Tim Ginn’s Personal Blog

This term I'm taking:

EE527 (Engineering Human-Computer Interaction) taught by Greg Phillips at RMC
CISC 897 (Research Methods in Computer Science) taught by Abd-Elhamid M. Taha

I'm enjoying the walk to RMC and the chance to get out of the Queen's bubble.  The course itself is interesting, too and seems like it'll be very applicable.

Interestingly enough all my courses this term use blogs.  For 527 it's a private course blog where we post interesting links and discussion notes before a seminar.  For 897 it's a place of our own choice for summaries/analysis of papers that we'll read in the course.  I'm going to use Posterous for it so I can just submit things by e-mail and separate it from here– it's at http://timginn.posterous.com in case people are curious.

I'm also a TA for the Introduction to Computing and the Creative Arts course this term.

Oh, and I'm submitting this post to my regular blog using Posterous just for fun to see if it connects properly.

Posted via email

In case people are wondering… this is what I’m taking for courses (Fall 2008):

CISC 857 – Image Processing – Prof. Abolmaesumi
CISC 878 – Organic User Interfaces – Prof. Vertegaal
CISC 860 – The Structure and Design of Programming Languages – Prof. Cordy

I’ve handed in the dead tree Add/Drop form.

I sincerely hope that bill C-61 “An Act to amend the Copyright Act” is either very significantly modified from it’s current status or fails to pass in the house.  I’m glad to see that awareness of the issues with the bill is spreading.  I particularly dislike that the amendments as written will disallow circumvention of ineffective locking mechanisms even for private use of purchased media.  I strongly dislike legal protection for ideas I’ve always disagreed with like region-coding digital media.  I can’t think of a good reason why something that’s been released for the general public of one region should be unavailable to people from another indefinitely– it’s digital media, there’s no difference in distribution costs based on distance.  Why is there some perceived need to make illegal activities that are natural to most Internet or iPod users now?

More information about the bill is available at http://www.copyrightforcanadians.ca/action/firstlook/ and http://www.digital-copyright.ca/

You can read the full text of the bill on the Parliament of Canada website where it’s also easy to lookup contact information for your local Member of Parliament.