Time has really flied–now it is me as a third year student now and the thoughest semester ever since I entered NUS is just behind me. Looking back at the semester, it does not feel like the battle field as I was experiencing at that time–I can still do better but I did not give my best effort to my team and myself.

Anyway, yesterday is history and tomorrow is mystery, while today is a gift–that is why it is call “present”. I just rewatched Kungfu Panda this vacation and took this line down with some new understanding. Besides watching movies, I have also read a few books, novel, philosophy, about work, time management, finance related and so on. I am still not sure where is balance of work and life or how to a lead a more fulfilling life.

Maybe the answer is not just about watching and reading but also about probably feeling and doing–which is what I need to continue to try my best to find out.

OK. Enough for the unrelated stuff and back to the main topic. It has been a rather busy semester considering that the CAPstone module–CG3002 and 5 other modules are trying to crashing me at the same time–let alone the jobs as CS2103 tutor and CS1010 grader(by the way, a good way to force yourself to do some recapping on C or Java is to do the tutoring). What made the semester worse is the freaking (fill in either good or bad here, both fit really well) idea from the lecturers of CG3002 that this year we are going to do something way cooler. To be honest, it is cooler but the fact that 3 of them are experimenting with our patch did make our life harder.

But I guess complaint does not make the problem any easier to solve but real work does. So you see COM1 is full of CEG student, with sleepy and red eyes. We used to stay up but we do not do that any more–we do not sleep at all and it is not a short hackathon after which you can just grab a great sleep but a rather long one. For me, the most hard part is that tuning the system is tedious and debugging hardware is even more unpleasant. I was lucky to have a great team working together so that we did have to burn any night to catch up with the deadlines but life is still hard.

CG3002

Moving from cashier to indoor navigation, I see the positive changes in this module–it is getting more useful(although the final product is still not usable in reality). I guess in the following few years the topic is going to remain this one and only slight modification may be made–but that is not my call of course, it lies in the hand of Rajesh, Colin and Uncle Soo.

But no matter how the topic changes, there will one fact that will always shine–hardware is the most diffcult part. The hardware here is not referring to just getting those connections right as what is shown in pin tables. How well those connections work together, what the readings from sensors look like, how well those actuators work–all of these should be taken care of with highest priority. Of course, stressing the importance of hardware does not mean all of the team members need to go for hardware–always choose best ones.

The design for this module is not entirely free but restrictions are not harsh. So hope you will have fun.

Grade: A

CG3207

MIPS processor is very simple and this idea will remain true until the moment you really go and try to implement it. Thinking about just 5-stage pipeline will already blow my mind. That makes me wonder how on earth those engineers are working on 30-40 stages(I hope I did not remember the number wrongly) and dynamic multi-issue processors.

However, CA is not the most surprising part, final is. It seems to be just about memory–at least for the most blanks I failed to fill in. So read lecture notes carefully, even trivia details.

Grade: A

CS3213

Nothing much to talk about on this module. Some design patterns/principles are already covered somewhere else many times; some are not covered but used in practice, what we gotta do is just get familiar with the terminology; others are new, interesting or not interesting, easy or hard, simple or complicated. But one thing for sure, learning without practicing them in real life does not mean anything and any understanding without practices backing up is weak.

Grade: A

CS4211

Module checking, oh I am sorry, model checking is useful and interesting, if I am just a person sitting there and watching without doing any coding by myself. So the fun part about this module is the concept and everything else is not fun–either boring or hard to get. As far as I know, the content keep changing but PAT(process analysis tool) is definitely one of the topics. Alloy, Z or some other model-checking languages or tools will be included.

Grade: A-

EE3204

Well, networking may not be my piece. But honestly I just do not really absorb whatever is taught in lectures well. Only after I took those tests and then I go back and Google–I kind of believe Google teaches better, or maybe it is because I was coding for some other modules while lectures :P

Grade: B+ A really bad-looking grade, I guess it is a punishment for me not taking it seriously.

GEM2900

An easy module and a freaking easy module after taking ST2334. But I got only B+–and I think the reason is the incident happened during the exam: I was not very sure about the meaning of perimeter and “周长”. A blur idea in mind tells me that them are the same for a circle but I just wanted to confirm with the lecturer. He first told me “not supposed to say” but then replace with a “No”. After hearing him, I changed my answers thinking that “周长” is diameter. And then you know the result already–B+.

Grade: S(B+)

OK. I guess this is enough for the summary of last of semester and the third to the last semester is waiting for me right in front of today–tomorrow CORS bidding 1A.