apollonic.net

Class: 13 hr/wk

Work: 19 hr/wk

Math Homework: 4 hr/wk

Coding Homework: 14 hr/wk minimum

Reading for Class: 6 hr/wk

Transit times: 7 hr/wk minimum

National Guard duty: 20 hrs

Total work and trans hours per drill week: ~77 minimum

Hopefully, I can fit a meet up with Josh, a meet up with my brother, and some time with my wife in there. Oh, and sleep, if I get the chance.

So here’s the rundown of what’s been, well, going down:

• Rewrote Bitstream and Huffman encoder/decoder in Java, now fully integrated with my image editor (download them from the code page)
• Slept, finally
• had an intense session with JK with lots of Dew, code, and good discussion
• cleaned the apartment some

Tonight I have a study session for CS411, assuming that I manage to finish my CS421 homework. *Sigh* it never ends when you’re a CS major at UIUC.

Hopefully I’ll also have a chance to make dinner. I’m leading toward my mom’s classic marinara sauce recipe, which will be posted later if I manage to make it.

Math Exam Status: Aced.

Why yes, I am implementing Huffman coding at 4AM.

Tonight’s all-night CS242 coding session brought to you by Mountain Dew, the programmer’s drink of choice.

Honestly, I never do the Dew, except when I am doing some hardcore coding. I don’t know why that is, but I can tell you that I owe many a subroutine or pointer hack to the amber ambrosia.

The last year or two has seen a rapid acceleration in the debut of new (or at least better-developed) toolkits for working with many languages. Most of these focus on web development, in particular “Web 2.0“.

These languages (Ruby, PHP, Javascript, CSS, etc), and web development in general, are not my forte. I am a low-level programmer, preferring to abstract from the machine no further than the semi-object-oriented nature of C++. However, the growing power and ubiquity of the many scripting-style languages, in combination with better libraries for such langauges, has lead many to question the future of the C programmer. Is C the new assembly?

While there will certainly always be a need for low-level programmers, I can’t help but wonder if my skillset is becoming somewhat outdated. I prefer to work in pointers and recursion, rather than with stylesheets and browser compatibility questions.

I can take comfort in one of Joel Spolsky’s essays, “The Perils of JavaSchools“. He recognizes that someone who can design a tail recursive, pointer-heavy function on the fly can probably learn Ruby on Rails with a minimal time investment.

I guess I should thank the UIUC CS Department for providing me with classes like CS225 - Data Structures and CS421 - Programming Languages and Compilers.