Life, Opportunity, and Development

The final final

nobody@vox.com(Matthew Kruskamp) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:06:38 -0600

Recap. Yesterday was a fairly long day. I took my CS360 final that covered: COM+, Remoting, Message Queuing, Web Services, routing, and WSE3 Security policies. did alright on the written part, and got a 100% on the coding portion. Then I did a demo of mine and dusda's XNA assignment to our DirectX professor. That went pretty well also. The cool part, however, was the insane amount of feedback from the students when we let people play it in the student commons. Fortunately, we actually made a game that people replayed and switched off with one another. The remainder of the day was spent with my car. She was running poorly so I cleaned up the engine bay, changed the oil, swapped out some spark plugs, and fixed all the warning lights. Then another long night... this time for packing for the trip to Michigan.

Today was my final final. Mathmatics is not my strong suit although I am very interested in it. I just haven't done enough. So I was happy to get a 100% on the exam and finally end this quarter. What is ahead? 26 hours of driving.

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DirectX Exam

nobody@vox.com(Matthew Kruskamp) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 11:18:01 -0600

Well exams have kicked off, and I am pleased with the result of my DirectX exam. Partially because I'm pretty sure I obtained an A, and secondly, because my DX professor's exams are humorous. I think all school exams would be much more effective if they kept you in a relaxed frame of mind while you were taking them. Nothing relaxes a person like laughter and snickering. Our professor entered the room this morning with an announcement of a "pop quiz." even though we had been reviewing for this final for some time now. The exam started out with all 80 people in the DirectX room doing the wave while making noises for 1 point of extra credit as long as everyone made a noise, and the wave went across the room and made it back. Then, once the exam started, every multiple choice question had 5 or more choices, but the 5th or 6th choice on the exams were not your typical answers.. Here are a few examples from previous tests:

Question concerning attenuation in DirectX lighting:
    "e. It doesn't do anything. DirectX is stupid and anybody that teaches a class in DirectX is an absolute idiot."
Question concerning capturing mouse states:
    "e. Your mouse is broken. Pick it up and stare into the laser underneath it to see if you can figure out what is wrong."
Question about camera rotations:
    "e. My camera is not an ambiturner. It can only turn left."
Question about the ControlPan member of the BufferDescription class:
    "e. Allows you full control of both frying pans and sauce pans. Both types of pans can be used to create different types of sauces used in numerous tasty and fulfilling goodies."
A choice on a vertexbuffer question:
    Chuck norris was annoyed with the verticies and kicked them with infinite velocity.

So although the jokes were a little senseless, the material covered was fairly intensive and complicated, and it was nice to chuckle while completing the exam. I'm definitely looking forward to another class with this professor. Learning is even more fun when you have people with a sense of humor. It is nice to get away from the abundance of people around that take things a little too seriously.

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Theta Wars

nobody@vox.com(Matthew Kruskamp) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:32:34 -0600

Dusda and I have been working on an XNA project to replace our DirectX project. Again, since my updates fail to compare to my experiences, the viewers of this blog have no idea what I am talking about (Except for the house members). XNA is Microsoft's release of a framework to develop Xbox 360 and Windows game applications. Beings that Dusda and I had a directx assignment due, our professor decided that a collaborative effort between Dusda and I in XNA would be appropriate. Unfortunatly for us, we had never used it before since it just released, so we have been pulling all nighters for the duration of the week in order to complete the assignment while still studying enough for the exams. We are almost complete, and the product will be kind of fun. Nothing flashy as we didn't have the time, but I am sure this is not the last time I develop in it. So today, it is presentations for an AJAX, remoting, and COM+ services application that my team wrote, and Dusda and I will be finishing up Theta Wars.

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Personal Update: Dx never ends

nobody@vox.com(Matthew Kruskamp) — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:46:17 -0600

Sleepycoders

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