It’s only been 6 months or so since my last post, so now seems like a good time to upgrade. This semester is probably the most interesting set of classes I’ve had yet (CS-wise anyways). Robots and Society, which is an alternative to CS Ethics, is insanely interesting and we have some very interesting debates. I’m planning on writing my term paper about the ethics of strong AI, which will certainly be interesting. CS2200 (Systems and Networking) sparked an interest in Systems. That and my lukewarm reaction to Introduction to AI led me to move into Systems, which has a ton of interesting problems (parallelization is the big thing right now). Hopefully I’ll be able to take the Linux kernel class the next time it’s offered. I’m glad I took databases, it was extremely useful stuff to learn and I got a chance to really build something in PHP. I do want to play with Ruby, or some other functional language - maybe play with Rails and build a simple To Do list that I can’t seem to find anywhere (not one that’s simple or easy to use).
I’m also taking Advanced Operating Systems, we’re doing a lot of stuff with threading. I’ve got to build a multithreaded web server soon, which should be interesting - ironically, a single threaded web server that uses asynchronous IO (and some of the other kernel tricks) is usually faster. I’m also taking User Interface Design, which is vastly necessary - since most CS majors seem to think about interfaces as an afterthought, something years of using Apple’s interfaces then using something else has made abundantly clear. I do need to take algorithms soon though, since it is the core of CS. I can’t wait to graduate though, I want to go build something in the real world.
It snowed recently, which was cool - other than the freezing temperatures. 30 Rock and the few episodes of Studio 60 I’ve seen were great - it’s sucks that Studio 60 was cancelled though. This writer’s strike sucks - give in soon you evil producers! I needs my Entourage and trashy TV. Lost starts tonight, I’m hoping for consistent awesomeness, but I should probably go in with low expectations after most of last season. Now to head off to a group meeting. Maybe I’ll post more often this year… maybe….