Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.

November 30, 2003

Exhausted & Tired

I'm sick and it's starting to get on my nerves. I've had lots of work to do over thanksgiving, and I somehow feel like I haven't gotten much done. I'm somehow unable to get started on anything and really really hope I get healthy by tomorrow so that I have energy to work again....
Posted on November 30, 2003 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 30, 2003

Optimizing Integers

Optimizations have turned out to be more difficult than I thought, especially because the runtime environment was not designed for them at all. This makes many things quite complicated, especially because we only have 3 days to implement everything, and only want to spend about a day on it. Right now it seems like we will only optimize integers and booleans, and maybe strings. I have figured out how to do integers, but will need to make some modifications (easy...
Posted on November 30, 2003 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 29, 2003

Lectures on HCI

I've been spending the day watching lectures on Human Computer Interaction on the Stanford Center for Professional Development. The class the lectures are from is CS 547, and is offered every year. I will try to watch all the interesting lectures in the future, because there is so much to be learned from there while I am working on other stuff. I think there is something for everyone here, so look through the list and watch the lectures....
Posted on November 29, 2003 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 29, 2003

Slashdotted???

My RSS reader now displays the following for Slashdot: You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Though I do not depend on reading Slashdot at all, I am still a bit annoyed and offended because of this. I have never had problems with updating at all, and I wonder why this happened....
Posted on November 29, 2003 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2003

Submitted!

We just submitted CS 143 PA4. Tomorrow we will start optimizations (the extra credit assignment). I woke up at 4pm today, and have a lot of work to do now. But I am very glad that the compiler is finished....
Posted on November 28, 2003 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2003

Success!

It seems like I have fixed all known bugs in our compiler. Our write-up for CS 147 is also almost finished, and I will make some final changes to it tomorrow. I also have to make a nice looking graph for our 147 project, but it should not take too long. I have quite a lot of sleep to catch up on, which I will probably not do tonight, though I will definitely get nine hours of sleep. Travis and...
Posted on November 28, 2003 02:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2003

Happy Thanksgiving!

I just had Thanksgiving with Albert, his family, and lots and lots of friend's of Albert's family. This was my first real (big) thanksgiving dinner, and the food was delicious. Though I don't really see the point of this holiday, the evening was a lot of fun, and it was quite interesting to meet new people, some of which actually go/went to Stanford. Thanks to Albert for this awesome day. In other news, I have fixed some bugs in the...
Posted on November 28, 2003 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 27, 2003

Compilers: The Story Continues

Quite unfortunately Travis and I were not able to finish CS 143 on time. An hour before the assignment was due, we realized that our compiler failed most of the test cases. We stayed up till 2pm and tried to get everything to work before Travis left for thanksgiving break, but did not succeed. Though we fixed many errors, some still remain, and I will fix these tomorrow, and then submit the assignment by midnight on Friday when Travis returns....
Posted on November 27, 2003 03:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 25, 2003

A Blog for Every Law Student

It looks like the Law school is going to implement what ITSS and ISIS have been planning to do for quite some time: giving every entering student their own blog, according to Professor Lessig. Right now this is only planned for Law Stundents and it would be very interesting to see who will help the Law School with implementing this, and how simple it would be to use. Right now the Stanford blogging project is mostly worked on by Brad...
Posted on November 25, 2003 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 24, 2003

Blog Renaming?

I have been contemplating this for some time now. Should I rename my blog and if so to what? Please comment or email me with suggestions, and tell me what you are thinking. I want something that might possibly sound a bit more professional but still personal. If you think the current title is good, then tell me that too....
Posted on November 24, 2003 01:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 23, 2003

And Now: Test Code

I am finished with most of the actual CS 143 code and will now start writing test code and try to find and fix bugs. Travis is still working on case which seems to be very very difficult. I also just finished all 4 DVD of LOTR, and now need to find something else to watch while programming. I think The Matrix and LOTR are no my favorite movies of all time, but more about that later....
Posted on November 23, 2003 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 23, 2003

The Beauty of Zen Gardens

Although I am not really interested in Japanese culture, I am starting to find Zen gardens to be amazingly beautiful. The thought of sitting in the grass and thinking is intrinsically beautiful to me, and I love the feeling of calm and quiet that must exist there. I often imagine myself sitting in a garden thinking, and then hearing somebody walk up to me. I open my eyes and look at them, and it feels like waking up from a...
Posted on November 23, 2003 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 22, 2003

More on Code Generation

Things are going quite well, but today will be a day of massive architecture restructuring. We now have working function calls, if statements, I have a good feeling about all of this right now, and I hope that this continues to work well tomorrow....
Posted on November 22, 2003 03:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 21, 2003

Human vs. AI: I Win!

I just played Othello/Reversi against Max's and Greg's AI and one the first game were I thought about every move. I won 63 to 33. In the second game the AI was improved and I played quickly on instinct. I realized that I made a mistake some time into the game (right after the move), and was destroyed. This game was not very serious though, and I will have a serious rematch on Sunday. I am excited. In other news,...
Posted on November 21, 2003 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 21, 2003

Sweet!

I just finished loading attributes. This means that we can use both attributes and formal arguments in our calculations. I hope our speed of progress continues, because we now have to handle one of the most important steps of code generation, implementing the first code that uses labels. This assignment is lots of fun, but very very challenging....
Posted on November 21, 2003 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 20, 2003

Rocking CS 147!

Great Kudos to Tristán for doing an absolutely amazing job on CS 147. Our personal trainer prototype is now almost completely ready for the demo tomorrow morning. It includes Speech Recognition, Displaying of a Camera Feed from an iSight and amazing images. We have most of the necessary screens finished, and though things will be added for the final presentation, this week's version is amazing. I will post pictures tomorrow after the demo. CS 143 is very difficult, but we...
Posted on November 20, 2003 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 18, 2003

More Work, but It's Going to Work Out

Both the CS 242 Problemset and E40 Prelab are due tomorrow, but I think that will work out quite nicely. We are slightly stuck on CS 143 right now, but we are going to office hours and got some good news today. We were planning to finish the project by Friday evening and then start doing extra credit. This put us into the uncomfortable situation of having to compromise the code generator itself in order to do optimization. Fortunately the...
Posted on November 18, 2003 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2003

Codegen Madness

Yesterday Travis and I started working on the last CS 143 programming project: our code generator. This assignment requires us to learn MIPS assembly, write headers and implement the assembly for an Object Oriented language. I have wanted to learn more about assembly for such a long time now, that I think this will be one of my most interesting assignments at Stanford till now. Right now we have made quite a lot of progress setting up all constants and...
Posted on November 17, 2003 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 16, 2003

Spotlight on Naranja

I just had Spotlight and it was not particularly interesting. It was probably impossible to repeat last years success, but I feel like there was less of an interest in pure craziness among people, which was one of the best things about Loro. I also forgot to tell the stories about all the expressions we invented last year, and generally people didn't respond much to most of the things I was talking about. I do not feel like my talk...
Posted on November 16, 2003 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 16, 2003

Template Changes

Inspired by all the ISIS talk about blogs I have started redesigning my template organization. Right now I am trying to figure out whether having the left menu bar for every entry will make updating impossibly slow, or whether it is workable. More to come....
Posted on November 16, 2003 03:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 15, 2003

ISIS Retreat

Friday and Saturday have been great. Tristan, Greg and I went to the ISIS retreat in Monterey. Just driving down there in a car with 5 people was an experience (we travelled with fellow ISIS members Phil and Kimberly). Our house was right at the sea and had an amazing view. Tristan and me immediately sat down by the bay window and started coding for CS 147. More people arrived soon and people started playing with Lego and PlayDo, talking...
Posted on November 15, 2003 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2003

Work

It is Wednesday morning, and I have three problemsets due today, and one due tomorrow that I have to finish today. Travis and I finished CS 143 yesterday and turned it in on time, and I went to EAST to work on CS 242. I am finished with the E40 problemset, the CS242 problemset and most of the E40 prelab. I now need to do the write-ups for the latter two and watch a lecture for CS 143 and do...
Posted on November 12, 2003 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 10, 2003

Camino Out, Enter Safari

I will give Camino 2 weeks, as of today, to release a new version, otherwise I will switch my main browser to Safari....
Posted on November 10, 2003 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 08, 2003

Kevin Warwick: A Talk on Cybernetics

This Wednesday I went to a talk by Kevin Warwick on Cybernetics. Warwick, for those who have not heard of him, is one of the chief researchers into Cybernetics and was the first human to have a computer chip implanted into his body. Warwick's research is quite controversial and I was unsure what to think of him, before going to the talk. Warwick believes that integrating the human body with computers is a good idea, and unlike others in the...
Posted on November 8, 2003 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 06, 2003

The Clark Center

The Clark Center is the center of Stanford's Bio-X program that tries to bring together Engineers, Biologists and Doctors, and encourages innovative Biotechnology and Biomedicine research. I did not think that this program would pay off, after going to some lectures about Bio-X last year, because it seemed like nobody had any detailed idea of how this would actually work. Yesterday's visit to the Clark Center changed my mind. The building consists of three curvacious structures with walls of glass,...
Posted on November 6, 2003 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 06, 2003

My Mind on the Matrix

Sleeping late, watching the Matrix and then going to a magnificent talk about cyborgs (more about that tomorrow) does weird things to my mind. I am very tired and very excited at the same time. I am unable to do work, mostly because I am agitated because I know that I will see the matrix again tonight. I am listening to Cake, especially "Commissioning A Symphony in C" which I find to be an amazingly beautiful song, mostly because I...
Posted on November 6, 2003 03:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 05, 2003

Getting Up For the Matrix

I got up at 3:15am this morning to go to Denny's and then to The Matrix Revolutions. I will not say much about the movie till most people have seen it, there are NO spoilers below. I liked the movie, and thinking about it I am starting to like it a lot more than I did before. Some of the things I would have done differently, and I will not accept some things as having happened, but I liked it...
Posted on November 5, 2003 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 05, 2003

First Entry with Safari

This is the first entry I am writing with Safari, and I very much like it for now. Spellchecking is great. The main reason I am writing is, is because I really like the following opening lines from Commissioning A Symphony In C by Cake: So you'll be an Austrian Nobleman Commissioning a symphony in C Which defies all earthly descriptions You'll be Commissioning a symphony in C With money you squeeze from the peasants To your nephew you can...
Posted on November 5, 2003 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 03, 2003

Happy Birthday Nora!

Happy Birthday Nora! Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!...
Posted on November 3, 2003 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 03, 2003

Crazy Cool Coding

After spending most of Saturday trying to figure out what we had to do for part three of our Cool compiler (type checking), we finally started coding Sunday morning. As of yesterday evening we are pretty much finished with type checking for classes. Our type checker makes sure that every class a class inherits from is actually defined and there are no direct or indirect cycles in the inheritance tree. It also checks that no classes are ever redefined, and...
Posted on November 3, 2003 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 01, 2003

Guido van Rossum & Python

Guido van Rossum gave a talk about Python 2.3 at Stanford this Wednesday. Till then I had not seen any Python code, and the only thing I knew about it was that it was usually grouped with Perl and Ruby (I know the first, not the latter) and that it was very easy to learn use. I was very impressed by the talk, both by Guido and by the language. Meeting great people in CS is one of the best...
Posted on November 1, 2003 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack