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so, finally all classes for the term are over. i still have an ece demo tomorrow and an optional econ talk on tuesday, but those don't count. so, following up on older post at the start of term, it's time for an end of term review.
Econ 102 - although the first couple of lectures were rather dull, it really picked up after that. really picked up. i can see why larry smith is held in such high regard by so many people.. and now i'm one of them. i learnt a ton in that class (both economics and history), and it was probably the least amount of work i've had to do in a university course yet. can't beat that.
ECE 427 - good course. designing and optimizing digital circuits was fun. bishop was a good prof.. he actually goes over the lecture slides before the class and makes sure he knows the stuff on there and points out pitfalls and such. very rare in a prof these days. the one gripe i have about him is that he never actually replied to the 3-4 emails i sent him over the course of the term. he did (eventually) fix the problems i pointed out, but there was always a lag where i wasn't sure if he'd gotten the email or what was going on.
CS 343 - the only big problem in this course was the bad spec on assignment 4 (see previous post). although really, it was much better than previous CS courses - only one bad spec, and buhr was very helpful in getting it fixed. kierstead, however, is another matter entirely. content-wise, i didn't learn as much in this course as i did in the other courses because a lot of the stuff just made sense to me and i didn't have to think too hard about it. still a pretty good course, and pretty well presented overall.
SE 362 - ah, project management. they ran the course completely different this year than they did last year, and i'd say it was mostly successful. the course basically rested on what we did for the project (designing an online accreditation manager for tracking documents etc.). there was a lot to be learnt from the different interactions in the team, and it took me a bit of time to catch on to that. but a fairly good course overall. norm's lecturing style was somewhat different from other profs, in that he tends go off on wild tangents (not necessarily a bad thing). the course was more student-driven than other courses, and on the whole it worked out pretty well.
SE 382 - aaaaah. there was a lot of potential in this course - even with the crappy way it was run, i think i learnt a lot more material than i did in other courses. but it could have been waaay better. for a course on user interfaces, the prof seems to be remarkably unaware of the lack of quality in the course notes and website. the lectures were mostly him rambling on about some topic that interested him - it was fun at times, but also painful at other times. his midterm was horribly subjective, and he basically expected us to read his mind in order to figure out what he was asking. ironic, because he was complaining about how students force profs to read their minds while marking the exams. same for assignments - he never actually told us what the focus was on on the assignments, and large chunks of the marks were handed out subjectively when they could definitely had been made more objective. cowan is probably the most hypocritical prof i've ever come across.
SOC 232 - meh. DE course, low workload. lots of reading of really dull books and such. the essay was a pain and a half to write. the exam is probably going to be really tough, but there's not much i can do about that.
CS 444 - i went to the first two weeks of this. then came the first assignment crunch, and there was no way i could sustain going to an 8:30 class i wasn't even enrolled in. ah well.. maybe some other time.
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i've now integrated the comments into the RSS/atom feeds, as well as added better unique identifers to the feed items. if you're using the feeds, there might be some duplicated items because of the update - you may want to clear out any archived items and refresh the feed. or not.
also: added a little "remember me" checkbox in the login thingy on the navbar. i didn't actually realize i missed this until just now. d'oh.
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so mandrake changed their release scheme - now they're only going to be releasing one version a year. the 10.2 version that was about to get released in the next few days (they were up to RC1) seems to be left as-is. :(
that, combined with my efforts at avoiding my soc essay, resulted in me installing freebsd again. i installed 5.3-release, which is the latest and greatest. the install went pretty smoothly the second time (first time too, but there were some config options i missed and it was just easier to do it over). i'm planning on building that install slowly with the apps that i need, as opposed to my usual approach of install-anything-that-might-be-useful.
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aha!. this theory also seems pretty sane, given what google's been doing of late. i remember reading about how they're scooping up oodles of the dark fiber that was installed during the dot-com boom but never used. as larry smith keeps reminding us in econ 102, there's enough fiber out there to keep the internet increasing for the next 25 years. this just might be why. it certainly fits in with their mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
i think that a centralized OS/applications are probably quite likely, but centralized data storage might be a bit trickier. they would have to go extreme lengths to make sure that it was protected enough. each person's data store would have to be encrypted individually, so that even if their servers got hacked, the data would be safe. they might generate individual encryption keys that only the user has, so they can guarantee that they don't access to the data. i'm thinking people carry around their keys on USB drives so they just plug it into a google thin client anywhere in the world, be auto-logged in, and ready to roll.
i wonder if they've hired any security experts recently?
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it should be interesting to see if this challenge actually makes a difference to microsoft. i, for one, hope they stop disintegrating the web with their disregard for open standards.
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RIM to bring AOL, Yahoo IMs to BlackBerry
It's about time! It feels so good to see something I helped develop finally hitting the market.. :)
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Just out of curiosity...
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in my various attempts at procrastination, i cobbled together a calendar for this website.. i'm not sure how useful it's going to be though. meh well, it was fun writing it :)
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awesome article.. How to Start a Startup. long, but filled with good info and tips. should read more of his stuff..
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so while i was looking for a web-based newsgroup server that listed uw.cs.cs343 for my last post, i came across this: http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~kwhyte/news.cgi. i don't think i've run across any pre-made software that generates newsgroup listings and threaded post info like that, so i'm assuming kwhyte wrote the perl script by hand. nifty.
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