A full day of classes today, including an exam in Computers and Society. Met with Steven in the afternoon in the library to finish up the Electromagnetics homework. Worked on Assignment 3 for Project Engineering using Microsoft Excel 2003. Learned how to use the data analysis add-in to generate random number distributions and histograms, which I thought were neat features. Still, I feel as though I can’t trust any of my data when using Microsoft products, evidenced by the fact that Excel crashed on me twice while performing rudimentary operations.

Since I presented last week, I basically spaced out for the majority of Professional Practice. Adam and I went to Little Dino’s afterwards for lunch. I briefly spoke with Stevie about techniques to write a wiki system before returning to the apartment.

It turns out that my initial impressions were correct. Writing a lexer and a minimal LR parser seem to be the best way to go about the task. I therefore quickly hacked together a preliminary grammar using the BNF style for LaTeX.

Good news! I grudgingly went and picked an undergraduate degree petition application. It’s due on February 25th. CTAN has also accepted IEEEannot into their catalogue. Finally, I accidentely stumbled upon an article on working more productively with bash. Specifically, I discovered that bash supports intelligent tab competion, via /etc/bash_completion in Debian.

Made the transition to XHTML. Most of the pages are now fully XHTML 1.1 compliant. The main page now validates with PHP sessions. The next major development on the site will be the WikiFilter, which is still quite buggy. Finally, I created a page for IEEEannot, which is now publically available under the Perl Artistic License. Hope that someone finds it useful.

Familiarized myself with the basics of using and working with gdb, the GNU Project Debugger. I also unearthed the mystery of static and shared libraries, and learned how to load libraries using dlfcn.h. It’s just a small step in the grand scheme of things.

Adam introduced me to a new web log analyzer tool called awstats. There are some minor spelling and grammatical errors in the software. Consequently, I’ve submitted a bug report to the developers on SourceForge. The site has also been upgraded, and a crontab entry has been added to gehennom to automatically update the analyzer.

Registered for the second phase of the EIT/FE exam on the ELSES website. Had an interview with Jim Hudson at the Technology Square Research Building in the evening. He is working on a project to understand how educational discussions vary from one environment to another, such as classrooms and online discussion structures. I volunteered for the interview, since I had nothing better to do today.

Turned in Problem Set 4 for Electromagnetics and received my exam scores for Electromagnetics and Engineering Economy. I’m pleased with the results. I’m also extremely exhausted. I actually spent most of the evening sleeping, and accomplishing little else.

Final preparations for the Project Engineering and Professional Practice presentation before heading to class. I boldly volunteered to go second. I just wanted to be done with the whole thing, and I’m glad I went early. All in all, it’s not the best presentation that I’ve ever given, but it’s certainly not the worst either. Regardless, I feel that a great burden has been lifted off my shoulders. I can finally give some much needed attention to other important tasks that I’ve been neglecting – like finding a nice girlfriend.

I just realized that mplayer supports AAC. Is there anything this program can’t handle?

Had an exam in Spanish. Received feedback from Christina after class and made several changes to the presentation material based on her suggestions and criticisms. I spent most of the day and night at school working on the project. I met with Jason in the evening to look over the final details of the presentation.

I found an unlocked room on campus with a transparency machine and practiced for a few a hours before heading home. It seems that this project has occupied the last several days of my life, but it’ll all be over tomorrow.

More research throughout the day. I finished up a final draft of both the annotated bibliography and presentation slides and e-mailed them to Christina for review. I’m currently on schedule and things are progressing just as planned. I briefly studied for Spanish in the evening.