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.

CS015 Website Redesign

August 4th, 2009 § 1

CS015 website ScreenshotThis semester I’m a teaching assistant for the CS015 course at Brown that I wrote about half a year ago. My main responsibility this summer has been revamping the course website. If you are reading this blog post any time before the summer of 2010, you can probably see the new layout live. In the case that I’m communicating with you over a year into the future you can see a screenshot.

My brief was to make a website that would fit with the course’s theme (Yes the course has a theme. Read the aforementioned blog post), Star Trek. I decided to base the website off the Star Trek universe’s LCARS computer systems. This was by no means an original take on making a Star Trek tribute layout – lots of fan sites have done similar things – but it is certainly recognizable.

I cherry picked other layout aspects quite liberally from different time points in the Star Trek series. The header text uses the typeface from The Original Series. LCARS itself only features in episodes and movies placed chronologically after TNG. The ship shown is the Enterprise of the 2009 Star Trek relaunch.

I ran into the CSS column issue when making the layout. The dashed line under the navigation buttons was always intended to stretch to the bottom of the layout no matter how long the content was. I originally made this work with positioniseverything’s CSS columns hack but later realized that there would be anchored links in the content presented in the layout. The anchored links caused the layout to break in Firefox, so I was forced to revert to javascripting the same effect. However the javascript I (found via google and) used to do it doesn’t work in some versions of IE. I obviously need to become proficient with a JQuery or another good javascript library.

The layout also uses conditional comments and the ie7-js script to mitigate issues with IE6, in particular the use of a png image with an alpha layer for the Enterprise in the top left.

In closing… if you are reading this and are an undergraduate at Brown, take the course this year! If you tell me you’ve read this post, I’ll give you extra special help*.
*This statement is probably a lie.

A letter to my MP

June 22nd, 2009 § 0

My initial email:

Dear Andrew Slaughter,

It was recently brought to my attention
(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=117055866653) that Margaret
Beckett, the current favourite for the position of speaker, does not
accept emails from her constituents.

I find this rather disturbing given the widespread adoption and the
efficiency of the medium. I believe that in not accepting contact of
this form Ms. Beckett makes it much harder for her constituents to be
heard, decreases transparency and accountability and shows that she is
disturbingly tied to outdated tradition and naïvely close-minded to
notions of innovation.

I urge you to take this into consideration when casting your vote for a
new speaker.

Thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Adam Zethraeus

The first response:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for contacting Andy. I’m not sure where this information originates, but according to the very website you used to write you email -i.e.  Write to Them – Mrs Beckett received an above average number of emails from constituents and responded to them, getting a medium rating, which is pretty good, considering that the sample size used suggests that she receives an well-above-average numbers of emails!

I’ve no reason to suppose that this isn’t still the case – I suppose it just goes to show that  as well as facilitating communication, people can use the web to spread rumours, inaccuracies and falsehoods…..

Yours sincerely,

John Dawson
Parliamentary Assistant

My second email:

John,

Thanks for getting back to me.

Mrs. Beckett is listed as having no email at http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/mps_and_lords/alms.cfm
Additionally the guardian lists her as having no email address. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/contactdetails/0,,-319,00.html
Mrs. Beckett has no website so further verification appears impossible.

The website writetothem.com has been developed from the now defunct ‘faxyourmp.com’. Furthermore, nowhere on the statistics page (http://www.writetothem.com/stats/2007/mps) from which you quoted Mrs. Beckett’s ‘medium’ rating does it state that messages were delivered as emails. It therefor seems reasonable to posit that writetothem.com simply faxes letters written to Mrs. Beckett.

I would greatly appreciate if you could relay our correspondence so far to Mr. Slaughter.

Yours sincerely,
Adam Zethraeus

Second Response

Adam,

You’re right. I’ve just checked with Margaret Beckett’s office and indeed she doesn’t do email. Write to them do Fax their emails over, as you suggest, and she apparently deals with them by post.
I don’t need to relay anything to Andy – through the magic of  server-side rules, mail filters,and forwarding, all our correspondence is already in his private inbox!

Kind regards,

John

Twitter made Jaiku sad

May 26th, 2009 § 0

I deleted one of my two old accounts on jaiku a today. In the process, it redirected me to its 404 page.Jaiku 404

Really a better caption would be “Maybe a bird was eating it so google stepped in and ruthlessly ‘euthanized’ it with a large rock”.

Experimenting with Lock Picking

May 23rd, 2009 § 0

Padlock I’ve been trying my hand at lock picking for a little while recently. I did some research around the subject and joined a forum called Lock Picking 101. At their advice I bought a set of 14 picks from LockPickShop.com. I also downloaded and read the LSI guide to lock picking, a resource similar to the better known MIT guide but more visual. The picks seem well made and (in all my untrained glory) I’d recommend them to anyone interested. I also found a guide to making lock picks online which I guess would be useful to anyone with a workshop at easy access.

A little while after having my picks delivered, I mentioned my very undeveloped interest to a friend who was then generous enough to lend me a loose door lock she had used to practice lock picking in high school. It is a simple 5 pin ‘Kwickset’ lock with normal pins which I can now consistently pick. I’m considering buying some pins designed to make picking more difficult, or maybe a totally new lock. I’ll probably go to a locksmith in my neighbourhood in the UK (I wonder what their policies are on selling to someone learning to pick) but I’m also considering buying a ‘training lock’ such as the one sold at learnlockpicking.com. » Read the rest of this entry «

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