Party at Saun’s house! The ProgDev TAs met in the College of Computing and we left for Saun’s place shortly afterward. A great dinner of hamburgers and pasta, followed by evasive rounds of chinese checkers. Much was fun had by all. Pictures below.

Updated my resume. Had an exam in Biology and Circuit Analysis. Filed a bug report on the hpcalc.org web site regarding the partial fraction expansion problems encountered on the HP49g calculator a few days ago.

The idea of decentralized systems is a very fascinating one. A decentralized system is essentially a model without a central leader or authority. Many real-world examples, such as traffic jams, ant colonization, and cellular division follow this strange and surprising paradigm. Today I explored two decentralized system simulators: StarLogo, which I have described in a previous entry, and breve, a 3D simulation environment.

Eye exam in the morning, followed by a Circuit Analysis review session by the professor. A busy day full of studying in the library with Maryam, with the usual lab hours in the evening. However boring today’s entry may seen, I was indeed very productive.

Josh and I got checked off on our final design project for Embedded Microcontroller Lab, though it wasn’t very much fun lugging all those electronics to school. Excellent! We still have the final project report due on Tuesday, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re in the clear.

Partial fraction expansion wasn’t working on my HP49 calculator for some reason. Frustrated, I made a post to comp.sys.hp48 and reset the calculator, using Matthias Bunte’s ROM upgrade program for Linux, I always forget the steps needed to do this. I later discovered that I really didn’t have to reset my calculator at all; simply disable the Step-by-Step flag and all is well again.

The simpler ADC samples arrived in the mail today, though we no longer need it. Man, Texas Instruments is fast! I turned in the last biology lab report of the term, and took a biology lab exam in early afternoon. Spent the evening grading Test 5 for CS1322, before rushing off to teach recitation, where we covered graphs and graph traversals, along with alternate hash table implementations.

Josh came over and we spent the day at my place trying to get the TLV1570 ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) to behave. Mistake after mistake, we eventually decided to give up on the complicated 8-channel part and order a simpler TLV1572 ADC instead, free samples courtesy of Texas Instruments. I dropped Josh back at his apartment, and carefully read the ADC instructions once more when I returned just to make sure that I had not missed something obvious. Oops. It turns out that I had the pins connected wrong all along!

Even though the ADC is still quite flaky, it works well enough now to where I think we can get a check off on Wednesday. I’m ready to get this project over with.

Tenatively signed up for classes for Fall 2003 during Phase I registration. Worked on the design project for Embedded Microcontrollers. Except for interfacing with the SPI part, everything seems to work correctly and we should be able to turn it in by the end of the week. Adam and I had dinner at the International House of Pancakes.

Maryam and I went to see Nueve reinas, a Spanish film directed by Fabián Bielinsky. The film was one of many in the week-long 4th Annual Hispanic Film Festival. I enjoyed the movie, but Maryam thought it was pretty boring for some reason. She’s weird like that.

I’m glad its Friday. Installed Phoenix, a light-weight redesign of the Mozilla web browser component. Made an eye appointment for next Thursday at 10 AM with the College Optical center at Georgia Tech. Josh, Melissa, and I ate dinner at Eats, a smallish, inexpensive Italian cafeteria-style restaurant. I learned about GTK+ and made a simple "Hello World" graphical application.

Finished my biology lab report. Nicky and I ate lunch at Don Pabló’s. Had lab hours in the evening as usual.