Just wanted to wish everyone a really great [civilian] new year
Went out last night - I think this was the first time I actually enjoyed myself on new years eve. I was at the Syndrome, which quite surprisingly wasn’t packed full - and there was a really great Reggae band playing
Things are starting to come together now towards the end of the semester, I hope the exam season goes well…
As to the courses I’m taking:
- Algorithms has been super, Alex is a really good lecturer and the exercises, although time consuming definitely help understanding the material.
- Computer Graphics is probably the single best course I’m taking this semester. The exercises are simply amazing, and showing off a spinning 3d object in opengl, you created yourself is a blast…
- Image Processing also gets high marks - The only downside is that the exercises [for me at least] are incredibly time consuming. On the plus side, the material we’re learning is definitely non-trivial and is immensely interesting. Extra high marks for Yael the TA who actually comes to the lectures and gives, hands-down best TA sessions of anyone this semester.
- DB has some remarkably good TAs, the only gripe I have with the course is the fact they keep publishing illegible exercises. For example the first exercise they gave assumed knowledge of stock market terminology without explaining any of it - guys… This is a CS degree…
In general it might be a good idea for one of the TAs to write the exercises and the other one to try to solve them - any questions he has to ask the other one need to be clarified in the exercise…
For example, they gave an exercise in JDBC a couple of weeks ago in which they didn’t specify the string needed to connect to the Oracle server anywhere - ???
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Logic - This course needs a new TA, who actually knows whats going on in the lectures. Up to now the exercises have been completely disjoint in regards to the class material - I have a feeling this has more to do with the TA not communicating with the lecturer than anything else.
In other news:
- SVG has landed in Firefox, and someone has created an implementation of Canvas in Explorer - this is absolutely awesome!
- Wordpress 2.0 with AJAX support has been released!!





