DONE

[tenlittlebullets]

Only in the computer science department can you get away with turning in a whole project in English (well, the parts of it that aren't in Java) with the excuse "well, it was either translate it or debug it, if you prefer buggy and in French I can bring a translation of the Friday-night version to the soutenance so you can have a good laugh."

I'm not sure I am going to get away with it, but I figure as long as the code works, right?

And it does. Sort of. It's full of weird little glitches where my attempts at multi-threaded programming go "SPLORT," but this is a course on network programming and not on concurrency, and if the profs at the jury/soutenance are sane they will take into account the fact that everyone else in the course has learned that stuff officially and I had never touched Java threads until this course. And the program does what it's supposed to do, weird glitches aside. It's supposed to be a peer-to-peer client for a simple protocol that the prof wrote, so the only way to test it is to fire it up and add his office computer as a peer and connect to whoever else is testing theirs, and let me tell you. Mine may be buggy, but at 10:52 this evening I still saw people who were connected to themselves twice over or who kept suddenly disappearing without sending a "close" message and logging back on thirty seconds later.

Also, the five-page single-spaced report I wrote on it just got more and more informal and sarcastic as I went on. It started out as a beautiful model of bland formal bullshit, and by the end it was like "There's really not much to say about this section without uselessly regurgitating what was written in the assignment, so here are the main points: first of all, I put the blocking and non-blocking functions in the same while loop with a timeout on the socket, instead of in different threads, because I did not want to waste system resources and beat my head against the concurrency problems..." Only in stilted "non-native speaker with too much work and not enough sleep" French.

But yeah. It's done. The final version is much less of a clusterfuck than the final version of my database project. And now I'm freeeeeeee to enjoy... the two soutenances and the final exam and the translation of a medieval-French text that await me this week.

I kvetch, but really, I'm freeeeeeeeeeeee. Three out of these four things involve showing up, answering questions, and being done less than two hours later. I can so totally deal with that.

Edit: And, uh, now I think I'm going to bed, and hopefully this will be the last night in a while where I stay up until 4am.

Comments

[coloneldespard.livejournal.com]

I have a real sense of relief to know that the project is done - that was the worst of the looming nastiness, wasn't it? I suppose I should be grinning about the gradual descent into informal sarkiness as you went on with the report!

Good luck with the rest of it!

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Yep, it was the biggest and nastiest-looking of all my academic obligations, and turned out to be less evil than the database project. Or maybe I just halfassed the database project more, I dunno.

I hope the prof is amused; he has a rather snarky and sadistic sense of humor himself, and browsing through the mailing-list archives I saw that last semester he awarded prizes for "least plausible excuse for turning a project in late."

And now that I don't have looming academic obligations I will hopefully be able to start planning Barricade Day again! Thank you so much for volunteering to shoulder some of the responsibilities, I would've gone nuts if I'd had to worry about Procope RSVPs in the middle of programming Java sockets.

[(Anonymous)]

That should have read "I suppose I shouldN'T be grinning..."! As long as your humour is on the same wave length, it can be fun! My rather irrepressible brother once borrowed a Little Mermaid transparancy to use as a pointer for a presentation he had to do on an aspect of marine surveying in his geomatic engineering course.

No worries at all about the Procope stuff - I'll do the booking today. Will also send you a seperate note about the Barricade Day email account and LJ PMs, but the short version is that there's nothing there that looked like you needed to worry about it. The only thing I suppose would be confirming the list of attendees for the performance and where they should report for their tickets.

[kittycallum.livejournal.com]

Yay freedom! Best of luck with the rest of that stuff, but glad to hear that the worst is over!

[mmebahorel.livejournal.com]

Yay! Now sleep - sleep is good :)

(and as a reward for surviving, if you request porn, I'll see what I can do this week.)

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

You know I will never say no to porn. :D (Unless it's Thénardier/Gueluemer/Eponine torture porn, but this isn't the Harry Potter fandom so I guess there's no need to specify that.)

[mmebahorel.livejournal.com]

That's just not the sort of cracky that I can do.

Let me see what I can come up with.

[sophiedegrouchy.livejournal.com]

Congrats! I finished my last final yesterday morning and it feels amaaaaazing.

[collectingbees.livejournal.com]

hooooraaaaaayyy!!! :D