Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

My thesis advisee was also in the department yesterday when I finished my introductory programming class. I was supposed to go to lunch immediately afterwards with one of my co-teachers, but after waiting for us standing at the counter for several minutes she said she would have to go ahead to the cafeteria because she was already hungry.

Not surprisingly, he asked me first of all if it was really necessary for him to include the Moon-planet occultations and the tracing of the Moon. He said he could just as easily place in his recommendations, because there was already enough coverage in his thesis. I could have simply have allowed him to try to get that past his panelists (after I had already asked the department chairman, also the head of his panel, about those two features). But instead I put my foot down and said it was easy enough for him to add given everything else was already working in his program. I did not want to risk another redefense, not this late in the “game”.

I also told him that other than offering to look at the celestial events for a specific year he should give the user the option of seeking the next event from a certain point in time forward. The reason he gave me for not including that in his program was that he had no basis for checking Moon-planet cover-ups like with the Moon-stars and with the Eclipses. He was afraid that the user would believe the program had hung when the display did not change. I offered him ways, including the simple text display changes, to tell the user that the program was still searching or computing.

If he had pushed further I would have told him that at least one member of his panel would know about those tricks and would give the same recommendation, and not accept the excuses he was giving.

I also told him to change the table of differences of his program with the current available measurements. If the official time for the start of an eclipse, say was, 7 hours and 36 minutes, and his program’s calculation was for 7 hours and 40 minutes, he would give the difference in two columns: 4 minutes, and 0.067 hours, which is 4/60, instead of 0 hours. I had to emphasize to him that when talking about accuracy of his computations, he would want to show as many zeroes as possible to the panel.

Lastly, I told him that to conserve on paper he should just give me a disk of the file document of his thesis next time, also so I could check whether he followed all the grammatical suggestions of MS Word. He also has to bring the original corrected copy of his paper that I returned to him, so I can see if he followed all my recommendations.

Also yesterday, in the hallway I met my special class student in programming for the majors. Right then and there he gave me his disk with the program I asked him to make more than a month ago, even though he said there was only one more bug he hadn’t fixed. A couple of hours later, he passed by the department to say that he had found out what the error was. Not that it will affect his grade for that assignment any.

Well, that’s it for now. At 8am I’ll be leaving for Makati to buy the students’ tickets for the field trip on Saturday. I guess tomorrow is when I’ll post all about that and anything else that happens in the day.