This morning Vicky passes on a message from the cleaners:

Vic: They’ve said they won’t clean Elias’ room.
Me: Why not?
Vic: Uh, they said they can’t get the door open.

How classic is that? This guy (who just received about a hundred boxes of various things from home) has so much crap in his room that the cleaning ladies can’t even get in there. He’s now started shifting stuff into the corridor (where there is now a sizeable pile of boxes), commuting the room, as Josh put it, “from a Hiroshima to a mere fire-bombing of Dresden.”

On top of that, I returned to my PC last night to find this MSN-based gold nugget waiting for me:

Sambo Loooves Peanut butter says:
     heres a question for you:
Sambo Loooves Peanut butter says:
     is there any software that can convert audio (e.g wav) into text? Specifically for my lectures (so i dont have to make my own notes).

Words fail me :-).

So, ten days in and I’ve found the time and inclination to write.

Some observations from the past week:

• Course timetables are complicated. Take ten weeks, eight modules, ten daily slots, three different types of appointment, and appointments that aren’t consistent through the whole term, and condense them on to an A4 grid and what do you get? A mess. It was for this reason that I got up at 8am on Monday for a practical I didn’t have, and sat through a 2-hour Foundations for Accounting and Finance lecture on Friday afternoon that I didn’t need to be in, due to not taking the module. Despite the confusion, I have Wednesdays free, and Fridays free after 10am.


• Energetic and amusing lecturers are a rarity. So far I’ve had lectures for CS118 Programming for Computer Scientists, CS133 Professional Skills, and IB107 Computing and Information Systems. The CS118 guy is solid gold. His course notes read like a comedy, his lectures are engaging and funny. With him we’re learning Java, and while the lectures aren’t particularly fast-paced, his course guide is pretty thorough, so I’m going through that - no major issues so far. The same can’t be said for the other two modules though - especially Professional Skills. This module is half UNIX and Linux use, and half learning skills like how to make a presentation, summarise a document, etc. Yesterday’s lecture was an introduction to UNIX and Linux, and it was painful. I’ve only been using Linux 18 months or so, but I could have taught someone the entire lecture in about 3 minutes. The stuff was basic, like what a shell and kernel are; their relationship; how there are many different distributions of Linux etc, but it was painfully, *painfully* slow. The guy seemed to get a little preoccupied with the wrong parts - perhaps a feature of IT-centric teaching :-P. Anyway. IB107 this morning wasn’t exactly exciting, but at least it didn’t make me want to stab myself in the eyes.


• Uni is cool. Everyone I’ve met so far has been pretty cool. Cool people on my course, cool people in my flat, cool people in my building. Me and Josh have found the perfect combination of free food, drink and DVD viewings to snare their interest.


• Having a big TFT and elite speakers is cool. Just about every night since last Sunday there’s been a crowd of at least 2 in here, watching a plethora of films, and 24 Series 3 :-D. We’re about 7 hours in to the latter, going to do a marathon session tonight, as none of us have anything on tomorrow.


• Cooking is good. Junk food consumption has been fairly minimal so far. Most nights we mix it up and end up with a bunch of different things - pizzas being fairly popular :-). I’ve made pizza twice, and a load of pasta stuff; last night was Sin Chicken with rice (chicken breasts, hoi sin, soy, ginger, garlic, stock, magic) which went down a treat. It’s still fun and it’s still satisfying, even clearing up afterwards :-P.


• Residential networks are unreliable. The speeds I can get here vary a lot - probably due to the fact that all the halls appear to be on hubs for some unknown reason - I’ve had 1MB/sec from Sun’s FTP, and 2KB/sec from other places. Internal speeds are good though - *cough* FTP transfers hitting 10MB/sec and up. No port-blocking horror stories - I can SSH freely, access anything I choose to at home - only thing that I haven’t been able to get here so far is BitTorrent - can connect to the tracker but no peers. That’s to be expected I guess; haven’t tried any P2P apps yet. Tor works fine on my laptop, so if I came to it I could hammer something through that. My wireless AP is here but not on most of the time, as I found a regulation in the IT Services handbook declaring that “extending the network using wireless equipment” is a serious offence. Hasn’t been an inconvenience so far - there are hotspots all over the main campus.

All in all, an excellent few days :-D. Tonight’s plan is to get fuckfaced and hit the introduction party for our halls block in the SU. Should be a blast!

Spent this afternoon getting to grips with Java, which I haven’t touched for a long time. Many moons ago I did attempt to learn some, but the book I bought was ass, so I stopped. While working with it today I had to find out a couple of things which I thought I’d share. This is basic stuff, but I didn’t know it until 2 hours ago, and it wasn’t easy to find out then.

I’m using the J2SE Dev Kit 5.0 Update 5 on Windows XP.

Environment Variables
Before any Java apps you’ve written will compile, you’ll have to set your CLASSPATH environment variable correctly. From Sun’s page I found the command (which, believe it or not, I’d never come across before in Windows), and I used the following to cover all my bases:
> set CLASSPATH=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_05\lib;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_05\bin;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_05\;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_05\include
If this isn’t set up right, you’ll get error messages about java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError.

Using Custom Libraries
As part of my course I get to use an IO library provided by Warwick to assist with us newbies’ IO, the uk.ac.warwick.dcs.util.io package. I couldn’t figure out why javac was complaining about not being able to find the package, until I found out that I had to include a reference to the file in my CLASSPATH, adding C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_05\lib\uk.ac.warwick.dcs.util.io.jar to the command above.

There, wasn’t that helpful? :-)

I was introduced to some gems this weekend :-D. Pablo Francisco, hilarious comedian - check out the videos on his site, especially the stand-up routine from the Jay Leno show (WMV, RM). This guy had me doing Movie Preview Guy impressions all weekend. The other gem was a classic - Arnold’s Pizza Shop. “If you don’t fuck around, I’ll give you good pizza; if you do fuck around, I’ll take a pepperoni and punch it through your head.” :-)