I signed up for two courses on Udacity; CS373 Programming a Robotic Car, which is in its second phase self-paced incarnation, and CS253 Web Application Engineering. I signed up for the web app class initially because I think it could lead to a great occupation and also because I believe I have a great idea for a facebook rival and an idea for a research oriented ‘timeline’ application.

I wanted to sign up for the robotic car because it sounds very interesting, but I wasn’t sure if it would take time away from my schoolwork. I decided it doesn’t have to be a serious commitment because it seems that a lot of people don’t finish it. Turns out that it is very applicable, I’m already understanding the machine learning concepts from a class I was sitting in on. That class was a second part to a previous class that I missed and too difficult, but Thrun is so much clearer and takes it in easy steps. Now I have a better grip on Bayes theory, which it not all that complicated and something that I was already naturally doing. It’s just a formal definition of obvious logic.

Now I’m installing the Google App Engine (v1.6.4 for windows) for Python. It said it found Python 2.5 while installing. I hope that won’t be a problem since I use 2.7 mostly.

Thrun’s use of Python seems a little backwards and doesn’t use the special nuances of Python. I don’t know if he thinks it’s easier for the students or because he is use to it from other languages. There is no NumPy in the online Python IDE. I have to learn how to manipulate lists in ways that would be so simple with arrays. Although I think it is pointless since array processing is computationally faster than lists. All this time I’ve been trying hard to avoid for loops, especially nested for loops, and now I am forced to write them, haha, but that’s okay.