Week 9

Week 9

The test this week was very challenging! Much more challenging than the first midterm. Although the short answer questions gave me some trouble, particulary the binary questions, the Dr. Racket questions were a bit more straightforward.

I feel that I am comfortable with the commands "list" and "map" in Dr. Racket, so the shapes problems in question 4 were quite simple.

The string problem with the expression "rs" was challenging, but I believe I figured it out in the end.

Week 8

Week 8

This week we talked about modern hardware architecture and operators and operating systems. As Prof Heap went through the Von Neumann architecture of a CPU showing simple commands like load, add, store, etc., I realized all of the complex operations that a computer executes almost instantaneously.

We also learned that as computers get smaller they heat up considerably, and that Moore's Law will no longer apply. We speculated in class when Moore's Law would slow down, meaning that computers would not continually get smaller, but perhaps reach a plateau.

It was interesting to see how fragile a hard drive truly is. It's disconcerting to know that the head of the hard drive's actuator arm is "floating" in between the various discs of the hard drive. As Prof Heap mentioned, the mean time between failures (MTBF) of a hard drive is about 5 years. For someone who has a laptop from 2008, I think it's time to back up my hard drive...

Week 7

Week 7

This week we learned how binary is converted into various media including text, sound, RGB images, etc. It is interesting to notice how all these media that we think of as entirely separate can be rendered using 1s and 0s.

As a musician, it is fascinating to see music translated into WAVs or MP3s, where the computer reads a series of binary and spits out a recognizable sound.

Unfortunately in my opinion a digital binary representation of sound does not mach the nuance of an analog sound wave. The discrete changes in the waveform of a digital sound don't sound as good as the continuous wave form of an analog sound.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how sound is stored digitally because this is the main way it is mass consumed.

Week 6

Week 6

This week we have begun to learn more about Boolean logic, and the combination of simple true and false operators.

Understanding how binary works has always been a challenge for me, but once Prof Heap explained that binary works on the system of base 2 I quickly was translating numbers from base 10 into binary.

The carry in and carry out can get a bit confusing, but given the time it is easy to convert numbers into binary and vice-versa.

Week 5

Week 5

This week we had our first midterm test, which I found moderately challenging. I feel that I did well on the short written answer questions. The last questions at the end of the test gave me some trouble, as I wasn't entirely sure how the check-expect function works. I now understand it much better.

I didn't perform as well as I should have on the question about the Fibonacci sequence. Although I understood the concept of the Fibonacci sequence, I had trouble communicating it in an effective way.

I am confident that I did well on question 4, which was the short Dr. Racket questions. I feel that those types of questions really solidify the understanding of basic Dr. Racket tasks.

Week 3 of CSC104

Week 3

I am very pleased with how the class is developing. Prof Heap introduces concepts in a very slow and deliberate way that allows us to understand them, yet keeps them interesting.

The binary translation in class of the first phrase of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was especially enlightening. It made me aware of the massive task of coding and decoding that computers undertake constantly, and that we take for granted.

I also enjoyed the quick look at the Jacquard Loom and the Babbage difference engine. These machines have the elegance of a past, hand crafted age, yet they essentially run extremely simplified operations that modern computers run.

I am confident that I performed well on this week's quiz. On the first quiz I only got one question wrong, on the matter of rotation in Dr. Racket. I rotated the object 90 degrees, but in the wrong direction. I won't make that mistake again in the future.

Week 1 and 2

Week 1 and 2

So far this course is great. I especially enjoy the discussions about algorithms, specifically the history and limitations of algorithms. I've never thought about it, but it seems that websites like Amazon use algorithms to determine what kind of merchandise to show you based on what you buy. This makes me consider the professor's question "is there an algorithm for everything"? Unfortunately, though, an algorithm will never tell you to stop buying stuff on Amazon and go outside for a while.

Dr. Racket is a pretty cool guy. It codes programs and doesn't afraid of anything. It seems to be a very intuitive and student-friendly environment to get into programming. It's for all of us Arts students who need to take a computing course for a science credit.

Another course I am taking is Music, Media and Technology, and obviously computers play a large role in shaping 20th century music. It's not feasible to record music in the current industry without a computer or some sort of digital hardware. Therefore this course intersects with my music course in a meaningful way.

I look forward to the coming weeks of CSC104