Logic and Applications – Tough Exam!
I took the Logic and Applications exam last Friday. I think I’m ready now to talk about the ordeal…
It wasn’t so bad really, I guess. I made a bad call as to which questions to answer (it was one of those answer three of four kind-of-things) and ran out of time. One of the questions I initially chose had what was for me a brick wall towards the midway point, and on a two hour exam, spending 20-25 mins heading down a dead end isn’t the best idea!
I guess the two frustrations I felt with this exam were firstly that the course covered so much material so quickly, but each of the topics turned out to be a bit of a rabbit-hole when I got to thinking about it during the revision process – the more I thought about it, the more questions I found!
On top of that, one of the key aspects of a course like this is transformation of formulae into alternative forms which have properties we want – usually, more efficient solving algorithms. These transformations are rather like the algebraic manipulation of mathematical formulae we did at school – progressing in unit steps, painstakingly copying out each new form as you go. That consumes a lot of time, especially when the formulae don’t give out easily, but it doesn’t really seem to prove much about the student’s skills – the pages-of-transforms kind of work was all hammered pretty hard in the coursework, after all. Then again, maybe I just screwed something up early doors and that led to the extensive transform.
The course was new this year anyway, so maybe it takes a little time for the exams to settle in terms of difficulty. Or I’m just a dumbass. Anyway, it’s too late to worry about all that now. Hopefully, I passed – that’s the main thing, right?
In: Computer Science, Logic, MSc
Why I didn’t write any software for Windows Mobile
A few year ago, around 2006 at a guess, I saved up a bit of my hard-earned dollar and bought a Dell Axim X51v. It was a wonderful little device for the time and I fancied having a go at writing software for it.
So I went to the Microsoft website to find out how to do that, where I was confronted with a request for more cash. In order to write a line of code for Windows Mobile at that time, you had to shell out for licenses to use Microsoft’s IDE and developer tools. That’s on top of whatever fees that MS was getting from Dell and the license I’d bought with the device to actually run Windows Mobile.
Naturally, I baulked at the idea and never gave it a go.
Nor have I bought anything from Microsoft since – although that wasn’t a conscious decision. It’s just that since then, there hasn’t been anything that wanted to do in terms of development that mandated some kind of payment. Case in point – my faithful little HTC Magic, succeeded by my Samsung Galaxy S mobile phones. These phones are thoroughly awesome bits of kit which run on Android technology, and recently I had my first dabble in Android development.
Of course, everything you need to write software for Android is freely available on the web, and you can expect a post of two about how that’s going.
Out of curiosity, I checked back in on Microsoft, and it sure looks like you can write for Windows Mobile these days for free. Would it still cost money to write for Windows Mobile if the competition wasn’t giving away their goodies for free? I also had a look at Apple’s tooling to build stuff for the iPhone but I couldn’t work out if it’s free right now or not. (I couldn’t be bothered to look for more than a minute or two to be honest – any readers know?)
I wonder if my decisions since then would have played out any differently if I’d been able to just download the stuff I’d needed to have a go back on ’06? Who knows, I might have gotten hooked on the Microsoft toolset like Visual Studio.
In: Development, Mobile
Preparing for the Logic and Applications Exam
It feels like a long time between finishing the Logic and Applications course back in early November and the exam, which is next week on the 27th January. In between, I’ve done a little work on my project proposal in the meantime, but certainly since late December I’ve been focussing more on preparing for the exam.
It’s always a bit surprising when I start revising how much stuff we covered in a five-week course and this one was no exception. The syllabus is here on the UoM CS website. It’s also a new course this year, so there aren’t any specific past papers (exam papers from previous years) to get a feel for how the exam will be phrased and what kind of content has been examined before.
The nearest course in previous years was the Automated Reasoning course, which covered similar stuff but also included some aspects of logic programming in Prolog. In this course we used theorem provers SPASS and MiniSAT for the small amount of experimental work involved. Hopefully there won’t be any ‘remember-the-syntax’ style questions…
In: Computer Science, Logic, manchester, MSc
A quick post from my Kindle
The web browser that comes on the new Kindle 3 is pretty neat, supporting everything I’ve thrown at it so far… including this blog’s dashboard.
That means I can post from my Kindle. Not sure I’d want to do that much, as the keyboard is functional rather than comfortable.
Happy new year!
In: Development · Tagged with: Kindle
Logic and Applications Coursework Catch-Up
The lecturers and demonstrators for the Logic and Applications course held a ‘coursework catch-up’ today, the idea being that we can see where we went wrong in the assessed coursework pieces we submitted.
I think a big thank-you is warranted to the demonstrators on the course, Adam and Mohammad. These guys have been really helpful over e-mail as I’ve been doing the coursework pieces at home. It’s a little tricky because they can’t answer questions that are too open, nor can they confirm whether an answer is right or wrong. What seems to have worked this time is asking whether a coursework answer suggests that I’ve understood a specific concept.
I could have understood it and still made some small error and so got the answer wrong, so there’s no big reveal about what the answer is. The couple of times where there was a problem with my understanding, the demonstrators could just suggest that I review the relevant concept. Lots of thanks to those guys anyway for their patience and help!
After reviewing my marked coursework, I found that where I’ve lost marks it’s because of nothing more serious than typos which is nice to know. Now the revision process starts and there’s plenty to chew on with this one!
In: Logic, MSc