Occasionally Cogent

Some random things I’ve been working on/thinking about the last little while…

CurrMap

A couple months ago, I was brought into an interesting project for U of T’s Engineering faculty, to assist a good friend of mine on an interesting project, which has been dubbed “Cirriculum Mapper”, or “CurrMap”. The elevator pitch is that it provides a simple way for students and faculty to tell what a given course will teach you, along with easy access to all sorts of useful information about the course, professors, textbooks, and so on.

The really fun part is that we’ve basically been given carte blanche as to how we implement it, so, as of now, the system is designed with CouchDB as the backend and Sinatra for the front-end part. So, it’s a useful and interesting project, built on top of fun technologies that I’m enjoying learning more about.

Five Minute Stories

As I Tumbled about previously, I finally got this idea that had been in my head for a while off the ground. It was a pretty fun project, which I undertook in large part to try to get a better grasp of Rails and various rails plugins. I think it was fairly successful, in that it works pretty much as I wanted it to. I don’t think anyone other than myself has seen it yet, but give it time…

School Stuff

I also just started the second semester of my third year in Engineering Science (a.k.a. Nψ) at the University of Toronto. This has been a pretty brutal program, but I’m finally at the point where I get to choose my major (ECE!) and, after the brutality of last semesters focus on the electronic stuff, we’ve finally got to the computer stuff, which is a lot of fun.

On class in particular, Systems Software (ECE353, for those of you that are curious) is pretty awesome: Starting the semester with code for a skeletal, not-really functional operating system, we add features to it until we end the semester with a clone of Unix System VI, running on MIPS. It’s been pretty awesome already, and I’m very much looking forward to how it progresses.

Coda

All sorts of other stuff going on as well, some better than others, but this is what’s at the top of my head at the moment and I felt like writing something. Until next time!