Pete's Log: /me hates cse521
Entry #922, (School)(posted when I was 22 years old.)
so very much. This class makes me very unhappy. Such a waste of my time. It wouldn't bother me quite so much if it weren't for the fact that I'm not feeling well at all and it's looking less and less likely that I'm gonna sleep much tonight. I hate software that sucks.
OK, having taken a few deep breaths, I still find myself quite irritated by this whole assignment. I just read over the assignment again, and it still is completely ridiculous. So the introduction starts out with "The goals of this project are to begin the process of familiarization with various ways of designing, building and testing architectures." It goes on to talk about how we'll use DLX and how the work in this project will provide the basis for the next two projects. Then it says "Below are some of the tasks/goals for this assignment:" ... some?!?! ok, so ok, whatever. The first item is "Become familiar with one of the DLX simulators available on the web" the second one is "Make sure that it will do the following things:" and then lists several things. Problem is none of the simulators they list seems to fulfill their requirements (of course, most of them don't meet one of my personal requirements for software either: that it FUCKING compile!). Next item on the list: "Determine the performance of your design using the metrics indicated on the following pages." ok, um, what design? Nowhere else in the assignment does it say anything about designing anything. Then it goes on to describe how the simulator should consist of three parts: Assembler, Simulation Engine/Debugger, and Performance counters. The three parts are then described in detail. The details for the Sim Engine/Debugger say one of the operations it should support is assembling a program. Isn't that what the Assembler is for? Ugh. Then the next section is "What to turn in" ... "The written report should basically present your performance results for the of the programs assigned." blah. Then later "The report must be at most 1000 words in length (typed and spell-checked, of course)" (at least they got one of those two things accomplished in the project description: it was typed.) "with the following sections: introduction, explanations of how you did the simulator," (how I did the simulator? Am I supposed to do a simulator?) later: "Use appropriate methods for calculating averages." wtf? As opposed to the "inappropriate" methods I would've used if they'd not told me that? It finishes off with links to several simulators, followed by a list of programs we're supposed to run through the simulator. So generally, the impression I get from the project description is that we're supposed to download a simulator, run some programs through it, get performance results and write up a report. This is the impression I got the first time I read the project description before break. But I procrastinated until now and just now read it more carefully, and now I still think it says to do what I thought, but there's two things that make me kind of scared. The bit about determining the performance of my design, and the bit about describing how I did the simulator. Those two sentences make it sound as though we're supposed to write a simulator. I didn't catch them when I read over this before break. But nowhere does this thing explicitly say "write a simulator" it does say to become familiar with a simulator, to run programs through a simulator and gather numbers, and to write a report.
But enough whining about the project description. Let's move on to whining about the simulators. One of them, the ftp site is down. One of them I managed to compile, but can't figure out how to make work. None of the rest of them will even compile. One of the errors in one of the simulators was caused because they were manipulating
stderr->_flags. You don't do that! FILE*'s are abstract, you treat them like something magical. Accessing fields inside them is purely evil and can't possibly hope to ever be portable. Ugh. K&R code was prevalent among the simulators that didn't compile. I hate software that sucks. I hate this class for failing to have taught me anything new yet and for forcing me to deal with sucky software to do something that won't teach me anything.
But I'm not bitter. I'm just really tired. And my head is all stuffy.