Spring break was awesome. I finished almost all the work that I had been assigned and got to play some Black Ops, watch new television shows and eat some amazing food. I can't wait to head back there during Summer!

The CS 241 programming assignment, where one has to implement malloc + realloc + free, was an amazing learning experience. Mentally going over my CS 225 notes and thinking abou which data structures to use, making small changes in my C code to optimize it for slightly better performance, finding the right balance between memory utilization and speed; I learnt a lot over the course of the assigment and it was also a lot of fun. 

In other news, I'm now an Undergraduate Research Assistant for the Locus group! I'm working with my friend Onur to develop web applications for this project. So far, we've written code in Python(which I'm pretty sure we'll have to port over to php) and we'll be starting the next phase of development soon. 

Installed node.js and MongoDB on my computer yesterday. Might play a bit with that over Spring Break. Another goal of mine is to finish my CS 241 programming assignment(implementation of malloc) and catch up in all my classes. And work on the CS 411 project. 

Check out this amazing CSS 3 demo!

It's not been that long since I started this blog, and already the frequency of posts is decreasing. I think I am going to make a conscious effort to start posting more; I used to enjoy writing when I was younger and feel that I should continue doing so in the future.

I found out today that I'll be having two midterms and a final in a row after a week: 3/7 is my Physics 214 final, 3/8 is my CS 241 midterm and 3/9 is my CS 411 midterm. Hopefully I won't have a hard time if I start studying like a week or so earlier.

The CS 241 programming assignment (sorting and merging numbers in files using threads) took me slightly longer than it should have: I made s stupid mistake while coding that was leading to disastrous race conditions between my threads. I guess I learned my lesson about not coding in the middle of the night while sleep beckons. On the plus side, I did learn about helgrind and used it to debug my code. I learned a lot doing that assignment and overall it was a great experience.

I also came up with, what I think is, a brilliant idea for a website that Sam and I will be building soon. I even went and bought the domain for the website. My plan is to build it during Spring Break and launch it within the end of this semester. More details to follow.

Over the past few days I've been using Dropbox heavily, and I must say it is really, REALLY awesome. I usually work on multiple computers and keeping files in sync with each other was always a pain(unless it is code, in which case it is Github all the way!). Now, I just put everything in my Dropbox and don't have to worry about anything. I even added a cron job to back up all my important folders to my Dropbox account every night. No more missing data for me!

Another thing that I think is super useful is the Desktop notifications in Gmail. I now sign into my gmail and university accounts, shift to a different workspace/window and don't have to constantly check my mail anymore for new messages/chat threads. Hopefully, this will up my productivity a little bit. 

Just got done with my CS 411 homework. Goal for the weekend: finish my 2nd CS 241 programming assignment and study for the Physics 214 midterm. And of course, do some sweet Python coding. 

Also, CSS3-rounded-borders-goodness yay!

2/1/2011: All classes after 5.00 pm cancelled. 

2/2/2011: All classes cancelled.

The blue car in the picture is my roommate's car. And yes, it is pretty awesome. 

Started doing some coding in Python today. Learning Ruby over Winter Break really helped me get right in and start coding without worrying to much about the syntax. 

(download)

Click here to download:

snow-day-imwifBIsppcpwuEgzqEa.zip (1.28 MB)

So I decided to drop my CWL 114 class, not because I didn't like it, but because I realized that I do not need to take two gen-eds this semester to graduate in time. Following the advice of one of my friends, I mapped out my tentative schedule for the next 4 semesters and came to the conclusion that 18 credit hours this semester is not required. I am now back to a happy 15 credit hour schedule :)

Consequently, I now have my Tuesdays and Thursdays (almost) free. I plan to invest that time into expanding my current technological skill set to include(as of now) Python and possibly Django. I also want to spend more time with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and possibly build an application using it. 

So we had 'picture day' in Phil 102 today. I was talking to the instructor about an article I found and wrote my name down as "CS" on the board instead of my slick moniker "KP". Thankfully, I caught this error in time. 

Sometimes I wish life had syntax highlighting built in.