Category Archives: Homework

Pending Review

In the last 24 clock-hours, Ben and I have put in (combined) over 24 man-hours on our CS537 project, I believe, but I think we finally found the last bug. I’m so glad, as the process was extremely frustrating.

The idea of our project is basically just to implement a correctly-synchronized scheduling algorithm in a multi-threaded system of “Stations” and “Channels” by using Java monitors. We ran into a lot of bugs over the past 24 hrs, ranging from coding typos to design flaws. In the end I doubt there are more than 10 lines that either of us wrote that haven’t been rewritten.

All that’s left now though, pending Ben’s review to see if he can get it to break, is to fix up the commenting and make sure it adheres to our (rather stringent) style guidelines.

Awesome! Now on to CS/ECE 552, where I am sure I will put in another 12+ man-hours by its Tuesday due date. 🙁

On the upshot, I finally had a reason to try out Skype to work with Ben on this, and it’s really pretty cool. I’m sure everyone reading this who would be interested has already tried it, so I won’t say anymore about that, other than that I’m impressed and probably should have tried it a long time ago. Oh, and that it’s a lot cheaper than spending 4 hrs 18 minutes at a crack on your cellphone.

Up Waaaay too late

So I didn’t go to bed until 4:45 last night/this morning. Oops. I guess I decided I needed a bit of a break now that I’m finally back to my apartment (as of 8pm tonight). I’m surprised how long I’ve made it without crashing today on 3:45 of sleep.

This was the scene yesterday when I went back in to campus to work with my CS 537 partner Ben. It’s somewhat hard to tell from the photo, but straight above me is your average early-evening-with-cloud-cover gray. Down the street at the bottom of the photo (downtown Madison), it’s pitch black. Very impressive-looking storm, though we didn’t really get anything at all out of it. One crack of thunder and a couple sprinkles.

They’re taking down the last construction crane outside Mechanical Engineering today. I can’t remember the sky over Engineering without cranes.


“One last refrain… before the sun sets.”