The Happity Haps
A new quarter at school has started, and I’m pretty excited for this one. My schedule consists of probability and statistics, programming skills, privacy and security, and an independent study.
Probability is boring, boring, boring. My instructor frequently uses incorrect notation, confusing all the students. We won’t be discussing that class, because I try to keep this blog a happy place.
Privacy and security is pretty cool. Right now we are going over the legal and ethical issues in electronic privacy. The class is discussion based, and some of the talks have been fairly enjoyable (especially since Brady is taking it with me). Our first assignment was to use any resource available to us to datamine our professor and his family. Along with his public records and other easily available stuff, I obtained a list of all his vehicle registries in New York, and discovered some other fun tidbits about his children. Later on we’ll actually be jumping on the more technical side of computer security. Not a lot of it will be code-based (which I’m really disappointed about), but it is the part of class that I’m most looking forward to.
Programming skills is an upper level CS elective that has a changing curriculum depending on the quarter and professor. My class is focusing on Aspect Oriented Programming. We are just getting into it, but AOP is… well, a trip. I don’t know how I feel about it yet, but I’m learning.
My favorite class this quarter is my independent study. I’ve wanted to get some exposure to web development for a while now, and I’ve also been wanting to get some more experience with python. By developing a web-based quiz administering system for the CS department at RIT, I hope to accomplish both of those goals. It is kind of a big project for only 10 weeks, so Dave is signed on to help. As far as implementation goes, we’ll be using Python Server Pages as provided by mod_python for Apache. Javascript will assist with client side logic and any AJAXian features we decide upon, while HTML and CSS will be responsible for making a pretty interface.
It should be a fun quarter :)
