Four Day Week!!!!

I am so happy that today is Good Friday.  I am going to get some much needed sleep, and catch up on some schoolwork.

Today I started (and finished) Project #2.  I just turned on the automatic parentheses in DrRacket.  Sometimes, I find them very helpful, because it cuts down on the amount of typing I have to do, but every problem I encountered with the project related to the parentheses.  Sometimes I had too many, and sometimes I did not have enough.   These little mistakes made the project take longer than necessary.  I am still deciding if I am going to attempt the bonus.

On a completely different note, I read Chris Ng’s blog (http://csc104chrisng.blogspot.ca) this afternoon.  Congratulations on a fantastic team finish at the Canadian University Badminton Championships Chris!

One Stressful Week and One Lesson Learned!

This week I had three midterms, two quizzes, and three assignments due.  Everything was going well, until I had to do Wikipedia Part 3.  I had my entire assignment prepared, but when I went to edit the page on Friday night, I realized that the page I wanted to edit was locked and that I did not have permission to write on that page!  I started to panic, because the assignment was due in a few hours.  I read every Wikipedia page possible, and I talked with different users.  After a lot of extra work, I did the best I could to get my assignment submitted. 

After that fiasco was over, I realized why more people don’t edit Wikipedia more often.  It’s hard, and unfair (yes, I know that the world is unfair, but Wikipedia seems a little extreme considering it’s an encyclopedia).  My page was protected because irresponsible people put inappropriate and profane language on the page.  This stops people who have good intentions from adding to the page.  Another problem is, even though one user does a lot of quality work on a page, and provides accurate information, another user, who may know nothing on the topic, can simply delete all that information.  This decreased the value of the page, and Wikipedia (and seems a little unfair), but unfortunately I cannot think of a real solution to this problem.  

If there is one thing I take away from this experience, it is that I now understand why Wikipedia is never a good source, and that it is always important to check the validity of your sources, because anyone can put anything on the Internet.

Recursion and Term Test 2

Tuesday’s lecture topic was recursion.  Thank goodness!  I definitely understand the topic a lot better.   I realized that defining a function is not the same as a dictionary definition.  Recursion is more like a bunch of repeated steps based off of a smallest case.  It is kind of like mathematical induction where you have a base case or smallest case, and then you try and get to the next case (the n+1 case) (or vice versa).  Recursion is a nice compact and fast way of defining a function.

On Thursday we had the second term test.  I think I did fairly well.  I am so glad we went over recursion on Tuesday, because it was apart of the coding question on the test!

Recursion and Modern Computers

During this week’s lecture, we talked about recursion.  I have a hard time understanding how you can put the function you are defining inside your definition of that function.  To me, this idea seems equivalent to looking up a word in a dictionary only to find the word within the definition of the word, which then is really not a definition!  Hopefully, we will go over recursion more next week.

We also started talking about modern computers.  You would think this lecture would be boring, but since I know absolutely nothing about computers and how they work, the lecture was fairly interesting.  The most interesting fact I learned was during the heat wave in Australia cell phones stopped working outside because they overheated! 

Next week is the second term test.  I am happy we get a test aid; otherwise I would have a lot of memorizing to do!  This weekend will be full of studying for this term test and the three other term tests I have coming up in the very near future!

Project #1 and Binary

I have started and mostly completed project #1.  After reading the handout, I thought project #1 was going to be extremely difficult, but once I started I realized, for the most part, the project was a fair test of knowledge of DrRacket. 

In class this week, we continued to talk about binary numbers.  Initially, I was confused, and didn’t really understand what was going on.  After we did the example where we converted 37 to binary, everything made a lot more sense.   Even though I understand the concepts, I don’t think I can do anything in binary without using my notes and examples from class.  I guess I need to start practicing!