I’ve just finished watching Donnie Brasco with some friends and I really have to say that it’s an awesome movie. Al Pacino and Johnny Depp really deliver an amazing performance. It’s based on a real-life story which is worth a look, too - there are a few differences to the movie, though.
Lately I’ve been watching quite a few movies, not that I would have that much spare time but after an exam, I spoil myself with a movie now, and then and since I’ve had four exams in the last week you can guess how many movies I’ve watched. I’ve been busy like a bee this term which also accounts for the lack of new posts on this blog in the last months and I’ve pretty much finished the second and the fourth term in one /
This means that I will have more time in the next terms to work at university and earn some money. Moreover it’s not just about the money but also about the projects I plan to work on, but more on this later. Right now I’m working for the chair for medical visualization and augmented reality and my only (and current) project so far has been about implementing a paper about “Importance-Driven Volume Rendering”, where I’m currently and still stuck with work on the UI for the transfer functions (the data only consists of intensity values and since people prefer colors, some preprocessing has to be done). The bad thing is that I’ve totally forgotten everything else over it - I’ve spent like two weeks reading up on volume rendering and raycasting in general and even wrote a very simple raycaster in RenderMonkey, but I hardly remember any of it anymore now..
Most of the lectures that I attended this term were pretty interesting (Linear Algebra, Theoretical Computer Science, Computer Networks) but Algorithms and Data Structures was more on the incompetent side of things due to the lecturer not preparing for any of the lectures beforehand and an incredible amount of errors in his slides - our weekly schedule was as follows: 2 hours of new subject matter, 1 hour of discussing the corrections of the errors he introduced in the former 2 hours. In the end I only attended that one hour because it was more fun and I didn’t get as confused. My main source for learning about algorithms thus was the book (Cormen et al). I’ve also attended Software Engineering and I’m still not sure about what to think of it, so I’ll wait for the exam and maybe reread Code Complete for it to get some common sense about the general topics back again.
I must admit that university hasn’t told me a lot of new things so far. Especially nothing that I couldn’t have learned on my own just as well or even better in less time to be really honest.
So all in all I must say that anyone who is bright (I consider that myself) and already knows a lot about programming is well-advised to try and get a job in the industry directly if possible because anything else is just a waste of time.
On other news I’ve finally acquired my own domain: blackhc.net after blackhc.com was already taken. I haven’t really had any time so far to set it up properly, but I’ve already routed blog.blackhc.net to this blog, so it’s not a total waste.. :)
I might also move this blog to it but I’m not entirely sure yet, because I’m pretty happy with wordpress.com’s service so far. There is a little bit of irony to it, too, since I only got the idea of getting my own webspace, because I wanted to post a blog entry about matrices, etc. and needed formula support for it. I searched with google and everything I found required its own wordpress installation with plugins and so on. Then I started to look at domain names and found out that blackhc.com was already taken by someone else and that HostMonster was really very cheap (5 USD a month if you subscribe for 2 years) and the deal was pretty much settled. After I bought the domain and the hosting package, I went on to search how to install the plugins in wordpress and eventually found this FAQ posting.. Now I know that wordpress.com can do LaTeX after all and I have lots of cheap webspace, too - I should call that a net gain, right?
That said, I think this post has become long enough and I’ll drop by in a few days and write more after my last exam. I also still have that linear algebra post in the queue and possibly a few others, so hopefully I’ll have enough time to finalize them and publish them soon.
Cheers,
Black