Week 32 (8/13/2025 - 8/15/2025)

    (Click on READ MORE for better formatting)

    Hi everyone, welcome to my 32nd blog! This is the Week 8 post for CST 334 Operating Systems.
  • Write a 1-2 paragraph journal post, of at least 250 words, summarizing what your biggest takeaways from CST334 were, including any major challenges or topics you found particularly interesting.
    • One of the major challenges in this class (at least for me) was wrapping my head around some of the long math-style problems that have been seen throughout the course. Thankfully, I was able to get a lot of practice with these through labs, ungraded practice quizzes, Midterm Preparation Quiz, and Final Exam Preparation Quiz. In addition, members of my team were able to help me better understand what was needed to tackle these problems. For example, Wootark Kim (Tom) made a step by step video for me and the rest of Silicon Surfers that explained how to do CPU scheduling problems featuring the RoundRobin policy. Valentina Waltman created a similar video for the caching problems, mainly for BELADY as it is a more confusing cache policy compared to LRU or FIFO. I also contributed to helping my group by explaining the problems I was proficient in at the time, such as segmentation. I am always thankful that my group works so well together, since it is easy to find examples of teams where this is not the case.

      To fully overcome this challenge, the Final Exam Preparation Quiz was a great practicing resource, as it included one question from each of the following topics: VSFS States, Inode Access, Hard Drive Access Time, Bits to Bytes (and vice versa), Hex to Binary, (and vise versa), CPU Scheduling (Possible policies: RoundRobin, ShortestTimeRemaining, ShortestDuration, FIFO), Base and Bounds, Segmentation, Virtual Address Parts (variety of conversions between VA, VPN, and Offset bits), Paging, Average Memory Access Time, and Caching (Possible policies: BELADY, LRU, FIFO). Dr. Ogden also did something pretty cool that was not done for the Midterm Preparation Quiz: offer up to 6 extra credit points in the Exams category (20% weight) based on how many prep questions you got correct. After a few attempts on the prep quiz, I managed to get all 12 problems correct, netting me the full 6 points!

    • Overall, not only did I enjoy this class, but I also took away quite a bit from it. CST 334 certainly gave me a significantly deeper understanding of operating systems; before taking this class, my understanding of this subject was quite surface-level compared to other areas of Computer Science, such as programming.

    That is all for this week, see you in my Week 33 post!
    Onwards to CST 311 Introduction to Computer Networks! However, that will not be for another two weeks as summer break is here! Considering how "non-stop" the CS Online program can feel at times, it is nice to have a little break where you can truly unwind or take a vacation to clear the mind.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weeks 41 - 48 (10/26/2025 - 12/19/2025)

     (Click on READ MORE for better formatting)      Hi everyone, welcome to my 41st-48th  blogs!  This is the Week 1-8 post for CST 336 Internet Programming. Similarly to CST 311 Introduction to Computer Networks, while journal entries were not required  for this particular course, I wanted to document the concepts and assignments from each week of class. If you would like to see some of these projects for yourself, this link acts as a homepage to visiting all of the projects described below! https://bevans34.github.io Week 1: HTML and CSS This week's primary focus was on learning/practicing creating a website using H yper T ext M arkup L anguage (HTML) and C ascading S tyle S heets (CSS). Highlights from this week included centering a <div>, which is probably one of the biggest memes to ever come out of web development. Labs: 1 - ePortfolio Site In this lab, I created a site hosted on GitHub Pages that features a homepage, about page,...
Read more

Week 24 (6/18/2025 - 6/22/2025)

       (Click on READ MORE for better formatting)      Hi everyone, welcome to my 24th  blog!  This is the Week 8 post for CST 363 Introduction to Database Systems. Briefly summarize what you consider to be the three (3) most important things you learned in this course. How to query in MySQL and MongoDB, including select, insert, update, and delete. This also includes advanced querying techniques, such as subselect. Understanding schema structure of MySQL and MongoDB. After all, for the above to work you need a schema to create/use the database and establish table structures! Creating EER diagrams can also be bundled into this section as it is related to schema creation. How to take database systems and turn them into real-world solutions. For instance, using the JDBC API to create a webapp with a MySQL or MongoDB foundation. This was explored in group labs 19 and 21. That is all for this week, see you in my Week 25  post! Onwards to CST...
Read more