(no subject)
I'm now president of airsoc. Or president elect, anyway; we don't officially hand over until the end of term three. I was worried that I wouldn't be very good at it, but I was in charge at the last two skirmishes because Matt couldn't go. I seemed to do pretty well, which makes me considerably less worried. The first was a lot of hassle, but I was also doing the jobs of quartermaster and treasurer, and there were a lot of people there. Next year I'll have other people doing those jobs, so I should have more time to prepare my own kit.
I've bought a 1J spring to upgrade my P90 with. Unfortunately, as I was taking the gearbox apart, I somehow managed to break the tappet plate. That's the bit with the nozzle, which moves backwards to load a BB and directs the compressed air from the piston. So I need to replace that, which is annoying. Andi at the Grange recommended King Arms or Element ones, which are reinforced so they don't snap so easily. Someone who seems to know what he's talking about has said Guarder ones are good.
Also I need to worry about grease to lubricate the gears and piston. I have a 500g tub which didn't cost very much, but I don't know if it's suitable. The tub doesn't give its composition except to say that it's lithium-based, and I haven't been able to find any more information online. I've seen people saying lithium grease ruins rubber parts, but I've also seen "white lithium" grease being recommended. It's all very confusing - there's a lot of people saying things, and most of them probably don't know what they're talking about, but I don't know how to distinguish those from the ones that do. The sensible thing to do would be get grease made by the manufacturers, but that's ridiculously expensive and you only get a tiny amount.
For a long time my laptop wouldn't wake up after I put it to sleep. Upgrading the kernel to 2.6.31 seems to have fixed that. It has failed to wake up a couple of times since, but it almost always succeeds.
I got 92% on the Math Stats A exam, which was pretty cool. I don't get results from my Data Structures exams until the end of the year.
We had to give a presentation for our essays, in front of our tutors and a small group of students. Normally it's supposed to be 15 minutes, but for whatever reason my tutor said 10. I did mine on cyphers that offer perfect secrecy and why they suck. Thanks partly to the week before being stupidly busy but mostly to silliness, I didn't properly start to write it until the day before, and when I gave it for real my only rehearsals had been going over bits in my head. Given that, I think it went pretty well: I stumbled over my words a lot, but I ran out of time before I ran out of things to say (I had been worried that I didn't have enough). Mine wasn't the best presentation in my group - Ed spoke about knot theory and it sounded like he'd prepared. But I think it may have been second best (out of four). Again, I won't actually know how I did until the end of the year.
My essay itself is over 4000 words, but I think I just need to do some polishing up.
There's coursework for Automata and Formal Languages to be done over easter. In theory it's about parsing and lexing. What we need to do is make a shell using JavaCC. I don't like Java. But more annoyingly, the specification is really vague. It's pretty obvious how the parsing and lexing is supposed to work, but there are loads of edge cases in what I'm supposed to do with the stuff I've parsed and lexed. It's probably supposed to be "do what other shells do in this situation", but it's not obvious to what extent we're supposed to emulate them, and in some cases the examples deviate from other shells. I've posted a bunch of questions on the forum relating to the module, looking for clarification. Also we're expected to do tab completion, which means getting unbuffered input, which as far as I'm aware is a lot of trouble to go to for something which is only tangentially related to the point of the coursework.
My entry in last term's 48 hour competition (theme: stealth) was The Quick and the Detected which I made with Ali. You control a submarine with a cloaking device powered by kinetic energy: they can't see you if you're fast enough. (I now regret the name, and pretty much everyone refers to it as Speedstealth, because that's the 'temporory' name I gave to the svn repository.) It came in joint first place, which surprised me: not that it was bad, but it wasn't nearly as fun as Alan's entry, which lost because it wasn't a technical accomplishment. Which I think is a bad metric, but whatever.
My entry in this term's competition (theme: education) was The Very Hungry Caterpillar: The Game. Officially I was supposed to be on a team with Alan, but neither of us showed up until the Saturday morning for differing reasons. I didn't have a good game idea (I didn't like the theme), and his plan was just to make lots of crappy games in 2-3 hours each, so I decided to do the same thing. He gave me the idea (presenting it as "snake with gravity"), and then because I was stupid it took me the entire rest of the competition to make. It's not fun to play, but I like some of the technical details. Alan narrates the book (which makes it totally illegal; also my soundcard produces lots of static which is not pleasant) while you pick up fruit. When you've got all the fruit in a level he moves on to the next line. I think the integration was well-done, just not enough to save the game.
There's only a week left of term. I'm not planning to spend much time in Bristol over the holidays though: I have a lot of work to do, and also I like living here better than living at home. But I'll go home probably for two weeks, give or take, to see friends. Maybe I'll also get a few hours at the Orpheus, which might help pay for my train tickets.
I'm playing in an online Go tournament on KGS. I've only played one game so far, some time last term. (I lost.) I'd forgotten all about the tournament until my opponent emailed me on Friday asking when I'm free to play.
I've been to two Ceileidhs (Scottish/Irish folk dances) this term. They're lots of fun. I'm surprised at how well everyone seems to stay coordinated, even after the caller stops calling: the only indication you get of where the other groups are is from momentary glimpses, or sometimes everyone shouts at a certain point, but all the groups somehow seem to stay in the same time. At the last one I wore a skirt over my trousers briefly. Rachel brought it as a joke for Jon: he wasn't sure if jeans would be appropriate (and I didn't remember, despite having been before), so she said she'd lend him a pair of "Irish trousers" that he could change into when he got here. (Or actually that might have been someone else on her facebook chat.) So after he saw it and refused, Nathan said "I will if you will", and in the end five of us took a turn to wear the skirt for one dance. Except in my case it was just the intermission, for some reason. Apparently it suited me.
This entry was largely written and polished while I should have been revising for a test on Wednesday. It's the second of two class tests in Metric spaces. I got 66/100 on the previous one, which got scaled to 82.8% (8X/10 + 30); I could have done better, but partly I was stupid and partly I lost 6 marks due to a diagram not being very well drawn. If I do better on this next test, only the second mark counts, but if I do worse they take an average. In theory I probably shouldn't do as well, because I don't know the material as well and I'm not revising like I should be. (Tomorrow evening I have to go to a president's meeting, so that's partly out as well.)
I've bought a 1J spring to upgrade my P90 with. Unfortunately, as I was taking the gearbox apart, I somehow managed to break the tappet plate. That's the bit with the nozzle, which moves backwards to load a BB and directs the compressed air from the piston. So I need to replace that, which is annoying. Andi at the Grange recommended King Arms or Element ones, which are reinforced so they don't snap so easily. Someone who seems to know what he's talking about has said Guarder ones are good.
Also I need to worry about grease to lubricate the gears and piston. I have a 500g tub which didn't cost very much, but I don't know if it's suitable. The tub doesn't give its composition except to say that it's lithium-based, and I haven't been able to find any more information online. I've seen people saying lithium grease ruins rubber parts, but I've also seen "white lithium" grease being recommended. It's all very confusing - there's a lot of people saying things, and most of them probably don't know what they're talking about, but I don't know how to distinguish those from the ones that do. The sensible thing to do would be get grease made by the manufacturers, but that's ridiculously expensive and you only get a tiny amount.
For a long time my laptop wouldn't wake up after I put it to sleep. Upgrading the kernel to 2.6.31 seems to have fixed that. It has failed to wake up a couple of times since, but it almost always succeeds.
I got 92% on the Math Stats A exam, which was pretty cool. I don't get results from my Data Structures exams until the end of the year.
We had to give a presentation for our essays, in front of our tutors and a small group of students. Normally it's supposed to be 15 minutes, but for whatever reason my tutor said 10. I did mine on cyphers that offer perfect secrecy and why they suck. Thanks partly to the week before being stupidly busy but mostly to silliness, I didn't properly start to write it until the day before, and when I gave it for real my only rehearsals had been going over bits in my head. Given that, I think it went pretty well: I stumbled over my words a lot, but I ran out of time before I ran out of things to say (I had been worried that I didn't have enough). Mine wasn't the best presentation in my group - Ed spoke about knot theory and it sounded like he'd prepared. But I think it may have been second best (out of four). Again, I won't actually know how I did until the end of the year.
My essay itself is over 4000 words, but I think I just need to do some polishing up.
There's coursework for Automata and Formal Languages to be done over easter. In theory it's about parsing and lexing. What we need to do is make a shell using JavaCC. I don't like Java. But more annoyingly, the specification is really vague. It's pretty obvious how the parsing and lexing is supposed to work, but there are loads of edge cases in what I'm supposed to do with the stuff I've parsed and lexed. It's probably supposed to be "do what other shells do in this situation", but it's not obvious to what extent we're supposed to emulate them, and in some cases the examples deviate from other shells. I've posted a bunch of questions on the forum relating to the module, looking for clarification. Also we're expected to do tab completion, which means getting unbuffered input, which as far as I'm aware is a lot of trouble to go to for something which is only tangentially related to the point of the coursework.
My entry in last term's 48 hour competition (theme: stealth) was The Quick and the Detected which I made with Ali. You control a submarine with a cloaking device powered by kinetic energy: they can't see you if you're fast enough. (I now regret the name, and pretty much everyone refers to it as Speedstealth, because that's the 'temporory' name I gave to the svn repository.) It came in joint first place, which surprised me: not that it was bad, but it wasn't nearly as fun as Alan's entry, which lost because it wasn't a technical accomplishment. Which I think is a bad metric, but whatever.
My entry in this term's competition (theme: education) was The Very Hungry Caterpillar: The Game. Officially I was supposed to be on a team with Alan, but neither of us showed up until the Saturday morning for differing reasons. I didn't have a good game idea (I didn't like the theme), and his plan was just to make lots of crappy games in 2-3 hours each, so I decided to do the same thing. He gave me the idea (presenting it as "snake with gravity"), and then because I was stupid it took me the entire rest of the competition to make. It's not fun to play, but I like some of the technical details. Alan narrates the book (which makes it totally illegal; also my soundcard produces lots of static which is not pleasant) while you pick up fruit. When you've got all the fruit in a level he moves on to the next line. I think the integration was well-done, just not enough to save the game.
There's only a week left of term. I'm not planning to spend much time in Bristol over the holidays though: I have a lot of work to do, and also I like living here better than living at home. But I'll go home probably for two weeks, give or take, to see friends. Maybe I'll also get a few hours at the Orpheus, which might help pay for my train tickets.
I'm playing in an online Go tournament on KGS. I've only played one game so far, some time last term. (I lost.) I'd forgotten all about the tournament until my opponent emailed me on Friday asking when I'm free to play.
I've been to two Ceileidhs (Scottish/Irish folk dances) this term. They're lots of fun. I'm surprised at how well everyone seems to stay coordinated, even after the caller stops calling: the only indication you get of where the other groups are is from momentary glimpses, or sometimes everyone shouts at a certain point, but all the groups somehow seem to stay in the same time. At the last one I wore a skirt over my trousers briefly. Rachel brought it as a joke for Jon: he wasn't sure if jeans would be appropriate (and I didn't remember, despite having been before), so she said she'd lend him a pair of "Irish trousers" that he could change into when he got here. (Or actually that might have been someone else on her facebook chat.) So after he saw it and refused, Nathan said "I will if you will", and in the end five of us took a turn to wear the skirt for one dance. Except in my case it was just the intermission, for some reason. Apparently it suited me.
This entry was largely written and polished while I should have been revising for a test on Wednesday. It's the second of two class tests in Metric spaces. I got 66/100 on the previous one, which got scaled to 82.8% (8X/10 + 30); I could have done better, but partly I was stupid and partly I lost 6 marks due to a diagram not being very well drawn. If I do better on this next test, only the second mark counts, but if I do worse they take an average. In theory I probably shouldn't do as well, because I don't know the material as well and I'm not revising like I should be. (Tomorrow evening I have to go to a president's meeting, so that's partly out as well.)