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It's currently 28 degrees outside... check for yourself (http://weather.uwaterloo.ca/), if you can make snow at that temperature, I'd be impressed.

Once we have automated tools that can verify a program as bug free (doubt that'll happen in my lifetime), then maybe it can become an engineering discipline.

With the assumption that your materials are within tolerances (and this can be determined for many), most engineering disciplines have very verifiable results. You can verify with mathematics that a bridge or building won't collapse, assuming your materials are verifiable. You can't do the equivalent with software.

Let me take a second to provide you with a bit of education because with this particular misconception you have because you miss out on an utterly fascinating bit of science. In fact, we cannot even create a program that determines if another program would ever stop or not. And by "we cannot" I mean, such a program is actually a logical contradiction. This entire notion that we can always create a well defined solution to any given problem has had itself disproven over 80 years ago. In fact, this entire notion can get expanded upon into some of the most mind blowing ideas in science, in my opinion. I would highly recommend you check out "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Read up on the "Halting Problem" here...
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/washington/halt.h tml

Check out the /. Review of Gödel, Escher, Bach at
http://slashdot.org/books/99/04/23/147248.shtml

They're not winning. I receive several hundred spams a day, and a couple get through. The pain of training my spam filter is much smaller than the pain of using an unlisted email address.

I use Spamassassin, specially configured to learn properly, but Bogofilter is easier to set up and appears to work just as well. In my experience, these two work far better than any of the other spam filters that have been touted here.

DVD Shrink is a free Windows program that (mostly) works under wine with a little bit of effort.

It lets you delete or retain menus and components, and do (lossy) compression without transcoding.

"How much computation can one neuron do?"

at http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~klarson/teaching/F04-8 86/papers/loder04.pdf

found it here:
http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/earth/waton/tritiu m.html

I've heard the same thing once or twice, but this page says it's one of the least expensive radioisotopes.

This blogger comes to the conclusion that it is at least a thousand times more expensive than gold.

And here's a solid figure: the Canadian Ontario Hydro company asks about 28 million dollars (Canadian) a kilogram. Hang on, I'll get my wallet.

The mathies where I am stick out like sore thumbs --- at least there's a definite "culture" to the math building. Often there's some board game being played in the lounge like Titan or Settlers. If not that, then at least someone's playing Magic: The Gathering. They like not sleeping (and gaming instead), and bemoan the lack of women in their faculty. (Though my department, Physics, is worse off.)

Then there's the jokes.
Q: What do you get when you cross a banana with a goat?
A: |goat| * |banana| * sin(theta)

My research is currently looking into approaches to related areas (as a user, not necessarily as a cryptographer), you may wish to look into "secret sharing", where given a secret (e.g. a private key), a set of participants, and what the literature calls an access structure which is a collection of subsets of participants that you wish to be able to easily recover the secret (called a qualified subset), establishes a two stage protocol:

1. Share - a trusted entity called the dealer takes the secret and encodes it into a set of shares, securely awarding each participant a unique share.
2. Reconstruct - some subset of the participants presents their shares, if the shares are valid and the subset is a qualified subset, the secret is recovered and securely distributed to that subset of participants, otherwise the secret should not be revealed.

There are proactive variants that periodically recut the shares to prevent accumulated leaking of shares over time from forming a qualified subset.

Also there are verified secret sharing schemes which support a verify operation, where a share can be checked for correctness without trying to reconstruct the secret (so that bad dealers can be caught and that at reconstruct time invalid shares can be found prior to reconstruction).

Finally there are "cheating immune" schemes. A cheater is a participant who gives a bogus share at reconstruct time. If they know something about the reconstruction step and can assume the other participants are giving valid shares, some schemes may allow the cheaters to learn something about the secret. In cheating immune schemes, this is prevented.

Finally there are schemes that use verifiable threshold schemes and verifiable secret sharing for digital signatures.

If you are interested in some references, Doug Stinson's bibliography on Secret Sharing (he has some recent work too). Tal Rabin has done some good work, as has Markus Stadler. Recent work by Stanislaw Jarecki has caught my eye.

You're talking about Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, right? Buddy, go down the street (literally) and take either computer science if you're into software, or computer engineering if you're into hardware at the University of Waterloo. WLU is for business students.

Seriously.

Plus, computer engineering will still get you a job at a software house if that's what you like, and you'll be more valuable to them.

> oh and honorable mention means you didn't solve
> any. Take that Tech! ;)

That doesn't seem to be true.
this scoreboard shows "honorable mention" universities with score > 0.

I think it is too bad that they over-abstract the final results. I understand that they don't want to single out the shutouts, but several strong performances were masked by the final reporting. I'll mention two.

UBC was had a much stronger finish than the other North American teams. For a good part of the contest they gave Waterloo a run for their money - leapfrogging them in the standings.

And MTU were very strong. They lead American teams for a while. In the end they were eclipsed by some teams but they and their coach should be very proud. These stories get lost in the over-simplified results.

Minute-by-minute snapshots (up to the 4 hr mark) may be found here.

To fellow UW Grads,
If you read the news and feel good about UW reputation, think our education was so worth it. Let's give something back to the school so they can do even better, attract brilliant high school students with scholarships, fund researches and so many other stuff that we could benefit (and always) even we already graduated. Donate! (I know I did)

https://alumni.uwaterloo.ca/alumni/forms/secure/pl edge/index.html

yah, the interesting thing is.. if you are in any other type of engineering (computer, electrical, mechanincal, mechatronics, enviromental, chemical, geological, civil... etc) you get a Bachelors of Applied Science, in Honours ___ Engineering

but if you are in Software engineering (which at my university - waterloo http://www.uwaterloo.ca/ (which im going to guess you are at as well), which is a joint engineering / math program you recieve a Bachelors of Software Engineering.

licensing is something in and of itself
see http://www.ccpe.ca/e/index.cfm, http://www.peo.on.ca/, and http://www.ccpe.ca/e/index.cfm

I don't think it was just that. Around 1983 I picked up a set of C coding standards developed by the folks at Bell Labs' Indian Hill site. I can't immediately lay my hands on my copy, but here is a version of it that at a glance doesn't seem very different. It advocated the One True Style of K&R.

Schools need to make better efforts to plug these holes.

I attend the University of Waterloo, and am in its co-op program. Their job application system, JobMine inadvertently informs students about the status of jobs they have been interviewed for. Students are not supposed to be informed of whether they have been offered or ranked for jobs prior to a certain date, however, the job disappears from the 'active applications' section as soon as the employer has made their decision not to offer or rank you. I initially thought this was something random, but every job that disappeared I had been rejected for, and every job that remained I had either been ranked or offered. Of course, I didn't have to do any special 'hacking' to find the results - it was linked directly (ok so I have to go through about five links to get there - really poorly designed for usability, but still) Any student could get this information through legitimate use of the system, without any special skill or instruction.

It's sometimes hard to believe that a school that prides itself in its specialty in computer science, co-op, and engineering has such bugs in its co-op site. Especially if employers are exposed to such systems - what will they think of its students?

Judging from the writing style, I am 99.98% sure I know who wrote the above post. I would like to share a few extra anicdotes involving guest lecturers.

I took Applied Cryptography (C&O 487) at the same time as the parent poster. During the course, one of the guest lecturers that we had was a man by the name of Gary McGraw, author of several books on the topic of computer security. During his introduction, Gary thanked Alfred for being kind enough to pick him up from the hotel he was staying at. Gary also thanked Alfred for scaring him to death because Alfred hardly paid attention to the road while driving. We later found out that Alfred drives a somewhat beat-up Toyota Corolla, and you should see some of the scratches! This is a man that could probably afford a better car, but I guess he would feel worse if he dinged-up a nicer car.

Also during that C&O 487 class, we had a guest lecturer by the name of William Tutte. Tutte talked to our class about the cryptographic work he did at Bletchley Park during WWII. Shortly after he gave the lecture, he passed away. (To the parent poster: we still have a minidisc recording of that lecture, we should get around to putting it on CD and donate it to CACR.)

Now to add to the "Celebrity Professor" story from above, I also took Coding Theory (C&O 331) but not during the same term as the parent poster. For this class Scott had one of his grad students, Kenneth Giuliani, who was on campus writing his thesis, to teach the course that term. Ken took up residence in Scott's office, but the office door still had Scott Vanstone's name plate on it. On two occasions that term, Ken arranged for Scott to come in and give a guest lecture, FOR HIS OWN CLASS!.

Judging from the writing style, I am 99.98% sure I know who wrote the above post. I would like to share a few extra anicdotes involving guest lecturers.

I took Applied Cryptography (C&O 487) at the same time as the parent poster. During the course, one of the guest lecturers that we had was a man by the name of Gary McGraw, author of several books on the topic of computer security. During his introduction, Gary thanked Alfred for being kind enough to pick him up from the hotel he was staying at. Gary also thanked Alfred for scaring him to death because Alfred hardly paid attention to the road while driving. We later found out that Alfred drives a somewhat beat-up Toyota Corolla, and you should see some of the scratches! This is a man that could probably afford a better car, but I guess he would feel worse if he dinged-up a nicer car.

Also during that C&O 487 class, we had a guest lecturer by the name of William Tutte. Tutte talked to our class about the cryptographic work he did at Bletchley Park during WWII. Shortly after he gave the lecture, he passed away. (To the parent poster: we still have a minidisc recording of that lecture, we should get around to putting it on CD and donate it to CACR.)

Now to add to the "Celebrity Professor" story from above, I also took Coding Theory (C&O 331) but not during the same term as the parent poster. For this class Scott had one of his grad students, Kenneth Giuliani, who was on campus writing his thesis, to teach the course that term. Ken took up residence in Scott's office, but the office door still had Scott Vanstone's name plate on it. On two occasions that term, Ken arranged for Scott to come in and give a guest lecture, FOR HIS OWN CLASS!.

When I was an undergrad at the University of Waterloo (located in Waterloo, Ontario [Canada]), I had the benefit of having both Alfred and Scott as professors.

Alfred taught C&O 487, which is Applied Crytography. He is an excellent lecturer and actively involved in the crypto community. His level of intelligence, professionalism, and kindness never cease to amaze me.

Scott "taught" C&O 331, which is Coding Theory. He's a down-to-Earth kind of guy, who really didn't know how to teach a class, but boy did he sure know how to simplify tough concepts. His trademark is that he's what we called a "celebrity professor". He never used his office (located at St. Jerome's on campus) to the point where if you looked through his window, you'd never see him there, and everything would be packed up in boxes. His computer was never hooked up and chairs were stacked up such that no one could actually sit down with him and have a conversation :).

He was a celebrity professor because he worked at Certicom, and was one the company's original founders. He was paid the highest amount out of any C&O professor at the University, and barely ever made it to teach class. He'd spend the day at Certicom instead, and send one of his grad students over from Toronto to Waterloo (despite the weather, since Coding Theory is only available in the Winter term) to teach the class. Sometimes, when there were no grads available to do his teaching duties, he'd ask Alfred (who wrote his PhD under the supervision of Mr. Vanstone) to fill in. Whenever Alfred taught the class I learned 200% more than if Scott were to teach the exact same material.

All that aside, it's nice to see these two fellows get their name in bright lights after all of their hard work throughout the years.

In fact I've found it works great as a personal filter, if you configure it somewhat differently from the way the documentation suggests. That is, increase the weight of the Bayes filter, and have it train itself on every message it classifies. Then correct it on any mistakes it makes - which rapidly become few and far between.

Here's a paper showing that SpamAssassin can achieve as good results as others touted for personal use.

Unfortunately SpamAssassin is a bit hard to install and set up. But if you have RedHat or Debian Linux, it is available by rpm/apt and you can install a few scripts to make it work.

I wish I had a better shrink-wrapped version, but I don't. So I'm supplying the raw files for one user in the hopes that (a) somewhat technical people can reproduce the setup and be happy, (b) somebody will make a shrink-wrapped version, perhaps with plugins or extensions or macros for more mail clients.

Here is the Linux Personal Spamassassin setup.

In fact I've found it works great as a personal filter, if you configure it somewhat differently from the way the documentation suggests. That is, increase the weight of the Bayes filter, and have it train itself on every message it classifies. Then correct it on any mistakes it makes - which rapidly become few and far between.

Here's a paper showing that SpamAssassin can achieve as good results as others touted for personal use.

Unfortunately SpamAssassin is a bit hard to install and set up. But if you have RedHat or Debian Linux, it is available by rpm/apt and you can install a few scripts to make it work.

I wish I had a better shrink-wrapped version, but I don't. So I'm supplying the raw files for one user in the hopes that (a) somewhat technical people can reproduce the setup and be happy, (b) somebody will make a shrink-wrapped version, perhaps with plugins or extensions or macros for more mail clients.

Here is the Linux Personal Spamassassin setup.

http://swag.uwaterloo.ca/~jchampaign/goapplet.html

I guess you could still call it "digital" although not electronic. Lexmark uses a metal tab to prevent you from putting Samsung cartridges in their E210 printer, even though the printer is manufactured by Samsung.

Of course, the Lexmark cartridges cost 50% more.

If anybody still has an E210 and is still shelling out for Lexmark cartridges, please visit How to use a Samsung cartridge in a Lexmark.

And never buy another Lexmark.

There are many other virus approaches being pursued both in the lab and in clinical trials. At the forefront, is the Reovirus. This naturally occuring virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Here is a before and after picture of a terminal patient with an actively growing neck tumour that had failed to respond to conventional treatments. This tumour was eliminated with only a single injection of the Reovirus. Researchers at Oncolytics Biotech have shown that the Reovirus can kill many types of cancer, including breast, prostate, pancreatic and brain tumours. Human clinical trial results indicate that there are no safety concerns and that the reovirus shrinks and even eliminates tumours injected with this virus. Numerous other third party studies show that the reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers.

http://imprint.uwaterloo.ca/issues/100298/3Science /science01.shtml
http://news.com.com/MS+to+invest+150+million+in+Ap ple/2100-1001_3-202143.html

"Both Apple and Microsoft executives denied that the Microsoft investment represents a path to converging the companies' operating systems. However, they said they had agreed to work out a settlement to a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating system infringes on any of Apple's patents."

http://www.jmusheneaux.com/index02.htm#Major

From the last link it's clear that Xerox lost, so the only FUD here is that of Xerox deserving credit.

If a website contains no TLD or main site name (for example microsoft.com) it assumes it's on a local intranet, so yes it is an internal site, for example here I can type http://ece/ and it will show me the page you would see at http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca since I'm on the uwaterloo.ca domain's computers

http://experiencemore is likely just an internal pointer to this site
For your information, the same applies for mail servers, so if I send an email from this mail server using the local email service (not a webmail thing like hotmail) I can send an email to a person by sending it to user@engmail for example which, to a person outside the University network would have to user@engmail.uwaterloo.ca

Hope this was helpful, if you already knew, I'm not trying to sound condenscending...

Also, something like facial recognition needs large test datasets, and it's never a "solved" problem. There's always a way to do it faster or better or more easily. Other things like Canterbury Corpus or Calgary Corpus are datasets used for comparison between compression algorithms. Meaningful comparisons can be made between different algorithms based on how well they perform on them simply because they've been used enough and are standard enough.

I'm so interested in this that I just registered gpldata.com... finally something useful to do with my free time!!!

I remember seeing demos of "fractal image comression" -- it was extremely good at the time. There is more info about it here: Fractal Compression Projects".

Sure. I sent it to you. In case anybody else is interested:
here is a description of my installation

At first this flag was disabled by default because it was not comply with SPARCv8 ABI so some (mainly bad coded) applications that relied on the execution of code inside the stack could not run as expected. Sun collaborated with its huge community of developers to addresssome collateral effects and once resolved Sun published the new SPARCv9 ABI reference guide in which the stack is no longer mapped as executable.
Currently 64-bit Solaris applications running on SPARC don't need to worry about exploits that rely on malicious code execution due to stack overflows.

There is NO reason why you'd need more than about a $10 calculator in high school. Hell, I got my BMath and the only exams we were allowed to use calculators in (that I remember) were some stats courses, and actuarial science courses... and again the only calcs allowed were the non-programmable $10 jobbies. Maybe it's a Canadian thing... but if a high school teacher ever saw one of use with a graphic calc it'd be going straight back into the bag.

Sure some integrals and some derivatives are hard... but that's why you have tables to look them up, and why you remember your identities. If one's brain can hold onto the chain rule and integration by parts among other things, surely it's possible to remember a few more things.

A common theme among all of the replies is that "Experience is more important than the name of your university". This is definitely true. If your goal is to get a good job, then yes, employers do care more for what work you've done, not on the school you attended. Granted, "better" CS programs generally give more opportunities for cool projects to work on. For example, I'm in my last year of CS at UW and I've developed a compiler, a ray tracer and a toy operating system. Add the experience that the co-op program has given me, and there's a lot there for employers to drool over.

This isn't a "Look-at-me" or "UW-is-great" rant (in fact, there are a few things that I do not like about my program). The point is that I am kind of alarmed that everybody seems to think that if you have a CS degree, you are slated to become a code monkey. If you wanted to be a programmer (ahem, sorry, software developer) then you should go to a college (FYI, most Americans call any post-secondary institution "college"... Canadians maintain a distinction between college and university, with the former being more skills based while the latter is academically based).

The choice of school for your undergraduate should not be based on whether or not you will get a job as a programmer after you graduate. If that's all you wanted, you could have saved many thousands of dollars by not attending university at all and just hacked on some project for fun building while acquiring experience. Your decision on whether or not to transfer should be based on the quality of the education you're receiving and the quality that you expect to receive. If you are content with the curriculum in your school as compared to other schools, then there is really no reason to transfer.

some canadian clubs as well. Don't worry, we can get you out. Just don't wear a pink tie or all is lost.

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/ is a very detailed guide to some cryptographic algorithms and theories. This is not for newbies at all. For those wanting to implement a particular cipher, this book is the place to refer to. On top of everything, it is free.

Cant find the link that went into depth about this. It basically concludes that toast falling buttered side down is a constant of the universe.

If molecular bonds were stronger (or gravity weaker), we would have stronger skulls, so could fall from a greater height, so would be taller, so would have higher tables, so the toast could do a complete flip and land buttered side up before hitting the ground.

This http://wvlc.uwaterloo.ca/biology447/modules/intro/ MurphysScience.html isnt the original, and not nearly as funny...

Look, we simulate populations of neurons all the time. Sometimes they are extremely realistic on an individual scale. A colleague of mine at a has funding to build a Beowulf cluster, simulating IIRC around 40,000 neurons, bigger than this collection of rat neurons. See Chris Eliasmith's work here.

Do you shed elephant tears for the numbers floating around in our computers? Or do you think there is something magic about cells?

Well... someone either went to UofT or got rejected from U Waterloo's CS program...

While it is true that there are some profs there who care about undergrads about as much as they do toe fungus (Mr. Buss, I'm looking at you), there are a legion of CS profs who are great for undergrads: Atlee, Becker, Vasiga, Pretti, Mann, Steve MacDonald, I could go on. Enrolling at St. Jeromes is also a great way to get a leg up as an undergrad in Math or CS there.

To answer a few of your other assertions, tuition may be a shave higher in CS at Waterloo than other CS programs in Ontario, but nowhere close to double. Also if you've got the HS marks to get into their fantastic co-op program, it more than makes up for that fact. It's a program where you alternate terms between school and working (at a paying, relevant job) to help pay it off. Without any help from the folks or working a part-time job during terms I graduated debt free with 2 years of relevant work experience under my belt.

I lean left politically, and I frequently argue over design and implementation details with my boss and colleagues.

As for the machine stuff... well, I'm just trying hard not to laugh.

In any case, I know of a plethora of companies, both American and Canadian, that would disagree strongly with your assertion that U Waterloo's CS program is sub-par.

I had a prof that did that, at the University of Waterloo, of all places.
It's one thing to use somebody else's lecture notes. But this guy clearly didn't even read them before coming to class. You'd ask him a question and he'd just say "Uh, I don't know, these aren't my notes." For crying out loud! And I was paying $700 or so for that course! The prof was Mavaddat in case you're curious. If you're ever scheduled to have a course with him, SWITCH as fast as you freaking can! You're better off Googling for stuff and reading other people's PowerPoint slides by yourself.

I had a prof that did that, at the University of Waterloo, of all places.
It's one thing to use somebody else's lecture notes. But this guy clearly didn't even read them before coming to class. You'd ask him a question and he'd just say "Uh, I don't know, these aren't my notes." For crying out loud! And I was paying $700 or so for that course! The prof was Mavaddat in case you're curious. If you're ever scheduled to have a course with him, SWITCH as fast as you freaking can! You're better off Googling for stuff and reading other people's PowerPoint slides by yourself.

They're the same game. Looks like "snakes" was the original name - "chutes" dates from 1943, Britain imported "snakes" from India in the 1890s, and it looks like the (ancient) Indian version had snakes and ladders (although it was called "The ladder to salvation"). See here and here. Most countries seem to call it "snakes", lthough "chutes" makes more sense than "snakes" - who ever slid down a snake?

Not quite 1000 miles in a day, closer to 500km per day, but still rather impressive.

A 15,000km 40day world record tour of Canada and the US.

http://midsun.uwaterloo.ca/tour/tour_news/

And proud to say it was my university that did it.

"CA settled it's case with the DOJ."

It should be its, not it's.

Since we had a recent article from the CGL at the Univeristy of Waterloo, here's the explanation from one of the faculty there.

Yes, I'm pedantic.

"CA settled it's case with the DOJ."

It should be its, not it's.

Since we had a recent article from the CGL at the Univeristy of Waterloo, here's the explanation from one of the faculty there.

Yes, I'm pedantic.

"CA settled it's case with the DOJ."

It should be its, not it's.

Since we had a recent article from the CGL at the Univeristy of Waterloo, here's the explanation from one of the faculty there.

Yes, I'm pedantic.

For the rest of us, there will be an on-line public competition hosted through the Valladolid site and run by the University of Waterloo. The next one is on the 19th (3 days away!), free, and everyone can register. Stock up on doritos and join in the fun!

For the rest of us, there will be an on-line public competition hosted through the Valladolid site and run by the University of Waterloo. The next one is on the 19th (3 days away!), free, and everyone can register. Stock up on doritos and join in the fun!

I don't know what effect this will have on PeopleSoft, but I really hope it will improve this monstrosity called QUEST for the University of Waterloo.

For those who don't know about QUEST ( which is probably everyone here ), it's a very unstable, slow and annoying system for signing up for courses, reviewing marks, checking your account balance, etc. The damn thing doesn't work half the time, and the processes of adding/dropping/swapping a class is incredibly irritating.

Also, do any other Universities use this thing?

I don't know what effect this will have on PeopleSoft, but I really hope it will improve this monstrosity called QUEST for the University of Waterloo.

For those who don't know about QUEST ( which is probably everyone here ), it's a very unstable, slow and annoying system for signing up for courses, reviewing marks, checking your account balance, etc. The damn thing doesn't work half the time, and the processes of adding/dropping/swapping a class is incredibly irritating.

Also, do any other Universities use this thing?

John Graham-Cumming presented a talk Beating Bayesian Filters at the 2004 Spam Conference detailing these results. A video recording is available; alas, no paper.

In conducting a recent spam filter evaluation I observed (but did not report) that the statistical filter attacks were not particularly effective. The only attack that worked sometimes was to make the entire body of the message a current news item or joke, with only a URL linking to the spam payload.