01d 5k001 1337 h4xx0r

...at least I think that's how one would write it, if one were into 1337 5p34k. :P

Anyway, the person I am referring to is one Richard Stallman, who gave two talks at UC Berkeley this past week -- one on Wed. and one on Fri. -- about the importance of free (as in freedom, not price) software. Richard Stallman (for those of you who may not know) is one of the original "hackers" who worked at MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the 1970's. In 1984 he left MIT to start the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. He is the creator of the GPL (Gnu Public License) and the originator of Copyleft (upon which the GPL was built). He's also the princpal author of the GNU/Linux operating system, the GNU compiler collection, the Emacs editor and the GNU symbolic debugger, among other programs.

It was well worth the hour and a half one-way journey to Berkeley on both days to hear him speak. I would elaborate, but My boyfriend took extensive notes and made entries in his blog for the talks on Wednesday and Friday , so I will be lazy and direct you there. Lots o' good stuff. :D

Also a video of the talks should be posted within the next week on UC Berkeley's EECS Website under "Colloquium".

In other news, I am back in school this semester, taking Trigonometry and Algorithm and Design Problems. The trig is review for me, so I am at the top of the class (100% baby!). The CS class is a bit of review so far, with the exception of the analysis of pre- and post- conditions of algorithms. It's a bit odd, though, for me that the course is being taught in pseudocode, rather than a specific programming language. It makes sense because these are concepts that span all programming languages. But I tend to be more of a hands-on learner, so I would like to be able to compile and run these things.

So I found myself blowing the dust off my C++ book yesterday so I could put it into practice. It was scary how rusty I have become in just a semester away from it. But I think this'll help me solidify what I'm learning in the class. I'll get the opportunity to learn more about how to use Code::blocks this way, too. In my spare time I've been wanting to learn Python, so I'll probably end up applying some of the class problems in this language, too.