Martin Geisler Online

I had my exam in Mat10 yesterday, and I passed. My question was about the Gram-Schmidt process. I started with the main theorem and proved some other theorems as I went. It went fairly well when I got started, and it was all over in about 10-15 minutes.

Now I’m getting ready for the next, and final, exam: dIntProg. I’ve switched places with another from my class, so that my exam is this Friday (the 18th) and not the 24th as it was originally. This means that I’ll be done with my exams roughly a week before schedule — very nice indeed! :-) After the exam on Friday, I’ll go to Aalborg, where I’ll stay till by birthday the 21st. I’ll no longer be a teenager after the 21st… I guess that means that I’ve grown up :-)

As you might have guessed, then I’m studying for my upcoming exam in linear algebra, also know as Mat10. The exam is the 15th so there’s still plenty of time. I’ve now worked by way through all the subjects we will be tested in, and have made a (Danish) document in LaTeX with all the theorems and proofs. I’ve now written something for every subject — there’s even a proof of the nasty Cayley-Hamilton Theorem! At first I thought it was very confusing, but then I found a proof on the net (sorry — I didn’t save the link) that took the time to explain things properly, and that helped.

The exam is without preparation, so I’ll probably have to rehearse some more… I’ve never tried this kind of exam so I don’t know what to expect. It sounds a bit scary, that I have to be able to talk about a random subject — just like that. My last exam in math was with 20 minutes of time for preparations — plenty of time to look things up in the books and so on… But on the other hand, we wont get a grade for this exam — we either pass or fail. That should make things much easier.

We had a good New Years Eve yesterday — the weather was a bit foggy at first, but it cleared up just around midnight, so that we could see all the beautiful fireworks. We have a really nice view of the city from the first floor — it was spectacular!

The Party was really cool! thoooms gave me a crash-course in OpenGL programming — I have now made a program that builds and illuminates a nice cube with rounded corners — take a look at the picture at the right. The idea is that this cube should one of 27 cubes that would make a Rubik’s Cube. I think it would be really cool to have a real three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube — one that you can rotate and solve using your mouse…

When I told thoooms about my plans, he looked a little uneasy. He showed me a huge book, that he had got this Christmas, and turned to a chapter about something called picking. It turned out, that it was far from simple to figure out which object the user actually points at in the 3D world — the book had a whole chapter devoted to that subject alone! So it’ll probably take a while before my program will be able to do that :-)

But that doesn’t matter, as it’s really fun to play with OpenGL. I’ve also gained a better understanding of all the hard work that lies in the fancy games we see today — there’s a really long way from my simple cube to that! :-)

I would like to wish everybody who visit my site a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The last four months have been pretty busy for me: I’ve started at university and moved away from my parents at the same time. But they have also been some of the best months in my life: I’ve met new friends and I like my study very much.

But now I’m going to relax for a couple of days — until The Party starts the 27th :-)

I’ll be attending The Party for the first time this year together with thoooms. I’m really looking forward to it — thoooms has told me so many exiting things about it.

I’m thinking about reinstalling my Debian system — they have a local mirror of all major Linux distributions… I also look forward to the many conferences. I’ll let you know how it went when I get home again the 29th December.