hi again, I’m actually still around

Still in the middle of the madness of test and assignment week. Assignments are proving to be incredibly interesting, especially those that keep being given extensions days after the deadline, when everyone has alreaqdy submitted!! Here are some excerpts from a forum thread. The assignment was due last Wednesday 19th August, and at 2:34am Monday 24th an extension was released:

It’s not really any use now is it?? I mean, thanks and all, but I’ve had to move on to my other assignments now. It would have nice when I was dealing with it last Wednesday…..then an hour or two would have been useful.
I was forced to give up, and just submit what I had. Is there going to be any bonus for not re-submitting?; ie not penalising people who have scheduled/time-managed their work, and don’t have the ability to spend another 2 days on it. As far as I’m concerned, this only helps people with minimal workloads, and therefore penalises the rest of us compared to them.
Unfortunately for all of us, the extension was NOT notified to the whole class prior to due date and time, and hence is not really appropriate at this late notice. Maybe if it was til some point during the mid-semester break to allow people a chance to make use of it.

we have been “officially” notified, albeit 96 hours AFTER submission date/time.

I could have done with the extension at the time the assignment was due, but now that it’s passed I don’t see it as fair

From the lecturer around noon Tuesday 25th:

Dear all,
I asked in class about the length of the extension, and the extension that was asked was indeed granted. You only get what you ask for.
The second extension was to help those who were in need, but it won’t penalize those who have already completed – those can move on with other things in life. Since I did not have Internet access, the second extension wasn’t timely (but better late than never). Had you asked for a longer extension the first time, it would’ve helped. Next time you ask for an extension, remember Hofstadter’s law.
Cheers,
Mano

and in response:

Hi Mano
Thanks for that. I believe the real issue is that most of the class DID NOT COMPLETE the assignment by last Wednesday; however they submitted what they had done as that was the due date. I don’t think any of us realised the difficulties involved in the assignment until we were getting into the more nitty-gritty details as the deadline loomed.

Some of us (myself included) do not bother asking for extensions as they are just thrown about willy nilly half the time due to student whining. We do however make use of the additional time when required. That said, submission by the due date is not an indication of completion, only a display of our understanding that a deadline is (normally!) a fixed time and cannot be exceeded.
In this case, we received the extension, and then worked to it – achieving whatever was possible in the time provided. The issue has now arisen as a “new” extension appeared well after the due date when most of us no longer have the ability to deal with it. Some students complained they have a test on this Wednesday, so you have now extended the extended extension to Friday. There are however a lot of us with this test on Wednesday, and another possible 2 tests Thursday, and another 2 tests Friday. (This is NOT another request for more time!!)
I honestly believe there should never have been a 2nd extension. The work we all submitted at the same time last Wednesday should have been the basis for marking all our assignments. If you then chose to apply a more lenient marking schedule, or scaling to the results, that would have been entirely within the bounds of your academic prerogative. As it is, the continued extensions being handed out now only benefit those who had, and have, the time to do more work on this assignment.
To bastardise Hofstadter’s law:

Quote:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Mano’s time estimations.

and then in response to the lecturer’s next response:

sman063 wrote:

If you leave the assignment to the eleventh hour, it is going to be very hard to complete. Yes, I know you have other assignments, but you need to manage your time and get things done sooner rather than later. If you are prepared to put in a late-nighter or spend the weekend before the due date, why not do it earlier?

Thanks for your feedback Mano. I guess that with regard to managing time and other assignments, the real issue is that many of us were managing our time; which meant that we were doing other assignments first, as they were due first. I for one am not complaining about the size/complexity of the assignment but, as I stated in my first post just after this latest extended extension was announced, I and others have taken issue with the fact that having dealt with the complexity and difficulty as best we could in the time given, we have had the playing field completely re-levelled in a destructive manner.
We did put in all-nighters, and weekends, without success. We do not have a problem with this. It was the same for all students. Now, however, with these additional extensions people without time management are being benefited. I, personally, allocated my time window for this assignment and it is now gone. I managed my time for this assignment amongst others in a manner which balanced them all. Based on this, I now have no available time to re-visit it.
If it has ended up that most of the class were unable to complete the assignment adequately, then that should really be reflected in our marks. These extensions are now simply going to benefit a very small minority, who may or may not have managed their time previously, while the majority of the class are commensurately penalised.

So, yeah, that’s a rant/presentation of some fun going on in my life at present.

I’m was also going to put up some new code posts in the next hour or two, but since some have come from assignment work I’ve been doing and now it’s not closed, that’ll just have to wait a little.

It was suggested to me on Sunday afternoon that I make a word game on my computer. I had a spare half hour before heading off to work, so I found it to be an easy distraction from the intensity of assignments. I knocked it pretty much all out in forty minutes, but just had one algorithm not quite right. I played with it on and off the last few days, and today I got the whole recursive action happening. It’s actualy not too bad a game, so I’m going to move it across from C# into Java in the next few weeks, and hopefully port into a Blackberry Storm app (yay for touch-screen). That step should be easy-ish. The next will be (if it seems worthwhile) to re-write it in Objective-C so that I can port it into an iPhone app.

I’m really looking forward to the next two weeks of break, as I have BIG plans. I’m moving a new desk into the spare room to set up a proper computer/work station for study and play/work; I’ll be launching a few sites as I get to polish them off in a focussed fashion; and then I’ll also be tapping away at my word game and a few other app ideas.

Good times!!

yippee!!! new WP theme

WordPress, being the awesome wonderful people they are, have just brought the iNove theme to the site. Now we can all experience it’s simplistic beauty and elegance. You can be your left valuable thing that I was straight on in and grabbing the theme straight onto my blog. Not to say I didn’t like my previous theme (P2), but iNove has much of what is perfect about self-hosted blogs, while still being on the WordPress freebie side.

That’s all I had to say, so back to assignments….4 hours to go, and counting….

There’s always one!! I’ve just finishe…

There’s always one!! I’ve just finished one assignment and handed it in, and I’ve got another due in less than 7 hours time…..but, on my way between campuses, I heard the radio guys talking about this vid. It’s only been on YouTube for a week or two, and already is approaching the 300k mark. Woohoo!!

So, here it is, enjoy:

Home from NZCS competition….we came 7t…

Home from NZCS competition….we came 7th in our section. We had four other questions answered, but somehow they were “wrong”. One wouldn’t run for the judges, but ran for us without fail everytime – it’s very hard to fix something when you don’t know how it’s broken. One kept outputting the incorrect answer apparently, however it matched the model solutions given, so again we struggled to “fix” it due to not knowing what was wrong. Two others we didn’t get to type up as we were focussing on higher point questions. If we had made the two we thought we had right, we would have won our section for the whole country, and also been in top 5 or 6 for all categories. Oh, well, all over now.
Other than that, back to assignment work, and then prepping for Google code Jam in 10 days time. Also, once assignments and tests are over this week, I’ll be launching a few sites. I know I keep saying that, but it’s really true this time…they’re ready, it’s just a matter of spending a day uploading stuff and configuring before it’s all go….
Nothing mor to say tonight, but I’m hanging to do a real post again soon; so don’t go away.
Ciao
C

I’ve been way too busy with assignments…

I’ve been way too busy with assignments and tests this week, and next week is looking even worse. I’m hanging out for mid-semester break!! I’ve got the New Zealand Computer Society coding competition tomorrow (Saturday), so I’m heading for bed now that I’ve done some prep for it. Also Google Code Jam is coming up, with qualifying in a week and a half’s time. Definitely looking forward to that.
I’ll be posting some more code snippets and the like tomorrow or Sunday, because I fiddled with some stuff for some of the assignments I was on. I couldn’t post it before, as that would potentially be cheating etc.
Well, off to bed now, but I will definitely post properly in the next 24 hours.

how to unmask your passwords securely – JavaScript

Unmasking passwords can remove a lot of frustration when trying to enter long and/or complicated passwords. This simple JavaScript below enables you to do this on any site you are visiting at your discretion.
Remember that doing this will reduce security, for example in an internet cafe where someone could shoulder surf; so use this technique with due diligence and discretion. You have been warned, and I take no responsibility for problems caused by using this script.

var els = document.getElementsByTagName('input');
for(var x = 0; x < els.length; x++) {
if(els[x].type.toLowerCase() == 'password' ) {
var test = els[x].type = 'text';
}
}

Simply paste javascript: at the beginning of that, and delete all the newlines so that it becomes a one-liner, then you can delete the text in your browser’s address bar and paste the JavaScript snippet in the address bar instead, then hit Enter. This will cause masked passwords to be revealed.

If you find you will use this a lot, you can bookmark the script. Simply create a bookmark for any page you wish (preferably without an icon), then edit the properties of it so that the URL it points to is the script (ie javascript: var els = document.getElementsByTagName('input'); for(var x = 0; x < els.length; x++) { if(els[x].type.toLowerCase() == 'password' ) { var test = els[x].type = 'text'; }} and rename the bookmark to something common-sense such as “UNMASKER”.

There you have it. [Sourced from techrepublic]

quick update: LOLZ!!!

Thanks to dailyfailblog, here’s the world’s most stupid student….

I haven’t had much time to come up with anything to say tonight, so I won’t waste your time. There’ll be a post tomorrow though. Oh, yeah, and just a reminder that I’m being cheeky this year and setting up a Donate with PayPal link over on the right for my birthday.

Been busy, here’s a catch up

I haven’t posted much this week as I had mad assignments (still going on) and tests (more of those coming too….), but the weekend is here now, so time to share the love again. My birthday is coming up on Wednesday this week, but I’m delaying celebrating it properly until the beginning of September so I can focus on assignments and tests pre mid-semester break. I’m being cheeky this year and setting up a Donate with PayPal link over on the right. HEHEHE!! It’ll let you donate a little something something to my birthday kitty using the security of PayPal (it goes through bit.ly because the link keeps breaking and reformatting, but it is safe). Anyway, enough of being selfish. I had a bit of fun with assignments this week. One in particular was “stimulating”. I was building a WBMP to PNG converter in C#, which in itself was not dramatic, however I kept getting funky skewing on some images. I eventually figured it out – it was “human error” (ie Cameron’s stupidity) and me forgetting to allow for the buffer bits in the byte stream….a simple %8 revision fixed that, but it took me forever to realise what I hadn’t done. Just polishing off an HTTP proxy server for that one at the moment actually.

Otherwise, Google has just set up a nice resource for developers and small business owners alike. They’ve blogged about it here, and this has all the links to the various levels of resource. Very useful this, so I’ll be visiting fairly regularly I feel.

Also, a mate of mine from uni and I were chatting today, and he mentioned a Squid App he’d written to easily allow users to change permission within a GUI, without needing to change everything and play with the whole config file. It’s up on SourceForge [link here], so have a look and go back and review if you like it. We did notice that he’s had over 2000 downloads, and no-one has bothered to come back and say “Yay” or “Nay” about it. Simon did mention that he wrote it and posted it while still at school, so the code is a bit “ugly”, but that said, it works and the GUI is fine.

I’ll be collating my thoughts a bit over tonight and the ‘morrow, so there should be something fairly well written and posted by the end of the weekend.

C# algorithm for aesthetically converting bytes to strings

A quick little C# algorithm for converting bytes to strings. Pretty self-explanatory, but it may come in handy for someone sometime. This basically wraps the in-built Convert.ToString() method within C#, and “beautifies the result a little – adding 0s to the front of it to make the resultant string a full 8 characters long.

public static string b2s(byte b) {
string result = Convert.ToString(b, 2);
while(result.Length < 8 ) result = "0" + result;
return result;
}

Nothing revolutionary at all, but it provides a nicer looking output and may come in handy for someone to use.

quick update: Robert de Niro’s screen-test for The Godfather

I just stumbled over Robert de Niro’s screen-test to play Sonny in The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola had him audition….