Semester 4 Done ... Now What?

The semester is over.  Finally.  Most people in my class were, and still are, envious that I only had to take three classes this semester.  What they did not see was, after finishing school for the day, I still had to work for five or six hours.

Semeter 4 of 6, also known as year 2 of 3, is done.  In fall 2009, I took another C++ programming course, a Flash(Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium Upgrade from CS4 [Mac]) and ActionScript class, intro to databases, and a math class.  This past winter, a class devoted to Linux and the BASH shell, a final C++ data structures class, and an SQL class.

Now what?  My first year in Computer Science were all intro classes.  Stuff that could be taught in a highschool prgramming class.  Year 2 is where we started actually learning things.  Case in point, from what I learned in Database 2, I was able to offer tips on how to improve some things at work.  From Data Structures, I can see how applications actually store and access data.

But, I am still stuck at my job for the summer at least.  Most jobs in the IT business require more years experience than I have, which would be zero, and most summer internships pay a lot less than what I earn in my current job.  On top of that, with little free time on my hands (more like none), getting contacts in the IT industry here in Montreal is hard.

So now what?  Update my C.V. to show I still have one more year of school left, and no IT experience.

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It's Been a While

It's been a few months since I last posted something, something that no writer should ever do.  My last post on Jan. 20, 2010, described how I handle early morning classes.  In the mean time, I have lost all free time.  Once classes are finished for the day and my shift at work is done, the few hours I have at night leftover are spent with the girldfriend.

Weekends were usually lost to catching up on sleep, and finding time to head to Jay Peak whenever the conditions were decent.  All that to say I have been busy these last few months, adn to day is one of the few days where I have no assignments to work on.

One of my favourite classes is Operating Systems.  It of course started with a brief introduction to the Windows command line, with one assignment where we created a simple batch file.  Then we moved on to Linux.

All of us have used Linux before, but mostly just on a casual basis; trying it out and comparing to Windows or OSX.  I now have a new found respect and appreciation for Linux.

Sed, Grep, and Awk were the starting points of our Linux experience.  Which moved to shell scripting.  To date, our major scripting assignment was an archiving script, with very strict and precise rules.

The core of the script looked like:
  for i in $2/*
  do
     echo "cat > $i << '!EOF!'"
     cat $i
     echo "!EOF!"
  done

Simple enough.  The output of this script was sent to an archive file named in the parameter list.

The tricky part was catching the errors, such an empty source directory, or missing directories along the target file path.  All this to say, if (and probably when) I ever have write scripts, I hope it is in Linux, since its command line tools are simple and elegant, yet much more powerful than the command prompt on Windows.

What I wish was covered in more detail, was the boot process, and how to customize how Linux boots up, or how further customize the Linux shell (in our case, we were using Bash, which seems to be the defeault on most Linux/Unix systems).  We had ten minute description on Bash environment variables, but that was it.

Though I learned a lot about how powerful Linux is under the hood, it seemed like it was lacking.

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UNIX(R) Shells by Example (4th Edition) 

DataStructures.NoCoffee = True

For the last five weeks, I was in the habit of sleeping in until noon everyday.  What seems like a blessing at the end of a semester quickly becomes severely annoying, especially when a scheduled lecture is at 8:30am in a computer lab that STRICTLY forbids coffee.

Now lets be honest here.  Computer science is interesting, but it is not the most thrilling experience in the world.  Enter Data Structures.  This will be the fourth C++ programming class that we are required to follow in CompSci at John Abbott College.

There are two sections for my class this semester, yet the college has decided to combine the two sections for this one class.  The idea is to have the same teacher, and therefore more consistency, for both groups.  Unfortunately there only thirty-two workstations in the lab, and thirty-four students.

On top of that possible inconvenience, the class runs three hours, from 8:30am to 11:30am, twice a week.  It starts with a lecture portion then moves onto a lab section.  8:30 in the morning is too early to be thinking about abstract data types and linked lists without caffeine entering the blood stream.

The first day was basic, a review of data types, functions, and other basic programming concepts.  The good news, the text (Starting Out with C++: From Control Structures through Objects (6th Edition)) from my first programming class is still valid, that will be a $70 book that was used in four classes.

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Formerly Sleeping 'Till Noon

After a long Christmas break, the first day back at school is always the touhgest, plus it was made annoying by a unrelated things.  My last exam was on December 14, 2009, and today (January 18, 2010), after a five week break, I'm back at school.

John Abbott College, like other C.E.G.E.P.'s, have a ridiculously long Christmas break; five weeks long.  Just long enough that when classes start up again, waking up at noon has already become the norm.

To make a my return to a normal school routine a little more annoying, I found out that, because I only taking three classes, I had go meet with an academic counsellor.  The issue was that I was not taking enough courses to qualify as a full time student.  John Abbott's policy is that a minimum of 12 hours a week marks full time status, yet they also insist on four classes.   I had to meet with the counsellor to explain my case.  Since I also have bills to pay, I also need to work at least 30 hours a week, especially now after Christmas.  The annoying part is that there is no consistency for qualifying as full time; 12 hours or four classes, it depends who you talk to.  This lead to me signing a special contract to make the exception for me to take three classes, which add up to more than 12 hours a week, which full time anyway.

My first, only class, today, was Databases 2.  We have moved on from MS Access, and beginning with Oracle Databases.  Our main development software will be Oracle's SQL Developer, which luckily, also comes with a Mac version.

 Now that school is back in, there will be less time doing this:



(p.s.  That's not me, it's just a great shot of my home hill:  Jay Peak, Jay Peak's Flickr Page)

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