I made it! Indeed, I just came back, the result is a 7! It took 45 minutes, and it was much easier than I thought. It wasn't about all detailed pesky proofs etc, just about general ideas. Subjects were RSA, BCH decoding, and the SAT problem. It went quite well I must say, and the teacher was friendly.

Now... weekend!

Well; in a few hours we'll know it... my test is at 13:30. I feel very comfident about practical things; decoding code, designing code or decompressing. But I have no idea whether that's enough or not. The theory is also quite prominent in the book; and I'm just not fluent enough with it. I understand it, for sure, but reproducing would be quite hard. Anyway.

Yes, it surely was a long night. At the other hand, I expected to have to go to bed at 4, but things went well. Tomorrow I'll sleep in a bit, read some parts again and just hope for the best.

This is going to be a long night.

Data compression is luckely enough not a huge subject (at least not in this course). Read the theory on uniquely decodeable codes and prefix codes, learned the Huffman algorithm... it's probably gonna be late tonight but I think I'll survive tomorrow :)

Only thing I don't like is that I'm not able to wave Daniel & Erika goodbye... they'll be leaving in an hour from Amsterdam, back to Hungary. Funny thing... as always before he leaves, Daniel is now in Coco's, a pub near the station. It seems to be famous Europe-wide, even some Bulgarian friends know about "Lousy food and warm beer"!

Finally (!) finished the assignment for tomorrow... quite a lot of work! But at least I completely understand BCH decoding (and working in GF(2^4) for that matter). Now to the other subjects, Complexity and data compression. And I also would like to have another look at Shannon's Theorem etc.

Definately time to go to sleep.

By the way these LPF guys are really a bunch of clowns. Would be funny if it wasn't that they're going to be in our government...

Another nice day of studying. Finishing the assignment the teacher gave me, to decode a message with a BCH code that contains 3 errors. Looking now for a 'nice' message, that won't interfere with the given error-pattern ('last 3 bits turn 1'). Will be going to bed soon. Tomorrow two big other subjects: data compression and complexity. Pfff...

Found a website (here) that has a number of BCH generator polynoms. Spoke to Joanna by MSN; that instant messaging is a nice thing.