So what have I been up to lately? Mostly school.

My stats and AI courses are easy, but still take up time (I’m trying to actually do homework and study instead of just cramming ;)

The robocup project is… Well, it’s a group project. :) It’s not going too badly, though.

I’ve also got martial arts and choir in the evenings (although I think I’m going to drop choir, the schedule’s just a bit too inconvenient). And I found a go club at sfu, which always seems to end in late-night gaming… :) One of the really nice things about school is that every semester there’s a chance of making new friends. Although it is a bit odd to hang out with teenagers – I feel old now ;P

Life is fun and busy… so very busy…

I’ve still been sneaking in a bit of plasma time here and there, though- little fixes for my gsoc project n’stuff. Popup applets can be right-clicked properly. You can add & remove activites without zooming out, too.
Now with those buttons and my activity-list mouse plugin, activities are a lot more convenient:

but that’s a bit ugly. We have better plans being worked on… they are shiny… ;)

Oh, and virtual desktop are more convenient too – you can add a desktop just by right-clicking the pager now. There’ll probably be a remove button soon, but… well.. virtual desktops weren’t really designed for convenience, so it’ll probably have to be a “remove last” button.

Oops, I almost forgot. I can finally commit a bugfix I wrote at tokamak that uses a 4.6 function. whee!

Oh, and i’ll be at dev days in SF. Yay! :) That’ll be fun. And I have midterms directly before and after… Yes, i’m crazy ;)

Well, saturday night was fun. :) We all went out to a chinese restaurant and had lots of yummy food. Then some of us went back to the hotel and played cards for a while. I learnt a new game, but I have no idea how to spell it. :)

Sunday was the last day – checked out of the hotel, did a little hacking, and we had a post-mortem meeting with all the students. I got lost in my laptop after that, plus my mind was not liking the lack of sleep, so I never got around to having lunch… oops. :) There was pizza at the airport, at least. Our group divided up again, into two groups – for the rest of the semester we’ll be working on different features for the robocup client, competing to see which improvements are more helpful, then merging them into trunk (oh god I wish we were using git now instead of svn).

four of us were on the same flight back to vancouver, so we got seats all in a row, which was nice. :) mostly we just wanted sleep, though. god it was nice to get home and sleep in… I didn’t go to any classes today, I need to recover. :)

it’s day two of the ucosp sprint. thursday night I arrived in toronto, tired and coughing… and found karaoke in the hotel bar. grrrr… I *finally* find karaoke, and it’s on a night when I can barely speak. but I met up with some of the other students, and we headed to another bar where the law students were having a party. :) much beer was consumed… and when I wandered back to the hotel with a couple of other students we found the karaoke still going. so we went in there and got to sing the last song. :) I feel sorry for the few people still there listening ;)

friday morning I somehow dragged myself out of bed on time, met the rest of the students, and we headed to the university. there I finally got to meet my team in person. yay! :) we’re doing the robocup 2d simulation… there are a few clients from hte summer that we have the code for, and we had to pick one of them to build on. so we spent time reading stuff and trying to get stuff running, and debated the pros and cons of java vs. python. eventually we decided to extend one of the python clients; it’s got most of the boring details done, but the players are still pretty stupid so there’s lots for us to do. the java project was already so good we weren’t quite sure how we could improve it (and had run out of time to look for things, really).

once we’d settled on a codebase we started poking at that code specifically, trying to get it running on all our computers, coming up with things to improve, fighting with strange network errors… I spent a good chunk of my afternoon replacing the pile of simple bash scripts that started teams with a single more intelligent bash script.

friday evening some student union had organized a party for us at a nearby pub :) free beer FTW. I left early to get caught up on sleep but somehow the interwebs distracted me instead. ;)

saturday morning.. urgh. well, it’s a code sprint, I don’t expect much sleep. the cough and cold are annoying, though. I wandered in late, which turned out to be not so great as my team had started their meeting. oops. :) we came out of that with a list of seven tasks we’re going to do over the semester (and get marked on). I spent most of the rest of the day working with iona on getting the debug output of the clients in a more useful format (one curses thingy per process doesn’t work so well when you start 6+ processes out of a script; we’ve got a PyQt ui started instead).

this afternoon we also had a talk from greg about grad school. I’m not hugely interested, but it was an informative talk. :) most of what I remember is his little speech at the end… undergrad is about learning to learn, grad school is about learning what questions to ask, but what university is really about is teaching us to take over the world. :)

now it’s dinnertime, and I should head out to the group dinner.

wow, the week just flew by. it’s saturday night now, and I’m in zurich, checking email n’stuff. early tomorrow morning I’ll head to the airport.

it’s been a really awesome week. lots of hacking and hiking and very little sleep. it was wonderful to see the plasma family again. I miss you guys already. but I feel like I want a vacation to recover :P

no vacations for me, though. school starts tuesday and I’ve already got reading assigned. I’m in this cool new course where we’re going to be working on projects with students from other universities… here’s the blog for the course. it should be a lot of fun. :) but… the downside is it might be very busy, too, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for KDE this semester. we’ll see. after everything that’s happened at tokamak I really want to make *some* time to keep hacking. :)

well, the first day of a new semester is over. it’s been a fairly good day. the burnaby campus was closed (even though buses were running) but the surrey one was open, and all my courses are there. the first course was cancelled anyways because the teacher didn’t think he could make it. :)

I got my upass, sold an old textbook, managed to get into the bookstore at a time when it actually had no line and buy one of my textbooks, and discovered I’ve got a friend in each of my classes. macm 316 looks like it’s going to be annoying (the teacher has a thick accent and mumbles), but cmpt 383 will probably be quite interesting.

how much time I’ll have for KDE this semester remains to be seen, but I *am* going to campkde, and there’s another tokamak soon (oh god I hope I can keep up with my courses with all this travel) so if all else fails I’ll have a chance to hack then. :) aseigo and notmart’s work on the qtscript bindings seems to be going quite well, so this week I think I’ll try to focus on getting ahead in class wherever possible and preparing for my courses. of course, having said that I’ll probably get distracted by shiny code anyways ;P

I’ve never really cared much for studying. Trying to memorize facts seems incredibly boring (although digits of pi aren’t ;) and it’s always a struggle to actually get anything done.

This semester i had two math classes – and sfu math classes are hard, so i can’t just ignore them and expect an A. ;) So i decided to use a tool pete uses for language training to help me memorize the boring bits of the math classes (which turned out to be almost all of them).

It’s called anki, and it’s a cute little flashcard program written in pyqt4. It also has a web interface and a client for the iphone iirc, although i haven’t used those. It was originally designed for learning japanese, but it’s expanded since then. It’s got LaTeX support, so writing crazy math equations isn’t a problem. The spaced learning system trains your brain to remember all the facts you’ve entered – all you have to do is enter those facts, and then actually use the software for a few minutes each day. :)

I didn’t start using it until after the first midterm, and i haven’t been very consistent with the actually-using-it bit… But i think it really helped me. I had pretty much no motivation to learn the material; i seem to have lost interest in math. :( But entering facts into anki helped me think about it – i had to break things down into little pieces that’d work well as flashcards – and kept me reading the textbook when i couldn’t be bothered with the homework.

One thing that doesn’t work so well: cramming a bunch of data in right before a midterm. Spaced learning doesn’t work when there’s no time for things to be spaced in ;) my second midterms didn’t go so well. By the time the final came, though, i had more than half of each course’s material in there. I had to study the things that weren’t in there – a lot of which i’d completely forgotten and had to relearn – but for subjects that were in anki, i just skimmed the material and looked at a couple of things i’d been getting wrong a lot.

I think this worked out pretty well. I got a nice mark on the final for macm 201. I didn’t do as well on math 152, but i still ended up with a B+. Some things anki just can’t help with; evaluating integrals takes more.. Lateral thinking, i think. Just knowing a bunch of facts isn’t enough. but when material *can* be broken down into lots of little facts, anki signifigantly reduces the effort required – and turns something i’d normally find horridly boring into something almost like a game, where i can just keep clicking and answring questions as it asks them. :)

so if you’ve got lots of facts you need to memorize, and you don’t like doing it (does anyone?), give anki a try. :)

despite spending my whole damn weekend at school, i’m feeling much happier recently. maybe it’s the sunshine. maybe it’s knowing that the seester is nearly over. maybe it’s the fact that i’ve been carefully not thinking about all the things that could go wrong and all the things i’m not getting done. maybe it’s that for the last 2 weeks (not counting this weekend) i’ve been making sure i spend some time relaxing in some way, not always being on the computer. maybe it’s other nice things ;)

but i think at least part of it is that i’m writing code again, lots of it. not only that, today i had my whole group with me coding too. i could help them debugs things, i could get code written while they helped each other, i could hear cheers go up when something hard started working, i could bitch about the insanity of this course with them… :)

slowly but surely our system is taking shape. by most reports we’re well ahead of the curve. today i spent a bit of time helping someone in another group – he’d essentially been writing procedural code in java. heh. the complete lack of code design experience among the people in this course is pretty unfair, really.

and speaking of design, it’s pretty cool to see mine coming together and working :) yay! naturally there have been changes along the way… i’ve learnt that designing classes for other people to implement requires much more planning and detailed explanations of just what is responsible for what. i should’ve started the class diagram earlier (or not gotten sick :P ) – it’s amazingthe number of ways a design can be misunderstood. especially when the generated code doesn’t include the comments from the diagram it was generated from. :P
i also would’ve had more classes if i was doing this over again. some stuff seemed small, so i lumped it together, but i would’ve had a much cleaner system if i’d pulled all of that out into separate classes.

i’ve also learnt a bit about group dynamics. working with people isn’t one of my strengths… i needed to teach them gui programming concepts and had no idea how. still don’t really have any idea how actually, but in the end we all figured it out somehow. :) i also have this tendency to make people feel stupid when i try to explain what they’re doing wrong, and i haven’t quite figured out how to tone that down… but i seem to have not really pissed anyone off at least :)
in the end, i stiill feel fairly lost on how to work in groups well when people don’t have the same grade expectations as me… but at least i’m a little more confident that it can actually work :)

i’m also happy that some of my group members with the least experience have been catching on quite quickly and writing stuff that does in the end actually work. :) it’s kinda neat to watch people make the same standard beginner’s mistakes that i remember making in the past… and reminds me just how much of programming is learnt from making and fixing those mistakes. somehow it still amazes me how valuable experience is.

anyways, it’s very very late now – i had to catch a nightbus and then walk a dozen blocks home, and then decided it was such a nice night i should sit outsiide and blog…
i’m gonna go inside and defrost now ;)

just one more week of classes. then the evil group project will be over. ohh god.
it’s actually not going too badly. could be a lot worse. but i got home at 12:30 this evening and i’m oing back to school tomorrow to do more code. urgh.

so it seems to be 4.2 beta time. already. huh. aseigo cleaned up my config ui in time for the string freeze, but i still haven’t had time to make it actually do anything.

pretty soon i need to figure out this fosscamp thing, and start planning the campkde thing… more plane tickets to buy. wow. stuff will be happening again. :)

oh, and an odd thing: a couple of weeks ago i found the source of my kernel panics. buggy iwl4965 wifi driver. if it’s connected to a router running openwrt it’ll panic randomly, so bad that even the magic sysrq keys don’t work. some people report success with the previous version of the driver, but for me that just won’t connect. so, since the router at home runs openwrt, i’ve got an ethernet cable running down the hall to the bedroom :) wired connection… feels so old-fashioned ;)
i wonder if there’s a way i can help debug the driver… maybe i should bug whoever wrote it…

anyways, time to pass out now. :P looking forward to december… i’ll probably need to do a fair amount of studying to catch up on the neglected math courses before exams, but at least there won’t be any groupwork. and then exams will be over and i’ll be free for the rest of the month! :D hopefully i can join the plasma bughunting for some of that time. and, y’know, actually relax and have some fun too. ahhh, it will be nice to have a vacation. very, very nice :)

whee! it’s been a bit more than a week, but yesterday i handed in my first assignments. far too much of my time this week was spent on those. iirc i did math all weekend :P and now i have new assignments, oh joy!

somewhere i have a list of thoughts about the n810 that i’ve been meaning to blog. let’s see how long it takes me to get around to that. i don’t like how little computer time i’ve been getting; school is too darn busy.

anyways, good news: first, my group for cmpt 275 seems prettty awesome. not a lot of experience, but lots of enthusiasm, everyone seems smart and has their own strengths. :)

second, my laptop may arrive tomorrow :D yay! i’ve burnt an archlinux cd, and started learning how to install it… that should be fun. :)

third, i managed to repair my backup and got some files off it. yayy! i have my calendar back at the very least… basket files are there but i haven’t got basket installed… i think some files have damage but haven’t run into them yet, so hopefully it’s just unimportant ones. from now on i test my backups after creating them :P

oh, and somehow i got talked into being exec at large for the csss (whose website is indeed down atm). doh.

anyways, i have to go back to getting school stuff done. blah. i hope i can find some time to write code this week…

crowd behaviour amuses me.

there are always long lines for the 145 bus, the last leg of my trip to school. the school crowds are big enough that they have us board through all 2 or 3 doors, and security is there to make sure we stay in lines and off the road. today a 2-door bus showed up just after i arrived, but when it was 2/3 full a 3-door bus pulled up behind it. suddenly almost everyone rushed for the other bus. i figured i had the choice of standing on the first bus or standing on the second, so i stayed with the first and had plenty of room to stand in – normally we’re packed like sardines :P

once the doors closed I looked around, and noticed something that’s far too common. the newer buses have some seats at the front that automatically fold up, for the convenience of wheelchairs n’stuff. a pair of these seats had been left up, and there were so few students on the bus that nobody was even standing in the space the seats would occupy!

i waited a minute to see if anyone would take the seats, then pushed my way to the front and put the seats down myself. :) once i’d done that, someone else sat in the other seat, but he would have stood for the whole ride if I’d gone to the other bus. :P
i’m not sure if people have trouble with the latch that releases the seats, or it’s one of those funny social things, or if they just don’t care… but it got me a seat on the bus today. :)

i’m also happy to see more no-smoking signs around sfu. there are a few outdoor areas that i have to walk through regularly, and now i don’t have to try and hold my breath for them. yay :)