Type Slowly
Day log, 3rd November 2010
I didn’t bother with a day log yesterday, as I was at my other job, washing casks and carrying sacks of malt. Today, however, I was back in front of the computer today, with a surprising amout to show for it; I’ve completed my final programming assignment, to create a visualisation of the Mandelbrot set, and have added a few extra features to it - the ability to scroll around the plane and zoom in on areas of interest, for instance. With that wrapped up I’ve started looking seriously at my systems infrastructure coursework - it’s a pretty broad ranging course, starting with a few lectures on databases, followed with a load of stuff on operating systems, concurrency, memory management and networking, and finishing up with compilers, parsers and language design.
We’re currently looking at how concurrency and multiprogramming are implemented in operating systems - I’ve read through our lecture notes today as well as looking at a couple of papers: Firstly, Gary Peterson’s brief letter on his mutual exclusion algorithm, which is wonderfully concise and informative - it sets out the context of the problem and existing solutions, describes his algorithm, and gives a proof of its correctness in just two pages, while still being incredibly accessible to a newcomer to the field. Secondly, I read through Christopher, Procter and Anderson’s paper on their Nachos operating system, developed for teaching undergraduates at Berkley, which was a valuable overview of the field, and what I can expect from the course. I also did a fair bit of reading around the subject elsewhere, and I think I’m starting to get my head around various concurrency primatives in a way that I hadn’t managed before.
I’ve also been pressing on with learning some stats - I’ve just started the section on conditional probability in my book, and it treats a subject I’ve previously found quite tricky in a way that’s both rigarous and straightforward - in particular, it contains a derivation of Bayes theorem that follows very naturally from the formulas for joint and conditional probability. I’m planning to write about this in more detail soon.
