IAP is coming to a close for this year, and classes are starting up for the second semester next week! I’m pretty excited about the classes I’ll be taking:

1. 2.003 (Dynamics I) – this is my first mechanical engineering class! I’m really looking forward to it. I’m planning to minor in course 2. I got my textbook for this class a few days ago and started reading it, and I have a feeling that I’m really going to enjoy this class!
2. 6.004 (Computation Structures) – I’m also really looking forward to this class. Basically, we design and then program our own computer processor. Fun!
3. 6.005 (Principles of Software Design) – a programming lab. I’ve heard it’s pretty fun, and the projects we do sound pretty neat.
4. 6.006 (Intro to Algorithms) – also sounds pretty interesting. The textbook for this class is also really nice.
5. 21M.302 (Harmony and Counterpoint II) – A second-level classical composition class. I took the prequel last year during the spring semester, and liked it a lot.
6. Jazz Combo – I’ll be playing the piano again with a jazz combo through the chamber music society. Always a  good break from doing psets!

So, really looking forward to next semester! It’s going to be pretty busy, though. I hope I can manage all of those classes

Perhaps I’m addicted to photography… I’ve been having a lot of fun this IAP taking pictures of MIT and Boston. I still have many more pictures that I’d like to share on this blog, but here are just a few of my favorite recent pictures. They were all taken from the lounge in my dorm, at different times and on different days.

The first pictures are on a bright, cold, and crisp winter day.The pictures near the end are ones that I just took this morning at sunrise. My addiction to photography has been strong enough lately to coax me out of bed at inopportune hours of the morning and prevent me from partaking in my much-appreciated sleep. Anywho, I’m really glad I got up this morning, because these are some of my favorite pictures. The sunrise ones were taken between 6:00 – 7:00 AM.

I know I haven’t blogged in a while (again), so here goes! I’ll finally write about some of the things that I said I’d write about in my last post, starting with a PHP class I taught a few weeks ago.

PHP is a really knarley web-programming language – it stands for “PHP: Hypertext Prepreocessor” (yes, a recursive acroynum!). On Tuesday, January 13th from 7:30 – 10:30 PM, I taught a caffeinated crash course in PHP through SIPB, a computer group on campus. By caffeinated, I’m not referring to actual beverages. Rather, this refers to the jam-packed nature of the course, as SIPB’s caffeinated crash courses tend to pack a gargantuous amount of information (such as an entire programming language) into a relatively short amount of time (just 3 hours).

My PHP class went very well I think, and I was very happy that there was a good turn out at the event (I’d estimate around 30-40 ish people showed up). Here’s a picture of it:

In case you’re interested in seeing some of the lecture slides/topics I covered in class, here is a link to the class website:

http://sipb-iap.scripts.mit.edu/2009/cccphp/

It was fun! This was my first time teaching a class, and I enjoyed it a lot. I do admit that I was nervous before class started, but after I got the hang of things, it turned out to be pretty fun!

I’m finally done with my finals, and what a fantastic feeling that is! I had four finals this semester, which is a lot. Judging from talking from most of my friends, the average is usually around 2.5-3. Some of my finals however weren’t all that bad; two of them weren’t cumulative, they were just unit tests, which certainly makes studying for them less stressful! Anyway, now that I’m done I really have nothing that I have to do. It isn’t very often in my life when this happens

Now that finals are over, I can look forward to going home and having a nice relaxing winter break with my family and friends. Right now I don’t really don’t have any specific plans, except that me and some other friends are likely going to go and visit my old high school to say hi to past teachers.

And then, after break, it’s time for IAP (Independent Activities Period, MIT’s month of january in which there are no regular, official classes, but you can take other fun classes if you want). I’m doing the 6.370 BattleCode competition with some friends. BattleCode is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition, based on programming a computer to play a starcraft-like video game. I’m really looking forward to this, it should be fun! It’ll also be a great way to re-acquaint myself with Java, which I haven’t used nearly at all this semester. Also, I’ll be teaching a 3 hour course on PHP during early IAP, which I’m very excited about!

There are so many other random things I want to do over IAP. Here’s a list of some things:

1. Go to a bunch of cool programming/IAP classes
2. Explore Boston!
3. Play the piano a lot
4. Go running often
5. Work on cool projects (in addition to BattleCode), likely with SIPB
6. Get plenty of sleep (hopefully!)
7. Refresh myself on Newtonian physics (preparation for 2.003, a class I’ll be taking next semester)
8. While I’m at it, if I feel ambitious, try to start teaching myself some of the material for my classes next semester

I’m very excited, because I’m going to be teaching an IAP class with SIPB! SIPB stands for “Student Information Processing Board,” and it’s a neat computer club on campus that does all sorts of awesome/crazy things for MIT people, like make a virtual machine server, an Athena dialup, a way to make Ubuntu/Debian act like Athena, etc.

I’m going to be teaching a Caffeinated Crash Course in PHP on Wednesday, January 21 from 7:30 – 10:30 PM in room 1-115! Although there won’t actually be any caffeine per say, the title of the series (there are “caffeinated crash courses” in a bunch of other programming languages, too) gets across the point that a lot of information is being jam-packed into a really short amount of time. If you haven’t heard of it before, PHP is a programming language that basically makes websites. You may have seem some websites that end in .php instead of .htm – those all use PHP.

Here is the course-description that I wrote:

Some topics I’m thinking about including:

1. What is PHP, and what it can be used for
2. PHP history
3. How PHP works (the code runs on the server, which sends HTML to the client, etc.)
4. Syntax of the language
5. Typical uses of PHP
6. A few programming examples

I’m really excited about teaching this class!! If you think of any other topics that would be neat to cover, let me know!