The College of Computing has conditionally offered me a position as an undergraduate teaching assistant for CS2130, Languages and Translation, for the upcoming summer term. I’ll more than likely accept unless something else particularly interesting comes my way. I have until May 7 to decide.
Upgraded Minix to version 2.04, and added a personal note for stock trading APIs. It looks like Interactive Brokers is currenly the best choice for designing automated trading systems.
I woke up earlier than usual to meet with Juan and do some last-minute studying. It was the last and hardest exam of the spring semester, but I think I managed to at least pass Thermodynamics. I spent much of the afternoon filing papers and archiving schoolwork. All I can do is try.
The final exam saga continued with the Computers and Society exam in the afternoon, which went well. I spent the evening attending a review session for Thermodynamics. Adam invited me to Orkut, while Brandon sent an invitation to Gmail. I’m convinced that both are social spyware products designed by our furry friends at Google. I signed up immediately.
Project Engineering and Professional Practice final exam in the early afternoon. Professor Callen thinks that I will do well in the course. I think he knows the guy who assigns the final grades, so I’m tempted to believe him.
In the technical domain, I discovered Garnome, a usermode installation of the bleeding-edge GNOME distribution. It builds the latest GNOME Desktop tarball releases and provides testers with a comfortable desktop environment. PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 was also recently released. The PHP mailing lists can be accessed via RSS through their experimental news.php.net web interface. I hope I have the opportunity to try these out sometime in the near future.
Met with Professor Callen in the early afternoon to discuss some last-minute final exam questions for Professional Practice, followed by a comprehensive Electromagnetics final exam in the afternoon. I met with Juan right after to work on Project Engineering and Professional Practice. It’s going to be an annoyingly long week.
I went in search of engineering and technology related RSS news feeds to add to Straw. As with most engineering sites, many of these feeds can be quite difficult to find. New Scientist, for example, offers the New Scientist RSS feed on science and technology, though, as far as I can tell, the link itself can be found nowhere on the actual web site. Yahoo offers RSS feeds on a variety of topics, written using simple language that is quick and easy to digest. Tom’s Hardware, a resources for PC hardware reviews and news, offers a RSS feed that is also seemingly nowhere to be found on their site. Industrial News Room has product releases on several engineering industries. Finally, NewsIsFree and 2RSS offer RSS feed directories.
The day was more or less spent deuglifying EMACS, and learning the basics of Tcl/Tk. I was able to disable the toolbar, which I never use, and change the fonts to something a little more readable. I next configured AUCTeX and installed preview-latex, a mode that allows LaTeX code to render directly inside the buffer. The Debian emacs-goodies-el package also provides some minor modes, such as highlight-current-line and ibuffer, which I put to good use. I spent whatever was left in the day studying for the Professional Practice exam on Tuesday.
It’s the last day of classes for the Spring semester. I installed Quartus II Web Edition, a free VHDL compiler and simulator by Altera, and checked out a book or two on the subject from the library. There’s a fairly descriptive Quartus tutorial as well. I also made note of Tcl/Tk, a popular scripting language used for a wide variety of integration application needs. Finally, Razza introduced me to a potential full-time job at Forest Express as a Java developer. We’ll see what happens.
I dropped by Georgia Tech for a few hours to discuss the final exam with Professor Callen, and chatted with Christina about various random topics. I performed a preliminary install of MiKTeX on legato. MiKTex is an up-to-date implementation of TeX and related programs for the Microsoft Windows operating system. TeXnicCenter complements MiKTeX by providing a full-featured integrated development environment. Both are freely available under the GNU General Public License.
Balanced my checkbook. All assignments have now officially been turned in and all that’s left to worry about are final exams. I began studying for Project Engineering and Professional Practice by working problems from the sample final exam. Unfortunately, solutions are not provided. Finally, Bryan signed my PGP key. Hooray for the web of trust.