CS15 Skits

May 11th, 2010 § 3

Presenting… every skit filmed during Brown’s CS intro course CS15 in fall 2009.

Poster for CS15

They’ve been a while coming but I’m thrilled to finally have them online for anyone to see. The atmosphere and attitude captured in these videos is probably unique to, and more importantly absolutely ubiquitous within, CS15.

Opening Day Skit

The skit showed/acted on the first day of class. Star Trek themed (as was the course and website) in 2009. Written by the 2009 Humor TAs.

Collaboration Policy Skit

3 short filmed skits animating the course’s collaboration policy. Written by the 2009 Humor TAs.

Star-crossed References

An in class skit personifying some of the aspects of programming and the Java environment. Includes variable scope, garbage collection, references and constants. Presumably written by TAs who’ve long since graduated.

Slush Gray

In class, Snow White themed skit. Has a linked list. The skit is a long-standing CS15 feature. Presumably written by TAs who’ve long since graduated.

Othello

The skit written and preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Othello’ in which students make the board game Othello and implement a minimax based AI.

Adventure

The skit written and preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Adventure’ in which students make a 3d randomly generating objective based maze game.

Sketchy

The skit preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Sketchy’ in which students make a basic graphics editing program. Written by previous years’ TAs.

Credits

The credits reel for all of the videos included on the DVD from which they were ripped.

Bloopers

Bloopers reel from lots of the above videos. » Read the rest of this entry «

Pointer to Peach

April 30th, 2010 § 1

I wrote and acted in this skit for CS4 at Brown. Cs4 is an intro level CS course for likely non-concentrators (i.e. engineers). In it, we cover a whole bunch of Matlab and a small amount of C.

The skit is about pointers and is set in the Mushroom kingdom… It’s nowhere near as hardcore as the stuff that we did for CS15 but it’s my baby, so here it is.

Script after the break. » Read the rest of this entry «

MGMT – Congratulations

April 26th, 2010 § 0

Article originally posted at 95.5 WBRU » Read the rest of this entry «

Playing with user scripts

March 6th, 2010 § 0

I’m taking a rather fun algorithms course with a website that reddit loves but I do not. I decided to turn this dire, lolcat-overloaded, situation into an opportunity to practice some javascript (without jQuery) and to write my first userscript.

User scripts are javascript files with the extension ‘.user.js’ that are executed client-side to add functionality to a web page. They are natively supported by chrome and opera and are supported via extensions in most other browsers of any note. (Some include Greasemonkey for Firefox, GreaseKit for Safari and Trixie for IE).

I succeeded in reskinning the whole website which was pretty fun. There seems to be a limit to the usefulness of userscripts in that support for the ‘@run-at document-start’ flag which I believe should make the script run before any scripts on the page do, is not supported by most browsers. It’s not all that useful a flag anyway as I imagine you’d often want the script to run after the DOM has been written so that you can work with the content expected to be on the page. In this case however it would be useful as I attempt to strip out a script on the course page that redirects 1% of all hits to a rickroll (sigh). As such the script still runs before the userscript and so the rickrolling still happens.

I might also put some more time into the replacement style sheet some time soon.

CS16 course site

OriginalCS16 course site with userscript and restyle

Reshaped and restyled

Code after the break. » Read the rest of this entry «

A comment in my code.

March 6th, 2010 § 0

Lovely:

# tired 5 am adam suggests you scrap the ensuing block and rewrite it while you are fresh
# then again, he failed at writing queue tonight, so maybe his advice isn't great
# i will hit him for you

CS15 TAing Retrospective

January 14th, 2010 § 0

Poster for CS15I TA’d the introductory Java/Object Orientated Programming CS15 this past semester. It’s a pretty interesting course as an introduction, racing people who’ve never programmed in their lives straight through inheritance and polymorphism in the first half of the semester – pretty much before using a single operator. It can get pretty intense.

My job, aside from the universal holding office hours and grading papers was to create and maintain the website, as well as to do a couple of odd jobs such as the pictured poster (which really should have had more actual information on it). That said, holding office hours and actually teaching was by far the most fun part.

Anyway, I guess this post is most directed to people considering to apply to TA the course, so I’ll try to include some useful info. For one, it’s a lot of work, a lot of time (a fair number of people end up taking only three courses while TAing this class) and you’ll be terribly underpaid. Do it because you enjoy teaching or because you want too be more involved with the Brown CS department – whatever other reason you want. It’s also a really good way to become really familiar with the course material. Aside from academic stuff, you’ll be working really closely with 15 people or so and you’ll probably get to know at least some of them really well. You’ll have ample opportunity to get to know some of the students as well.

In short, apply! It’s worth it.

Google are to stop censoring search results in China

January 12th, 2010 § 0

In a just published blog post, Google strongly suggests that it is holding the Chinese government responsible for a recent spate of hackings of Chinese dissidents’ GMail (and other non-google services) accounts. As a result Google is changing its policy vis-a-vis its relationship with China. It will no longer serve censored search results.

The post further states that Google realizes and is prepared to accept that this may be the end of its business within the country.

Purely from a user’s perspective, it’s great to see the internet behemoth making an effort to stick to its principles. Whatever the motivation, and even if Eric Schmidt still doesn’t understand the importance of privacy, this is a reassuring point towards the “don’t be evil” tally.

Edit: Laughing Squid reports that Google has already stopped censoring google.cn.

Edit: Some Chinese reactions.

An interesting extrapolation from the Fermi Paradox

January 12th, 2010 § 0

Nick Bostrom of Oxford University has written a damn interesting paper arguing that finding traces of alien life would be a very bad omen for humanity. He accepts the Fermi Paradox as a paradox and makes some very interesting deductions regarding a ‘Great Filter’ preventing the rise of space faring alien civilizations.

Read the paper. (Really).

And here’s a reddit thread about the paper which points out some of the unstated assumptions.

Other related things of interest:

Golden Ratio Stick

January 12th, 2010 § 0

Here’s a low tech way to measure the golden ratio in things you’re designing in photoshop. Just open the png below with your project in photoshop and line stuff up. Convert it to a smart object and keep it around. I don’t get why there isn’t at least be a feature in photoshop to let you line rules up according to the ratio.

It is a 1000px wide translucent png. If it were any less sophisticated, it’d be a ruler on your screen.

Newspaper Layout with JQuery

January 11th, 2010 § 0

Is it a good idea to use javascript to completely reshape a website’s design? Columnizer is a JQuery plugin which makes the long wished for and ever intangible vertical wrap CSS feature come to life.

The idea of the feature is to allow for dynamic newspaper style columns on a website. Columns have ordinarily been unachievable though any means but manually separating up content (which would still give unpredictable results).

I’m in the camp that wants the web to be both usable and pretty even with javascript turned off. I’ve missed lots of neat aspects of websites as a result of browsing behind NoScript in past. I think it would be very difficult to make a website designed with such drastic styling done with javascript degrade gracefully in a browser with the tool disabled. However, from a designer’s perspective, this is still one of the most interesting JQuery plugins I’ve seen yet.

« Older Entries