I'm Famous

Well, maybe this doesn't qualify as fame-worthy, but a story written about my Extreme Blue experience (along with the other Extreme Blue interns from Case) did appear on the Case homepage.

School's Out for the Winter!

I just finished the last final exam of my undergraduate career. On January 14th I'll officially have my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University. w00t.

Now I've just got to move out of my apartment, find an apartment in Pittsburgh, and start my new job on January 17th.

Quote of the Day

"This is finance between consenting adults." --Prof. Deeds

Blogging Talk Photos

My talk on blogging went fairly well. There were about 15 people there, and we had plenty of pizza. :-) My friend Brendan took some photos of the event .

Brainwashing 101

AcademicBias.com has posted an interesting short film called Brainwashing 101 .

Brainwashing 101 is a provocative short film showing how universities use tools such as "speech codes" to force political views upon students.

I don't agree with everything in the film, but in general I think it makes some very good points about political correctness gone wrong.

Second Day of Classes

Today was the second day of classes, and I had three of them.

First up was COSI 100 - Intro to Human Communications. I signed up for this class to improve my public speaking skills, and it looks like I will get plenty of practice. For each class, everyone has to give two 2-3 minute speeches on a short prompt. Maybe I will post my speeches (or outlines of them) on this blog. The instructor for this course seems really good. He's an older guy, and he seems very interested in what Sean would call "The Higher Learning". Today we spent most of the period going around the room and explaining why we were taking the class and what we had learned at Case so far.

Next, I had ENTP 310 - Entrepreneurial Finance. The material covered in this class sounds pretty interesting to me. However, I'm worried that since I'm taking accounting simultaneously, I may have some problems (almost everyone else in the class is a business major who has already taken accounting). Still, I've never been one to back down, and I figure I can teach myself any accounting I need to know. This class is going to require some case analysis, which I usually enjoy. I am somewhat pissed that the professor wants everyone to spend $60 on a bunch of DRMed PDF files which will have no resale value.

Finally, I had EECS 423 - Distributed Systems. This class is being taught by Liberatore, not Podgurski, as I thought. That's probably a good thing. I've never had Liberatore before, but my intuition is that he and Podgurski are about equal in terms of teaching ability. However, Liberatore seems more enthusiastic about teaching, which is worth something. Projects comprise a large portion of the grade, so hopefully I'll be able to write some interesting programs.

CWRU Books Online

I have often said that there should be an online database of the books used for each course at Case, available at least two weeks before the beginning of each semester. This would make it easier to order books online without having to worry that you won't get them until too late. Well, Phil just pointed out to me that such a database has been created. You can view it here . Cheers to the bookstore for helping to eliminate the need to pay their inflated prices.

First Day of Classes

Today was the first day of classes. I only have one class on Monday, and it's Accounting 101. The class is being taught by a lecturer, not a professor, which in my experience means it will either be a really good or really bad class. Some lecturers seem to be people who couldn't get jobs as professors, and really have no business teaching (Izad from EECS 281 comes to mind). Other lecturers are people who have been in industry for most of their careers and teach because they enjoy it. The lecturer for accounting appears to fall into the later category. He's spent 20+ years in industry, and seems to be an effective communicator. On a cool note, he's extended an invitation for everyone in the class to have lunch with him (on his dime) in groups of 2-3 at That Place on Belleflower. I don't know many profs who would be willing to spend their own money to socialize with students.

Tomorrow I've got three classes, starting at 10am. I better go to bed...

A Walk Across Campus

Do not underestimate the simple pleasure of walking across a sunny college campus with lots of pretty girls around.

New Case Homepage

The new case.edu homepage has been unveiled. At first glance, I like it better than the old site. It has a cleaner look, and more content is directly exposed, rather than making you navigate through menus. There's way too much stock photography in use. Hopefully that's just due to time constraints, and the stock photos will be replaced with actual photos of campus as time permits.

Liz Pund also has some comments .

Exams Over

My last exams were on Wednesday, and on Thursday I moved out of the dorm. I'm now back home for a few weeks, until I leave for NC. I've been relaxing the past couple of days, but soon I'm going to start studying some of the technologies I'll need to use on my internship, as well as thinking about the direction the project should take.

Case Housing RSS

The Case Housing Office has an RSS feed for their news items.

Classes Over

Classes are over for the semester, and I can finally relax a little. On Monday I had two papers, a programming project, and a homework assignment due, and I had to scramble to get everything done. When I turned in the last assignment on Monday, I was so relieved that I felt a little like the Millennium Falcon shooting out of the Death Star in ROTJ. I relaxed yesterday and watched some episodes of Penn and Teller's Bullshit and Curb Your Enthusiasm . I can't relax too much though, since I still have to complete my final exams. Fortunately, my finals are fairly spread out, and I don't expect any of them to be terribly difficult.

Search Tree

It's the end of the semester, and projects are coming due, so I haven't posted lately. The low post frequency will continue until the end of the week at the earliest. Anyway, I was making a list of all the stuff I need to get done this week, and it occurred to me that planning for the semester is kind of like adversarial search in game playing. Right now, the leaves of the tree are coming into sight, and I'm close to determining the outcome of the game. It looks like I'll win, but with a narrow margin of victory.

Class Schedule Planning

Registration for Fall 2004 starts soon, so I'm trying to determine my schedule. This will be my final semester at Case. There are no classes that I have to take, although I do need a technical elective. I think I will only take 1 or 2 EECS courses, and fill the rest of my schedule with some practical courses that I'd like to take before graduating. I plan to work full-time for awhile after graduating, so this may be my last chance to take courses for some time.

I really like the entrepreneurship class I'm taking right now, and I'm looking at some follow-up courses that I think could be very practical: Accounting 101 and Entrepreneurial Finance (ENTP 310). The finance class has very good course evaluations. Accounting 101 is a co-req for it. I just hope Accounting 101 isn't too basic to be useful. If anyone has taken that class, let me know what you thought. Another course I might take is Game Theory (ECON 329). I've heard good things about this course from Josh . Still another course I might take is Intermediate Micro Theory (ECON 308).

If anyone has recommendations, post a comment or send an email.

The Hardware-Software Interface

EECS 314 hardware and software group members consult in the design of an ISA for the Nybblet processor.

SICP Lecture Videos

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is one of the most influential CS texts ever. It is the introductory book used at MIT. Now a series of video lectures based on the book have been released. Twenty 500MB DivX files in all. Fortunately, MIT has a fat pipe.

Internet2 DirectConnect Hub

I was just informed of a new DirectConnect hub, for Internet2 users only. If your school is on Internet2, then I highly recommend that you check out i2hub.com . And remember, as i2hub.com states:

We are all from universities, so it's obvious that this service is for educational purposes only.

Midterm Exams Completed

I got through all five of my midterm exams without too much difficulty. None of them hit me with anything out of the blue, and I'm pretty confident that I did well on all of them.

Unfortunately, at 9pm on the first day of spring break, I got an email from my AI professor assigning a project to write an Othello playing program, and announcing that the project would be due on a date approximately three weeks after we get back from spring break. That means that I'll have about as much time to work on the Othello program as I had to work on a much simpler Mastermind playing program that was due last week. Also, we haven't even talked about adversarial search, alpha-beta pruning, and related topics in class yet. And to top it of, I forget to pick up a copy of Paradigms of AI Programming from the library before driving home for break. Grrr.

Now I've got one more item on my list of things to do over break:

• Do taxes
• Work on Cocoa Programming Competition app
• Work on Aspect-Oriented Programming project for OO Software course
• Read up on Trusted Computing for Computer Security project
• Read up on Othello for AI project

E-Week Banquet

Last night Phil, Jason, and I went to the Engineers Week Banquet , held at the Renaissance Hotel downtown. I had never been to the E-Week banquet before, but student tickets were only $7 (for a $40 meal), so I figured I had nothing to lose.

There was an opportunity to socialize before dinner, and Jason and I spent a few minutes talking to Meral and Tekin . I especially wanted to talk to Tekin, to make sure that he knew I didn't hate him, even though I gave him a fairly scathing evaluation in EECS 341. Meral is my adviser, so it didn't hurt to talk to her either. Although most of the conversation was typical faculty-student chit-chat, Meral did make a rather interesting off-topic comment, but I'm not going to talk about that here. I also found out that a course in human-computer interaction is going to be offered soon, which is good.

Dinner was delicious, the best parts being the spicy tomato soup and cheesecake with raspberry sauce. After dinner, there were a few preliminary speakers, leading up to the keynote. All of the preliminary speakers sucked, and I was beginning to worry about the keynote. Fortunately, the keynote speaker turned out to be interesting. He was John Nottingham of Nottingham-Spirk Design Associates , and the talk was called "Relentless Innovation". Although his talk focused a little more on "here's what we've done" rather than "here's how we did it," it was still engaging. Nottingham-Spirk has done some very nice consumer product design, and sounds like a great place to work.

Overall, I got my $7 worth.

Midterm Exam Mania

Next week I have 5 exams in a 24 hour period:

• Wednesday, 3:30pm - Computer Architecture
• Wednesday, 6:00pm - Object Oriented Software
• Thursday, 10:00am - Entrepreneurship
• Thursday, 1:15pm - AI
• Thursday, 2:45pm - Computer Security

Guess I'd better start studying over the weekend.

Recently Heard in Class...

Professor: "...but the library said there's a long queue for scanning, and I don't know what that means."
Student: "He teaches data structures. He should know that a queue is a FIFO data store."

Eclipse Talk

I'll be giving a talk on Eclipse for the Case ACM chapter this Tuesday, February 10th, at 6pm in Clapp 108 . I'm going to attempt to make this talk worthwhile for developers of all levels of familiarity with Eclipse. If you're interested in Eclipse, please come, and bring a friend!

Kurt Vonnegut

I got to see Kurt Vonnegut , one of my favorite authors, speak on Wednesday at Severance Hall. In high school I read Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five, and both of them made a big impact on me. I even read the fan fiction novel Venus on the Half-Shell by "Kilgore Trout". Vonnegut is a master at showing the absurdity of life.

Vonnegut's talk was really funny, both in the sense of traditional humor and black humor. One of the best parts of the talk was his illustration of typical plot lines on a graph with two axes: "Beginning and Entropy" and "Fortune and Illness". He showed the progression of typical categories of stories (e.g. Cinderella and "Boy Meets Girl"). Then he showed the progression of Hamlet, which was completely different from the typical stories and defied conventional wisdom about what makes a "good" story. Vonnegut's point was that we all pretend to know more about life than we actually know. We think we know what the good and bad events are, when we really don't know.

I want to read some more of Vonnegut's work now, particularly Cat's Cradle.

ACM and IEEE Publications

It would really rock if ACM and IEEE provided RSS feeds for their publications. Unfortunately, I can't find any feeds, even third-party feeds. IEEE at least has an option to receive email notification of new articles. Still, it seems like someone must have written a scraper to produce RSS feeds for ACM and IEEE publications. Anyone have a lead?

Economics of Entrepreneurship

I have a feeling my Economics of Tech Innovation and Entrepreneurship class is going to kick ass. First of all, the class is in a very nice classroom (too bad the building that it's in was shot up last year - there will always be a stigma). More importantly, the instructor seemed to be an excellent lecturer, and was well organized. The structure of the class sounds appealing. One class per week will be lecture, and the other will be discussion or an activity. The class has about 25 people, so we should be able to have some good discussions.

Then the professor started talking about the textbook, and "what I was trying to accomplish with it." I looked closely, and saw that he was an author of the book ! I think this will be my best class this semester.

Turing Machine

I had my first class of the new semester today - EECS 314 (Computer Architecture). I have not been looking forward to this class, primarily because I have heard lots of negative things about the professor. Today, the third or fourth slide in his lecture was about Turing machines. The first thing the professor said was, "I have to admit, until this morning I did not know what a Turing machine is." Groan. If you're not a computer scientist, then you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but every computer scientist should know what a Turing machine is, especially a professor. I try to keep a positive outlook on classes, regardless of what I've heard from other people, to avoid self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, after one lecture, I don't have high expectations for EECS 314. My classes tomorrow should be better.

The Boys Are Back In Town

I'm back in Cleveland for the spring semester. I got back yesterday and unpacked most of my stuff. Then we went out to Tommy's for dinner and milkshakes. Today we watched the Eagles vs. Packers NFL playoff game. It's great to be back amongst so many geeks. I'm also looking forward to the start of classes, although that may sound strange to some people. A few weeks off is nice, but I need to be kept busy, or I start major slacking. Furthermore, I don't expect this semester to be a death march (my schedule is lighter than usual). Right now my major worries are getting ready for my independent study meeting on Tuesday and a job interview on Wednesday.

While writing this entry, I started thinking of the song The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzy (as evidenced by the title of this entry). I don't have this song in my collection, so with a few clicks I purchased it from the iTunes Music Store. That's the 7th song I've purchased from ITMS. During the Macworld SF keynote, Steve Jobs said that the top ITMS customer had spent something like $24,000. That's insane, but ITMS does kick ass.

Another Case Blogger

Bryan Inderhees has a blog .

Spring Classes

The spring semester starts on Monday, so now is a good time to post a list of the classes I'll be taking:

• EECS 314 - Computer Architecture
• EECS 391 - Artificial Intelligence
• EECS 600 - Computer Security
• ECON 369 - Economics of Tech Innovation and Entrepreneurship

I also want to do an independent study or senior project, and I have a meeting with a faculty member next week to discuss project ideas.

Rich and the Chipmunks

Rich Drushel, EECS 375 instructor, sings .

Egg Hunt

This Saturday, I'll be participating in the Fall 2003 Lego Robot Egg Hunt at the Great Lakes Science Center as part of the Autonomous Robotics class I'm taking. It's free and open to the public, so if you're in the Cleveland area, then come on out. The competition starts at 12:30pm.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Egg Hunt, two teams of two robots each are placed in a large enclosed arena, with plastic eggs scattered throughout the arena. At each end of the of arena is a nest. At the back of each nest is a bright light. One nest has a horizontally polarized light, and the other has a vertically polarized light, so that the nests can be distinguished by the robots. Any pastel eggs deposited in your team's nest are worth +1 point, while black eggs are worth -4 points. Rounds last 10 minutes, and the goal is to score more points than the other team. There are many strategies, but the most common one (and the one employed by my group's robot) is to collect a single egg, check its color, and drop it off in the appropriate nest.

I'm Back

The battle with final exams and projects has been joined and (mostly) won, although there are still some pockets of resistance. I've turned in my Networking final project, finished work on my group's robot for Autonomous Robotics , and completed my Databases final project and final exam. I've got two final exams left ( Programming Languages on Friday and Personality Psychology on Monday), but the psychology exam should be pretty easy. I've also got to finish up my robot design notebook, which is due next Tuesday. It's all downhill from here though, so expect to see more posts.

Final Push

I haven't posted for awhile, and I probably won't post again for a week or two. Why? The coming week is the last week of the semester, and after that I have final exams. I've got three major projects and two exams in the next 10 days, so I'll see you on the other side.

Network Application Protocol

I'm taking a course on computer networks this semester. The term project for the course is to design and implement an application layer network protocol. A client-server architecture where one server can handle multiple clients (e.g. HTTP, SSH) is preferred. Anyone got ideas for the next great killer network app?

WWDC Debrief

Jason and I will be giving a talk on WWDC 2003 at 6pm Thursday in Hatch Auditorium . Come if you're a student interested in learning about how you can attend WWDC, or if you want to see demonstrations of technologies unveiled at WWDC. You won't want to miss the no lines of code web browser using WebKit! :)

iSight Talk

Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk on iSight for Case SIGMAC . It's at 6pm in Hatch Auditorium (in Baker Building ). I'll have two PowerBooks and two iSights. I'm going to give a brief overview and demo of iSight and some of the software you can use with it (iChat AV, EvoCam, QuickTime Broadcaster). Then everyone will have a chance to play, and we can talk about Mac news and answer audience support questions.

Case Wi-Fi Makes Slashdot

Case 's large Wi-Fi rollout for the beginning of the new school year has made Slashdot . Every suite on the south side of campus (6 people live in a suite) has a WAP in it. The WAP is enclosed in a grey box on the ceiling, but we disassembled the box shortly after moving in so that we could take a look at the equipment. In addition to a Cisco Aironet WAP, the box also contains a linear directional antenna, to bathe the suite in Wi-Fi goodness.

Case has also started posting stickers with a Wi-Fi logo on them in the public spaces where wireless is available.

Back to School

I'm back in Cleveland. Classes started yesterday, and I moved in over the weekend. It's been really good to see Jason, Phil, and all of my other friends. I've also been hitting all of the Cleveland dining spots I missed in North Carolina. On Saturday I ate lunch at Skyline Chili and dinner at Chipotle. Sunday dinner was at Phnom Penh (yum, spicy pad thai). Tonight we stopped off at Gilly's to get some muffins.

Case Logo Unveiled

The new logo for Case has been unveiled . It's not too bad. The university's front page hasn't been updated with the new logo yet. Anyone out there on campus yet? Have all the signs been updated with the new branding?

UPDATE: Professor Drushel has posted a parody of the new logo.

Case

It appears that the new official short name for Case Western Reserve University will soon be Case. This will be the name used in most university communication. Case.edu is already up, and supposedly a new logo to replace the old CWRU sunrise/sunset logo (called the "turkey butt" logo by President Hundert) will be unveiled on August 15th. Overall, I think this is a positive move, as Case is more recognizable and memorable that CWRU. It should also help prevent the problem of being variously called Case, Case Western, and Case Western Reserve by media outlets.

For those of you affiliated with Case, you can read the cwru.general newsgroup for additional discussion.

O'Reilly Safari

CWRU now has a subscription to O'Reilly's Safari! This is great!

CWRU Blogs

I'm thinking about creating a site like javablogs.com , but for people affiliated with CWRU . I've been meaning to learn Python , and this seems like a good project for it. I don't think the basic functionality of the site should be too difficult to code. It would be cool to have something ready for the upcoming school year.

Anyone know of a good webapp framework for Python?

Computer Science Major

Great article about the Computer Science major in the New York Times :

Andries van Dam, a professor of computer science at Brown who has been teaching introductory computer science there since 1965, agreed. "When kids say, 'Is there going to be a job for me when I graduate?' I essentially have to laugh," he said. "That's like saying, 'When Maxwell discovered the rules of electromagnetism, was physics over?' "

I didn't really consider the job market in choosing to be a CS major. I figure that in any field there is always demand for people who are damn good, and if I'm not going to be damn good at what I do, then why even bother?

CWRU Shooter's Court Complaint

In case you haven't heard, last week there was a shooting and standoff at the Peter B. Lewis Building at CWRU.

The original court complaint detailing the events that supposedly triggered the shooting can be seen on the shooter's website . Apparently Halder was angry because he believed that someone at the university had posted a defamatory message on his website and then "surreptitiously gained unauthorized access to Plaintiff's Unix shell account at his ISP."

Registration

I registered for classes for the Fall 2003 semester today. Here's what I'll (probably) be taking come August:

• EECS 341 - Intro to Database Systems
• EECS 345 - Programming Language Concepts
• EECS 375 - Autonomous Robotics
• EECS 425 - Computer Communication Network
• PSCL 313 - Psychology of Personality (Term paper on Steve Jobs?)