Studies

I had to stay in the Technion today, and may remain for the rest of the weekend. The ironic thing is that it's holiday during the weekend ("Shavuoth") and I won't be able to enjoy it. The anti-christ in this story is the course "Computer Graphics" whose homework require my partner and I to invest quite a lot of time in the front of the computer, hacking with OpenInventor and Motif.

Hopefully, I won't have to do too much Motif programming this time. Building proper GUI is a tedious task, and I have time finishing it in a reasonable time. Especially with a something like Motif that is very awkward and not programmer-friendly. I spent most of the time in the previous exercise trying to get the dialogs to work, and the OpenInventor part was relatively easy.

I really wish I could do Inventor programming in Perl. (or in anything in the same vain). But I'm not aware of any binding that allows it. Maybe, I'll get to it one day. I also wonder how much is Inventor dependant on Motif? I.e: how long will it take to make it available for Gtk+ or something else?

There are Motif bindings for Perl, so maybe I'll settle down for them.

Other than that the last SICP exercise took way too long, because the MIT Scheme debugger was awkward to work with and buggy. My apartment-mate recommended me to use Dr. Scheme, so I think I'll give it a try. And now I have to draw an environment diagram... %-). Plus, I don't know how to draw box-and-pointer diagrams for streams. (and the lecturer was abroad to give a presentation, so I could not ask him).

The other courses are going quite well. Eran and I finished preparing the preliminary reports for the VHDL experiment. But the instructors there did not let us simply hand what we prepared as is. We'll have to be there to see for ourselves. I was told the Sun workstations there don't have floppy disk drives and the Internet connection is not functional. I'll have to go there and find out.

Liat and I prepared the "Design and Analysis of Algo" third exercise and are meeting on Tuesday to prepare the third. I wrote a Perl script that implements the Edmonds-Karp flow analysis scan. We have now standard to learn about complexity, intractibility, Turing machines and friends.