"The best way to predict the future is to implement it."

Friday was the Final Day. We all went to DCU to demo our projects, and five of us were chosen to present to everyone (even the dean of Engineering in DCU and Prof. Barry Smyth's friend were floating around. Eeek!), I'm suprised and thankful to have been one of them. I was super impressed by the ones with professionally printed posters, but in the end a few people found the ghettoness simplicity of mine appealing. All of the people I heard presented so well, and Dr. Muntean's speeches were very inspiring.

It's only been 2 days and I already miss everyone based with me in the fourth-year lab! I'm so glad to have been part of the 2010 programme, and a little sorry that I didn't get to know more people (especially the international interns) better.

I did many things for the first time, such as:

- Visited the Guinness Storehouse and discovered that I really hate "the black stuff".
- Signed non-disclosure and IP forms.
- Relied on my own abilities and pushed myself to grow where they were insufficient, given the lack of demonstrators - usually I whine to the poor demonstrators in labs whenever I get stuck with an assignment. No more!
- AoE II: The Conquerors LAN parties!!
- Gave a presentation (twice) on my own, which was good practice for fourth year. No more relying on project team members!
- Wrote a research paper. I like writing so it wasn't too hard, but it's always good to get some practice and become familiar with the format of academic papers (as opposed to reports and essays).
- Visited Microsoft Ireland and learned about programming techniques from Amazon speakers. It's always interesting to interact with people who are already in the industry.
- Visited Leinster House and was oddly impressed with the interior.
- Met so many smart people and fellow interns who are truly passionate about computer science.
- Had the kindest and most enthusiastic supervisor and was given the chance to work with Twittomender, an upcoming friend recommender system.


All of the interns minus Emma and Victor, organisers minus Dr. Nicola Stokes and some supervisors. Click on the photo for a link to my public Facebook album for that day.

I was introduced to Weedle is a careers-/skills-oriented site which can improve your ranking on search engines. Everyone join!!


Finally, I can't decide whether or not to keep this blog open to talk about compsci-related things, or stop posting and keep it as a time capsule (does that make sense with a blog?). I miss ODCSSS already...thanks to everyone who made it possible and enabled me to learn so much!


Subject title quote by David Heinemeier Hansson.

My First Major Memory Leak

Just over an hour ago, I encountered this initially frightening error: "OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded". I broke the garbage collector...woohoo!

Stumped about what might be eating up heap space, I immediately put my great Googling Powers™ to work, and soon found Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT).

Turns out I wasn't closing the ResultSets and Statements (?) properly. What a great program! All you have to do is generate a heap dump file from your exception-spewing program, feed it into MAT and it gives you a leak report, with charts and details. Very helpful!

Here's a great tutorial for using it: Eclipse Memory Analyser (MAT) - Tutorial. You don't have to download MAT as an Eclipse plugin (i.e. through the software updates window), you can download it from the site as a separate program.

More Parsing Work

Since last week, I've started to integrate my reputation model with the system I'm working for. The end is in the sight, so my tasks are to finish integration, write a paper and short report and make a poster for the final day.

All I can say at this point is, thank goodness for regex generators and GNU screen!

Languages to Learn (when I have free time)

- Learn Python. Looks easy enough.
- Learn Ruby (on Rails). I've been interested in learning some kind of scripting language for a while now, and I was very inspired by a seminar I went to last semester, in which Paul Campbell talked about Ruby on Rails.
- Learn proper bash programming, since I fell in love with Linux...


The Mid-Term Research Day is finally over, it was fun to see the different slideshow designs and presentation styles! The three people who won definitely deserved it. Well done everyone!

Bad Thing

- Recursion. I was experimenting with it over the weekend (again, I am so exciting) and it completely locked up my machine. I suppose I wasn't being very careful, but how was I supposed to see whether it would work or not? ):

Now for a Good Thing:

+ Got some very constructive criticism from my supervisor about my presentation for tomorrow. I'm grateful to have a supervisor who's always interested and arranges weekly meetings.


The Mid-Term Research Day is tomorrow, good luck to everyone with their presentation!

ODCSSS Mid-Term Research Day Approaching + Anti-Procrastination Tips

The ODCSSS 2010 Mid-Term Research Day is fast approaching (12th @ B1.06), time to put together a set of shiny and informative slides, as well as brush up on my rhetoric and admittedly rather poor explanatory skills. For our Software Engineering Project III last year, I enjoyed putting together most of the slides.


z.ky's Anti-Procrastination During Programming Tips

• Read Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder (or any kind of philosophy 101), it will fill you with philosophical insight and help you think clearly. I spent all weekend holed up in my room reading up to Hellenism (yes, I'm very exciting), and enjoyed an extremely productive day today.
  
• Make sure you know what you have to achieve, and how to go about it. Sometimes when I find myself completely stuck, it's because I don't actually realise what my next task is, or how to do it. The next point follows on from this!
  
• Try planning on paper: dissect the architecture of your program, write down problems to fix/what to implement next, optimizations that could be made...don't spend too long poring over a notebook though, set a time limit so you can return to the screen without coming to a complete standstill while planning.
• Surround yourself with other hardworking (I think everyone from the lab will laugh at this...) people for motivation.
• If you work well under pressure (like me), remind yourself of all the people who believed in you and your work, and helped you get to this point - don't disappoint them! Think of deadlines which seem very far away...if you procrastinate more, they won't remain so far!
• DON'T KEEP A BROWSER OPEN! Once you get on any sort of social networking/media site, the temptation to keep refreshing and waiting for updates (to procrastinate on) is immense. I was working so hard today that I forgot to check Twitter :P
• If you're working with nice people, ask them to keep you on point by reminding you to get back to work. Sometimes it works better than telling yourself.
  

Remember: many minor (coding) breakthoughs lead to a big breakthrough! As long as you keep working hard, things will only get better (:


I just realised that I really hate my vocabulary and 'blogging persona' here...hopefully that will change next time.

Learning Speed/Speed Learning?

I've found that this research experience has really helped my learning speed. With no demonstrators hovering about and everyone equally engrossed in their own projects, I've had to push myself to learn quicker in order to get my work done. I'm quite confortable with mysql now, compared to the beginning of the project, when I had to read up on the basic steps to set up a Connection!

Yesterday I started learning the Korean alphabet, I continued with it today and am surprised at my progress. Not only am I learning quickly, but the most important thing is that I'm pushing myself to complete each lesson without procrastinating. Yesterday I read my first word (바나나), just now I typed my first sentence: 아이-라이크-바나나! \(ㅇㅂㅇ )*

This is the site I'm using to learn, highly recommended! When I first started learning Japanese, I printed out the alphabet charts to learn. The wonders of the Internet...for some reason I find Korean vocabulary harder to learn than Japanese, but being able to read everything (pesky kanji) should help. Right now, most of my vocab comes from watching and listening to 슈주 (Super Junior)...

I heard that South Korea are out of the World Cup...too bad! They were pretty much the only team I was interested in, mainly because I love the attire of the Red Devils (Korea team supporters).


*with bonus emoticon!