Spring Recap

Time to dust off the old blag and do a quick recap of the exodus that was Spring 2012. As evidenced by my lack of postings here and general absence communication with anyone, it was a busy term. 

ECE 351 (Verilog/FPGA design) was – unsurprisingly—a complete clusterfuck. It was taught by the worst professor I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing, and he did his damnedest to make the class as useless as possible. A few observations:
-  I personally don’t think you can very accurately test the ability to creatively solve complex     engineering and design problems with a true/false question.
-  All of the tests had errors on them, but instead of simply removing the flawed questions and giving the point back, the lazy ass made every person go to the TA individually.
-  I work on FPGA code daily that is orders of magnitude more complex than the trivial examples given in class, yet I ended up with a B- so now my transcript is marred due to basically inane grading policy, not lack of knowledge.
-  He spent the majority of the class disagreeing with the author of our book, telling us he knew more about the IEEE standards than the IEEE does, and generally giving us verifiably incorrect information and poor practices.
-  I think I am actually worse off professionally for having taken this class.
-  I never have to take a class from him again, and just typing that lowered my blood pressure.

That is all. 

ECE 373 (Linux device drivers) however, was a great class. I felt like I was in over my head pretty consistently, but got good grades throughout and ended the term with a solid A. Two of my weaknesses right now are my lack of experience with Linux and the fact that I have only been coding for a few years. Go figure that a class that involved nothing but coding for the Linux kernel would be difficult. With that said, however, very few people actually finished the final project, which for my partner and I came in at a tree-slaughtering 35 pages when it was complete. Keep in mind that only 1 page was English sentences, the rest was code. I was very lucky to finally—maybe the first time ever, actually—get paired up with a partner who knew what he was doing and pulled his weight. Actually, when we finished I felt like he had done most of the work, but he assured me that the sections I had worked on (low level machine instructions, command packing, deciphering cryptic manuals) he would have absolutely hated doing. So it all worked out in the end. 

And I never have to see Greenwood again.