Friday, January 26, 2007

post-exam stress syndrome

After two weeks of exams and a couple of 4 hour sleep nights in a row, I guess it's natural to be absolutely exhausted. Still, I think all of them went okay except the Graphics fiasco, which was a kick in the face for a lot of us.

Still, as long as I passed it, I can hopefully make up for it with the other stuff... I keep telling myself how I'll work more efficiently in semester two. I'd better...

In other news, this is great reading. In fact all the articles are cleverly written (and where does he find the stuff..??)

It is also important to remember that Glen and Sophie are characters in two separate productions. Hey, it's the magic of post production. Glen then sits down to talk to another new character about Sophie. This is where the seams are really starting to show, as Glen obviously is in a barracks in the middle of the jungle, while the man he is talking to is in an office, in different lighting, and in a different movie. This guy then hires someone to rescue Sophie.
Brilliant.

Friday, January 19, 2007

drivers

Think Dublin drivers are shit? Try this guy...

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

私は茶を飲むのを好む。

Automatic translation tools are very useful, but it seems clear that there's still a lot of improvement that could be done in the area.

For example... go to google translate.

Enter "Let's drink tea.", select English to Korean and translate.
Paste the result ("차를 마시자.") in to the box and translate back to English.

Surprisingly, the outcome is "Drink the car." What? Right...
It might be a good idea not to be organising any tea parties in Korean using translation tools to communicate for the time being...
Japanese isn't so accurate either: translating "I like to drink tea" to Japanese and back to English yields "I like the fact that brown is drunk". Firstly, that stuff should be solid or you should be seeing a doctor, and anyway, I don't want anybody drinking my brown. That goes straight in the jar under my bed.


Update 4th February 2011

  • Now translating "Let's drink tea." to Korean and back results in "Janhaja tea". Eh.

  • The Japanese round-trip for "I like to drink tea" is now accurate.

It's a pity I didn't save some more bad examples of which I compiled quite a few, to see how the state of the art (assuming Google Translate is reasonably representative of this) has advanced in the last four years.

exams...

exams exams exams. We got the easy one first, so I spent about 3 days reading and making notes for it and was pretty well-prepared. Now I have just over one day to prepare for the graphics exam which is almost certain to be much more difficult.

Firstly, our software patterns & metrics exam is clearly structured - past papers online for the last few years are all "answer 3 out of 5 questions, each question on a well-defined area of the course: design patterns, architectural patterns, metrics, estimation and testing". That's the whole course. Easy peasy.

With the graphics course on the other hand, we'll be asked to answer 3 out of 4 questions from about 10 different areas... which means we have to study everything. Lame!

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

athbhliain faoi mhaise!

Happy new year! I did basically nothing on mine (I felt so lame that I went out for milk at 00:10 to wish a security guard and cashier a happy new year).

Thrilling stuff...