22 January 2004, the wee hours
The Standard Template Library is freaking crazy. This is the place I go to figure out what does what. I’m working hard on compilers, though I seem to lack the focus I used to have. Our first assignment is due in a week. I am feeling stressed.
21 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
The 4th iPod TV Spot is freaking wicked. You should check it out, it’s the best one they have done so far. I like break dancing, Apple, and iPods a lot though, so there may be some bias here.
21 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
You specify the syntax of a context free language with a context free grammar. Most programming languages correspond to a special class of context-free languages known as LALR languages. I have spent the past few days trying to write a working Ada/CS grammar, only to discover one laying around on the internet that works just fine. After getting rid of all the Yacc-isms I was left with something useful. I can’t believe I wasted so much time these past few days.
I am now trying to parse the output of this program called ilalr, which takes as input a LALR grammar and returns information that can be used to build a program that parses the grammar
Compilers is probably going to be a very hard course.
19 January 2004, late afternoon
I’ve been mucking around with my iPod since it arrived yesterday. I’ve been ripping my CD’s for the past few days, and am probably a third of the way done now. Right now my iPod is just filled with my albums. I’m not sure if I can get my entire CD collection on the iPod, but here is hoping. (I’m probably going to rip all my ‘fan ban’ chinese cd’s at 128 bit ACC to save space.)
You’ve probably read plenty of stuff on people raving about how great their iPods are, so I will try and tell you some things I’ve noticed that apple could improve on. First, the touch wheel is really sensitive, a bit too sensitive. It seems far to easy to accidently have your iPod do stuff while it is just sitting in your pocket. Secondly, I don’t like the way apple has engineered the syncing mechanism. It works nice if you want your iPod to mirror your iTunes music collection, but if this is not for you there are no real alternatives besides manually managing your music. I was hoping that I could upload all my albums, erase them from my hard drive, and then select some play lists in iTunes that I want to iPod to keep in sync with. I am hoping Apple will improve the syncing in a new release of iTunes.
All that said, the thing is very nice. I’m liking it so far.
Comment [5] Life | Apple Computers
19 January 2004, the wee hours
My iPod arrived today. Well, it actually arrived last tuesday, but it was a long process getting it from my home in Toronto up here to Waterloo. I’m playing music from it now. So far, so good.
Comment [2] Life | Apple Computers
18 January 2004, mid-afternoon
Nina got eliminated. Tragedy! All our dreams of meeting Strombo have been dashed.
18 January 2004, early afternoon
Shima’s friend Nina is one of the finalists in MuchMusic’s VJ Search contest. So go to their website and vote for her. I want to know a MuchMusic VJ, so make this happen people.
My cousin Vitty, doctor in training, is in the Miss Canada pageant. She’s Miss Calgary right now. You can also vote for her to be the next Miss Canada by sending an e-mail to vote@beautiesofcanada.com with “Vithya Gnanakumar” in
the subject line.
17 January 2004, late at night
Have you heard the new Britney Spears song, Toxic? If you haven’t, go and listen, it’s surprisingly good. I never thought I’d ever catch myself complementing Britney Spears on one of her songs. However, I don’t think it sounds like her singing at all. Anyone else of the same opinion?
16 January 2004, early evening
Just got back from a talk given by one of the big guys in the Computer Science community, Al Aho. (He has written a lot of important computer science texts, most notably the Dragon Book.) The talk was quite good. He discussed the state of software today, and talked about his research in to compilers and programming languages for quantum computers. I saw Yang and Phil, Nabeel, Ju-lian and Ryan at the talk. The room was packed. I’ve never been to such a busy talk.
15 January 2004, late evening
The Complete Faye Wong Discography. This is the discography I have used since high school to figure out the english names of all the Faye Wong tracks I like. The guy who runs the site, Josh, is also a Scarborough boy to boot.
Comment [2] Interesting Links | Music
15 January 2004, the wee hours
I seem to have forgotten a lot of C++. That sucks. I will probably know a lot when I am done this project.
14 January 2004, early evening
I met with Kumar today to work on our compilers project. We think we have sketched out what we need to implement in order to recognize the tokens in our language.
For those who don’t know, when you write a computer program, the first part of compilation involves a program called a scanner breaking your program up into individual tokens, which are then fed to a parser and processed further. For example, a C code fragment like “x = x + 1” would become something like “ID ASSIGN ID PLUS INT_LITERAL”. Additional information like the name of the identifier and the value of the integer literal would also be stored in the token, to be used later when compiling. So now you know a little bit more about compilers.
It is so cold outside. I am in no mood to walk back home, but will probably do so shortly.
Comment [5] Compilers | Computer Science
13 January 2004, the wee hours
I have started reading the definition of the language we are supposed to write a compiler for, Ada/CS. Ada/CS is a subset of the language Ada, which was developed for use by US department of the defense. Compilers looks like it will be a bitch of a course.
Comment [1] Computer Science | Compilers
13 January 2004, the wee hours
I’m getting my iPod in a matter of days. I’m trying to decide what format I should rip music in, and at what bit rate. Right now I am partial to ACC (Apple’s Mpeg-4 format). mp4 files sound better at lower bit-rates, so you can get good quality music out of smaller files. The only problem I see with mp4’s is that they currently can only be played in iTunes and on an iPod (I believe). I’m not sure if this is really an issue or not. I plan to start ripping my CD collection as soon as I can figure this out.
Comment [4] Music | Technology
9 January 2004, mid-afternoon
I have ordered an iPod! There has been much talk on my part about getting one for quite some time now, so I decided with the announcement of the 15 gig model i’d bite the bullet and buy it. (My thinking is that with no big iPod announcements at Macworld that there would be no changes to the iPod for some time.) The iPod is in Shanghai, China right now. I’m waiting for it to arrive here.
7 January 2004, mid-afternoon
What is Mac OS X? This is an interesting article I found linked on Slashdot which discusses the technical details of Mac OS X. An interesting read if you are keen on computers and what not.
6 January 2004, mid-afternoon
School has been pretty good so far. I had my marxist theory class yesterday, and it sounds like it will be interesting. I’m hoping it isn’t too much work.
We went to FED 102 last night, we being me and gary. We got there quite early, maybe 9:30 or so, and were surprised to see we weren’t alone. I left messages with people letting them know to go, so Gary and I sat around waiting to see who would show. Victor, Rick and Phoebe ended up showing up, which was cool. We spent most of the night with them. I saw a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while, which is always nice.
Waking up this morning for my Compilers class was hard. I think I have been to 2 other 8:30 classes my entire university career. The first time was when I was taking CS 251 with Robert Mann. There was another section being offered, and I used to go to that one because it was later. One day I happened to wake up early, and decided I’d go and check out the class I was supposed to be attending. The second time was when I was taking Group Theory. I skipped all the lectures and taught the material to myself because I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. (Apparently Prof. Ng taught so slow that there really was no point attending class anyway.) We had an in-class midterm for the class, so I had to go to that class.
I’m in the C&D now, waiting for my statistics class to start. I am not looking forward to the class at all.
5 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
Tomorrow is my first last day of school. I’m not really excited about it. I have moved back to my old place in Waterloo. My room was bare all of last term, so this term I have decided to fix that. I finally put up the Chungking Express poster that I received as a birthday gift two years ago. The poster is looking pretty damn cool in my room. I have also put up a hello kitty calendar, it’s above my bed. Dave drew me a picture of myself for christmas, and that is hanging above the light switch to my room. The picture actually replaces one he had his brother draw of my many years ago, that was stolen when I moved into Cardill Crescent. All in all, my room still looks pretty bare, but this is all a start.
I’m slowly moving this blog from blogger to moveable type. Eventually I will host it from the domain ramanan.funkaoshi.com. I will make www.funkaoshi.com be a sort of index to all the things I have up on the web, for examle my photoblog. Expect to see changes shortly.
I’ve been waking up well past lunch during the entire christmas holiday. I don’t know how I will be able to wake up for class tomorrow. We’ll have to wait and see how this goes.
1 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
Happy new year to everyone. We are watching 24 right now. It is quite good. We’re almost at the end of it all. This season is quite good. Lots of torturing. And putting people in ‘the room’.
30 December 2003, early morning
Started watching season 2 of 24 today. The show is still quite good, although a bit predictable at times. They still manage to throw in some crazy plot twists. Being true to their winning formula last season, most of the women on the show are serious dumb asses. I’m hoping they kill the daughter this season, but I think she is too hot to go. If they kill the dumb sister I will happy, but she has 16 episodes to redeem herself.
26 December 2003, late afternoon
The past few days have been great. I got some cool stuff for Christmas, and really, isn’t that what Christmas is all about.
Tony came back from the states yesterday, and I spent the evening with him, Howard, Derek and Rishi. Christmas Eve was spent watching Bowling for Columbine and X2, the greatest comic book movie ever. My friends are coming over today to start watching My So Called Life.
23 December 2003, evening time
I must say that iTunes is a great program. I’m streaming my music to my iMac, now Krishna’s computer, so I can listen to my music on his speakers. It is very easy to share music in this fashion with iTunes.
22 December 2003, evening time
Friday night I loitered about with my friends. Watched Lord of the Rings in the afternoon, which was wicked, and ate at Alice Fazooli’s at night.
Saturday I went down to System Sound Bar for Fukhouse’s latest party. It was a wicked night out. All the DJ’s were wicked. Two of the sets were done live. The music was crazy. James, Constantine, Rishi and myself went down for the party. There was booty house in the vip room that was also quite good.
I had a big pot luck last night. Lots of people showed up, which was great. As usual we had way too much food. Even Howard brought something this year. Well he brought KFC, but that’s a start. Everyone loves fried chicken.
20 December 2003, evening time
The new Faye Wong cd is excellent. I can’t stress that enough. Track 3 and 9 standout right now as really strong songs, but the album is solid. Will try and write a longer review once I’ve listened to it a bit more.
20 December 2003, early evening
I saw the last installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy today. What an excellent movie. I can’t wait for them to make the mother of all box sets for it. I wonder how long we will have to wait for such a thing.
I have been reading quicksilver. The book is good so far I suppose, though not much has happened yet. It is a confusing read keeping track of all the characters however. I want to finish it before school starts again, though I don’t know if that is possible.
