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The Final Exam and then Deep Woods

Tomorrow is this semester’s last exam. For the first time, we have an exam in the afternoon. Mostly because there are a lot of elective subjects this semester and some of them had to be in the afternoon sessions. I just hope everyone remembers to write AN (afternoon) instead of FN (forenoon) in the front page of the answer booklet.

After this on the 8th I’m heading off to MCC for the last day of Deep Woods(their yearly cultural event) and the day of the rock show. George says Thermal And A Quarter is playing, along with two of MCC’s own bands whose names I’ve forgotten.

Oh, I also have an arrear exam on the 18th. I hope I don’t forget about it.

Project IT

Next semester is my final semester of engineering. That means that we are required to do a large project using all the skills we have learnt in college.

Now, if you were an engineering student you’d still be laughing. That’s because we know nothing from our 3+ years at college. A little programming perhaps. That’s pretty much it.

Anyway, my partners for the project are Vinod and Balasundaram. I was hoping that they would do all the work and I could sit at home and update my blog and play some computer games but it looks like I might have to do some work too. Tcha!

We have no idea what we’re going to do for our project. We’re supposed to tell our college what exactly we’re doing on the 12th this month. So we planned to copy whatever Sundar was doing but recently we discovered that Sundar was in turn waiting to copy our project. Oh great. I considered copying Arun M’s work but the idea was rejected since no one else is smart enough to understand what he does. We’ll probably have trouble copy-pasting his work. That’s how good he is.

So I need you guys to give me some suggestions for my final year project. It should be computer science related. Stupid ideas are welcome too, as always.

My original plan (which was rejected by Vind and Bala) was:

“Finding the prime numbers in a Fibonacci series of a number using heap sort with a program compiled by a Java compiler written in C++”

I still think it’s awesome. Combines everything we’ve learnt in our course into one project.

Semester 7, Exam 5 - C# and .NET Framework (Elective)

We picked this subject since we had already studied most of the first two unit in other subjects in previous semesters. We wanted an easy to study subject without any mathematics involved and after looking at the syllabus of other electives we chose this and Information Security (that’s on December 6th).

C# is a language similar to Java and most of the syntax is similar. The .NET framework basically simplifies all sorts of things like database access and letting applications access the internet.

As usual they split the subject into two books. Unnecessary, as the second book covered the entire syllabus. I realised that too late and ended up studying from a downloaded version of the second book at 2 AM.

The exam was somewhat easy. We wrote a lot of text, drew some block diagrams for everything and wrote some simple programs where required. The best of this exam is that there was a 5 day holiday after it.

Semester 7, Exam 4 - Digital Signal Processing

DSP. Also known as the Degree Stopping Paper (since you just can’t pass the damn thing).

I had such a hard time studying for it. It was a vile mixture of filters and signals and functions with formulae thrown in here and there to make the whole thing more painful. See Vinod’s post here. It was literally painful studying for the subject. I was sitting with the book open well past midnight unable to concentrate for even two minutes on the subject.

So not worth it, man.

Bastards.

What possible use could I have for DSP? I will never use it in my life. My career is not going to suddenly require a knowledge of signal processing. I’m in the computer science stream for a reason. To learn about computers and software engineering processes. Not electronics. If I wanted to learn electronics I would have taken ECE or EEE!

Semester 7, Exam 3 - Object Oriented Analysis and Design

I actually liked studying for this subject since many things made a lot of sense. I would probably be using these very concepts at the workplace so there was a point in learning some of these things, unlike most of Anna Univ’s prescribed syllabus. My classmates wondered how I could listen in class to such a boring subject but it wasn’t that bad really. However, I ended up finishing learning for the exam only at 2.30 AM. As usual, I couldn’t get to sleep and was walking around until 3.30 AM and must have gone to sleep after that. This was mostly because I spent a few extra hours playing Freelancer.

I actually managed to get to the bus stop on time thanks to my father who woke me up earlier than usual. So went in the regular bus with the usual gang. Topper, Champ and The Great Bala were claiming that they’ll fail the exam as is usual.

I wrote the exam until my hand hurt and my back and neck couldn’t take it anymore. Seriously, it’s just a test of memory. Why make it so long? Won’t a two hour test suffice? Or a simple 5 minute memory game or something?

Semester 7, Exam 2 - Internet Programming

What I did wrong was drink tea yesterday.

I hadn’t had tea at home in months and so I said yes when my mother asked me if I wanted some. This was in the evening. The tea was awesome - warm and strongly flavoured. We’ll get back to this shortly.

So at about 8.30 PM I started studying. Anna University was not content with prescribing outdated nonsense like frames and DHTML filters (which work only in Monopolysoft’s Internet Explorer) and spread the syllabus over two books. Now the book banks give only one book per subject. Just great.

When I was done studying from the one book I had it was already 11.30 PM. There was still a lot to cover so I went online and started searching for the books I needed. Surprisingly, I found them in minutes. The first was Google Book Search which displayed the entire book! But that was hard to read and so I went to another site and downloaded a .crm format of the book I needed. That was somewhat more comfortable. Then I downloaded another huge book for one other unit and read up on servlets. It was 2.30 AM by then.

Now remember the tea I drank? I remembered why I hadn’t had tea or coffee in months. They mess with my system. I can’t get to sleep. I was totally wide awake. I ate some walnut cake, I walked around, I listened to music… nothing. I was awake in bed till it was time to get up to go to college. No more tea for me. Or coffee. The watery stuff they call tea in college, I drink everyday. That’s harmless. Weak stuff. Mostly just hot water. At home, I’ll stay away from these stimulants.

Anyway… the exam. It wasn’t that hard. But they asked weird questions like:

Write a program using CSS to display the background image repeatedly in a file.

Morons! CSS isn’t a programming language! And the question was for 16 marks (we have five 16-mark questions and 10 2-mark questions). The solution to this question, looking past Anna Univ’s poor grasp of the subject, is just a few lines. Why take the risk? I skipped that and attempted the other option.

Semester 7, Exam 1 - Total Quality Management

1 AM, today.

Text messages between me and Sundar.

Me: Dude, what are the seven tools of quality?
Sundar: Beyond all care. Am into the maneater of malgudi. don distb.
Me: You have no arrears and can afford to be carefree. You probably finished studying everything yesterday.
Sundar: F*** off
Me: Oh so I was right. You did finish studying already.

No reply from Sundar. He must have been revising or something.

7.15 AM

The day started off with me missing the college bus and ending up getting to college by bike. Good thing the exam is at 10 AM.

TQM. This subject can be best summed up by this sentence I found in my textbook:

FMEA uses occurrence and detection probability criteria in conjunction with severity criteria to develop risk prioritisation numbers for prioritization of corrective action considerations.

See Karthik’s adventures with a ‘local author’ textbook for the subject: Link

Later on in the day I ended up paying Rs. 240 as a fine for returning a library book that I was supposed to have returned on February 4, 2006. What happened was I had left the book at Ragha’s place back then and totally forgot about it.

I was returning from college in the afternoon with Vijayalayan riding pillion and we found this Maruthi Swift standing on the opposite side of the road.

Looks unfinished but I’ll give points for the attempt. No custom wheel rims though. Too bad.

Here’s a shot of one of the air conditioned buses with the large LED route boards (like in Bangalore) that is sometimes spotted on L.B. Road.

I’m Not Asleep… I’m Awa… zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

College is so bad that I’ve got to do something like this.

A (Rational) Rose By Any Other Name…

If you’re not a computer science student, please ignore this post completely. It won’t make much sense to you.

For the 7th semester in the final year of my engineering course (under Anna University), we have a lab called CASE Tools Lab. CASE stands for Computer Aided Software Design. We are supposed to use Object Oriented Analysis & Design (OOAD) principles to draw Class Diagrams and Use Case Diagrams to represent the structure and operation of the program and use that to generate pseudo code that makes it easy to code the actual program.

What we’re trying to do in our lab is use IBM’s Rational Rose 2000 (older version, I know, but that’s irelevant) to draw the use case and class diagrams. However Rational Rose is extremely complicated for beginners.

So I decided to throw away RR and try out some simpler alternatives like ArgoUML and Dia. Dia looked way too much like a simple drawing tool and wasn’t very polished. ArgoUML had a much better interface and I figured out how to draw diagrams and add attributes right away. However, we did the actual programs in Visual Basic and now I have great trouble switching to an object oriented view of the project. How do I represent the form based project in VB as a class based diagram? Hopefully the next lab class should clear things up.

Fifty minutes left and I’m going to spend them on Digg.com. That way I get more time to play Colin McRae Rally 2004 at home.

The Velammal College Incident

Heard about the Velammal incident? I am too bloody angry to be coherent. This site originally had some information but got taken down:

http://coldblood.memebot.com/

Read this instead: link

And this: Orkut community topic about this (registration required)

Engineering colleges in Tamilnadu these days are violating human rights and behaving in ridiculous ways. The major cause of this problem is that the students are systematically deprived of all power starting from when they join college. The attitude is to beat the students into submission. So we have no student unions in college and students have absolutely no protection.

I respect the work of the Students Federation of India. They unconditionally support students every single time and provide the much needed manpower and influence that engineering students lack when situations like this arise. Let’s see what the Anna Univ VC tells them at the meeting on Monday at 10.00 PM. I predict that he will simply ask students to go back to classes and that he will take care of things. That’s the kind of person he is. He if does something that actually satisfies the protesting students, then I would be very very surprised.