This is my first Chrome extension. I don't think it's useful as an extension but it was useful for learning. I took the (very useful) Merge Windows* extension and did the opposite, hence, Explode Tabs. You can view the source by installing it* then opening up the file.

*Merge Windows

*Explode Tabs

Unlike INFS1200, this course was more about being a database administrator than a designer. The first two questions to this assignment were about database design just to test that we still remember how to do it. The last three questions focused on writing PL/SQL (this was done for Oracle) to analyse usage of the database including users, queries, and indexes.

Talk about a deceptively simple assignment. Two parts: implement 'immediate files' and 'encryption'. There were times when a single line of code took hours to research. The lecture content was basically: there exists a VFS and data is stored in blocks. I walked the Linux source tree* down from the open and write system calls through the VFS layer to the block device driver to understand this stuff and it was a lot of fun.

*Linux source (file systems)

By far, the most interesting and most fun assignment I've ever had. The lectures consisted of just about zero information about how to go about this so there was a fair bit of research to do. We had to implement a linux device driver interface to an encryption 'coprocessor'. The driver performs a XOR-based stream cipher since we didn't have special encryption hardware. I decided to make full use of the Linux kernel linked list* and circular buffer* APIs.

*linked list

*circ_buf

To learn about thread scheduling we had to modify the Pth* scheduler to implement fairness across all threads in a single process using a lottery mechanism. The policy to ensure fairness is "fair share with priorities" as described in the design specification. If I were to do this again, I would not use malloc and friends -- they are way too slow for hundreds of tickets.

*Pth

As a warm-up exercise for this class, we had to implement 'ls', 'cp', and 'rm -rf' as built-in commands to a custom shell using direct system calls instead of the C-library. The 'ls' command needed to print its result in a specific way and the 'cp' command wasn't supposed to deal with multiple files or directories.

The "mine environmental management system" I worked on in a team of 6. We came from various backgrounds and three of us were the core programmers (I was one of them). I was the one who chose to use the AppFuse* framework so I had to learn to use it and help the others get acquainted. We wrote most of the documentation together but I worked alone on the System and User manuals so I've linked to them directly here. We didn't win best overall project but I thought we were close.

*AppFuse

• User Manual
• System Manual
• My presentation

The full application and most documentation can be downloaded from the subversion repository

We had to incrementally optimize an algorithm for finding the median k-mer of a DNA sequence. Pseudo-code was given for a naive implementation so I first implemented that. Then, I added the branch-and-bound mechanism which significantly sped things up. Then, I implemented the trie to store k-mers which allowed me to optimize the algorithm to search promising k-mers first which sped things up slightly more. I was worried before submitting because my computer at home was slow and didn't pass tests as quickly as others but when I did it in the lab, it was 3x faster (in a class on algorithms where we talk about big-O, it annoyed me that they gave an absolute time for what we should shoot for). Ended up with 19/20 so I did it mostly right.

This was an easy assignment since I had already written a linked-list in C the semester before and was working through CLRS at the time. The array-based data structures were partially written for us and we needed to fix them to pass the given tests and ensure they will pass any other relevant tests thrown at them. The link-based data structures had to be implemented from scratch, only the interfaces were given.

A university course information system implemented in JSP with MySQL connectivity. The focus of this project was to implement a course scheduling algorithm to minimize clashes. I took a naive approach to the algorithm and a very inefficient way of dealing with database connections. It is a proof of concept--that I am able to design and program a complex information system requiring database connectivity, authentication and automation. We had a choice of JSP or PHP and I chose JSP because I am partial to Java and believe experience with web programming in a Java environment is more sought-after in industry. I was unable to complete parts 3b and 4b of the design specification but was still awarded full marks for the amount of skill and understanding I demonstrated.

Note: I provide specifications to the other pracs below but I’m not going to provide my implementation of them because most of them are rather trivial. The one were I implemented authentication and database record retrieval with JSON and AJAX was interesting but does not adequately portray my aspirations.

1. Web Page Design — pdf
2. Interactive Web Design — pdf
3. Dynamic Web Design — pdf
4. Server Side Programming — pdf
5. Web Applications — pdf
6. Web Applications II — pdf
7. Database Web Applications — pdf
8. AJAX Web Applications — pdf
9. Web Application Data Exchange — pdf
10. Full Web Application — pdf