Monthly Archive for May, 2001

Two command keys? Best feature, Ever!

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday May 29, 2001
in Apple, Hardware, Opinions and PowerBooks
. Closed

Today at work, we got a TiBook and some new iBooks for me to play with. Well, they weren't actually for me to play with, but my (former) boss and I sure did spend all day doing just that. Of course, my (former) boss has his own TiBook, and we've already played with that at length, so it was mainly the iBooks we were interested in, and we spent a lot of our time trying to figure out the best ways to keep the OS X environment on all four machines similar. I'll write a little more about that once we get the details down, because it's definitely something that will be useful to someone out there. For now, I'm going to confine the subject to my impressions of the new iBook.

The first thing I noticed when I came in today was "Look at all that white!" The new iBook is very white, as it's encased in a shiny white plastic, and while it's very pretty when it's brand new, it attracts finger prints like a detective, and a couple of our iBooks already have scratches on the edges. But, while it scratches pretty easily, it's very sturdy, and the screens have very little give if you try to tweak them, unlike my PowerBook G3 and the TiBook.

Speaking of the screen, it's very beautiful. I was looking at those screens all day, and I didn't notice difference between the 1024x768 resolution on the 12.1 inch screen compared to the 1024x768 resolution on my 14 inch PowerBook G3. The iBook was perfectly usable, and I can't complain at all about the screen size. Additionally, when I sat my PowerBook G3 next to one of the new iBooks, my screen looked incredibly dark, even at maximum brightness. The white on the iBook is white, while the white on my PowerBook is more of a grey...

Also of note is that the single battery is held in with a lock screw, and if you turn that screw, the battery will just fall out. It isn't secured in any way other than the lock, so let's hope that that screw stays tight. Of course, this iBook, like the TiBook and iBook before it, only supports one battery, leaving the user at the whim of his battery life. And, unfortunately, the battery life on these iBook's seems... sub-par. It seems even worse than the battery life on the TiBook which, with it's power hungry G4 processor, is rather counter-intuitive. This is especially unfortunate for me, because I've been spoiled with the dual batteries in my PowerBook G3. To upgrade the RAM, you have to first remove the AirPort card, which sucked for us, since we ordered our RAM separate from the iBook's and the AirPort cards, so we had to go through all the AirPort cards to install the extra RAM. This is, of course, better than the TiBook, which requires a much more complicated install involving the bottom of the computer instead of the keyboard, but it was annoying.

The CD Eject key on the Keyboard is usually pretty responsive. Unfortunately, one of the iBook's stopped recognizing it's CD drive at one point, but that was nothing a restart didn't fix. The CD trays on the iBooks also feel much sturdier than the previous generations of floppy laptop CD trays, but I think I still prefer the slot loading TiBook (Of course, my real preference is for a drive bay, like my PowerBook G3 has, so I can have two batteries and 10 hours of battery life, but... Tradeoffs and all.)

And finally, there's the feature of the new iBook which makes up for all of the flaws: Apple finally replaced the second option on the right half of the keyboard with a second command key instead. Apple laptop keyboards haven't had a second command key for longer than I can remember, so I figured they had a reason and "suggesting" a second command key instead would fall on deaf ears. But apparently I should have voiced my opinion sooner, because they've finally addressed the one complaint I have about my laptop... Now, I wonder if I can get a keyboard upgrade for my Pismo?

(for those unsure of what I'm talking about: due to the space limitations of a laptop, and the desire to include arrow keys on the keyboard, Apple was unable to mirror all of the keys from the left half of the keyboard on the right half without making the keys unusably small, so they got rid of the extra command and control keys, and only had an option key and an "enter" key on the right half of the keyboard next to the space bar. Now it's a command and enter instead. The enter key is for the emulated numeric keypad, and is questionable in and of itself, but I'm not going to get into that.)

Crazy Taxi 2, without the 2?

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday May 29, 2001
in Disappointment, Dreamcast, Releases and Sega
. 1 Comment

When I first heard about Crazy Taxi 2 back in about December, the most notable new features mentioned included split screen multiplayer action and internet multiplayer action. The internet play didn't strike me as overly important, but it sounded nice -- it was the multiplayer action that really piqued my interest.

So when I heard that the Internet play wasn't going to make it into the final product a couple months ago, I didn't care too much, because the report explicitly stated that the split screen multiplayer would remain in the final product. That multiplayer action was all I really cared about. When I first played Crazy Taxi so long ago, one of my first thoughts was "This is a great game! But where's the multiplayer?"

I would have bought Crazy Taxi 2 if all that were added was two player split screen.

So I've been eagerly anticipating today's release of Crazy Taxi 2, which, so far as I knew, not only included multi player goodness, but also included new maps, mini games, drivers, and moves. It sounded like the perfect sequel to an already great game.

But today I read this review of Crazy Taxi 2, and, um, apparently, it's single player. And now, despite all the new additions, I'm not sure that it's a sequel I actually want to play.

Zone of Enders

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday May 29, 2001
in Confused, Disappointment, Graphics, PlayStation and Reviews
. 6 Comments

I picked up Zone of Enders for two reasons: 1. It came with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo. And 2. It looked like an amazing, anime inspired, mecha combat game. And having played and beaten the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo, I can say for a fact that it came with ZOE. And having beaten ZOE, I can say for certain that it's an anime inspired mecha combat game. As to whether or not it's amazing... Well, it depends on which scale you're judging.

Let's go with three scales, for simplicity. First, there's gameplay. How much fun is the game to play, how does it control, and how is the experience of beating the game? Well, it's a hell of a lot of fun to play. The game makes controlling the Jehuty feel like second nature, and it reacts like you want it to without getting in your way. In fact, at times it didn't even feel like I was consciously doing something, and it just happened. In fact, it's so easy to play that I spent a couple of hours just playing old missions over and over. Alas, there were only three different kinds of enemies in the whole game (not counting bosses), so I eventually tired of just beating up drones and had to actually play some of the game. The bosses, on the other hand, were moderately interesting, and each had a little trick that had to be figured out to beat them. Unfortunately, there were only three real bosses. Fun factor: 5/5.

Next, there's the story scale. And when it came to playing the game, I discovered the worst voice active I've ever heard, combined with the corniest plot I've ever seen and the most cliche Neon Genesis Evangelion rip off story ever. Little boy accidentally gets in big robot. Little boy kills someone. Little boy doesn't want to kill. Little boy has to kill. I want to kill little boy and whoever his voice actor was and whoever was the voice actor of the big robot's computer. Oh, what's this? Hitting start skips a cut scene? Ohhh... I didn't watch any of the story after the first 15 minutes (Which turns out to have been a pretty large portion of the game, but more on that later). Of course, it didn't help that the missions were all totally cliche, and consisted of any one of Protect everyone, Destroy everything, or fetch item allowing you to destroy everything. And to top it all off, the game was really short. Like three hours short. Story factor: 0/5.

And finally, Graphics and Sound scale. Unfortunately, because "voice acting" falls under "Sound", this scale break down does a huge disservice to both the Graphics and Sound Effects, so I'm going to pretend that the voice acting falls under the previous category. The graphics in this game are amazing, and the attention to detail superb. This game really shows what the PS2 is capable of doing that the PSX wasn't. From the trails that the Jehuty will scrape into the ground if you fly too low, to the countless buildings you can destroy and the cars parked in driveways, it's amazing. And the sound effects are nice, too. Explosions, explosions, everywhere! Graphics and Sound factor: 5/5.

My, what a dilemma we're faced with here. Amazing game play and amazing graphics, but amazingly horrible story and voice acting. So I guess ZOE qualifies as an "amazing anime inspired mecha combat game", as long as your definition of amazing doesn't mean amazingly good in every possible way. Now, normally I'm the story-whore and my roommate Keith is the graphics-whore, and I would have smelled a game with a story this bad a mile away... But the gameplay and graphics are so good that, despite the stinking story, I can say that this is a game you should play. I give it a 3/5, but with all kinds of asterisks and footnotes. However, it's also a game that you should rent and not buy, because it's so short. In the five days Blockbuster allocates you, you'll be able to play this game two or three times and spend plenty of time with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo while you're at it.

But while I recommend you play this game, I urge you to remember that you can skip every cut scene by hitting start. And if you don't believe me, you can taste the waters yourself, but... I don't recommend that course of action, and don't say I didn't warn you.

Stew Reviews Vagrant Story

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday May 29, 2001
in Interface, PlayStation, Reviews and Squaresoft
. Closed

It was about a year ago now that Vagrant Story was released to an unsuspecting and an unprepared world, and in that time, it's been highly praised as one of the best PlayStation games ever, right up there with Metal Gear Solid. In fact, along with Soul Calibur and Zelda 64, Vagrant Story holds the honor of being one of the only three games to ever get a perfect score from the terminally picky Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu. And yet, despite critical praise, few seem outside of the hard core Square fans seem to have heard of this game. Sure, it had a commercial, but it wasn't sold to the average gamer. It was assumed that the average gamer would never play a game like Vagrant Story (and perhaps they were right), and they didn't even try to share it's excellence with the world.

I actually beat this game back in March or April, but I've been dragging my feet on writing this review. Of course, there's the question of why it took me that long to beat such a great game, and I have a number of excuses. Notably, I started Zelda 64 before Vagrant Story was even released, and I'm still working on that one. But more relevant to this review is the fact that when Vagrant Story came to the US, a lot of "game play" was added. What this means is the bosses were made harder, and the city of Lea Monde was populated with a lot more enemies. This, combined with the complete medieval city (complete with catacombs!) the game created for you to explore, made for some... problems... when I got lost. So, since I didn't have a rigid path laid out for me to explore, and I wasn't sure where I was supposed to be, I didn't have any plot driving me along, and I got bored and stopped playing in favor of other games. Finally, I finished it when I got motivated to figure out where I went wrong. It took me a couple of days to do that.

The player controls Ashley Riot, a special agent of sorts, on his mission to uncover the circumstances surrounding an attack on a baron's manner. And of course, Ashley has an obligatory mysterious past, but for once, we're spared a video game romance, and instead get religious philosophy which, in my book, is a good thing. Unfortunately, there isn't enough story to go around. In Japan, the game supposedly took about six hours to beat. When it came to the US, it jumped from a six hour game to a twenty hour game, which spreads the story more than a little thin, requiring a very patient gamer to get through the quest.

This game is not an RPG. It's an adventure. You control a single character, and the battles happen in real time, though you select your attacks and targets via menus. As Ashley takes his journey, he gains special attacks, new weapons, innumerable items, and magical powers. And all of Ashley's abilities are accounted for by the plot. In addition, every weapon and every piece of armor Ashley acquires can be taken apart and reassembled in various ways at workshops scattered throughout the city in (frequently unsuccessful) attempts to create better equipment. The entire system is incredibly complicated, but it allows near limitless flexibility as a reward for the patient players willing to experiment. For the impatient and unwilling to learn the system, this trait of the game is probably undesirable.

The graphics are very impressive, but they stretched the poor little PlayStation to it's limits. The models move with grace, and the attention to detail in the rooms of the city is incredible, but the frame rate is less than stellar, the textures very blurry, and the palette limited. When you play Vagrant Story on the PS2 with psx texture smoothing enabled, however, the quality of the textures increased dramatically, making it practically look like a whole new game. The palette unfortunately remains limited on the PS2, but that was arguably intentional, because of the intended realism of the city Lea Monde.

With a freely movable camera and a highly controllable Ashley, all the buttons on the PlayStation Dual Shock controller are used to their fullest. My only real complaint about the control scheme is that unlike every other Square PlayStation game, they chose to make the O button confirm instead of the X button, which is arguably more clear to the user, but there's something to be said for being consistant over being clear. I found myself frequently tapping X when I meant to tap O, and found myself in all kinds of menus I didn't want to be in because of it.

Vagrant Story is a 5/5, platinum star game, but it's not for everyone. Unlike the mass-marketed Final Fantasy, it takes patience, experimentation, and perseverance to complete. And while the ending set up hooks for a great universe of adventure, it'll never happen because Square failed to sell it's product, and faced with a "failed game", redistributed the development team. Well, I guess it might happen, what with Namco developing Xenosaga, a new installment in Square's Xenogears universe. And I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hypercorrective Pronouns

Published
by
Benjy
on Monday May 28, 2001
in Linguistics, Politics, Sex and Society
. Closed

I was talking to my brother on Instant Messenger earlier this evening, but when I finished, I didn't close the window. And when he went to bed, he left his computer on, and instead of setting an away message, he let his session go idle. And when that happened, a message popped up in the window saying '"Benjy's Brother" has stopped using their computer at 2:19:49, and is now considered idle.' Now, I'm not sure if it was the AIM service that sent that message, or his client that sent the message, or my Mac OS X Beta client which printed the message, but it was definately an automated message and not an away message.

"What's wrong with the message? It's gender neutral and everything!" you might be saying. Well, it's precisely the gender neutrality that's the problem. It's nice that they used the correct "their" (as opposed to there or they're), but it's not nice that "their" wasn't even the right pronoun to use. 'Their' is defined as "The possessive case of the personal pronoun they", and 'They' is defined as "The plural of he, she, or it." In other words, 'Their' is the plural possessive. In other other words, according to AIM, my brother is a plural entity. Which he isn't. Trust me, I've met him.

Why did AIM do this? Because they were trying to be gender neutral, of course. They didn't want to use sexist language, because apparently it's "bad form". It would have been embarressing if it'd said '"Benjy's Brother" has stopped using her...', and while using 'his' in that context is usually the accepted solution to this quandry, AIM chose not to do so.

What would have been a better way to word that message while staying gender neutral? Under normal circumstances, the best way to stay gender neutral is to rephrase what you were saying to be a plural statement from the get-go, instead of trying to wedge gender neutrality onto a non-plural statement. But off the top of my head, I can't think of a better way to handle the AIM case other than "his or her", because this is a complicated automated situation.

update: My roomate Keith offered up '"Chan da Man"'s computer has not responded for x hours and is considered idle.' Ah, very good, thank you Keith.

Most people probably noticed pretty quickly the error in the message, but there's a more insidious case, which is more common than I can shake a stick at. In an attempt to stay gender neutral, people will use 'they' in place of 'he' and 'she', which sounds right, because it's so common, but it isn't. It's also tricky because it happens when you're speaking in the third person. For example, instead of saying "The student asked what he should be doing", you'd see "The student asked what they should be doing". Another example would be "Each student put their coat in the closet."

This comes up when someone wants to make a general statement about a single unspecified entity. When it's a general plural statement, English is armed to the teeth with gender neutrality, and when it's a statement about a specific single entity, the pronouns practically speek themselves. But English isn't prepared to deal with statements about unknown singular entities. A solution? Figure out how to rephrase your statement as a plural statement, because odds are, it'll apply to more than one person, given that there are six billion people out there for it to potentially apply to. Alternatively, make the tradeoff between being awkward (his or her) and being gender neutral. None of these are exactly optimal solutions, as each has it's strong points and week points. Whichever option you pick, trying to use a plural pronoun in place of a singular pronoun, no matter how much you convolute the sentence (even if it's subconscious) to make it work, isn't a solution at all.

This phenomenon is known as hypercorrection. An example of this that's less complicted is the plural of octopus. It looks kind of like a latin derived word -- alumnus, for example. Both alumnus and octopus are singular, and the plural of alumnus is alumni, so the plural of octopus is octopi, right? Well, no, because octopus is a greek derived word, so it's octopuses... But that doesn't stop hypercorrection, and some day octopi might actually become the plural of octopus. And I'm not even going to comment on alumna and alumnae, other than to point out that even if octopus was derived from latin, the plural for a bunch of female octopuses would not be octopusae.

Memento, Memento, now it’s time to go to bed

Published
by
Benjy
on Monday May 28, 2001
in Movies, Psychology and Reviews
. 3 Comments

Memento was a very intense movie, requiring a great deal of concentration, but in the end, it was well worth it. My friend in Bakersfield tells me that it's not playing down there, though, so those who have an opportunity to see this movie should consider themselves all the luckier.

The movie is about a man named Leonard who has anterograde amnesia and is attempting to find the man who raped and murdered his wife and get revenge. This is an interesting premise precisely because of the nature of anterograde amnesia -- Leonard can't remember anything since the accident which left him with his condition. He's able to hold conversations, because he can keep the conversation in his short term memory, but when it comes time to encode something to long term memory, he is completely unable to do so. However, despite this condition, he's able to remember everything that happened before the accident which left him in that state, just like you or I could.

Anterograde amnesia is a very real condition, and isn't at all made up for the movie. The condition is caused by hippocampal lesions, and the result is the inability to encode new memories. The famous patient HM, who had his hippocampus removed in order to control his epilepsy, described the condition as if it were like he was always waking up -- a line which Leonard quotes in Memento. The condition is also interesting because though the patient can't encode new memories, they're able to learn new procedural tasks, such as how to ride a bike or how to play tennis. The patient doesn't remember learning how to do the task, but they show improvement with practice. When asked about it, the patient will reply with something like "I must be naturally good at it" or "It must be beginners luck". This distinction between implicit memory and explicit memory also comes up in the movie. Sheesh, the things I learn in school...

In fact, the only flaw in the movie's Nueropsychology is that Leonard refers to his condition as "Short Term Memory Loss", which it isn't at all. If he had no short term memory, he wouldn't even be able to carry on a conversation. Short term memory is that space where you can remember a phone number you just heard before you repeat it to yourself five times to commit it to memory. Short term memory is that space where you think about what you're actively talking about. Short term memory, Leonard had in abundance. The ability to commit that short term memory to long term storage is what he lacked.

I got so caught up in this little detail, and looking out for other mistakes, that I wasn't paying full attention to the unraveling story. If you know anything about nueropsychology, let me warn you in advance -- suspend your disbelief, because the story is worth it, and there aren't actually any errors in the movie. Trust me on this one, and don't get caught up in this detail like I did, because it's an irrelevant detail.

Anyway, my not paying attention was a big mistake, because the story is told in a very novel fashion which is rather tricky to follow. At first, it appears that the story is being told in reverse, with two sets of flashbacks happening on the side. But as the movie progresses, it becomes apparent that one of the flashback sequences is sequentially moving forward and the rest of the movie is sequentially moving backwards (while the other flashback sequence is Leonard explaining something of utmost importance to the story that happened before his amnesia), and they're both converging on a single point which is the climax of the movie. It's a very novel method of telling the story, and it works incredibly well considering the story being told.

All in all, there's not much of anything I can say about the real details of the movie without giving something away. I'd recommend seeing Memento if you like thinking a lot, but make sure you're very awake and prepared to pay attention to lots of details, since when the movie is over you're going to have to assemble a whole time line if you want to figure out what really happened. This movie ranks a 4/5 in my book.

A mad, file deleting rampage

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday May 27, 2001
in Confused, Entropy, LinkStew, Memories and Nostalgia
. Closed

Last night, I went looking for something which I thought was posted to LinkStew, only to find out that it'd never been moved over from my old site. So I went digging through my files, only to find five copies of my old site... And I only looked on two of the computers I have files stored on! So I've been on a mad file deleting rampage since last evening. I've never deleted a web page directory before, for fear of needing it again -- but today I threw out that notion and blew away thousands of files. I destroyed all of the various West High web pages I created but the one. I destroyed everything I ever did for Intelegenesis. I destroyed all of my programming projects from the classes I took at Bakersfield College. I consolodated seemingly hundreds of other directories. In general, I put things into one of three categories. 1. Things which should some day put into the stew. 2. Things which I want to keep, but don't belong in the stew and need to be incorporated into a new place. or 3. The Trash.

And if I hesitated, I trashed it. The reason I even had that much junk was because I'm normally so hesitant about trashing things. So the next step in my insanity is to add anything to LinkStew that's pending and delete the local copy. If my essay about Ford in Brave New World is in the stew, why do I need three copies of the original document? Why do I even need one?

The copy in the Stew should be the canonical copy, and there shouldn't be other copies. This saves on disk space, it saves on organizational difficulties, it makes the information safer, since the stew is backed up regularly, and it makes the information useful to everyone who isn't me.

And after I've done that, (which hopefully won't be this weekend) I'll incorporate everything that's left into an organized structure on one computer. I know where things are scattered between all of my computers, but do you know how much space that's wasting in my head? Think of all the other things I could remember with the space that remembers that I have school papers in hal:school, another:school, rincewind:Documents:School, and rincewind:/Luggage/Documents/School, and some other subdirectories which I don't actually remember.

Another Semester in Review: Spring 2001

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday May 27, 2001
in Reviews and School
. Closed

In the past, I've taken a couple of different approahces to reviewing a semester. There was the incredibly long, point by point review, and there were the shorter, more general and freeform reviews. This time, I'm going to go for something in between, and review the semester as a hole, and briefly touch on anything interesting about each class. Yes, I'm still trying to achieve closure on the semester, and I've actually gotten further from doing so since the last time I tried.

Last semester, I took Computer Science 164, Psychology 117, Linguistics 100, and Interdepartmental Studies 100AC. At the beginning of the semester, I had eight requirements I needed to fill to graduate, plus three classes I need to take to get a CS minor. At the beginning of the semester, I was actually enrolled in 6 classes, all six of which filled requirements. CS 164 went towards my minor, Psych 117 towards a major requirement, Ling 100 towards a major requirement, and IDS 100AC to fill the college American Cultures requirement. The other two courses were Psych 129 for a major requirement and CS 170 for a major requirement. I opted to take Psych 117 in favor of Psych 129, and I didn't get into CS 170, which is mildy amusing since 164 didn't actually get me any closer to graduating. That I didn't take any fluff classes was good if I want to get out of here on time.

My first class each week was Psychology 117: Biological Psychology and Human Brain Dysfunction, taught by Professor Robert Knight. This is a class I would recommend any Berkeley student finding an excuse to take. I'm pretty sure it'll fill both the Biological Science requirement and the Behavioral Science requirement for LnS students. Knight was an engaging lecturer, who was speaking with the knowledge of an actual doctor. The biggest problem with this class was that, without homework or any other motivation to keep up, it was terribly easy to get behind when it came time for a test. Another minor problem was there were a lot of details, as the brain is a pretty big place, but because the tests were multiple choice, the problem was reduced from memorizing a ton of details to recognizing a ton of details. I enjoyed every lecture in this class, despite the C+ I earned in the end. I've got excusees for that grade, but no one cares about excuses, and I already talked all about them here.

Next, I had Linguistics 100. This is a CogSci requirement, because for some reason, Cognitive Science at Berkeley includes Linguistics. Okay, maybe there's a reason, and maybe I know what it is, but that doesn't mean I resent it any less. And resent a class makes it difficult to do well in it. The class did have it's moments, though, in which the material was probably some of the most interesting I had all semester. Notably, the broad discussion of historical linguistics and the english language offered a lot of insight. Unfortunately, for every engaging topic, there were about three tedious topics -- from sound features to syntax trees to... Well, there was plenty there to dislike. And also unfortunately, very early in the course we had a guest lecturer who covered some material that the other teachers had already been over, and I realized that it wasn't really the material that sucked, but rather, the lecturers. I really wish that guest lecturer had been the professor for the whole semester, but alas. The workload was a little annoying, as we had weekly homeworks which were worth 40% of our total grade. Weekly homework I don't mind, but when it's a huge percentage of my grade it's pretty annoying. Also, the tests could have been better written, because the second one was way too long. In the end, though, I somehow managed to earn a B+, despite my complete lack of interest in most of the material.

IDS 100AC was a class I'd been wanting to take for a long time. The title of the course was "Technology and the American Experience". If I were making up the name, though, I'd probably call it "Cultural history of American Technology", which is more accurate and no less interesting sounding. This course fills the college's "diversity" requirement, so we spent time studying the technologies of everything from native americans to black slaves to chinese miners to... The list goes on. The material did have some rough spots, and certain cultures got more coverage than the others, but on the whole, there was more than enough good to outweigh that bad. I haven't taken any other American Cultures classes, but having gone through this one, I think it'd be a good option for any Berkeley student to consider. The workload was nonexistant until it came time for a midterm. Again, there were no weekly assignments, and there wasn't even a discussion, so there was nothing forcing me to keep up with the reading until it came time for a test.

And finally, I had Computer Science 164: Programming Languages and Compilers. This course built a lot off of CS 61C, though 61B and 170 experience are useful for some of the insane tree parsing that has to happen on a couple of the projects. Unlike 170, which teaches pretty generally useful topics, 164 is pretty specific. It made me realize that I never want to be a compiler writer, and it led me to dislike java even more than I used to, because of my massive perl experience since the last time I used java. There were some general ideas which could be gained from the course, but they weren't laid out and said "here, this is useful" -- the student was left to extrapolate them from everything else that was thrown at him. The course also left me with a hugely increased respect for Larry Wall, because the mere thought of parsing perl left me blithering, even after having written my own compiler for the stripped down academic language (COOL -- Classroom Object Oriented Language) we were working with. The workload the course was pretty hefty. In addition to weekly homework assignments (which, thankfully, weren't worth 40% of my grade, but only 10%), there were 5 projects. An interpretter for a simplified stack language written in COOL, a semantic analyzer for COOL, a parser for COOL, a lexical analyzer for COOL, and a code generator for COOL. The last two projects took a huge amount of time -- probably about a week and a half for both me and my partner -- and together counted for 50% of my grade. Whew. All I can say is that I worked for my B in this class. If you're a CS student at Berkeley, you have no choice but to take this class, and if you're not a CS student, you'll never take it, unless you're a CS drop out. The person that my comments about this course would be useful to is the potential CS student who isn't sure if he wants to do CS, and for that student, I would say that this class isn't a reason not to major in CS. There might be others (in my case, the 170 series and the 150 series), but this isn't one of them, even if you think language design doesn't interest you.

Now that the semester's over, then, I have five major requirements and two minor requirements left. For my major, I need to take Linguistics 105, Computer Science 188, the equivalent of Psychology 129, Computer Science 170, and Computer Science 160. For my CS minor, I hope to take CS 162 and some other random CS class... There aren't really others I want to take that I stand a chance in hell of getting into. It's already going to be tough enough for me to get into 160, let alone, for example, 186.

Since neither Ling 105 nor a Psych 129 equivalent are being offered this fall, those will have to wait until the spring. Which, scanning the list, leaves me with any of five CS classes I want to take try to take in the fall. I'll take 188 and 170, and I'll try my damndest to get into 160, because that way I'll get another chance to try in the spring if I fail to get in. I'm going to hold off on (trying to) take CS 162 until the spring, because I've heard nothing but bad things about the professor this fall. So that leaves my spring booked in advance, which means I better hope like mad I can get into those classes, and leaves me with two open classes for the fall, one of which will need to be a class towards my CS minor if I want to complete it. I'm open to recommendations, since, at the moment, I haven't actually signed up for any classes, since the waitlists for 160 and 188 were already full, let alone did I get a spot in the class. (Just because I'm not on the waitlist doesn't mean I can't try to get into the class). In other words, I've got an exciting couple of semesters left as far as getting into classes goes.

Cheating for Towel Day?

Published
by
Benjy
on Friday May 25, 2001
in Laugh, Memories and Nostalgia
. 1 Comment

Today is Towel Day, in memory of the late great Douglas Adams. Now, some might call it cheating, but conveniently, today my office is also having a pool party and barbecue at my (former) boss's (former) frat house. So I kind of need to bring a towel for other than survival purposes.

But wait, before you jump to conclusions -- I have a towel with me whenever I have my backpack with me -- it even has it's own compartment in my backpack. If you don't believe me, read this tale in which I used my towel. It's also really useful when I need to blow my nose during long finals.

There are so many big ideas I could talk about

Published
by
Benjy
on Thursday May 24, 2001
in Blogging, LinkStew and Time
. Closed

I haven't written something for two tiny days and I feel like I haven't said anything interesting in ages. Excuses are easy to come by -- Finals happened. They happened. Past tense, as in, they're over. They're so over that the grades for 3 out of my 4 classes are already available via InfoBears. They're so over that this post written a mere two and a half weeks ago seems like it was an eternity away.

But I'm still fighting the undertow -- The open seas of the summer are waiting for me, but the specter of the semester is looming over me. I've spent the last two days trying to think of something to write about, but all my ideas seem trite and unimportant. I need to get on with things and put the semester behind me -- I need some closure. So pardon me while I do just that. The following (preceding? The direction of time is so difficult to keep track of in a blog...) entries were written not for you, but for me.