In case you’re trying to track me down for whatever reason, this might be helpful. My current (still Kingston) cell phone number is good until January 18th, after that please don’t use it; e-mail’s best. I’ll update my contact page when I’ve got another number.

January
Washington, DC (until January 3rd)
Port Perry, Ontario (until January 18th)
Seoul, South Korea (arriving January 20th local time)
Beijing, China (arriving January 20th local time)
Harbin, China (arriving January 23rd local time)

February – July
Harbin, China

August
Beijing, China (departing August 28th)
Seoul, South Korea (departing August 29th)
Toronto (arriving August 29th)

post August 29th is uncertain (probably Port Perry for a bit).

Also of interest: photos of Harbin (1, 2)

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

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.

The keynote speakers were:

• Tim Bray
• Zed Shaw
• Dr. Peter Grogono
• Dr. Jeffrey Ullman
• Jon Udell
• Jeff Atwood

Their keynotes were all recorded and will be posted to the CUSEC website at some point in the future (which, I think is great, because that means I can catch the first half of Tim Bray’s keynote which we missed because of arriving a bit late). I definitely picked up on a lot of tidbits from different presentations. Here are some highlights:

• I gained a real appreciation for just how elegant an approach functional programming (e.g. Haskell, etc.) is for handling massive concurrency. Apparently at other universities students aren’t taught it until 4th year and even at ours the emphasis for learning it was much more academic (the approach thinking about programming in different ways helps you even if you don’t touch the language again) than practical.
• I met one of the three people who wrote the Interac system. Thousands of transactions a second a billions of dollars go through that system which hasn’t needed to be modified since it was created.
• I got to tour the EA Games Studio in Montréal and a free copy of Madden ’08 from them by being the 17th person to show up on the second day of the conference.
• There’s a real opportunity to talk to the speakers before and after their presentations; not just a question and answer period; but, the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation. I especially liked how many of them went out to the other conference events like the banquet and pub night.
• Finally the implications of the semantic web and the terminology around it became clear.
• I had an opportunity to meet and talk with Tim Bray in person, whose writing I’ve been following for a while.
• Meeting people from the other schools was very interesting; it turns out that we have a lot of the same challenges.
• There were a lot of Linux users; this wasn’t unexpected, but, is none-the-less cool especially seeing the degree to which some people have automated their daily tasks and the techniques they used to do so.
• I saw an XO laptop in person, that was neat.
• I learned about some very different approaches to writing some specific types of software than I usually use which seem to have a significant learning curve but tremendous benefits (Ragel for creating parsers).
• There were plenty of recruitment opportunities; which,isn’t what I was looking for in the immediate future; but, making connections now for later is beneficial.
• A lot of the speakers were very inspirational, especially once they revealed how small the teams that completed some massive projects really were.

It was a great experience and I really encourage you to attend in the future, if you can. Your university may not be like Concordia (where some of the Computer Science lectures are canceled so that people can go to CUSEC instead); but, it’s definitely more than worth the financial cost and the time to catch up on school work after.

“You know you’re gonna hear people rapping about comic books, video games, role-playing, non-deterministic finite automota but you know we’ve all got one thing in common and that’s we’re all trying to preach the gospel of nerd empowerment, you know we’re trying to to spread that nerd pride, spread that nerd love.”

There are some mild profanities in the video so if they will offend you don’t watch it.

Now, to do the less fun task of studying for the Algorithms (CISC365) test.

It also means I don’t have to go through and approve comments; which is great because to be honest I wasn’t doing too good a job of it. I’ve deleted all the old spam comments, now, too (and read new ones). Anyway, I’m quite a bit happier with this layout and think it might just help me post more regularly… which would be good.