Type Slowly

Day log, 21st October 2010

(Chris Roos has started writing a short daily blog post outlining what he’s done during the day, which strikes me as a pretty neat idea, so I’m going to try and do the same.) 

First up, some long overdue housework, then I spent a fair chunk of this morning working on my Architecture and Hardware coursework for university - a few exercises translating MIPS assembler statements into machine code. Then, some computer-based chores - setting up our home network so we can actually get WiFi upstairs (we seem to have very thick walls), some .zshrc yak-shaving (I’ve recently moved from bash and spent a while getting my preferences and prompt how I like them - this article was an invaluable guide to the latter), as well as writing a little script that uses rsync to synchronise the music on mine and Vicky’s laptops to the mpd server I’ve set up. Along the way, I also came across the Midlands Graduate School in the Foundations of Computer Science, a one-week course which covers a bunch of interesting areas that my MSc doesn’t go into in so much detail, so I’m going to look into attending next spring, if I can.

Later, I got cracking on my 4th Java programming coursework (writing an application to visualise the Mandelbrot set), and spent a bit of time reading up on implementing UIs in Swing according to the MVC pattern.

Tomorrow, I’m gonna finish this Java project, do some day-job work on Thrive (the application formerly known as Creativenvironment), and hopefully do a fair bit of reading - I’m aiming to get through a large-ish stack of books by Christmas, so I ideally need to be reading at least 30 pages of something school-related per day.