Trees 12/5

     Recently in advanced computer programming we have been learning about stacks, queues, binary trees, and general trees. Most of the labs have been manageable for me but the general trees lab took more time than any of the others. The general trees lab was a challenge for me. For some reason I had a really hard time trying to figure out a way to create a random tree. However, I was able to work through the problems with some help and finished on time. I am the proudest of the general trees lab over all the others because of how much time and effort I put into making it work. 

     In general things are going well. I am learning quite a bit in class through my small struggles. Elena and I have been working together on most of the labs helping each other debug. I have been distracted from my work by college apps and news. Now that college apps are wrapping up I should be able to work better in the future. 

SPICE 11/16

The spice circuit simulator creates circuits based on netlists and then will simulate all properties of that circuit. These properties can then be displayed in a graph and or measured using a measure statement. Spice will also let you make sub circuits for any part you want to make out of transistors. The hardest part about spice is remembering all of the parts to the measure statements, to the transistor statements, and any sub circuits. The way the statements are formatted makes it hard to visualize the circuit which makes it hard for me to understand what all is going on. Spice is mainly used to figure out propagation delays of a circuit and or rise and fall times of a specific part of a circuit. Spice allows you to measure basically any aspect of the circuit and change the width of transistors while logisim only deals with the logic. Logisim will run inputs through gates and gives you the output but will not let measure aspects of the gates. You use spice when you want to optimize a certain aspect of a gate or part of a circuit by modifying transistors.

Databases 11/16

In Google app engine databases work by using GQL to store or access elements of an entity. Entities may contain one or more properties which has a name and a specified data type. All properties are stored within an entity in the form of a table. Each entity is identified by its kind which is specified in the name of the class which creates the entity and a key which is unique. The Google App Engine datastores do not update instantaneously so accessing an element which was just entered into the datawstore can result in problems. The GQL syntax which is very similar to SQL is used to retrieve entities or keys from the datastore.

Transistors 10/19

A transistor is like a switch because the voltage at the gate determines whether or not current flows between the source and the drain. This creates a situation where there is either current flowing through or not much like a switch. A transistor is like a resistor when it is linear mode. This is because the p-type or n-type silicon used in the transistor restricts the flow of electrons between the drain and the source. A transistor circuit is like a RC circuit when a capacitor is hooked up to it because transistors have a resistance. The PMOS source is connected to Vdd while the NMOS source is connected to ground because this allows for current to flow in different directions through different types of transistors. This allows for the creation of Inverters. 

HTTP Get and HTTP Post 10/19

In Google App Engine the HTTP Get request is used to get content from the servers where as the Post request is used to update data. Get request parameters are also displayed in the url and have a maximum length. The Get request also can be cached and does not change anything on the servers. The Post request stores parameters in the body and does not have a maximum length. Post requests are not okay to cache but can change the server.

Vectors v Arrays 10/14

     Vectors and arrays are similar in that they both store data which can be accessed by indexes of the array or vector. The main difference in C++ between vectors and arrays are that you can add elements to a vector where as you can not change the size of an array. Vectors also come with many other methods which can be used to alter the vector where as Arrays do not. Vectors are comparable to Arraylists in Java.
     I think the class is going fairly well. I like the idea of researching certain topics and presenting to the class. The effectiveness of this will become more apparent as we get to the harder topics. I need to get a project to work on for when I finish the labs in order to stay occupied and focused.

Electric Circuits 9/28

Personally even though I already have taken Physics and have learned about circuits it was a bit challenging the way we learned circuits in class. I thought that the way voltage, current, and resistance behave in a circuit (voltage is constant in parallel) could have been explained in more detail or in a better way. I found that it was also very hard to pay attention and learn because of the shear number of people in the room and because of people having their own side conversations. The way basic electrical circuits was taught worked well it could just use a few minor tweaks.

Learning HTML/CSS 9/28

I think that the way we learned HTML and CSS worked. While the methods and programs we used to learn HTML and CSS probably could have been better they did the. Most of the problems I had with code avengers was the fact that it was picky about certain things and because it was just annoying at times. There also isn't much to learn for HTML and CSS its all attributes and tags which can easily be looked up. I think that the amount of time we spent learning HTML and CSS was reasonable. I wish we would have learned the very basics of Python before we started working with Google app engine. In general code avengers worked  but it did not prepare us enough for the CSS project 2.

Learning Linked Lists 9/28

When faced with the problem of being told to learn linked lists I was at first, confused. I had actually missed the class when we had been given the task so I had some catching up to do. At first linked lists seem pointless and they still kind of do. Arrays accomplish the same thing except that you can not control the memory usage like in linked lists since arrays are automatically made by the computer. I started of learning linked lists by I was able to learn linked lists was that I partnered up with someone to share what we had learned. As we encountered problems in our code we would help each other to try and figure out what the issue was. While this assignment was a challenge it was a unique learning experience to learn this way.

August 27 Algorithms

          I personally think that the idea of the world turning into a place run by math, by computers constantly running algorithms to potentially control and increase the efficiency of everything in our lives is kind of scary. But at the same time I think it is also really cool that someone with and idea can sit down and write code which can run part of the world. Another thing to consider about these algorithms is that if they are going to increase in number which they will, then everyone who has no idea of what algorithms are or without any sort of coding knowledge will be stuck in a world where they walk around blindly at the will of computers and under the influence of programmers. This leads into an interesting idea of if everything is starting to be taken over by mathematicians and programmers then what will many college graduates be able to do when their work becomes dominated by the computer and algorithms. One final thing that I took from the TED talk was that I had no idea what those graphs of algorithms are and or what they were doing. The video made me realize how import algorithms are and how I need to learn more about them which it looks like we will be accomplishing in this class.