What did you do this past week

This week, I worked and almost finished the Netflix project with my teammate. We met on Wednesday and Friday and worked for about 3 hours on each day. We started the project form scratch, copying the Collatz files and renaming/changing them to fit Netflix. My teammate and I had read an article about the Netflix prize and the article explanined some math concepts to us and gave us some hints to predict our own ratings on the probe file. I am thankful for the cache files that our TA, Seth, provided as it made coding netflix_eval() much easier. I am also thankful for being allowed ot use the NumPy library as it makes calculating the RMSE much faster. On Friday, my teammate and I managed to get an RMSE of 0.97 and a running time of ~20 seconds. We are almost finished, just a few requirements to fill out and some outputs to record.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is really in my way. My teammate and I are almost done with Netflix so that is out of my way (unless we managed to find some huge bug that will set us back). I have my first exam for Software Design in two weeks and the first exam for this class in three weeks. I plan to start studying for the Software Design exam after my teammate and I finish and submit Netflix.

What will you do next week

I plan to meet with my teammate on Wednesday to finish up Netflix. We only have little left to complete but I seriously hope that we don’t encounter a huge bug or logic error that will force us to work hours into the night to complete. And, as usual, I have my homework that I have to do for Accounting and Intro to Security (along with proejct 2).

This class

The readings this week were pretty good. I enjoyed the two papers that we had to read on the Ariane 5 and Mariner 1. It reminds me in CS439 when we learned about some bugs in other systems that caused fatal crashes. I’m glad I actually took the time to read them because they appeared in the quiz.

On Tuesday, we discussed the Netflix project in the beginning of the class. I have heard about the project and was excited to have finally have the chance to work on it. I am still confused on why our acceptance tests will be tested against other students. Won’t everyone’s prediction algorithm and RMSE be different? Anyways, we also learned about yield and the map function.

On Thursday, Dr. Fraij lectured on list comprehensions, iterables, and stuff on functions. I am still trying to wrap my head around what are iterables and what are in python. It’s really confusing. Also, during the list comprehensions lecture, I was finally called out. It was my first time being called out in the class. The lectures on functions went over my head so I plan on reviewing them before class on Tuesday (there could be a quiz over them so I better study).

Tip of the week

Get the Hooked app now on iOS and Android phone devices. Its an app that shows food and restaurant deals over campus and in Austin. My personal favorite is the chik-fi-la @ Union on Mondays and Fridays where you can get free waffle frees with a purchase of a chicken sandwich. There is also a deal with the Panda Express in the Union; so if you’re into that nasty american asian food, theres also that.