Tim Ginn's Personal Blog

My courses (Fall 2008)

tim — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:38:34 +0000

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.

Canadian Copyright Bill C-61

tim — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:08:42 +0000

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.

Exam Schedule

tim — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:43:51 +0000

My exam schedule:

CHIN100 - April 14th @ 2:00 P.M.
CISC422 - April 15th @ 2:00 P.M.

(and, that’s it, everything else is either in class or has no final exam).

CUSEC 2008

tim — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:48:21 +0000

This past Thursday-Friday I had the pleasure of participating in CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in Montréal. I organized the Queen’s delegation and am very impressed with not only the speakers but also the impressive degree of transparency in the planning and execution of the conference and my peers at the other universities.

The keynote speakers were:

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.

Winter Term 2008 Class Schedule

tim — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 19:27:25 +0000

In case for some strange reason you’re determined to stalk me here’s my Winter 2008 class schedule to make your life easier.

(Image is taken from iCal; a text-based but slightly less pretty version is on my Facebook profile made with the Courses 2.0 app. CISC499 is not shown because it doesn’t have formal class hours).

Second Life

tim — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:53:02 +0000

I recently got Second Life (because I learned there was finally a Linux version in Alpha, the last time I looked at it was years ago and seeing that it was only for Windows at the time I paid little attention). There’s also a Macintosh OS X version (in addition to the stable Windows and alpha Linux versions). If you have a character, feel free to look me up as Buttersby Wrigglesworth. Here’s some photos from my Second Life travels so far…

Sitting on an alligator in front of the National Air and Space Museum.

Flying in the air in front of a mysterious flower-power house.

Software/Website Accessibility

tim — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:19:57 +0000

I recently gave a presentation as part of my major project in CISC497 (Social, Ethical and Legal issues in Computing) on the topic of making software accessible to people with disabilities and since have had some requests for the materials I prepared. For those who are interested, I’ve uploaded
a PDF version of my Keynote presentation and the final project report. If you know of any other good resources, feel free to add them in the comments to help others who are trying to learn and who may stumble onto this page when searching.

Here’s a list of the resources cited in the paper:

Timetable 07-08

tim — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:23:02 +0000

It’s course preregistration time. Fancy images provided by Albert Choi’s QCARD Wrapper (the standalone converter thing).

COMPSA Frosh Video

tim — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:14:53 +0000

A lot of you have asked me to tell you when I finished the frosh video and to post it on You Tube as soon as I could. I was editing right up until the point I had to leave Kingston for the long weekend, and, it’s slightly over You Tube’s 10 minute video limit; but, is now available
via Google Video. So, I get to have the first full night’s sleep in a while tonight. Yippie.

Update: As of the evening of May 21st I was able to improve the audio levels and transitions on the video (and that improved version will be what makes it to the frosh). The Google Video version will be updating shortly. As of May 30th, the address above is changed to a version that actually uploaded properly.

Lightsabers

tim — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 20:03:00 +0000

I’m making myself a pair of lightsabers. This is the first one (and wow my camera is grainy).