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I participated in the ACSL contests mentioned above when I was in high school. We also have a contest run annually by the University of Waterloo called Canadian Computing Competition

The way they work is this - you get a certain amount of time (forget how long - maybe 2 hours?) to write 5 programs to their specs. You have sample input and sample output, and at the end you get scored based on how correct your programs execute on different input files. So I guess they value correctness of output over cleanliness of code or efficiency - the ends justifies the means in this case. This round is done in the high school and usually administered by your computer teacher.

Because it's a timed competition, the design of the code is usually pretty ugly as submitted by the programmers. But it's a great exercise - most programmers are able to finish 3 or 4 of the programs (sometimes correctly). Only the best ones are able to finish all 5 (though there's always something that breaks when it comes to getting the new inputs).

They pick 20 or so of the top programmers by hand (now it's score + code style I think) and move them all to a single location to go head to head in a national competition to come out with the winners list.

As many people already pointed out, what you need is a complete UML/software engineering tool. Program writing proper only accounts for about 15% of total development cycle, so you can only improve overall productivity of 7-8% if you found a way to code at double speed today. The essence is: there is no silver bullet: No Silver Bullet, by F.P. Brooks, Jr. Productivity DOES increase with new tools, editors, etc. but at a slow rate... I hope that your new president knows that.

http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~t3singh/tush ar/tfcostume.html

oo7
Quack

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/electricCircuits/

Here is a partial list of books published online, that I happened to like enough to bookmark. I find that reading a book on the computer screen is tedious, I mostly use the online version as a reference.

Handbook of applied cryptography: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

Underground: (I actually haven't read this yet) http://www.underground-book.com/

Netizens: (only partly read this) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/

http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/crypto/army.fi eld.manual/

Big Breach: http://www.antioffline.com/bigbreach/

The Prof's Book: http://frode.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/Turing/inde x.html

I have a lot of other links also, but my bookmarks have become so nested and folderized that many are lost in there, I really need bookmarks for my bookmarks . . . Anyway, I would suggest that if you find yourself looking for interesting reading online, you will find plenty. If you choose you can find scanned in pdf's of various works on newsgroups and in freenet, etc.

However, my advice is to use the 'net primarily as a way to figure out what to read, and become familar with the local public library. Almost all libraries have inter-library loans which give you access to huge amount of stuff. When I can't get a work that way, I fall back upon checking databases of used bookstore inventories -- http://abe.com/ and http://powellsbooks.com/ are the places I generally go to.

President Bush's speech is now available for download: to 911/ca site

Check out the co-op program at Waterloo for what you're looking for. All Engineering students and lots of other faculties are in the co-op program, it's what was a driving force behind the startup of the school. Real work experience, resume writing, more interviews than you could imagine.... You get lots of experience in potentially lots of areas (depending on your program and what you want to try out). There are six four-month terms in the typical co-op program degree, so you get lots of exposure. The real upside is that you get your 'training' and 'technical skills' through work, and leave the theory and design and the real school stuff to Universty classes. It's great, and it pays the bills. Can't say enough good about it.

Check out the co-op program at Waterloo for what you're looking for. All Engineering students and lots of other faculties are in the co-op program, it's what was a driving force behind the startup of the school. Real work experience, resume writing, more interviews than you could imagine.... You get lots of experience in potentially lots of areas (depending on your program and what you want to try out). There are six four-month terms in the typical co-op program degree, so you get lots of exposure. The real upside is that you get your 'training' and 'technical skills' through work, and leave the theory and design and the real school stuff to Universty classes. It's great, and it pays the bills. Can't say enough good about it.

As many others I too have lost confidence in the ability of W3C to direct the evolution of the Web.

HTML 3.0 and MathML are but two examples of how the corporate nature of the W3C has led to the delay and/or abandonment of sound technical proposals.

If you are interested in charting a new path for the web join the World Wide Web Standards Group (W4SG).

The beauty of the program is learning problem solving techniques that apply to virtually every career worth pursuing.

Unfortunately, they wouldn't be much help in the WTC situation, where everything is buried under tons of rubble, but there are some really amazing things being done in the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International International Aerial Robotics Competition. My school has had a team for a few years, and they kick ass. The goal: Autonomous flying robots with vision, image recognition, hazard avoidance, and more. This stuff is frickin cool.

Unfortunately, they wouldn't be much help in the WTC situation, where everything is buried under tons of rubble, but there are some really amazing things being done in the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International International Aerial Robotics Competition. My school has had a team for a few years, and they kick ass. The goal: Autonomous flying robots with vision, image recognition, hazard avoidance, and more. This stuff is frickin cool.

Of course, this system relies on software to do all the work. A real system clock would just be the same thing implemented in hardware.

UW's resnet is a bit of a joke. All I can say is I'm glad I'm no longer a student.

For the longest time, I couldn't stand looking at those crummy Netscape buttons. I like the themes option. Extremely customizable.(I realize this has been around for a while)

And it does seem to live up to the promise of "less crashes". (I've had it running a whole 15 minutes and it hasn't crashed yet ;)

But there are drawbacks. On Win32, running Mozilla wants 33MB from my heap. That's almost 3 times what IE wants for rendering the same page :P Not sure my RAM-poor laptop can handle that.....

A nice surprise: Mozilla properly handles true alpha-masked PNGs.

But hey, kudos to the mozilla folk for making a stable build!

Except for Concrete Math, all of these are available on the web free of charge, and all of them are of lasting value, and well worth the cost.

Driving the solar car: Is plenty of fun! I've driven through Missouri, Oklahoma (where I experienced an unpleasant bout of dehydration), New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The most beautiful places to drive through are New Mexico and Arizona. NM has gorgeous mountain ranges and scenery that is taken straight out of a Western movie. I drove through the Zule mountain range into Albuquerque and also from Flagstaff to Kingman, Arizona. The stretch of geography from NM into AZ is incredible. In the evening, as the sun sets, the most beautiful hues of colours are reflected off the mountain ranges and the stars are brilliant against the night sky.

• Midnight Sun finishes third in ASC
• Midnight Sun VI living up to top five prediction
• New Midnight Sun on the rise (with photos)
• Midnight Sun rising on UW (and cover image)

Then there's the official Midnight Sun site.

Paul

• Midnight Sun finishes third in ASC
• Midnight Sun VI living up to top five prediction
• New Midnight Sun on the rise (with photos)
• Midnight Sun rising on UW (and cover image)

Then there's the official Midnight Sun site.

Paul

• Midnight Sun finishes third in ASC
• Midnight Sun VI living up to top five prediction
• New Midnight Sun on the rise (with photos)
• Midnight Sun rising on UW (and cover image)

Then there's the official Midnight Sun site.

Paul

I am insulted, for those interested however here it is:

UWaterloo.ca
Midnight sun (the car)

GO WATERLOO!

I am insulted, for those interested however here it is:

UWaterloo.ca
Midnight sun (the car)

GO WATERLOO!

Speaking of being on the road at the same time as "real" cars, the first solar car at my university (Univ. of Waterloo) was hit by a pickup truck that was passing a vehicle in the oncoming lane. Well, our solar car happened to be in that lane and we were forced into the ditch. The driver was unhurt but the car couldn't finish the race.

More info at the Midnight Sun history page.

1. Does the race route have to be carefully planned to avoid long tunnels or deep forests?

The race is carefully planned. not so much for tunnels and forests, but more for safety. Avoiding interstates, and avoiding small towns (i.e. traffic) are both good ideas, although seem to be in conflict with each other. It takes the race organizers the better part of a year to plan the route.

2. What sort of percentage of maximum speed is attainable on a cloudy day (compared to a sunny day)?

The speed is not a function of sun (at least not directly). These are electric vehicles, powered by batteries. The more sun, the slower you drain your batteries.

3. Do the cars carry batteries as a backup in case of sudden eclipses etc. that block out the light briefly?

Yes.

4. If batteries (or some other energy store) are carried, how much running time can be added before the weight of the storage reduces the efficiency to a point where it'd be better to just run off solar power?

The rules of the race limit the amount of batteries you can carry (ex: Li-ion=30kg). After the first few days of a race, teams typically run only off the sun, using power from the batteries only in the morning/evening/cloudy periods.

5. Do you ever get kids who think it's funny to throw tins of paint at your cars to cover the photovoltaic cells?

Kids (and adults) are always a risk. They never realize that the paper thin silicon they are about to touch is worth more than them. For this reason, when they are on display, the cars are never left unguarded. I haven't heard of any intentional vandalism though.

6. What sort of a drain on the speed is the Linux-GPS setup?

I beleive this setup was in the support van, not the solar car. The rules allow auxiliary batteries (replacable) to be used to power telemetry equipment, so this is not an issue.

7. Just how fast do these cars go anyway? Are we talking Smokey and The Bandit or what?

Honda (WSC 96) attained a maximum speed of 138km/hr. I beleive this is still the record. More typical max speeds are between 100-115 km/hr. Typical average race speeds are around 70-85 km/hr although can reach higher speeds depending on the terrain.

Rob
Midnight Sun Solar Car Team

I'm not at all knowledgeable about art, but used to attend the University of Waterloo, where the Computer Graphics Lab (part of the Computer Science department) gives some courses jointly with the Fine Arts department, and even offer a joint degree at the graduate level.

All of students and faculty in the Computer Graphics Labs should have public web pages, so you can get some idea of the sort of work that people are doing in the combined area.

I'm not at all knowledgeable about art, but used to attend the University of Waterloo, where the Computer Graphics Lab (part of the Computer Science department) gives some courses jointly with the Fine Arts department, and even offer a joint degree at the graduate level.

All of students and faculty in the Computer Graphics Labs should have public web pages, so you can get some idea of the sort of work that people are doing in the combined area.

-- Dr. Mike

Because of course, it is fairly trivial to make a laser diode suddenly act like a class 3b laser product.

No. Let's think... Red light, low power, and you can still blink. This is not going to cause any problems except for fear mongers.

ftp://plg.uwaterloo.ca/pub/uSystem/uC++book.ps.gz

It approaches the subject from a more theoretical rather than applied point of view, but if you understand all of the concepts in this book you will have a better working knowledge of concurent programming than 99% of the programmers in the industry!

A DAG is not the same thing as a tree. Try this for a refresher.

What the AC said (not having any mod points at the moment). (All trees are DAG's, but not all DAG's are trees - a node in a DAG can have more than parent (e.g. Java inheritance puts classes in a tree, but C++ is a DAG)).
--

A DAG is not the same thing as a tree. Try this for a refresher.

This looks something like a concept I've been working on for a little over a year. I call it " openreference ".

It's basically just "object-oriented" hypertext.

In the browser the interface could look something like the Windows SendTo menu. (The equivalent of the Unix Pipe.)

If anyone has ideas or is interested in helping out, send me an email.

There's a course at my school (University of Waterloo - CS452 - the lab is the one that used to have the "All hope abandon, all ye who enter here" sign and the train in the noose in the window) and probably many others where you write an OS from scratch as a project. The code is written on a Solaris box and cross-compiled for Intel x86. The assignments involve building processes and multitasking, IPC (servers), various drivers (keyboard, serial, graphics), kernel/user services, etc., and it's a good idea to build a decent debugger. The final project involves controlling electric trains, through a pretty crappy interface (polling), and trying to make an interesting application that's robust enough to get around the train controller problems (and deal with things like evil TAs picking up trains and moving them). And of course students can add other features too, such as threading and pretty graphics.

You do get some help, such as a tftp based image loader (so no boot sector coding to worry about) and the loader puts the system into pmode before it calls the start routine, but then you're pretty much on your own with the Intel docs and some hardware spec sheets. It's only a regular four-month course (although the lab is pretty much never empty at any hour of the day or night during that time).

The most time consuming part of writing a "real" OS is standards compliance, as someone's already said, and writing all the drivers for all the different types of hardware out there (it's a lot easier when you know you have only one graphics card to worry about!) But it's not as if writing an OS was such a rare thing.

(Greets to all reading that have survived trains....)

There's a course at my school (University of Waterloo - CS452 - the lab is the one that used to have the "All hope abandon, all ye who enter here" sign and the train in the noose in the window) and probably many others where you write an OS from scratch as a project. The code is written on a Solaris box and cross-compiled for Intel x86. The assignments involve building processes and multitasking, IPC (servers), various drivers (keyboard, serial, graphics), kernel/user services, etc., and it's a good idea to build a decent debugger. The final project involves controlling electric trains, through a pretty crappy interface (polling), and trying to make an interesting application that's robust enough to get around the train controller problems (and deal with things like evil TAs picking up trains and moving them). And of course students can add other features too, such as threading and pretty graphics.

You do get some help, such as a tftp based image loader (so no boot sector coding to worry about) and the loader puts the system into pmode before it calls the start routine, but then you're pretty much on your own with the Intel docs and some hardware spec sheets. It's only a regular four-month course (although the lab is pretty much never empty at any hour of the day or night during that time).

The most time consuming part of writing a "real" OS is standards compliance, as someone's already said, and writing all the drivers for all the different types of hardware out there (it's a lot easier when you know you have only one graphics card to worry about!) But it's not as if writing an OS was such a rare thing.

(Greets to all reading that have survived trains....)

BSc (Honours Bioinformatics)

BMath (Honour Computer Science - Bioinformatics option)

BSc (Honours Biology and Bioinformatics)

Hooray UW!

Figures 6 and 7 show growth of the subsystem (SS) relative to the system as a whole. So a straight line means that that SS is growing at the same rate as the kernel as a whole (which fits nicely into an n**2 curve).

Of the major SSs, only the file system SS failed to grow at the same rate as the system as a whole. The drivers were slightly faster growing and the other major SSs grew at roughly the same rate as the whole system.

So, therefore, it's not true that the growth was primarily in the drivers. -- MWG

Figures 6 and 7 show growth of the subsystem (SS) relative to the system as a whole. So a straight line means that that SS is growing at the same rate as the kernel as a whole (which fits nicely into an n**2 curve).

Of the major SSs, only the file system SS failed to grow at the same rate as the system as a whole. The drivers were slightly faster growing and the other major SSs grew at roughly the same rate as the whole system.

So, therefore, it's not true that the growth was primarily in the drivers. -- MWG

For those of you who were interested in the "exponential growth" issue, I did a much more detailed study on the growth of the Linux kernel that was published in the 2000 Intl Conference on Software Maintenance. I think it's very readable by non-academics. Comments welcome. -- MWG http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~migod/papers/icsm00.pdf

Up here in Canada, we have it so much better. DSL is cheap -- really cheap. I paid $40/month (US$25) for ADSL. This is with PPPoE. If you pay a bit more, or go with dsl.ca instead of the local monopoly, you can get static IPs and stuff. As well, Bell has a deal with our university where students get 10% off DSL.

My install in September took four days. Four days! When I was with Telocity in San Francisco, it took 87 days. I am not exaggerating.

In fall 1999, when DSL first came to our area, Bell screwed up our order three times and it took us six weeks. (Most people got theirs in two.) I was very upset then, but service was great once it arrived.

Right now, I have Rogers@Home. They are as flaky as a two-dollar pastry. We were down two or three times over the weekend.

Paul

I have had only one case of the university using it for any purpose. They let me know that I would be receiving a snail mail application for an affiliated credit card. Its much better than changing your email address with scores of contacts every time you need to switch ISPs.

Looks to me like you've reinvented Pascal.

Programmers can cope with punctuation. C and LISP are the classic "languages of choice" and they have a fairly minimial set of keywords and punctuation to learn. Programmer's don't like syntactic sugar - it gets in the way of programming. I find the whole indentation-defined scoping disgusting; that's partly personal, but also because it will be a pain to keep track of indentation when generating code, and because tab settings vary so much.

A lot of the other things have already been addressed... based numbers, it's typical in other programming languages and mathematics to put the base at the end, it looks odd at the beginning, hard to find the actual number in question.

How do you plan to set precedence for your named operators?

C doesn't mandate anything with regard to parameter passing mechanics; a compiler is free to stuff e.g. 8 byte parameters into a single 64-bit register if it thinks it will help (e.g. in the case of a struct); I believe compilers do that already.

The result parameter... also from Pascal.... which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's too much of a "magic" variable for me, but then maybe I'm just too used to the C/C++ return keyword.

Bleah, I can't go further, I've been up too long and the language looks too much like Pascal/Ada, and yes, that's a bad thing, for a language that is to be used in the real world.

Still, kudos for at least being out there and giving it a shot... I can only hope that somewhere in there is a decent small language trying to get out, and that it will....

Dave

I see a lot of overlapping work with Symbolic Computation Group's Maple.

I worked on Maple many years ago, and it's more like a programming language to me than a symbolic representation of mathematics. Why bother doing the same thing over again with less completeness?

To be honest, Maple is like hell to me(probably I don't like programming mathematics), but I just don't want to see people create another hell.

Just a few months ago, one of the Microsoft GUI guy (the Clippy's creator no less!) came to my universify and gave a talk about how important the office assistant is to newbies. And now they are killing it? Hmmm.... I guess, just like MS Bob, the Clippy is "ahead of its time".
___

This problem was solved five years ago by MINSE (a Medium-Independent Notation for Structured Expressions). It's not just a design, it's a working implementation. See http://www.lfw.org/math for details, or visit a demo page to see output (compare it to the HTML source of the same page).

Summary: enter equations like sane people do, e.g. "a*x^2 + b*x + c = 0" or "x = (_b +/- 'root(b^2 - 4*a*c))/(2*a)". Type them directly into your HTML; no need to run a converter to generate your pages. They appear in your web pages, look much, much better than LaTeX2HTML because they're antialiased, and anyone with a browser can see them without installing any software. Even text browsers work -- they get an ASCII art rendering!

Presented to the W3C but sadly ignored. At first it was rejected because they thought extensibility was unnecessary; then after they realized extensibility was critical, threw out their design and started over, they ignored MINSE because it wasn't XML. But there's one little point they missed: it actually works. Five years later, MathML is still vapourware -- and even if it did work, it would be completely unusable by teachers.

This problem was solved five years ago by MINSE (a Medium-Independent Notation for Structured Expressions). It's not just a design, it's a working implementation. See http://www.lfw.org/math for details, or visit a demo page to see output (compare it to the HTML source of the same page).

Summary: enter equations like sane people do, e.g. "a*x^2 + b*x + c = 0" or "x = (_b +/- 'root(b^2 - 4*a*c))/(2*a)". Type them directly into your HTML; no need to run a converter to generate your pages. They appear in your web pages, look much, much better than LaTeX2HTML because they're antialiased, and anyone with a browser can see them without installing any software. Even text browsers work -- they get an ASCII art rendering!

Presented to the W3C but sadly ignored. At first it was rejected because they thought extensibility was unnecessary; then after they realized extensibility was critical, threw out their design and started over, they ignored MINSE because it wasn't XML. But there's one little point they missed: it actually works. Five years later, MathML is still vapourware -- and even if it did work, it would be completely unusable by teachers.

What happens is at a great school, you have a strong student body. This lets the faculty run the program at a high level (teach fast, advanced content, etc.). This attracts even stronger students, forming a positive feedback loop.

At a not so great school, the students are relatively weak. This forces the faculty to teach slowly, remedial content, etc. Students may also be looking for that "quick fix carreer change", which means teaching technology (Java, JDBC, VB) instead of fundamental concepts (algorithms, data structures, abstraction). This in turn attracts more of the weaker students, forming a negative feedback loop.

So if you're hot stuff, go to a hot school. When the assignments are hard, don't be surprised. If you're more into a slack lifestyle, go to a lesser school.

Of course, teaching quality does vary. But contrary to what some other posters have said, teaching quality is not the inverse of research quality. Some research-oriented faculty are too busy to spend time on their students, while others are also truly great teachers. At small colleges, some faculty are there because they truly love to teach and are great at it, and some are there because they are lamers and a Moo U appointment is the best faculty job they could get. But my basic observation is that these variations are minor compared to the student body feedback effect.

----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D
Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
----
Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Oregon Graduate Institute

The university of Waterloo has an SGI origin which they have apparently been given to develop Linux for. Some information can be found here.

I have a degree in computer science... 90% of what I did at university and 90% of what I do now is bang out code.

where'd you go to school? I'm a Waterloo CS guy. I would say code is nowhere near 90% of what I've done (I'm in my fourth year).

These are the CS courses I've taken:

• theory of computation (zero programming)
• algorithms (15% programming)
• data structures (half programming)
• scientific computation (33% programming)
• social implications (zero programming)
• operating systems (75% programming)
• concurrency (75% programming)
• software engineering requirements (zero programming ... some UML)
• databases (10% programming, plus SQL)
• law of information technology (zero)
• intro to CS (60% programming)
• software abstraction and specification (75% programming)
• sequential programming (75% programming)
• digital design (zero)
• user interfaces (40% programming)

I think a great quote to describe this subject is "real computer scientist don't use computers."

Paul

We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.

Here's who does:

• Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
• Dartmouth has it
• Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
• Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
• Marquette
• Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario

Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.

Paul

We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.

Here's who does:

• Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
• Dartmouth has it
• Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
• Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
• Marquette
• Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario

Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.

Paul

However, I have to say that your comments about profs do kind of piss me off. I don't know where you go/went to school, but the profs that i deal with here are dedicated and intelligent, and in all likelihood, worked their asses off to get where they are. Most of them are probably a hell of alot smarter than you or I.