It’s Friday night, and I have just finished my first week of my second year at the Australian National University. This is the reason I haven’t written anything here for the last week, and my blog rate will probably remain low for the next 10 weeks… but I’ll do my best! This semester I’m doing some rather interesting courses (and some not so much…)

• COMP2300 – Introduction to Computer Systems Which is about.. well computer systems. It covers topics like binary representations of numbers, C, computer architecture, etc. The thing I am however most looking forward to the most will be the third assignment, which will be based around the uni’s new T2 (the one Ben Lippmeier is using for most of his GHC on SPARC work)

• COMP2100 – Software Construction This seems to be more about how to write larger software, than actual programming (though it does emphasise programming weekly to get into good habits). I’m interested to see for the Personal Software Process (PSP) stuff goes, it seems to me that it can make you a more productive programmer quite easily. After only an hour of using the time keeping for it, i’ve noticed i don’t get distracted as much, because it’s not programming time, so all i do is program in this time. Means i distract myself less, which is very helpful.

• ENGN2211 – Electronic Circuits This is a second year electronics course, and should be fairly interesting too. Not much to say about this one…

• ENGN2226 – Engineering Systems Analysis This course is taught by a pretty cool German maths PhD, and focuses mostly on modelling systems, which is obviously an integral part of engineering. We’ll have to use MATLAB for this, which from what I’ve heard from others may not be very fun at all. Could be a good place to use some of the nice statistical packages for haskell…

Anyway, I’ll try and keep up with the haskelling, but I’ll be doing a lot of non haskell this semester (C, Java, ASM, MATLAB), so it may have to fall by the way side for now

– Axman