dancsjournal

[dancsjournal]

Final Learning Journal of the semester!

Name the 3 most important things that you learned in this course.  Briefly explain each one and why you think it is important: The three biggest things I learned were time management, reinforcing my SQL knowledge, and finally how to do better ERDs!

First and foremost, time management has been a crazy struggle for myself, with this class taking up the back burner most of the time.

Secondly, I already knew some SQL, and this class has definitely helped me reinforce my SQL knowledge which I might need for interviews! Hopefully.

Third and finally, I can now create better ERDs which is super helpful. While LucidChart makes it incredibly easy to do, now I know how to make them pretty and usable.

[dancsjournal]

Week 10 of Databases

This week in databases I learned that I don't actually know anything at all. The locking and unlocking of database controls was already confusing enough, alongside the pointers and the other database management systems. But now I have to memorize it all for an exam next Monday? My weekend is going to be absolutely crazy!

Concurrency is interesting though, and I wish I could focus on the lectures in class but for some reason the professors voice always starts to drone on and I lose focus. I wonder if I need to go take a mental break from all of my homework and stresses. I probably do, but this learning journal isn't going to write itself. On that note though, it is nice to finally be done with project one! Garrett and I just finished the HeapDB Class, which is super exciting!

I did learn something cool about databases this week though, mainly that they can hold vast amounts of data. This is not new information however, but mainly information that has been hammered into my brain from the professor. While he does not mention it each lecture, I really do wish I could focus on them, it always seems to present itself in hidden niche ways each lecture. It is almost as if this class is full of hidden mickey's that my brain instantly wants to find, and it then devotes way more resources to that than to listening unfortunately.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk Derrick, hopefully you've read it all the way through and if you did I will then delete the image I have of your litter on the ground. Once again, thank you!

[dancsjournal]

Week 9 Learning Journal

Describe in your own words why a hash index is not useful for a query with a predicate  salary > 75000.

* A hash index is not useful because of a lot of reasons, one of those being that it only works well when the numbers are smaller. This seems true, so it must be! Can an ordered index be used when the predicate is name like 'Wi%'?  Why or why not?

* I would argue no. Why, you might ask? Great question! I would say that to have a good ordered index you must not use any spaces inside of your index names and your index values, as that could cause errors when checking a string against another string, such as on bash/linux executions. Can an ordered index be used when the predicate is name like '%ski'?  Why or why not?

* No, since '%ski' would have values that are not in alphabetical order and thus not an ordered set of indexes.

[dancsjournal]

Week 8 Learning Journal

The three things I learned about indexes are as follows:

1) The thing I've been using since the start of this class is called indexing/using indexes, which is funny since I thought it was closer to an if statement than an indexing search function.

2) MySQL typically, when looking through multiple indexes, finds the index with the fewest selected rows and checks that first which would be useful for where clauses where we use an and statement, as it would make our sql call that much faster.

3) You can optimize your joining of tables if the indexes you are selecting and using for the joining statement are the same size!

Thank you for coming to my ted talk

[dancsjournal]

Week 7 Learning Journal DB

Honestly I have no idea why a trigger is different than a check. All I know is that a trigger is a wonderful little tool where we can inject java code directly into a database upon the execution of a sql command like update, insert, or delete. Pretty sure that is also what an sql injection attack is, but I would assume it would be more along the lines of something like putting "drop * tables from db" as a username, which could then trigger the sql command upon the insertion of this entry into the database.

[dancsjournal]

Week 5 of Databases

Question from an administrator:

"I would like to see what instructors we have on the payroll, but I can't seem to access it. What happened to all of the tables?"

Answer from recently fired Database manager:

"drop table instructor" "This happened because you recently fired me, and it's something that could happen to anyone"

[dancsjournal]

Week 4 of Databases

Here is my most interesting question, from week 3 problem number #10: -- 10. how many different native countries are found in the data set? select count(distinct native_country) from census; --> 42 I thought this was the most interesting question as it showed me how to use the select count function as well as the distinct qualifier. It was really cool Derek. Please give good grade

[dancsjournal]

Week 3 of Databases

For this week, we learned more about SQL and Java’s querying code, but none of this was really super new to me. I was super perplexed by the Java code, but that was probably just me being confused about the prompt. Either way, it’s been an interesting week!

[dancsjournal]

Week 2 of Databases So I’ve had some problems with Java this week. Honestly, it’s pretty funny looking back on it now as I felt super confident coming into this class, as I’ve taken all of the java orientated (or so I thought) classes at CSUMB, but nope I clearly have a lot to learn. I had this one issue where my code kept error-ring out when it was supposed to see that this integer was actually null and thus needed to return null, but it would ignore that and continue onwards to crash the program.  Well, try-catch statements came back to save the day and now my code works. Woooohoooo! #CST363 CSUMB ComputerScience

[dancsjournal]

Week 1 of Databases

I thought that the best way to create these blog posts would be to use the platform which blog posts really took off in popularity: tumblr! Which is why you are here and where I will be putting all of my other blog posts for this class! 

To start off this journal, here are the answers to the questions asked for this journal:

What makes a relational database relational? (i.e. what is difference between relational and a non-relational database)

In my own opinion, a relational database is relational because it’s indices are kept separate from the data, which helps keep all of the information in the database organized in a specific way. The data is also broken up and stored in such a way that each row/entry has its data stored in different columns, so that you can specifically search by a column identifier and then a key in a row.

A relational database is far more structured and organized than a non-relational database.

Is SQL the same thing as a relational database?

According to what I’ve read, SQL is not considered a relational database, but it is a programming language used by many different relational databases. Basically, SQL is a language and not a database.

Can’t wait to continue this class! This will be extremely exciting!

[dancsjournal]

Week 13 of CST 325

YEEZUS CHRIST, this one was a doozy of a hw! Not that it was exceptionally hard, challenging, or tricky to solve, but that holy moly I just couldn’t understand the text at times. None of it is on the professor though, it’s 10000% on me because fuck I’m blind. He basically spoons feeds us this assignment, and here I am biting my own finger. Although I also had some issues, 100% not my fault, with Spectre.js (it won’t show the camera render in firefox, but works on chrome), most of my problems this time were based on me thinking way too hard. I definitely learned a whole hell of a lot, and I honestly feel like next semester (as a TA) will be a breeze what with all of the help I’ve gotten both from the professor and from the current TA. Lol most of my work has enough notes to help anyone understand what is going on, even my partner lol Thank you again for all of your help Michael!

[dancsjournal]

Weeks 11 and 12 of CST 325

Welp, shadows are back again to cause me no end of heartbreak. Got it all resolved though, and super polished (more than normal). Both versions of it (direction and point lit) are working with barrel and light sphere addition (light sphere just representing light source not attached). Really stressful though, since the documentation while straightforward doesn’t explain as much as it requires in some parts. Like the whole visualize bit was off for me in most of the todo’s. One example is the phong and the reflection visualization section, where phong is lighting sure but it’s the final float and the reflection is the color. Also, I was never able to get my reflection vector to look like the result shown in the doc with a solid green plane and a multi colored sphere, it would just show a multicolor plane that changes based on my camera angle. So that was all fun, and it was also suuuuuper fun when I accidentally deleted all of my work for the rotation of the light sphere in sync with the light source, super fun thanks git and VS code for not showing me the folder location of the files, where I reverted back to an older and more broken version, thanks! LOLOL

[dancsjournal]

Week 10 of CST 325

This week has been wild. The assignment itself wasn’t too bad (looking back) but it was really wacky dacky. I did get it to work, but now it’s transparent in the wrong direction so like huh wacky dacky! Can’t include a picture (because this is tumblr), but my transparency goes from the green & white side to the red & blue side (opaque to transparent) while the word doc shows it going from red & blue side to the green & white side (opaque to transparent) which is interesting! Wack lol

[dancsjournal]

Week 7, or 8 or something of CST 325

Yeezus this week broke my mind a bit. Rasterization pipelines are weird af, and the quiz snapped my soul in half. Just a really tough week, coupled with a fat course load of hw from my other courses but now that I'm over the hump yaaaaay! I'm going to try to get the hw to change view on button clicks, but that's a fun side project due to the fact that it's due in like 2 hours. So won't be able to do that tonight, but I still want to learn about it so I'm gonna still do it but later. Gotta get back to research work, turns out python and Arduino's are rude af, not wanting to do as I say! Rude.

[dancsjournal]

Week 6 & 7 of CST 325

This week, we tackled matrices! Honestly, I had a ton of fun with this one and I’m extremely grateful for my higher math background as I think I would have struggled with this homework if not for that linear algebra course I took a while back. I’m extremely grateful for that teacher as well, as they helped me understand that matrices are nothing more than data structures for vectors which helped A TON with the final bit of this homework! I got it all done, with the biggest issue being getting the moon to circle the earth. I don’t know why I forgot to combine the rotation matrix with the earth transform matrix, but I did and that caused me no end of issues. But I did find out that this way of doing the problem is kinda boring. I know if we change the axis that we rotate on (z -> y) we can get a much cooler effect of the earth passing in front of the sun! Either way, this was a really fun project and now I’m scared for the next project: rasterization.... Should I scream now or later is the question of the day

[dancsjournal]

Week 4 & 5 of CST 325

This week(s) on 325, ray tracing!

Issues: SHADOWS

Solution: Crying and brain hurty

Interesting fact, when brain hurty life hurty? Fun fact!

[dancsjournal]

Week 2 of CST 325

This week has held a LOT of complications regarding the HW assingment, and I learned a lot of interesting things about spheres and myself: mainly that I can be a bumbling fool from time to time. Raycasting proved to be more challenging than I thought it could be. Figuring out the formula was a bit tough, but mostly converting it to code was the biggest challenge. Remembering how the human eye worst (see things’ front not the back cause we don’t have x-ray vision) was proabably one of the biggest problems. But it’s all done now so YAY!! Time to submit lol thank GOD, now it’s onto harder projects and less sleep woooo thankfully coffee exists.