Donnie’s Blog

I love it when a plan comes together.

I haven’t been to a farmer’s market in ages. But, since I have two big meals to prepare this weekend, I thought I had better hop on over to the South Pasadena Farmer’s Market so that I could pick up a few things. Honestly, I just had no idea where I was going to find this stuff, but fortunately I found everything and more.

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I wrote a fun little program for computing the closure of a set of functional dependencies this week. Functional dependency theory is the foundation for Third Normal Form and Boyce-Codd Normal Form, and a variety of other neat things you can do with relation schemas. An interesting and powerful set of ideas, but I think that most database designers don’t really use functional dependency theory so much. But it is fun to play with!

Anyway, a lot of the problems are very simple in that they work with abstracted schemas, such as R(A, B, C, D, E), and if you take a set F of functional dependencies against the relation R, you would like to compute things like “What is the closure of F?” or “What is a canonical cover of F?” Then you can answer questions like “What are the candidate keys of R, given F?”

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I made another pizza on the ol’ Weber grill on the weekend. I think I am finally getting this process down pat. (It was really touchy when we didn’t have any cornmeal in the house; pizzas simply will not slide off the peel if you don’t have a good layer of cornmeal laid down.) Anyway, in the past I would use too much charcoal, and the bottom of the pizza would finish cooking before the toppings had all cooked. This time I finally used slightly too little, and I didn’t get that nice crisp crust that I was looking for. So, next time it’s a 3/4 full chimney-starter for perfect pizza.

Boy, the day classes end, we get word that there are 132 students pre-enrolled for CS11 next term. What is going on?! The students sure seem to love CS11. My hope is that about 85% want to learn C, OCaml, Haskell, or Python.

Anyway, it sure is nice to be able to focus solely on grading for a while. Hopefully I’ll get caught up on this in the next couple of days, and still get to sleep a reasonable amount every day.

With all the guest lectures the CS department has been having lately, the staff has branched out a bit with the flyers:

It’s kind of funny. It’s to the point that a plain old white flyer would stand out!