Echo Binary

I can’t remember when and where I filled out a form to get a free copy of “Visual Studio 2005 Professional 90-Day trial Edition and Partner Resource DVD 2006″ but it was delivered today anyway.

The package contains 2 DVDs. The first one is the 90-Day trial of Visual Studio Professional. Whatever. Then, the second DVD contains “best-of-breed” 3rd party tools. These components can be used in Visual Studio trial that comes with it. I thought it will contain freebies and other useful stuffs… Well, partly true because some components are provided in full version. However, most of them are either limited time trial or demo. It won’t be really useful unless you want to purchase these components if you want to get their full functionality.

I’m quite disappointed but it’s here already and it’s free. I might as well experiment with these components.

I have uploaded as much as 132 GB and downloaded 123 GB since I used µTorrent. If I remember correctly I have uploaded as much as 130 GB in Azureus and download 190 GB before my PC was wiped out. Then I have uploaded another 60 GB and downloaded 45 GB in Azureus again. In total I have seeded 322 GB and leeched 358 GB, which will easily fill up my hard drive. x_x Thanks to DVD-/+R doing backups is a relief.

There are several software updates during my “hibernation” in the past 2 weeks that I failed to know soon. Here they are: Azureus 2.4.0.2, µTorrent 1.5 and WordPress 2.0.2.

First, I still use Azureus even though I use µTorrent most of the time. I downloaded it just now to test whether it is still using so much CPU and memory, and yes it is. µTorrent 1.5 was released earlier and I was still using version 1.4 until yesterday. As usual µTorrent lives up to its famous features — low footprint and efficiency. It now has an “easter egg”. Go to Help -> About and press T to find out. Finally, I updated my blog script recently. It’s a critical release update so I didn’t waste any time when I read it today.

I hope I didn’t miss more updates.

Btw, this is the easter egg of µTorrent if you don’t believe…

After 2 weeks lurking in my room, writing thesis documentation, reading technical journals and practically sleeping whenever there was a chance, I’m finally back again

Who would have guess I’m still alive. I thought I would be dead by the end of “thesis 1″ because of stress, pressure and emotional problems. The main reason is no matter how much I organize my life (schedule, studies, relationship, etc) it generally ends up disorganized as if my life is meant to be at the edge of chaos. Nevertheless, I am very thankful to God because no matter how difficult things are, the sweat, tears and blood that I put into my work seems to be paying off. I’m very grateful to be here, alive and kicking.

Let’s talk about my college experience with my professors. I think I just developed hatred to one of my professors because of HER stupidity. However, I’m still doubtful if I would be really angry to her or I would show pity to her. I don’t want to sound arrogant but I don’t want to lie about the truth anyway. I really lost interest in her subject because of her incompetence. Don’t you think it is pathetic when more than two-thirds of the class does not even bother listening to her when she’s reading the lecture? It’s a big insult that she could not handle our class properly yet she didn’t mind reading the lectures again. I personally couldn’t stomach her reading in front of our class. I understand the lessons much better if I read them on my own rather than attending her class. She’s not even helpful in the laboratory. Everything is self-help as if there’s an invisible instructor at the back of the lab.

Anyway I would stop my ranting and I’ll just move on to our thesis panelists and adviser. It’s really funny how we convinced our thesis adviser to help us in our thesis proposal. At first we thought that having an advisor with technical expertise in .NET would help us a lot in decision making and program logic so we took a professor who was trained in .NET. Later, we realized that we have to ditch him because he’s too preoccupied that we could not get any help from him. So we choose Sir Kelly to be our thesis advisor. He’s a system administrator and the faculty ambassador to Microsoft Philippines. It’s really awkward that we have to change our thesis advisor halfway but we really have to do it for our sake. It’s really worth it because Sir Kelly really helped us improve the content of our documentation and set the goals of our thesis properly. Choosing our panelists is more interesting. We worked on their schedule first in order to avoid difficulty in reserving defense schedule, and we also intentionally chose those professors who have vacant periods in Thursday and Friday afternoons because we want to reserve our thesis defense later, either on the Thursday or Friday to give us more time in preparation. We only have 4 choices but we have to remove one professor from the list because he’s only available on Saturday. So we took their approval and made them our thesis panelists. Surprisingly, during our defense we were not bombarded by questions. I think that our panelists were satisfied to what they saw in our proposal. They were really excited to use a working protocol already. In fact, one of them had mistaken that we were defending a thesis prototype implementation (thesis 2). They “demanded” several additional features so we needed to revise our documentation for those on-demand features. I’m very glad that they didn’t trash our ideas. After all, our thesis is for the benefit of our school so they better give us a motivating grade.

That’s it. I have cleared all the requirements for this term and I’m anticipating my grades already. Everything should be fine.

Jeeezzz… thesis documentation is one of the most time consuming write up I have ever done. Seriously, I didn’t imagine that it would take that much time just to complete about 50% of the documentation.

It’s quite problematic when we were required to do our own Data Flow Diagram when it was not even discussed to us. Those who are taking Information Management have tackled this before. Unfortunately, we, the hapless students enrolled in IT didn’t have a chance to learn it from one of our subjects… Well anyway we had to do some self-study before doing our DFDs.

Signing off.