Warmth, Glorious Warmth

Unknown1:55 PM0 Comment

It's been a while. I've been busy/lazy with classes and whatnot. Nothing of serious interest has occurred, and I lost the habit of writing for my blog. As it's been so long, I won't be going over the past weeks in detail, just skimming over anything of import. First off, I dropped one of my classes: Coding Theory. I didn't have the background required, and after discussing it with several people (including my professor) I decided that it was best that I stopped participating in the course. It was a serious relief to not have to worry about...

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Snow Again

Unknown2:43 AM0 Comment

Weekend Quite uneventful. Spent most of the time working on homework for Coding Theory, Cryptology and Secure Software Design. Didn't make much progress regarding CT, remains frustrating and I'll be seeking assistance once more. Crypto was surprisingly approachable, and it was a huge relief to understand the homework and have a plan of attack. I'm also planning to meet up with a few classmates next weekend to continue work on the HW. I intended to work on my SSD essay, and did make some progress. However, to my delight, the next lecture was on Role Based Access Control....

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Yay Cake

Unknown2:51 PM0 Comment

Tuesday Weather was pretty good today, not as good as yesterday but it remained in the high 40s. The Estonian weather gods have been truly benevolent as of late. My only complaint is the cold winds, but other than that it's been sunny and almost warm. Coding Theory remains a challenge, I feel that I understand the material in class but when it comes to the homework...bleh. In class today we covered parity-check matrices and the notion of dual codes (when the parity check matrix of one code is the generator matrix of another). Next course of the...

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Happy

Unknown12:24 AM1 Comment

Friday My Fridays always seem to be good days. I can only hope the trend continues. My first class, Cloud Computing Lab was a lot of fun. It was an introduction to working with MapReduce functions. We used Hadoop and worked with the provided Word Count example. (Given an input, in this case a folder with several books in plaintext, it would output the frequency of each word to a given output.) It was written in java and we were tasked to make a few alterations to it: making it ignore punctuation, make it sort words only based...

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Titles Are Getting Harder to Think of

Unknown11:22 PM1 Comment

I see these signs everywhere and the stick figures always make me giggle. Seems to be a common symbol, as they were even at the airport in Oslo. They're almost comical and I always feel like I'm in a video game or a movie. Tuesday Had a terrible time trying to get to sleep, as I've developed a cold, or something of the sort, and I'm unable to breathe through my nose. Surprisingly I wasn't as tired as I thought I'd be in the morning, but I was certainly not looking forward to attending 6 hours of classes....

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Bird is The Word

Unknown12:53 AM0 Comment

I figured this mildly interesting enough to write about: quite a few times I've seen an absolutely massive flock of birds fly over the dorm, creating quite the racket as they do so. The first time I heard them I thought it was a car alarm going off before I looked out the window. Let me tell you, it was like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. The birds also tend to congregate in large groups upon the trees. Of course the second I tried to take a picture they all spread out, so you'll just have...

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Yay for Friday

Unknown2:39 AM0 Comment

Tuesday & Wednesday Tuesday and Wednesday were largely unproductive. Due to the late arrival Monday night I didn't get to bed until around 2am. Because of this I made the decision to skip classes on Tuesday. I wasn't really equipped to handle 6 hours of classes on not enough sleep. I'm really bad at skipping classes because I feel guilty all day, but I really did need the sleep and the notes were posted online. So hopefully that won't have an impact on anything. But I really didn't accomplish anything on Tuesday, which was mostly alright with me....

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