On Computer Science and World of Warcraft

As Computer Science majors the majority of us want to be Software Engineers on some level. However a lot of students within the major feel there is too much mathematics and not enough programming and abstraction.

I’ll attempt to define what abstraction really is for some people on a very simple level. If I wrote a computer program that could only do this equation, 2 + 2 = 4, this would be the most worthless program in the world. However, if I let the user input his/her own numbers to add them together X + Y = Z, we have a much better program. The idea is to simply take a concept and make it as useful and less general as possible.

This idea gets way more complicated; however I’m not here to scare people or give the impression that I’m some super genius. I’m just here to vent! In the major we learn a ton of mathematics that seem fairly worthless to us. While induction has some minor application in numbers and proving an infinite sequence, to me there is little here to do with abstraction that I could apply in real life.

Why do I need to prove things anyway? Proving (n^2 – 2) is not divisible by 5 is stuff for math majors. To me it seems like a whole lot of worthless work that I see little benefit from. I do understand that problem solving and analytical processes are important, I’m just not digging this stuff right now. Maybe that is the problem.

Lets switch gears, is it me or does World of Warcraft seem incredibly boring right now? As of late I’m rolling a level 80 Unholy Death Knight and its fun for about an hour and then I need to go do something else. I attempted to go level my Paladin but having played a Death Knight, Retribution strikes me as all too boring. You cannot really expect anyone to level as Holy or Protection.


Fortunately we are on the horizon of a patch in the near future. The patch looks fairly promising for Death Knights especially in the unholy department. Paladins can't seem to get enough buffs. I guess pressing having a 2 button kill mechanism is not simple enough. To top it all off, if that does not work for some reason you get 12 seconds to fix the problem.

With Death Knight I fully expected the Glyph of Ice Bound Fortitude to be nerfed. It’s unfortunate but hey 12 seconds of stun immunity seems like something no class should have at the touch of a button, oh wait a second?

Bleh, at any event I got to run back to my Discrete Text Book and finish some boring Big “Oh” proofs!

iPhone 3G vs. Black Berry Storm

The great debate over which phone is better, has more potential and will continue to dominate the phone market will rage on until a new successor has arrived. But for now, we have the iPhone and the Black Berry Storm to play will. Having used both to a great extent I can easily determine my pick!

The iPhone hands down beats the Storm in nearly every category. The Storm is clunky, single touch screen only and lacks the wonder of the iPhone. Even though the iPhone has been out for quite some time, the Blackberry has had plenty of time to refine its model and create a solid product.

Without being biased, it’s difficult to say anything particularly good about the Storm. It almost caused me to not even try the iPhone. The internet was slow nearly every ware I was, single touch press screen thingy was interesting, however does not allow for multi-touch speed browsing like the iPhone does. Even as I write this there still no application store for the Storm as of yet.

My biggest problem is not really a complaint more of a concern is that the iPhone gets fairly warm after lengthy use. I did some research and found a couple of horror stories, however all of my friends say its normal and nothing to be too alarmed about.

My theory behind the Storm is that it is not really intended to be a replacement for the iPhone. Black Berry understands the momentum behind the iPhone and doesn’t necessarily want to compete directly with it. They have plenty of other good phones such as the Curve and the Bold.