Back to work

I'm back after missing a couple of posts due to travelling for reading week. Reading week was quite relaxing, but now is time to focus on the tasks at hand once more. The workload comes thick and fast at this particular time of the year for a university student, and CSC104 makes no exception.  The second part of the Wikipedia assignment is due this week, while the first project is due next week.

The first project seems to be quite interesting. When I first looked at it, waiting for a delayed flight at an airport, I must admit I thought it was quite hard. I've had a couple of more looks since and now I think it is not very hard and it is going to be enjoyable to work on. Besides, between useful DrRacket tools like the stepper and examples of similar completed definitions in the project itself or the lectures, I think I should be able to figure it out.

The most tedious assignment is turning out to be the second Wikipedia one. The reason is that I cannot figure out how I am going to indicate that I have read the learn how links without making the plan look and sound incredibly artificial. I have, more or less, figured out what I want to do with my article. I have also consulted various helpful links in Wikipedia. The next step now should be writing the plan, but this is where I'm having trouble. My problem is I cannot think of a seamless way to combine the two. The main concern is that the plan is going to look and feel too disconnected, because I will have to go out of my way to show that I have read the learn how links and other resources such as the Wikipedia Manual of Style. As of the moment of this writing I have not yet come up with a solution to this conundrum. Hopefully though, by tomorrow at 11:59 PM I will have found a way.

The blizzard and the test

This week there was the first term test for the course. I was a bit nervous in anticipation of it initially (as with every exam or test or any other way of direct performance assessment). When I first got the test in class and had a quick look at it the first impression I got was that the questions were not hard but it was going to be long. I thought I might struggle to finish in time but in the end it turned out quite well. I was very happy with how I did and I am expecting a good mark on it.

The other good thing related to the test was the fact that there were no tutorials this Friday. I am not saying this as a disrespect to tutorials, but the lack of them this week allowed me to stay inside during the massive snow storm that hit the city, during which, for some reason that I'm sure appeared good enough to the powers that be at the university, ours was the only university that remained open in Toronto, at least for a good portion of the day.

So there you have it, two good things inside a single week coming from a test. Who would have guessed?

Third Week

Wikipedia! That has to be the key word for this week. Not only because the first part of the Wikipedia assignment is coming up but also because this week got me to learn new things about one of the most famous websites in the world (probably). I knew the way Wikipedia worked generally, I knew it is essentially a community-driven portal. However, before two or three days ago I really had no idea on how it really functions, how much work it actually takes to contribute to Wikipedia.

Before this week, I thought it fairly easy for someone to log in and correct an article, find a picture to post or update some information. In fact, several times I have wanted to click the little links saying things like "add a citation" but have only stopped once being presented with the account creation screen. It just was not worth the time. After all someone else could do the job just as easily, right? Wrong. Indeed, looks can be deceiving. Upon closer look I realized that things are not necessarily as easy as they first seem to be. If a citation is not there it is most likely because it is so hard to find a reliable source to cite from. If a picture has not been uploaded chances are that it might be a very rare picture which is not readily available for anyone. 

Then there was the problem of finding a viable article or two to work on. I thought that it would be easier and more fun if I were able to find an article in a field that interests me and in which I have some knowledge. However, after an hour scrolling through the "Help out" section my hopes had taken a dent. It is not easy to find articles dealing with any big themes, events, personalities or products that need to be revised or updated. Even articles on things such as recent sporting events had been impeccably updated. In fact, the whole exercise forced me to reverse the usual roles. I was not the guy looking to find something on Wikipedia anymore. I had become the guy that needed to find what was not on Wikipedia, and then add it. Easier said than done. You simply cannot just go on Wikipedia and write on the first thing that comes to your mind, because someone else has already done that

So I had to change my tactics. I switched from looking for articles dealing with big themes or events to articles talking about smaller component parts of those themes/events. I also stopped looking for them in the lists of thousands and thousands of articles needing help in Wikipedia and started to Google the articles I'd be most interested to work in, hoping they would have the "help needed/suggestion" banners at the top. It took a while but in the end I was able to have some success. I came up with a list, but I am still a bit worried that some other Wikipedian will get to those articles before I do. In that case, we're back to square one. Fingers crossed...

It is the end of my second week in CSC 104, and since these blogs need to be written weekly I do not have a lot of news to report. I am a bit worried that the class is getting a little bit more complex, especially for someone who is not in the computer science disciplines, such as me. When I say this I am referring mainly to the exercises for the second quiz which do not seem, on a first view, as straightforward as the exercises of the first quiz. To be fair, however, I have yet to do any meaningful work on them, so my hope is that by working on them I will be able to understand them better.
Apart from that, class today was fairly interesting. I particularly enjoyed the demonstration of the bits transmission message. I thought the idea on the part of the professor was brilliant, far better than just explaining the concept using words, or the occasional slide. It was an original approach to explaining how the process works and how much harder and sower it must have been prior to the invention of computers. Well worth the walk in the extreme cold.

First blog post

Well, here goes nothing. This is the first time I have engaged in blogging of any kind, so for now this is probably going to be an exercise in free writing. But since that could probably mean going on tangents and talking on and on about things that are unrelated I will try to keep this structured around the course as the instructions advise.
CSC 104 is the first computer science course I have taken at the university level, despite me being in the fourth year of my studies here. The reason for that is that this is not my field. I am a political science major and this is serving as a science half-credit for me. Since I had to take one, I thought why not try a basic computer science course? After all, computers are becoming more and more central in the every-day lives of everyone. Whether you are a journalist, historian, political scientist or a doctor, chances are that you have a computer and that it plays an important role in your daily routine. Therefore, knowing something more about computers and computing would not hurt.
I can claim to know some basic things about computers and programming, however my only course on some very basic computer programming was back in high school, and the memories of that had almost completely escaped my mind. The first two weeks of this course however have done a good job of bringing back some of those memories. So far the course has been not only informative, but also enjoyable and enlightening in a way. As a bonus, at least judging on what I have seen so far, the learning curve is steep but the difficulty curve is not.
 All in all it has been a refreshingly different experience from the year-to-year and day-to-day routines of my field. Not only is the subject matter and the teaching style new, but along with them comes a package of what I find unique and curious things to try, such as the task of  physically going to a computer lab in the Bahen Center in order to set up the CDF account (Note to self: I still have to do that by the way). Oh, and of course, let's not forget that because of this course I just started my first blog. Who knows, it might become a habit...