I’m feeling a little behind schedule with this project, but I know I can only blame myself. The main menu was fairly simple to get up and running. I don’t have much to say about that.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got my first load working, but I haven’t checked the syntax yet. I haven’t had any major problems, but the format for reading from and writing to files still confuses me a little. I’m hoping to work that out this week.
Class this week was harder than I hoped, especially that quiz. I’m not going to make those mistakes again! But other than that, I really didn’t understand this chapter in our Fortran book, and my computer was broken for that whole week so I had problems with trying the programs at the end of the chapter. Now that I have it back and fixed, I’ll be fixing that as soon as I can.
This is less a post about technology than a look at look into an interesting phenomenon of coding and viruses. Almost ten years ago, in March 1999 a virus, later named Melissa, was released. Apparently at one point Microsoft thought it was a good idea to include a full-strength programming language in Word, and pretty much all elements of Office. Programs could travel with these “documents”, so they were code as well as data. Viruses that attached themselves to these documents were called macro viruses. Melissa was a macro virus.
While it wasn’t the first macro virus, Melissa was, at the time, unique because of the way it spread. If you used Microsoft Outlook, it would email itself to a number of your friends – which meant it spread very quickly. There was almost no time for antivirus vendors to react before many people were infected. Several security mailing lists, however, carried threads on how to deal with Melissa. After a few days, one subscriber sent an e-mail saying that he’d posted the source code to Melissa on his web site, adding that he’d cleaned up the formatting to make it more readable. By changing the format – adding or removing whitespace – the subscriber had accidentally created a new variant of Melissa that some software could no longer catch. Funny how that works.
Since I got this from a book, I’m sorry but I have no link for you guys.
Maybe it’s a just the slightest bit early, but I don’t care. I’m worn out. My computer is broken and I had to write a 4-5 page argumentative paper for English, and those programs were hard – and after I turned them in, I realized a major problem in one of them. Not to mention my big project for November.
On the other hand, I was very proud of myself for actually figuring out those programs. Many hours of work, and at least as many hours of time wasted, went into the coding. It’s hard to believe I’ve learned so much in such a short space of time. Less than a month ago I had no idea what went on inside a program, and now I’m writing them. Which reminds me: As I was writing that English paper, I kept trying to create a new line by pressing Esc and o. Took me a few tries to realize why it wasn’t working. Anyone else had similar problems?
That’s how I feel about class right now. I enjoy programming, but the new things come slowly. And I wish we hadn’t spent so much time going over the homework in class. (I think I may have been the only person who didn’t test the temperature conversion program for 212. Silly me.)
I like that we have so much time to work on the homework, but I feel like our classroom time is moving more slowly. Is it just me? I’m beginning to wonder about the final project, but I’m not too concerned yet. It will come. And by the way, does anyone else have a final exam during dead week?
Maybe not. It used to really frustrate me when people said that the opposite of love is indifference, but they may have a point. According to research led by Professor Semir Zeki, love and hate use many of the same neural circuits in the brain – which might explain why both emotions lead to similar extreme actions. The biggest difference, in fact, is that hate is much more rational than love. When people experience love, large parts of the cerebral cortex, responsible for judgement and reasoning, are deactivated. When they experience hate, however, only small parts are deactivated. The researchers suggest that this is because hatred often entails reasoning for how to exact some kind of revenge.
