starts with s, rhymes with feces
i've been meaning to do one of these posts since classes started, but i've been lazy. this quarter i am taking two philosphy classes, as well as continuing my MQP. these are the first philosphy classes i've ever taken, and i am enjoying them. the first is essentially a religion class. so far, we've been studying natural theology, which is the idea you can prove religion scientifically. it hasn't been fairing very well. hah. the professor is interesting. he looks like socrates, has the most jewish voice you could imagine, and is very hippie-esque otherwise. his teaching style is interesting and very engaging. very discussion oriented. and he often gives prompts to people who aren't coming up with the word he's looking for, an example of which is the subject of this post.
the other class pretty much amounts to political philosophy. so far, we've been dealing with the development and evolution of the public sphere, which is the institution at the core of modern liberal democracy. the class started out interested, then got kind of boring, then scared me by dipping heavily in to capitalism for a few days, but now we're back to discussing philosophy and more interesting things, and it seems as if it will stay that way for the rest of the quarter. the professor is one of those young thin guys who wears sweaters. i think you all probably know what i mean. he reminds me a bit of norm mcdonald, too. he says we may watch history of the world part 1 in class sometime, too, which is cool. this class is also discussion oriented, though not as much as the other. a lot of it also involves him reading the text to us. which is good, because then i don't have to do so in my spare time. hah. somehow i feel i come off as less eloquent than i'd like to think i am in discussions in this class, though.
and the project. well, we ended up scrapping the codebase that utilizes gnutella. there were just too many bugs. so now we're implementing the security system on a stubbed p2p network. it's a little less interesting, but there are less infuriating bugs. the install mechanism of the new codebase was pretty arcane, and led me to have my doubts that it would turn out to be much better than the previous one. however, after digging through the code for numerous hours and exploring, i'm pretty sure it's well-written. the guy just didn't know that, for example, it's bad to necessitate installing to the source directory, and writing a c program that prints out and executes a shell script is just plain... weird. so yeah, that's going pretty well.
let's see. other stuff. i've been messing with gui customization stuff a lot again lately. finally almost done with the winstripe theme for thunderbird. camino and chimera themes for firefox are in various states of completion, and i ported the latest set of bluecurve icons over to windows/iconpackager a few days ago, with painstaking accuracy. i created some of the icons myself, and touched up many others. all of these goodies should be making their way to wincustomize in due time.
the other class pretty much amounts to political philosophy. so far, we've been dealing with the development and evolution of the public sphere, which is the institution at the core of modern liberal democracy. the class started out interested, then got kind of boring, then scared me by dipping heavily in to capitalism for a few days, but now we're back to discussing philosophy and more interesting things, and it seems as if it will stay that way for the rest of the quarter. the professor is one of those young thin guys who wears sweaters. i think you all probably know what i mean. he reminds me a bit of norm mcdonald, too. he says we may watch history of the world part 1 in class sometime, too, which is cool. this class is also discussion oriented, though not as much as the other. a lot of it also involves him reading the text to us. which is good, because then i don't have to do so in my spare time. hah. somehow i feel i come off as less eloquent than i'd like to think i am in discussions in this class, though.
and the project. well, we ended up scrapping the codebase that utilizes gnutella. there were just too many bugs. so now we're implementing the security system on a stubbed p2p network. it's a little less interesting, but there are less infuriating bugs. the install mechanism of the new codebase was pretty arcane, and led me to have my doubts that it would turn out to be much better than the previous one. however, after digging through the code for numerous hours and exploring, i'm pretty sure it's well-written. the guy just didn't know that, for example, it's bad to necessitate installing to the source directory, and writing a c program that prints out and executes a shell script is just plain... weird. so yeah, that's going pretty well.
let's see. other stuff. i've been messing with gui customization stuff a lot again lately. finally almost done with the winstripe theme for thunderbird. camino and chimera themes for firefox are in various states of completion, and i ported the latest set of bluecurve icons over to windows/iconpackager a few days ago, with painstaking accuracy. i created some of the icons myself, and touched up many others. all of these goodies should be making their way to wincustomize in due time.