Meanwhile, in the lab...

The Worst Essay in the World (aka. The Use of Formal Methods in Software and Hardware Design, Implementation and Manufacture) has not come back to haunt me as I expected - in fact, I've just found out that I somehow got a grade 18 in it, showing once again the pattern of my mark on essays being inversely proportional to my own opinion of them.

In other work, I finally got down to seriously doing the Databases practical, and found that it was easy once I'd actually decided on what scenario to model. At least, it would have been easy if it wasn't for the SQL client that we're using, which is astonishingly even less reliable and coherent than many of the programs that I write myself. The whole process is akin to some sort of psychological torture - we're using a program in which you can't save, and which could segmentation fault at any moment. The only solution is to work out what makes it crash (mostly, either right-clicking or dragging and dropping) and try to avoid doing them until you're fairly sure that you're past a point where it's auto-saved your work. To reflect the mental anguish which we're all going through, I've named the Advisors in my database after the cast of the Silent Hill series. I doubt the reference will be picked up, but it's a small satisfaction nonetheless.

Also, I still don't understand Logic, which isn't a good thing because we've just been given another practical on it. The lecturer appears to think that proving formulae using a computer-assisted prover is "like a computer game" because you can either take the long route or find shortcuts, and you get better at it the more you do it. I don't know what kind of twisted games that he plays to have been able to draw a comparison between them and the dullness of formulae verification - I'll stick to Transport Tycoon. Which now that I think about it is about running a transport network. Actually, he may have a point.