Martin Geisler Online

Today was a rather long day with five hours of lectures from 10 in the morning to 15 in the afternoon — the longest day so far :-) When I got home I had two plays with Thomas Jacobsen (a nice guy from the fourth floor here at [Skejbygård][]) on our table soccer game. I won the first game and lost the second so that was okay.

Then here in the evening we saw IMDB:Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002) on DVD. Really nice movie although I don’t like the way Gimli is portraied as the comic sidekick and how they’ve changed the story by dragging Frodo and Sam all the way to Osgiliath. I remember Faramir as much wiser from the book, but perhaps it’s because it’s been too long since I’ve read it.

It was also a pretty long movie: the DVD player showed two hours and 46 minutes when I stopped it. We have a movie club here at [Skejbygård][] where we rent and show a movie each Wednesday at 20 o’clock.

Tomorrow also looks like a busy day. I have a lecture on Complex Functions from 12 to 14 and then an appointment at the hairdresser at 14:15. At 18:30 Thomas Mølhave will be taking me with him to karate practice — I’ve never tried anything remotely like it so it will be interesting to see how it goes. We’ll be done at 20 and then head for [Skejbygård][] where we’ll be taking our new bar into use for the first time. I’ve invited a lot of people from my class to I’m sure that it will be a cool party. Luckily none of us have any lectures on Friday (except for RuneThorbek who does have a single lecture if I remember correctly…). So a long and exciting day awaits me tomorrow, I’ll go to sleep now.

The book that my dad ordered for my birthday has finally arrived. First my dad ordered the book from some English online bookstore in the beginning of January. But after having waited 14 days he asked them what they were doing? The webpage had said that it would be shipped right away. They answered that the book were in backorder with their suppliers… Strange, as this is an extremely popular book on C++.

So my dad cancelled the order and ordered the book at Amazon instead. While we were at it, we also ordered some extra books. I ordered a book about the Standard Template Library in C++ and my dad ordered a book about database development in Kylix — which is the legendary Delphi ported to [GNU][]/Linux. Using these tools, it’s possible to develop a program under MsWindows and them recompile it under GNU/Linux, or the other way around. Both Kylix and Delphi uses ObjectPascal which is another nice language.

Amazon promptly shipped all the books, but then the Danish postal service screwed things up! Or at least that’s our theory. The books in my dads package was switched with some books for a guy who lives in Copenhagen. My dad called this guy, but he didn’t reply before my dad had shipped the books back to Amazon. They were very sorry for the trouble and shipped a new set of books right away.

And now, I’ve finally gotten ”The C++ Programming Langauge” by Bjarne Stroustrup; ISBN:0201700735 and Effective STL by Scott Meyers; ISBN:0201749629. The Stroustrup book is as expected: heavy, complete and throughout. I bought it because I wanted a reference for C++ and I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve gotten.

The other books is much smaller and consists of 50 specific points that one should keep in the back of ones head when using the Standard Template Library (STL). This books is written in a much more entertaining style, but I’m sure the advice given here will be useful.

Now I just have to start programming some C++!

I’ve now had my first week at University of Aarhus and I’m slowly getting back into study-mode. My first expressions is that DAIMI:dModLog is going to be a lot of fun, DAIMI:dDist also looks promising and Analyse 1 is a bit old-fashioned. Our books is Real Analysis by H. L. Royden from 1963 (we use the third edition from 1988). So the notation is somewhat strange: The for-all symbol (a flipped A: ∀) isn’t used but the there-exists symbol (a mirrored E: ∃) is, he uses & to mean logical “and” but the normal v-shaped symbol to mean logical “or”.

I’ve been working lately on fixing [PhpWiki][] so that it’s possible to export the pages to static [XHTML][] pages. Most of the code is already there, I’m just fixing some errors to make it usuable. With that in place, it would be easy to setup a cronjob to periodically make a tarball with GimpsterDotCom, should anybody be interested in such a thing…

Also, with static pages PhpWiki suddenly becomes a powerful general-purpose tool for making websites. I’ve been hired to redo this website and expect to use PhpWiki for that. The homepage for DK-TUG (http://tug.dk/) will probably also get a dose of PhpWiki.

I started again today at University of Aarhus after spending the last two months doing nothing. So you can probably imagine how tired I was them my alarm clock started 8:00 this morning… The first lecture was about algebra — we heard about basic stuff like the integers, division with remainder, and congruenses. This lead us to talk about the principles behind the famous RSA cryptosystem which we’ll hear more about later in the course.

After the two hour lecture I had a break for three hours which I used to buy the books I’ll need for this semester. The books cost more than $200 but they look like they’re worth it. Two of the books written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum: ”Modern Operating Systems” and ”Structured Computer Organization”. I also had to buy a book called the BETA programming language — syntax of the language looks really weird but let’s see how it goes… The last two books was ”Database Systems” and ”Concrete Abstract Algebra”. The last one is written by our lecture and pressed here at University of Aarhus so it costed only $15.

After the break I had a lecture about the architecture of modern computers. We heard about the division of the computer into layers with the digital circuits at the bottom and the high-level programming language at the top.

All in all the three courses look very interesting, but I guess that it’ll take a couple of days before I get back into the old study-habit.

It’s expensive to live — I’ve just paid a total of 1,800 DKK (about 225 USD) in bills. And one of the bills was to Netsite, so that Gimpster.com can remain online for the next six months.

And then I’ve also bought books for the new term that has just begun. The most exciting new class is the one about algorithms and datastructures. It’s much more advanced than the introduction to Java we were presented with when we started last summer, and the book looks good too. The book is Algorithm Design — Foundations, Analysis, and Internet Examples by Michael Goodrich and Roberto Tamassia. It says in the introduction that it’s typeset with LaTeX so it can’t be all bad ;-) Although I think they’ve made the margins a bit to narrow, especially the right margin on the even pages (the pages that are to the right). But well… that’s how it goes when people insist on changing the standard layout LaTeX produces.