It has taken a few weeks to get properly back into the swing of things in terms of workload but now it is piling on, mainly due to array of careers talks I have been going to as well the job applications I am sending off and checking through.
I have also taken it upon myself to learn Latex properly, having being introduced to it in first year by our tutor I was reluctant to bother at first only ever using Word before. I’ve found a really good development environment for it which has helped a lot, if you are thinking of having a go try LEd which can be found here. It allows you to compile the code on the fly and view it in the inbuilt viewer, you will need a version of the tex environment as LEd is only a shell although you can get MikTex distributed with it.
Once I had learn’t the basic syntax it was easy to write a few small documents and they look really professional and LEd will convert them to .ps .dvi and .pdf giving loads of options for viewing. The only slight problem I have had is that I can’t seem to get text bigger than the huge font size (24.88 for those interested) but this is only a minor thing.
Also have been learning how to use Prolog, for the Artificial Intelligence and Logic programming course I am taking. It’s unlike anything I have had to use before but is really easy to pick up and there are plenty of guides online to help, which I am sure will get hammered before the next coursework deadline.
With this and trying to further develop my website the next few weeks are going to be very busy, I have also been launched into historical ciphers being set a decryption task for which I am trying to write a small program in Java to decrypt the Shift, Substitution, Vigenere and Permutation Ciphers. Admittedly this is a bit more than I need to do as it is fairly easy to do by hand but I feel I learn better this way.
Have the impending Champions League game to get through without destroying my nails, will be trying to write up a few lectures at the same time but i’m sure that will get disregarded fairly quickly.
