Happy 50th Anniversary, UTCS! During the evening banquet, I spoke with a UTCS alum who had graduated in 1984 when Dijkstra just entered the university. Wow!

What did I do this past week? We’re making good progress on the new Darwin project. We quickly knocked out many of the implementation details in regards to how the classes interacted with each other, so most of what’s left is testing. I also registered for courses next semester - I’ve put my eggs in the Security basket by signing up for Network Security & Privacy and Intro to Computer Security. If all pans out well, I should qualify for UTCS’ INFOSEC Certificate by graduation.

What’s in my way? The Darwin Project. Another Compilers project. Homeworks here and there.

What will I do next week? More coding. More reading. More assignments.

With only one “real” class session this week, I don’t have much to discuss for today’s post. I kind of miss the daily morning quizzes, actually. As much as I tend to suck at them, I’ve learned a lot from the simple and to-the-point examples that they contain. “Which constructor is it?” “How many times is it called?” “What does allocator.construct do?”

Admittedly, it’s pretty frustrating to suddenly lose 40% off the final quiz score for making a mistake or missing a small detail. I’d appreciate if the quizzes had more questions and took longer. That way they’re passable (70%+) even when missing a few questions, can more thoroughly cover older material, and give a small benefit to those who show up to class on time.

Tip of the Week: A small but useful one. Make sure your editor is set for C++ formatting when editing .h files, rather than C formatting. Because some keywords in C++ don’t exist in C, indentation can be incorrect in the wrong language.