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"Kompressor ... in action..."
Jan. 10th, 2003 03:19 amI'd been in sort of a strange mood today, feeling somewhat harried, and generally kinda tired. Not eating a whole lot during the day probably didn't help that; I was in classes (and the 2130 TA meeting) in a glorious block from 9:30 until 3PM, and then went and watched the beginning of the movie, which I'd missed for my Spanish film class. I was dragging by the end of it, generally sort of weary...
... and CS2200 is going to be interesting, I think, taught by this really entertaining fellow whom I couldn't place age-wise. He'd looked like he was somewhere in his 30s, but he was telling us about how he'd been coding on all sorts of strange machines back in the 70s... perhaps he's older than that. At one point, apparently, he wrote a Lisp interpreter for a stack-based machine, all in assembly... really disturbing. Ah, yes, and there were at one point apparently stack-based machines, which didn't have any registers that you could access directly (they only used them for caching purposes, so as far as you could tell, they weren't there) -- the only thing there was a stack. Ah, and ENIAC had just one register -- an "accumulator", it was called. Things're rather different nowadays...
For Spanish, we watched this really excellent film called "La Lengua de las Mariposas" ("Butterfly Tongue" -- it renders much better in Spanish), which was about Spain in the Republic right before the Spanish Civil War... it deals with (over the course of an hour'n'ahalf) freedom and attachment to tradition, and growing up, and betrayal, and ideals conflicting with expediency, and human nobility and baseness. Really well done. I was impressed, and glad that I went to see the beginning of it, which I'd missed due to the TA meeting. Corey's currently downloading a copy for me, though it's not going very quickly. It's pretty obscure, and apparently he could only find one guy with a copy for us to snag.
That was interesting as well, the TA meeting... Bill's apparently working to make the class less wildly threatening. "2130" is apparently something used to scare small children 'round these parts, and he's trying to change this around, fix the class's reputation so that it's more manageable and less draconian. What's really fascinating, though, is that a lot of the TA staff doesn't seem to like this idea -- they're trying to keep it more or less the same as it is, which is fairly violently informative. There could be a number of motivations for this -- maybe the idea is that a harder class turns out better coders, or perhaps it's sort of a gradually acquired attitude that the class itself should be made difficult -- perhaps at least as difficult as it was Back In The Day.
Generally busy day, though... I'd done classes for about forever, then worked on the computer and organized things so as to get ready for these classes... downloaded VMs, emerged squeak (yay! :) ), redid my bookshelf... and talked with Esther for a while, which made me feel much better :)
So now, I think I'm going to fall over. I'm still kinda sore from yesterday. Tomorrow I'll do... maybe two outside loops or something like that, and then Saturday, Running Wreck is doing the weekly Long Run... which might kill me off, but I think I'm going to try it. Yah, time to collapse. Only one class tomorrow, yay! :)
... and CS2200 is going to be interesting, I think, taught by this really entertaining fellow whom I couldn't place age-wise. He'd looked like he was somewhere in his 30s, but he was telling us about how he'd been coding on all sorts of strange machines back in the 70s... perhaps he's older than that. At one point, apparently, he wrote a Lisp interpreter for a stack-based machine, all in assembly... really disturbing. Ah, yes, and there were at one point apparently stack-based machines, which didn't have any registers that you could access directly (they only used them for caching purposes, so as far as you could tell, they weren't there) -- the only thing there was a stack. Ah, and ENIAC had just one register -- an "accumulator", it was called. Things're rather different nowadays...
For Spanish, we watched this really excellent film called "La Lengua de las Mariposas" ("Butterfly Tongue" -- it renders much better in Spanish), which was about Spain in the Republic right before the Spanish Civil War... it deals with (over the course of an hour'n'ahalf) freedom and attachment to tradition, and growing up, and betrayal, and ideals conflicting with expediency, and human nobility and baseness. Really well done. I was impressed, and glad that I went to see the beginning of it, which I'd missed due to the TA meeting. Corey's currently downloading a copy for me, though it's not going very quickly. It's pretty obscure, and apparently he could only find one guy with a copy for us to snag.
That was interesting as well, the TA meeting... Bill's apparently working to make the class less wildly threatening. "2130" is apparently something used to scare small children 'round these parts, and he's trying to change this around, fix the class's reputation so that it's more manageable and less draconian. What's really fascinating, though, is that a lot of the TA staff doesn't seem to like this idea -- they're trying to keep it more or less the same as it is, which is fairly violently informative. There could be a number of motivations for this -- maybe the idea is that a harder class turns out better coders, or perhaps it's sort of a gradually acquired attitude that the class itself should be made difficult -- perhaps at least as difficult as it was Back In The Day.
Generally busy day, though... I'd done classes for about forever, then worked on the computer and organized things so as to get ready for these classes... downloaded VMs, emerged squeak (yay! :) ), redid my bookshelf... and talked with Esther for a while, which made me feel much better :)
So now, I think I'm going to fall over. I'm still kinda sore from yesterday. Tomorrow I'll do... maybe two outside loops or something like that, and then Saturday, Running Wreck is doing the weekly Long Run... which might kill me off, but I think I'm going to try it. Yah, time to collapse. Only one class tomorrow, yay! :)
