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lol.

Burn, burn, burn...

Right. CSE 321 and CSE 370 readings for the rest of the quarter down today. Just a few more really tricky homework questions and I'll be done with all homework assignments for the rest of the quarter too. Then I can begin the burn mode (practice, practice, practice) for CSE 321.

Good thing I decided to screw shopping this year. The homework assignments were massively hard and time consuming. They truly saved the best for the last (both classes). But its only because I decided to give up black friday shopping... that allowed me to get done with the readings so early. Finals are only 1 week+ away; not the time for relaxation.

With any luck I'll be able to finish off both homework assignments tomorrow and shift into burn mode.

The Burn(TM) [26 Nov -> 30 Nov]

Well yeah. Anyone wanna join me at the CSE underground for the 5 day total thanksgiving break?

Gonna be going on a full burn on CSE 321 for those 5 days, in addition to finishing up final readings and homework for CSE321/CSE370. It's rare to get a break this long that allows you to do a full burn to improve your mastery of the material. Screw shopping.

Let's roll.

(Oh, and: I finished the card reader project yesterday. Like, right on the day it was assigned. lol.)

What does that say?

I was so bored waiting for the card reader stuff to compile, I made an 8 x 8bit word register with Othello. Can you guess what it says?

Hint: Each row is an 8 bit character. Black is a 0, and white is a 1. And here is the LCD decoding sheet for the corresponding characters:

Did you know that you could store 64 bits of information on a single othello board?

Someone set up us the bomb.

Hmm. Didn't get to work on the card reader today. Burned through a lot of homework though. Productive.

OMG, Finally.

18 hours later...

Well, after burning though 18 hours on the LCD (over the course of 2 days), I've finally got it up and running. Today was actually a public holiday (Veteran's Day) so I wasn't wasting time going to useless classes like philosophy. The result? A 9.5hour straight burn on the LCD Finite State Machine.

The reason it took this long was because I threw out everything I did yesterday because it was imperfect and sloppy. I basically spent the last night coming up with a completely different approach to the problem that basically uses one super-machine to process everything at once.

The final design is amazingly beautiful -- only 130 lines of code in Verilog HDL are used to describe a fairly complex number of interactions. This is why I like to refer to programming as an art. Getting code to work is one thing, synthesizing a beautifully short and efficient implementation is something totally different.

To give you a rough idea of how complex the state machine was, I used about 10 pieces of 8.5x11" paper to draw out the entire state diagram of the machine. But alas, this part is now down and I'm going to get working on the magnetic card reader this weekend.


This was when I realized I was on the wrong track, and ought to throw everything out and start over:

Fail. Do not want.

This is how it ought to be done:

Win. I can has cheezburger nao?

Perfectionism is a prerequisite for success in hardware design.

The Finite State Machine

Time for a serious project. I've got to design a working LCD + Card Reader system for the final CSE 370 end-of-quarter project. All of it via FPGA programming in Verilog, that will manipulate the LCD and card reader on the board.

Well, so far I've went at it 8 hours straight today, but still no luck. Learned a lot nevertheless. Looks like I've just got to sleep on it and take another crack at it tomorrow. This will take a while.

Lulz of the day

I was just reading this in my Discreet Structures textbook:

DEFINITION 5: A random variable is a function from the sample space of an experiment to the set of real numbers. That is, a random variable assigns a real number to each possible outcome.

Remark: Note that a random variable is a function. It is not a variable, and it is not random!

O_O *retarded look*

Right. Let's define something and call it a random variable. But a random variable is neither random, not is it a variable. But let's call it a random variable anyway, just for the heck for it.

I just felt like defining all bicycles as cars. But note that "cars" aren't cars. o_O

Omg, bring back programming. Now.

Well, I'm definitely glad that I'm going to be taking 2 programming-based CSE classes next quarter. The sticker shock of the grading systems that universities use is something that definitely cannot be worn off, at least for any logical mind. As I've always maintained, the institution of the University is a construct not built to impart knowledge, but simply to segregate society into generic social and financial categories.

While that effect is not immediate, it is the ultimately goal, as evidenced by grading systems that perform tests based on speed and what not, designed to produce resolution for a grading curve. This is society in 2008. We've stopped teaching. All that remains is the process of acquiring arbitrary fragments of material to be replayed bit by bit on a scale indicative of luck and speed.

I've read a lot of articles and commentaries that were social analysis in nature and none of them made sense. Then I read the Unabomber's Industrial Society and Its Future, and it finally struck me as bar none, *the* piece of social analysis that made sense.

"In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."

The time has come to stop pretending that the arbitrarily constructed measuring scales of knowledge are measuring knowledge. The time has come to start doing. That which creates is the benchmark of knowledge.