‘Twas a slow day today. I just read over a couple of papers I’ve been involved with in preparation for a meeting with Jaga tomorrow, then went to my prac session. There are an extraordinary number of students this year who haven’t programmed in Java before. The ones that haven’t programmed in Java are all Masters students. I’m doing my level best to get them up to speed, but I think some of them are going to struggle.
I had lunch with SB today, during which we saw a very big and bold bearded dragon jump up on some guy’s legs in order to steal his lunch! It failed in its attempt as the guy’s friend shooed it away with a book or something. The scary looking monster had been eyeing our lunch for quite some time before turning on the other guy. There are heaps of these dragons around the lake area, but none quite so bold as this particular specimen. SB will soon submit his Ph.D thesis. His topic is to do with vertical handover.
I didn’t mention that last week I wrote a Java version of the Chord protocol. I started on Monday, had it basically finished by Tuesday and was debugging it for the rest of the week. I got it completely working on Friday, and it turned out that the two bugs that had me befuddled were due to omissions in the pseudo code from which I implemented the algorithm, and not to my programming skills. This pseudo code appears in the Chord paper itself, and the omissions were, I thought, quite critical. Those MIT people don’t know what they’re doing. ;) Now I just have to put my service discovery protocol on top. After that, there are a couple of other programming tasks to do, but then I can concentrate on getting some numbers or building usage scenarios (I know I should have finalised by now how I’m going to test this thing, but I’m still mulling over the alternatives) and then writing my thesis. So the finish line is definitely within sight. (Please don’t let it be a mirage!)
It’s only ten past nine, but I am dead tired. Going to sleep now.
