Week 8

Week 8

This week we talked about modern hardware architecture and operators and operating systems. As Prof Heap went through the Von Neumann architecture of a CPU showing simple commands like load, add, store, etc., I realized all of the complex operations that a computer executes almost instantaneously.

We also learned that as computers get smaller they heat up considerably, and that Moore's Law will no longer apply. We speculated in class when Moore's Law would slow down, meaning that computers would not continually get smaller, but perhaps reach a plateau.

It was interesting to see how fragile a hard drive truly is. It's disconcerting to know that the head of the hard drive's actuator arm is "floating" in between the various discs of the hard drive. As Prof Heap mentioned, the mean time between failures (MTBF) of a hard drive is about 5 years. For someone who has a laptop from 2008, I think it's time to back up my hard drive...

Week 7

Week 7

This week we learned how binary is converted into various media including text, sound, RGB images, etc. It is interesting to notice how all these media that we think of as entirely separate can be rendered using 1s and 0s.

As a musician, it is fascinating to see music translated into WAVs or MP3s, where the computer reads a series of binary and spits out a recognizable sound.

Unfortunately in my opinion a digital binary representation of sound does not mach the nuance of an analog sound wave. The discrete changes in the waveform of a digital sound don't sound as good as the continuous wave form of an analog sound.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how sound is stored digitally because this is the main way it is mass consumed.

Week 6

Week 6

This week we have begun to learn more about Boolean logic, and the combination of simple true and false operators.

Understanding how binary works has always been a challenge for me, but once Prof Heap explained that binary works on the system of base 2 I quickly was translating numbers from base 10 into binary.

The carry in and carry out can get a bit confusing, but given the time it is easy to convert numbers into binary and vice-versa.

Week 5

Week 5

This week we had our first midterm test, which I found moderately challenging. I feel that I did well on the short written answer questions. The last questions at the end of the test gave me some trouble, as I wasn't entirely sure how the check-expect function works. I now understand it much better.

I didn't perform as well as I should have on the question about the Fibonacci sequence. Although I understood the concept of the Fibonacci sequence, I had trouble communicating it in an effective way.

I am confident that I did well on question 4, which was the short Dr. Racket questions. I feel that those types of questions really solidify the understanding of basic Dr. Racket tasks.