So, in about fourteen hours I'll be heading down to Fort Myers to visit my family. I'm fairly anxious; though I think it might just be because I don't like waiting. I'll be without the internet, and without my laptop. Luckily, Del is lending me his GBA SP and Chill is lending me his GBA games. So I'll be able to check out FFTA while I'm down there. I guess with the games it shouldn't be too boring. I'm pretty excited about the turkey dinner, though. Turkey and mayo sandwiches! Hurrah! I've heard that we'll also be having pumpkin pie!
My brothers won't be there, just my dad & step-mom. It'll be cool, I guess. I get to visit my older brother in December, and that I can't wait for.
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OpenGL looks pretty cool. There are more labs than the DirectX class had, but they're just as easy. Without my laptop on Monday, I couldn't do the labs. Luckily, the teacher sympathized with me, and I got an extension for the assignments. However, that probably means I have twice the labs to complete on this coming Monday. If I were smart, I would have grabbed the syllabus and lab assignments. But I'm not.
Machine Architecture, however, is definitely harder. We're not using Visual Studio; we're using Unix. Well ... I'm not entirely certain if it's actually the Unix system, but they definitely are Unix commands. I guess that CoD class will actually come in handy. The hard part is trying to understand what is expected of us on these assignments. Today, we had to add comments explaining some of their code. It appeared they wanted us to explain what their code is doing and how it works. Four hours was barely enough time for me to explain what their code is doing. So ... I hope they don't expect much about how their code works. At least I understand it.
Another regretful thing about not having my laptop is that installing Unix took a few hours and a lot of harddrive space. All of which I get to repeat when installing it onto my machine.
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I did receive a long, round object in the mail yesterday. Inside were three movie posters and some junk mail. Such a wonderful gift. ;)
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Some great news! Our Real Time Programming class has now been changed to Game Boy Advance! We'll be learning the GBA SDK; so I'm quite glad. This gives us direct education for the real world. Sure, we'll be using C++ and all, but that can be used for other careers. The number of careers that use GBA SDK are significantly fewer. And I'm led to believe that we'll actually be playing the games we make on a GBA. Wooh! Granted, this probably means we'll have to be fairly strict with our memory usage and image sizes. But I'm interested in optimization and sneaky shortcuts.
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Have a happy Turkey Day!
posted at 12:26 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Oh, and I almost forgot: when I went to see Harry Potter, I saw a movie preview for a cute penguin movie. Happy Feet can be downloaded here ... I think.
So what are you doing in Machine Architecture...other than commenting code apparently. What was the code doing? Must have been some pretty long or complex code to have taken 4 hours to understand and comment it. Please tell more about this class....I'm interested.
and that last post should have been me (Matt). I'm posting on Dads computer and forgot to log in as myself.
I thought Mr. Clean had also included the pin(s)or whatever other swag he had for you. If not, I guess he'll just have to find his own way to mail that stuff. I'm trying to clean this house, but if it's not mine, I'm making other people deal with the stuff. Therefore, I don't know where anything is!
Yeah, there should have been a OoTS pin and a booster/sample of that WizKids pirate ship game.
Well Matt, we were doing some binary work in class for MAR. Mostly negative binary with some floating point binary in there as well. Negative binary numbers have three main forms: high bit something, one's complement, and two's complement. High bit something basically means that the highest bit is for the negative sign. 1 if it's negative, 0 if it isn't. One's complement takes all the other bits from HBS and inverts them. The other 1's become 0's and the other 0's become 1's. However, that high bit remains as a 1. Two's complement is One's complement + 1. But if the number is positive, One's complement and Two's complement are the same as HBS. Two's complement is what our computers use, but the other two are the steps for humans to get there. They created Two's complement because having a negative zero didn't sound peachy. That'd be why a signed char goes from -128 to 127 ... at least I'm pretty sure those are the limits. Whatever.
I'll post the assignment here shortly.
As I told Tim on the phone, I hadn't seen any pin or booster pack in the tube. I looked around the apartment when I got home, and I can't find them. So I'll agree with Tim that some postal worker is now enjoying the goods.
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