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New user? Wednesday, April 16, 2008
I'm done!!!
WOOHOO! It's 3:30pm as I type this after finishing my final exam.
April 16, 2008, I'm officially FINISHED MY UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES! YAYAYAYAYYAYAYAYYAYAYAYYAY!!!!
It was 2 days short of 4 years ago that I first hinted at going back to school. Then on April 29th, I said I was going to finish what I started.
And now I've done it. Fuck you doubters, especially those inside my head, I did it just like I said I would, and I would be screaming my head off right now in celebration if I wasn't writing this inside a computer lab at UVic (I left my computer at home).
Now is as good as time as any to announce that I have been provisionally accepted into the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UVic (subject to grades, but that's a formality), and I'll be starting my work towards a Masters degree (MSc) in Computer Science this September!
It's going to be a long summer, I'm looking forward to this as much as I looked forward to going back to school in the first place.
Now, it's time to PARTY!
links for 2008-04-17
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A new multi-paradigm language that runs on the CLR and JVM and provides its own APIs that abstract both. On paper, it has some really nice features, and is pushed onto my stack of languages to explore.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Would you use a database from this guy?
fourspaces.com: FeatherDB - Java JSON Document database
Or at least I should have been. At the time, CouchDB was (and is) very much a work in progress... there were a bunch of things that were planned but were missing, such as: support for stored/named views and any sort of authentication. No problem! I'll just add this myself!
Problem: CouchDB is written in Erlang.
I don't do Erlang.
I don't have anything against Erlang... we've never met. I just don't want to learn another language. Especially one that is so specialized. I know that I should learn a language a year, but Erlang was just too much of a hurdle for me to get in and start mucking around in code. Plus, would you really accept a patch from a guy that is just learning a language? Neither would I.
No problem! I'll write my own Java version of CouchDB... and do it better. The result was/is FeatherDB."
(Emphasis Added by me)
So I ask you, dear reader of this blog, would you really accept a database from a guy that writes a Java clone of an entire database system just to avoid learning a language to add a couple of missing features? What a terrible reason to reinvent the wheel. Java developers can connect to CouchDB using CouchDB4J, the Java client for CouchDB.
I found Erlang ridiculously easy to learn. "Especially one that is so specialized"? Specialized in what, being incredibly reliable, scalable, cross-platform, and mature? Brutal.
links for 2008-04-16
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Damien makes the point that Erlang's share-nothing processes make it possible for garbage collection to work in high activity situations. In shared state threading systems, garbage collectors can't keep up and the system becomes a timebomb. Erlang FTW!
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Video of Johnny Lee's talk at TED. Find a prestigious award for this man and give it to him, now.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Less than 52 hours until I'm done
I have a final exam at 2pm on Wednesday. It's my only final exam this term out of four courses. If you're thinking "lucky guy" you're wrong. Classes that don't have final exams make up for it by having a big final project instead.
Final project: A week or more of solid work
Final exam: Study for a few hours and write an exam
Sure, you get more out of a project than an exam, but when you have three of them all due at the same time, it's not easy to manage. Actually, the course that does have a final exam also had an assignment due on the last day of class, but it wasn't as big as the projects for the other classes.
Anyway, 52 hours from now I will be finished my undergraduate studies! How should I celebrate?
