Blogging my thesis - second edtition

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second edition of "Blogging my thesis".

This time, I'm doing a cloud version of the Sage Notebook. I'm doing the front-end in ASP.NET MVC 3 with C# and Razor, the back-end in Python and an SQL Server database in-between.

Since a screenshot is worth around 1024 words, here's a little preview:


The good news is that it's cool and I'm learning a lot while writing it (like MVC or jQuery).

The bad news is that it's due on September the 30th. I wished to have it finished by the beginning of next month, but I'm afraid it will take too much work.

Well, however it turns out, it's cool.

I knew I forgot to blog about something

I knew I forgot to blog about something: I passed the70-536 exam!

I got 841 points and 700 was the passing score, so I was pretty well prepared. And they had good coffee at the center.

What's next? The asp.net one, as I have a bit of experience in that. And then maybe WPF, as it's the closest thing to Silverlight - or is there a Silverlight certificate coming up? I don't know about any so far.

I just registered for the 70-536 exam

Wish me luck, everyone! I'm taking the 70-536 exam (Microsoft .NET Framework - Application Development Foundation) on the 16th of December. So I have a bit less than three weeks to get ready. Maybe the fact that two colleagues from work are doing something isn't reason enough to do it, but I don't care - I'm doing it.

Okay, so how do I get prepared? Boss bought us the training kit:

It's a book with practice tests, so I'm reading it when I can and taking the tests. I really hope it will work. I'm a bit worried as I haven't heard the best opinions about it, but, well, we'll see.

My 6-months programming experience should help too, I recently learned how to use reflexions, for example. Basically, that's what the exam is supposed to measure: your level of experience.

My new addiction: Project Euler

I've got a new dangerous addiction: Project Euler. It's a website with cool math problems, like:

Find the only Pythagorean triplet, {a, b, c}, for which a + b + c = 1000.

These problems are quite easy to solve with a little piece of code, so it's great way of learning a new programming language. I try using that to learn ocaml for my functional programming class, but sometimes I forget about that and succumb to the tentation of writing a C# console application with great ease.

I have solved 12 problems out of 218 so far and when I start solving them, it's hard to stop! Yep, one more addiction...

First day of work

The title of the post is misleading: today is my second day of work. But I was so busy on the first one that I didn't get to tell my fascinating adventures.

I had to get there after 11p.m., so I decided to learn a bit of C#. I printed made Brother print for me the advanced chapters of "C# Programming" on Wikibooks - cool and useful. That page lead me to a tutorial entitled "learning C# in 5 minutes" which I tried in the 5 minutes before going out, but I don't really feel like that made me learn C#.

And the I went to the real work. Finally. And spent the whole day preparing my workstation, whcih means mostly installing Windows XP. That went not too bad, reinstalling my systems in March was a good idea as I knew pretty well everything I had to do.

Well, and that was all on my first day. Today I installed Office and I'm gonna discuss with the boss wich project I will join and therefore what developement environment to set up.

Installing, installing, installing....

Today is a pretty typical geek day. Basically, it means sitting at the computer all day long.

Having formatted my hard drive on Friday, I re-installed Windows XP from my recovery CD. Then I installed Ubuntu 7.10, only 34 days before Ubuntu 8.04 is out (you can get the beta if you can't wait, but I don't like the word "beta", or read a review here).

Sunday was Easter, so all I did was install The Sims 2, among with the expansion packs: Open For Business, Bon Voyage and Free Time. Then played a lot.

On Monday, I continued celebrating and installed Visual Studio C# and Visual Web Developer, both express editions of course. However, I didn't even have the time to run one of them.

Today, back to the serious stuff. Right now, getting the 204 important security updates Ubuntu has got for me. Then, installing Java and Eclipse. Then, Sugar, because One Laptop Per Child has been accepted for Google Summer of Code and I'd love to do something with them. Then, Thunderbird, which I'd love to see working under both Linux and Windows, using the same mail folders of course. Then, some SVN client, then, the libraries I need for my team project, namely Tuscany SDO and Apache Maven. Then, getting to work.

Ah, an entire day at the computer. I'm feeling so good right now.