Week 13

22 Nov 2015

One more full week of classes left, we’re so close to the end. So we turned in Life this week. The concept of it was quite easy to implement, but that may have been because we did Darwin before (which is really similar). In my last post, I had stated that we were doing Fredkin and Conway before Cell, and I can’t really say if that is the correct or best way to do it, but we did get it working. The memory leak was definitely one of the hardest things to figure out. We did have a memory leak, but that may be from writing bad test that caused the memory leak. But we struggled for so long on trying to figure out the memory leak. We knew what we had to do, but I think all the struggle was because we did not quite getting the fact you had to essentially make a deep copy. Once we understood that, we finally did not have a memory (or as bad of a memory leak). Now it’s time to study for the exam, Professor Downing is toying with the idea of having the test electronically (through Canvas). We had to take a survey on if we were “willing” to take it electronically. I am willing, but I am not sure if I am comfortable with people have more opportunity to cheat. In a written test, all we have is our cheat sheet. On the electronic test, you pretty much have to rely on the honor system or rely that other people see the cheating and report it. Although a plus I do like is that it will be a lot easier to type the code. I hope though that they will not be stricter on syntax since we are using a computer. For this test, I am not as confident on what study as the last test. I feel like what we have covered since the first test is more of behind the scenes (such as swapping pointer and memory stuff), and not as concrete as knowing how vectors, stacks, lists, and etc. iterators work.

Tip Of The Week: Seriously running out of tips.

Don’t wait till the day the project is due to start writing tests. You will have a very bad time if you figure out you have a bug then.