 am. Had breakfast of bread and jab, muesli, and coffee, then a shower, then checked out and proceeded to the bus stop to go to the university, hoping I can find the AAA this time. Fortunately I met a nice Ukrainian girl at the bus stop who was also going to the university. Again, having no clue as to how to pay for the bus journey, I didn’t. (more…)