Uni Blog Week 03
Last updated: 11 minutes ago
Intro
Sorry, this week's Uni Blog is a few days behind. I have been trying to aim for having this done on Friday. This Friday, my kid was home from school and we rearranged the household. For most of the weekend, everything has been in turmoil. For half the weekend I didn't even have access to internet or my computer. But we are getting there, and here is the post, only a couple days late for my self-imposed deadline.
Project Management (Monday Morning)
Lecture
Lectured about the 5 phases of project management: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring, and Closing. Not overly interesting or unique compared to other project management courses that I have had to take in this degree. The lecture only lasted 40 minutes or so. He wants us to think about a Project Proposal for Assignment 3 and we will need to focus on a project charter. But he hasn't assigned any reading or assignments this week, so not really sure what to think or do about that course right now.
Assignments
Nothing this week.
Operating Systems (Monday Afternoon)
Lecture
We Reviewed OS basics from last week, covered OS system calls, covered the differences between monolithic, layered, and module structures. This was a pretty interesting class, especially the part where he went over the C code and the system calls. From this session, I may now be fully engrossed in C programming. Since this lecture I have started programming a Pong game written in C and Raylib. I'll post to my Itchio once I have it done and once I learn how to convert C code to something Itch can handle.
Assignments
No assignment for this week's class. My group mates and I did get last week's assignment all put together and submitted. We've even gotten the marks back already; 100%. Looking forward to next week's class, he is going to lecture further on system calls in C, he has already opened the lecture and I've peaked ahead.
Data Communications (Tuesday Afternoon)
Lecture
Prof gave us a short quiz, 7 questions over 15 minutes. He then proceeded to finish lecturing about chapter 1. Which was all about network design goals, TCP and OSI protocols. Then! oh. Then he made all 30 of us screen share our textbooks to prove we had a copy of the textbook. If you have ever been in a meeting with one person struggling to do a screen share, I had to do that with 30 other people. This little endeavor of patience took over an hour to get done. A complete waste of time and resources. I am very angry about having this professor again.
Assignments
The solo homework 2 consists of two questions from chapter 1 of the textbook again. This week's Group Assignment 2 also consists of 2 questions out of chapter 1 of the textbook as well. Same as last week and probably every week of this course.
Extreme Programming (Thursday Afternoon)
Previous Lecture
I went over last week's slides to catch up for having missed last week's class. Those slides introduced and covered MapReduce. MapReduce is a data algorithm that takes large data, splits it into parallels, turns it into key:value pairs, shuffles the data to group all the like key data together, and then aggregates the data into simplified key:value data. I then went through the in-class lab, which I was able to download before it was removed. Got to play a little with a MapReduce sample:
# COMP 455 - Lab 1
# Simple MapReduce example: word count
data = [
# "apple banana apple",
# "banana orange",
# "apple orange apple"
"security cloud data",
"cloud data data",
"security data cloud"
]
# MAP
mapped = []
for line in data:
for word in line.split():
mapped.append((word, 1))
print("MAP OUTPUT")
print(mapped)
# SHUFFLE
shuffled = {}
for key, value in mapped:
if key not in shuffled:
shuffled[key] = []
shuffled[key].append(value)
print("\nSHUFFLE OUTPUT")
print(shuffled)
# REDUCE
reduced = {}
for key, values in shuffled.items():
reduced[key] = sum(values)
print("\nREDUCE OUTPUT")
print(reduced)
Here is a MapReduce article that covers what I just read in 21 slides.
Lecture
Lectured a lot about the various algorithms that we were going to be using. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to make sense to herself; she frequently stops and changes tangents. I think I'll need to do my own look ups and self-teach for this subject.
Assignments
She has assigned one lab this week and it's exactly the same as last week but with a different dataset. Got that done within a few minutes.
Conclusion
I found this week to be very boring and low stress. Perhaps a lull before the storm? I hope that next week will be a little more productive and enlightening.
References
If you want me to elaborate on anything, please message me on Discord, Mastodon, X, or email me. I’ll be happy to go into more detail one-on-one or to create more posts.
