18 Dec 2021
A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
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7 Dec 2021
The following is from a essay from a class on German literature and film.
Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis is primarily about the struggle between the oppressed working class and the ruling elite. What drives this tension, however, is a particular view of technology and technological progress that exacerbates the problems the film focuses on. This mentality is called high modernist ideology by Scott in his book Seeing Like a State:
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9 Nov 2021
What does this program do? At the most reduced level, one could say that a program’s behavior is defined by the effect it has on the hardware running it. That’s not very useful however; when we’re programming, we often have to deal with legacy code and tease out the original intent of the code.
Saying that the meaning of a program is entirely encapsulated by the code is saying that the intent and the implementation are the same.
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24 Oct 2021
Last week I was studying outside of a lecture hall where someone was teaching an introductory course on computer programming. There was a lot that I overheard that I disagreed with; this essay is an attempt to help me crystallize what exactly I disagreed with.
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21 Aug 2021
My wife and I got a chance to go to a place that lets you paint pottery and then have it fired. The pottery is all pre-made; you just get to paint it.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve worked with a physical art medium, so the mug looks kinda dumpy. I did alright with the Racket logo on the bottom-inside of the mug though!
I’m working on some fun projects with Racket.
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3 Aug 2021
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
— Erasmus of Rotterdam
Used bookstores are my arch nemesis.
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27 Jul 2021
Control-Flow Analysis is a popular technique for performing static analysis of many different kinds of programming languages.
It’s most often needed in cases where you have some kind of dynamic dispatch: either where you have first-class functions or when you have objects and you call one of their methods.
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30 Jan 2021
For one of my classes I am required to take a short weekly exam via Proctorio. There’s been some controversy surrounding this software. Although it claims it’s trustworthy, it’s not open-source, so no one can verify their claims. So naturally, I was reluctant to install it on my primary machine. Enter: the spare raspberry pi I have sitting around.
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28 Dec 2020
This is the story of how I managed to get FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, though I think the setup story is pretty similar for those with 2GB and 8GB.
I also managed to get Rust built from source, (kind of) which is nice because the default Rust installer doesn’t seem to work for FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi.
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11 Dec 2020
I noticed that my Internet was acting strangely: whenever I visited a web page, my browser would hang for a good second or two before it started loading anything. Zoom calls worked without a problem for school, so this tipped me off that something was wrong with the DNS lookup or the handshake.
Sure enough, I popped open my Pi-Hole admin console, and was greeted with this:
The green number in the Total Queries box would jump by 10, 20, or sometimes even 100 every second.
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