cout << "Dustin Paltz"

Good Lecture

Dustin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:31:15 +0000

Sat in on a lecture today by the CEO of Qualcomm – Paul Jacobs. Mostly about the evolving market of mobile technology, but one thing he said that resonated with me was that “we [Qualcomm] try to always work on the next big thing. We focus on a vision and then we are very open about how we reach that goal.”

I thought, that sounds like the kind of environment I want to be in. In just a few months, I’m not certain what my situation will be after I graduate. Guess I just hope it’s a situation where I can challenge myself to continue building personally and professionally.

First Day, Last Semester

Dustin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:25:52 +0000

Spring classes actually started yesterday, but I won’t have any classes on Wednesdays. All my classes are CS, but a couple of them (Algorithms & OS) have a reputation of being the most difficult in my major. My hopes are that Computer Security will be fun as well as challenging, I won’t drop any classes that I’ll later regret doing so, and that I can keep up with the blogging.

At the time of this post I am registered for…

CS 470 – Unix System Admin
CS 560 – Algorithms & Analysis
CS 570 – OS
CS 574 – Security
CS 635 – Advanced OOP
ENS 146 – Surfing

OOP final project… final grade

Dustin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:33:47 +0000

Instead of a final exam in my OOP class (CS 535), we had a final project… a final nightmare of an assignment that I do believe I have spent more time on than any other individual project prior to this final one for that course. If you want to read the specifications for the project it is here. Basically we had to design and delivery a textual based adventure game built in Smalltalk, and yes it was a pain in the @$$ to do! And let me clarify, the coding was not overly difficult, but considering that it was an individual project (we did NOT work in teams) it was A LOT of coding and when finished I had 12 classes not including my GUI for the game. I’m not complaining, I’m proud that I was able to implement everything and the fact that I lost many hours of sleep to finish the damn thing… just saying that it was a monster of a project.

So I just pulled up VisualWorks, connected to my repository and discovered that my project had been graded… 96/100!!! My professor (Dr. Whitney) noted that my Player class “does a bit too much”. Basically my player class is doing some things (getter and setter stuff mainly) that I should be asking those classes to do.

Well I feel like those hours… days… parts of my sanity… were not spent in vein. I don’t know what my final grade is yet, but I think I’ll be good. I just wonder how much the other students stressed over this thing…