How your computer actually runs

There is actually a Russian inside every computer flipping bits to make everything happen, and since this computer had been used so much the coating was wearing thin so you can see the Russian phantom inside the machine.

In other news, an informatics camp is probably one of the few places I could be away from home and still have enough stuff around me to fix a dead laptop.

Also, I would like to draw your attention to line 8 of the code in the above image.

In other news, we fly out to Thailand in another 11 hours. It’s really quite exciting, it just about makes the prospect of getting up at 6am worthwhile!

A Sydney Morning Herald photographer got a few shots of me for an article by Kim Arlington that should be out in a few days. So keep an eye out for that.

Syndicated on my blog.

A series of unfortunate events

The past three days have seen a steady descent from my laptop working, to it being a very attractive paper weight.

Sunday night immediately after blogging, it crashed, and rebooted with the desktop background corrupted, meaning that the hard drive was failing. After that there was an ill-fated (involving a ruler and a pair of scissors) attempt to get the back cover off to remove the hard drive. However this really only left me with a scratch on the underside.

Yesterday I turned up to the apple store on campus and asked to borrow some screw drivers to take the hard drive out. Much to my surprise, they obliged! With that the corrupted hard drive was removed from the laptop. However, they didn't have a spare anti-static bag, so I carried the hard drive from the quad, to K17, and all the way back up to Perouse Lodge. That night I came up with an elaborate scheme to fix my laptop, and the rest of the data off my hard drive. All I had to do was back up the data on my external hard drive, take the hard drive out of that, put that in my laptop, and put the laptop hard drive in the external case. Simple right? Trouble was that external hard drive case didn't have screws... I got the hard drive out of it though, but let's just say that it has more of an open air design now.

Today during our free afternoon I returned to the apple store, both hard drives in hand. Asked nicely and was allowed to borrow screw drivers again (They're very nice people there). So now with hard drives exchanged, I was told that it would be another day before they would get OS X install disks in. Next stop on my adventure was K17 (The computer science building) where they happened to have install disks for Ubuntu 9.10! The big problem I had then was I tried installing that operating system on battery power, since I left the charger up in Perouse Lodge. The install finished before running out of power, the only thing was it refused to boot from the hard drive... and now the ubuntu cd is corrupted...

I promise I program better than I break stuff.

Syndicated on my blog.

Mind bending scenario

We had our first practice exam today, and on the whole it was quite an enjoyable experience. However, getting up at 7am wasn't. Since everyone was still dreary from getting up it was a bit of a happy accident that the café wasn't open for breakfast on time, giving us an extra half hour to wake up.

The exam itself was really quite pleasant, the solution to question one was quite straightforward (I promise) and everyone got it out. Question two wasn't as nice though, but with a bit of maths and STL magic I got it out. Unfortunately the third and final question was quite painful, and even though I had the solution in my head it was quite ugly and I may not have been able to code it in time, so I coded up a correct but slow solution for partial marks then spent the remainder of the exam thinking about a nice way to code up the solution but didn't get anywhere.

This picture is from the problem session that ensued after lunch. We went through the exam problems and then got onto a problem that we were given in the lead up to camp. This problem is an exercise in "case bashing", which is where you come up with different input data for the problem and find patterns in it which leads you to a solution. Coding it was also an exercise in case bashing (and orac debugging, which is where you fix a bug and resubmit to the training site hoping and praying that you get 100 this time), and as of now no one has scored 100% on it. I'm on 95% though and will hopefully get the last few marks before the end of camp.

This post is syndicated on the official Robert Newey photoblog! (and will be posted at 00:01 July 17th)

Off to sleep now (or code, whatever takes my fancy). Until tomorrow!