We're back. This is the first week of classes, and I'm jumping onto the “early submission” band wagon to get all dem wonderful bonus points. I wrote the “Hello World” program and looked it over. I have not had any experience with C or C++ in the past (other than the few programs we were exposed to during UNIX projects), so this language is a little foreign to me. I'm sure as time goes by, however, the language will get more clear. I'm excited to see what this class will have to offer!

So I've been spending a lot of time with C. I've been writing my own little programs in my spare time, just trying to get used to the language. Pointers are extremely confusing right now. I'll think I understand them for a while, but then I'll try to implement them into my code and no luck. But that's whatever for now I suppose. This week we worked on the mms0 project, which I was able to complete fairly quickly. There were a few questions that were on the project such as “will this implementation of squaring work with three digit numbers? Four digit?”. I haven't really thought about it too much in terms of just doing the math myself, but the way I wrote my program, it will not work if the number inputted is more than two digits, mainly because I only established two variables for the output. Maybe if I were to establish more variables to accommodate the output it would work, but I have not personally tested it.

We've been working on dow0 this week (I'm pretty sure, anyway). I didn't exactly have many issues with this project. The main issue I ran into with this project was calculating the year 2000, which ended up not mattering (lawl). Otherwise, it was pretty straight forward. I mainly used if statements to determine the actual number day of the week (0-6) and then from there I set up an array that would, depending on which part of the array you needed displayed, would output either sunday-saturday. Not too bad, overall.

So, I'm still a little out of whack from break, so I'm not sure when this last project was due or if its even due or what, but at any rate, I did it. We were working on mbe0, which really was pretty straight forward in terms of usability. It just simply had to multiply a given number by 11, display the output, then terminate. Simple, right? Well no, not quite. The main issues I ran into with this project was not using arrays to split up the numbers that were given. It took a lot of ghetto-rigging to actually get each of the numbers by themselves. After that, It was mainly just a lot of if statements to tell the program if the number was a one, two, or three digit number, and then add the newly-split numbers together. Then bam, multiplied number.

We've been working on the prime number calculators this week. My hardest issue during the beginning of this project was getting the numbers to output correctly. My first implementation was outputting every number multiple times. I, after a while, figured out what was happening and corrected it. After that, it was pretty simple, at least for the brute and sqrt versions, since they were basically the same (just minor adjusting in the sqrt version). The opt version is where the project really got tricky. At first, I tried limiting what the program had to check (evens, multiples of 3, multiples of 5, etc.) and it looked as if it was insanely fast. I was doing primerun and getting like .8 for my time. Then I realized it was super cheaty and broken, so I had to change it. After a certain amount of time changing, messing with the sieve, and other things, I finally got a working opt version, and called it good enough.

This week we are working on cos0. I've learned that I'm not insanely good when it comes to shape calculation and manipulation, apparently. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of this project. The main thing that I was having trouble with was the idea of where corners are suppose to go, if that makes sense. However, I think I finally understand how the corners are suppose to be manipulated in order to get them to move correctly. I have a working circle generator, but not everything is perfect yet. Only time will tell how this turns out I suppose.

Currently, I am working on sam0, which is turning out to be a bad, bad word. Mainly because it deals with things that are completely new (which occurs in other projects, but this one seems to be more extravagant than others). I have it being able to spit back out input, have it able to be ran from outside the directory it is currently in, and have it (semi) reading from a file called “cipher.key”. Everything else is yet to come, we'll see how this one turns out.

We just finished up cbf0, and that project was pretty difficult. However, I got the minimum requirements done the best I could, so hopefully its good enough. Now, we are working on afn0, which is another mental math trick. I really enjoy these projects, because they give me new cool tricks to use at parties and stuff (I'm really fun at parties). I'm fairly close to finishing it already, but I am having some trouble implementing the math. We'll see how this turns out.

We are now working on gfo0, which brings me back to unix with the eoce. This time around, however, seems to be a little more in depth with the grade calculations. Instead of just using system commands and formatting the output to a specific way, we actually have to implement calculations and do the math, not just expect the 'status' script to do the work for us. It's a pretty straight forward project. As of right now, the only issue in the foreseeable future looks to be how I'm going to implement separating the projects array from my grades received to the total the projects were worth. I have an idea using mods and what not, but it probably wont work. So I suppose we'll see.

We finished gfo0 and now it's onto eoce. I feel like this semester flew by. I haven't really looked at the eoce yet, but I'm sure I'm in for some experiences if it's anything like the unix one last semester. Gfo0 ended up not being too bad. My main issue with it was over thinking how to calculate the projects section. I was trying to calculate each grade independently and then add them all together, divide by the total points, and them some other stuff which just got insanely complicated and unnecessary. So I ended up just adding all the raw points I accumulated, divided it by the raw total points, andthen multiplied that value by 36. Easy.