It had been a while since I was at the VU. Quite nice to see that the computerrooms have improved a lot -- there are now flatscreens in most of the rooms.

First I spoke with Mr. Van Wouwe, my study advisor. After all, I'm almost done with my internship.Before I can graduate officially I still have to do 1 more course. However, I really want to start working at Chess per March 1st.

Therefore I'm really happy that Mr. Van Wouwe told me about a course that I can still join. It is basically a practical assignment: Internet Programming. It's about the technologies I've been using at Net.Footworks for two years, and of course in Guus Bosman.nl; I don't expect it to be very hard.

After this I went to see Ralf; he had a lot of valuable remarks. Looks like I'll be able to finish the very biggest part of my paper before March 1st, so that's nice to hear. I also saw an old classmate again, Michiel. He's now working for the VU at a project.

Now I'll see Jennie, then in a hurry back to Haarlem to have lunch.

A nice commercial of the Vrije Universiteit.


"The Vrije Universiteit congratulates her ex-students Jan-Peter Balkenende, Wouter Bos and Gerrit Zalm with their election victories."


(through Bieslog)

Again I'm at the CWI, I just had my test of Formal Methods.

And I made it!

It went quite well, the beginning was a bit difficult but the final mark is an 8; very happy with that.

Tomorrow I'll start my internship with a conference day on Embedded Technology in Utrecht. My teacher will be there as well as a number of people from Chess.

Now I'll see if I can find a nice book on Computer Science from this library.

I've become a member of the CWI library. They still had my record from when I became member the previous time: February 2000. I was writing a paper of Object-Oriented Programming then.

I've borrowed a book my teacher wrote, Introduction to Process Algebra.

My teacher sent me two tests from last year. I'm doing one of them now to see if I know all the things I need to know. Tomorrow I'll do the 2nd one.

Tonight we'll play Kolonisten again, Steden & Ridders I hope.

Back to the study. I'll have my test next Wednesday, so there are 5 days left.

I just missed the bus from 15:20, the next one will be in half hour. Think it's too late to go to the VU now because many people leave early there and I won't be there before 16:30. So I'll go to my teacher tomorrow morning, and just study this afternoon.

I'm at the CWI again just like a month ago. I had a meeting with my teacher, Wan Fokkink.

We've made an appointment for my exam, it will be next Wednesday (23rd October) at 14:00 o'clock. The final mark will consist of 3 parts: this exam, a (relatively small) practical assignment and an exam on I/O automata.

Now I'll go to the VU to see the teacher who deals with IOA and make an appointment with him for the 3rd part.

Working on the 4th assignment of Formal Methods: an analysis of the bounded retransmission protocol. This is a protocol designed by Philips, used in remote controls for TV's.

I've been working on the 3rd assignment of Formal Methods today.

The assignments basically involve describing various systems in a formal language, and then generating a state-space of it. There are a number of tricks to reduce this state-space, while some properties will still hold. This way it's easy to prove certain behaviour.

In the assignment I did today (not quite finished yet), the goal is to prove that the alternating-bit protocol is a good protocol. That is, that a bit put in from one side will come out from the other one (even though the channels might be unreliable). After reduction of the original state-space (left), only 3 states remain: 0 (nothing going on), 1 (a 1 is sent and received) and 2 (a 0 is sent and received). The thing we proved this way is that there is no 'state 3' in which for example a 1 is sent and a 0 received (this would be an error).


Tomorrow I'll go to Chess and continue there because I want to print a few of the state-spaces. This to help me understand exactly how the state-space reduction algorithms work.