This is what I used in college

Even then I was on the hunt for technologies that would help me to digitize, organize and synchronize my class notes. Or to just be able to take notes in digital format. We were not quite there yet with technology. I kinda wish I was going to school now rather than back then when I think about all the technology that we have available now. My life as a student would have been so much better today as there exist tools now that have been built specifically to solve the exact problems I was constantly running into back then.

That’s what I want to talk about today – the things students have right now, that I didn’t have back then. If I was an undergrad, this would be my kit.

Hardware

Hold on to your hats because I’m about to say something controversial: you probably don’t need to take a laptop to class. Granted, you should have a full fledged computer somewhere in your dorm for doing heavy duty things that may crop up during the semester. But for your day to day note taking and web browsing here is what you need:

Student Hardware Kit

Let me do this in list form – here is your hardware base:

• iPad
• iPhone
• iPad compliant Stylus
• Bluetooth Keyboard

The last two items on the list are optional but recommended. Here is my line of reasoning: you don’t need a device with a hard drive for note taking. Laptops are great but compared to weight and portability and battery efficiency of an iPad they might as well by blocks of wood. A modern dual core laptop will usually give you probably 3-4 hours on a single charge. An iPad will give you more than twelve, and it weighs much less and takes less space in your book-bag than an average 3 ring binder.

Homeworks, Term Papers and Documents

First thing that everyone wants to know when I show them this, is “how do I Microsoft Word on an iPad”. You don’t because Microsoft Word is so 90’s it is not even funny anymore. Word is a relic of a bygone past and if you are telling students they need to use you are actually hurting them. You are inflicting psychological trauma on their innocent minds. So please, spare me.

But the root of the question is valid – how do you type papers on a ultra-thin mobile setup like this. The answer is Google Drive. Here is the beauty of this solution: it offers you the basic office suite functionality (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations), it hosts your documents in the clouds and it will sync them with any computer you register with the service. Not only that, but Google keeps revision history of all your documents so you can revert your changes at any time.

Here is a use case: you are sitting in cafeteria and you remember you have a paper due tomorrow. Whip out iPad and stand it up on the table using your smart-cover or whatever you use. Whip out your bluetooth keyboard and start writing. Need a break? Save, exit, throw gear in bag. When you get back to your dorm you can jump on your computer and just pick up where you left off. Need to print the paper? Well, chances are you might not have a printer in your room here is what you do: head to any computer lab on campus, log into Google, print.

Note how this setup removes the necessity to transfer and manage files across multiple computers. Everything is just there. All the other files – handouts, supplementary documents, etc can be dumped into Google Drive too. Added bonus is that any Document from Google Drive can be exported into Microsoft Word format if your professor decides to be annoying and insist you submit a .doc file.

The second cloud service I will recommend that you sign up for is Dropbox. It was actually the original, and so far the best cloud sync solution out there. I mentioned Google Drive first because it has the built in authoring tools. Dropbox is just for syncing files between computers and applications and it does that very well. Why can’t you just stick with Google Drive? Well, for the time being Dropbox and not Google is the defacto standard in cloud syncing. So all the software tools I mention below will let you save your crap to Dropbox, but not Google drive. That’s why you need both.

Note Taking

Note taking on a tablet is a little tricky. As far as I can tell, there is nothing out there that will beet pen and paper on speed and comfort. You will always be faster and more efficient scribbling on dead-tree pages than on your screen. That said, it does not mean your notes can’t be digitized. Enter the brilliant JotNot Pro which lets you scan and pre-process your hand written notes and save them as PDF documents directly to your Dropbox account.

This is where the iPhone comes in – because you won’t be taking pictures with your iPad. Why not? Because it makes you look like an absolute tool. Don’t do it – especially not where there are people to see it. Plus it is just easier to control a small phone and snap a dozen of quick pictures with this app than it is trying to maneuver an iPad over the notebook without it casting a star-destroyer sized shadow over the page.

Here is a snapshot of my JotNot Pro app. Not very organized.

Here is a protip: every evening JotNot all your notes from the day and Dropbox it. Give the files descriptive names that relate to their content and organize them in folders by course. Over time you will build up a digital library of notes that can be searched by date or by keywords contained in the file names. These notes can be easily shared with your classmates if for example they missed a class, or just never bothered to take their own notes.

Also, have you ever had that one jerk professor who keeps putting supplemental materials on library reserve instead of putting them online, forcing all the students in class to pay like $1 per page in quarters on the dilapidated xerox library machine? Well, you can just JotNot those things too, add them to your digital library and print from anywhere at your leisure.

If you do want to try the digital note taking route, the best app I have found is Penultimate. It is a very well designed app, and similarly to JotNot it lets you export your notes to Dropbox as PDF files.

Penultimate in Action

Obviously you will need a stylus for this – they are cheep though. You can buy them for like $6 from Amazon. That’s not why this is less than optimal though. Here is the problem with digital note taking on multi-touch devices such as iPad: it’s not great. Note taking was actually better on the old-fashioned devices that required a special stylus to work. On the iPad, no matter what you do, your palm will interact with the app. Writing long-hand notes while holding your palm in the air is incredibly inconvenient and the designers of Penultimate know this and they even devised some sort of customizable “palm block” feature. You can pick whether you are left or right handed, and how you usually hold your pen and it works… About half the time.

So if you are serious about this, you will need to learn a nifty trick I picked up when I was leveling up my pencil and charcoal drawing skills: you use a barrier. To prevent smearing (or in your case unwanted input) you just place something under your palm. A piece of paper or a folded napkin is enough to block the skin galvanic response the touch-screens pick up on and eliminate interference letting you concentrate on working your stylus. It will take some practice to get up to speed writing like this.

Why not just type your notes? Well, if you are fast enough typist and your notes are going to be 90% words then yeah – that’s probably the ideal solution. It builds up searchable document base that is way better than document scans or vector graphics PDF dumps you get from the above. I was just going from my own experience – my course load was science heavy, and most of my notes required me to draw stuff. Diagrams, float charts, graphs, tables, etc.. But if your courses don’t do that then you can easily use Google Drive, or something like Plain Text app which atuo-saves your notes to DropBox.

What is your Student Toolkit? What apps and services you would recommend to a modern day college undergrad?

In the meantime however, I created another little blog out there. It is called I Teach 109 and as you can imagine it is school related. I more or less outlined my goals here, but I can summarize them here for those of you who are lazy. The basic premise is that it is a hyperlocal blog with the target audience being my students, my peers and other members of the MSU community. I envisioned it as a resource containing three types of blog posts:

1. Teaching aid type posts in which I expand upon, or provide background for some of the topics I mention in class.
2. Posts in which I share resources, techniques and ideas for teaching my class that can be used by other faculty.
3. Technical posts in which I talk about tools/services available to students and faculty, and MSU related lifehacks.

That said, the first two items can be easily used by anyone.

I’m hosting it on the university provided space, so I’m keeping it clean and professional (unlike here, where I try to maintain my average quota of swear words per page). For that reason I kinda chickened out on comments. From my experience, everything with text area boxes will be abused when exposed to students. It’s not that I don’t trust them, it’s just that I don’t fucking trust them.

The interesting part is that the webspace we get from the university is just a WebDav directory. There is no server-side scripting available, which is not an ideal environment for creating good looking websites. In the past, I dealt with this by doing clever things with Javascript. This time I opted for doing it with Jekyll by adopting my 5 minute bootstrap.

This is my first “bigger” Jekyll blog, and so far I find working with it very enjoyable. Part of it is that I’m writing my blog posts in Markdown, which makes them very, very clean. Terminally Incoherent posts tend to be typed in raw HTML (sans p tags, which WordPress adds itself) because as you know, I can’t deal with WYSIWYG editors. HTML has been working for me for years, but whenever I start adding inline links, lists or images the text becomes a tad difficult to scan and skim. Whenever I write Markdown I use the “footnote” notation for links, which means long URL’s are contained into a single enumerated list, at the end of my post without introducing visual clutter.

The other part is that the work-flow for that blog is very unixy. I create the posts in Vim, and use the command line to test and deploy my changes. For some reason this seems more elegant and sophisticated than the pedestrian web forms of WordPress or Tumblr. Of course in a true unix fashion, this work-flow also has tendency to punish you for your mistakes. For example, few days ago, I typed my command wrong, and Jekyll happily clobbered the wrong directory. I ran this:

jekyll --no-auto /mnt/webdav/

What I wanted to run was this:

jekyll --no-auto /mnt/webdav/blog/

The end result was deletion of all the files I had in the entire web-accessible directory. It, gets better though – I never bothered to back any of those files up because they were living on a remote server and therefore in the “cloud” and thus supposedly safe from my machinations. Lesson learned – if you spent more than 15 minutes creating it, it ought to be under source control, period. Have you done anything this stupid recently? Share your command line mishaps in the comments.

Also, let me know what you think about the blog. It was a rather fun little side project and I figured it would be nice to share it here.

Wait, hold on – before you scold me for being a science geek elitist, please take into account that I have great respect for folks in humanities. I read a lot of books and I sometimes fancy myself a literary critic of certain genre works, so believe me – I have nothing against the good folks with Literature degrees. I think they are not only good people, but also productive members of society – we need folks who are well read – if nothing else just to point me towards good things to read, so that I can inject condensed knowledge and beauty into my cranium by the way of well written prose and/or poetry.

I mock business majors, and people with fake degrees (communications anyone?) but I don’t think I have ever said a bad word about writers, poets, literary scholars and philosophers. I am constantly humbled by their knowledge and consider them to be a fellow species of nerd, even if they wont admit it. So it actually pains me to see shit like this being used to advertise humanities:

Science vs Humanities

Let’s count all the things that are wrong with this picture:

1. Blatant anti-intellectualism and disregard for the sciences – check
2. Lack of understanding of what scientists actually do – check
3. Implication that science does not concern itself with ethics – check
4. Lack of understanding what cloning is – check
5. Finally, what’s most baffling – and indication that the author of said avert does not understand what Humanities do either – also check

The first point is especially annoying, because they should have known better. The whole “what has science done?” cliché is old and tired and needs to go die in a ditch. Hollywood loves this damn trope, but university professors should know better. Shouldn’t universities foster a culture of appreciation of knowledge in all shapes and forms? Isn’t the point of liberal arts education to give student a broad understanding of all different fields of knowledge? Isn’t science education just as important as education in literature, philosophy and arts? Apparently not, according to whoever make this advert. It strikes me as childish.

I would love to hear why is it not a good idea to clone a damn dinosaur. I read Michael Crichton’s book, you know – the one with a park full of Jurasic period critters, and the main thing I got out of it was that greedy assholes will always ruin a good thing. That was the main message – don’t be a greedy fuck, and don’t underestimate mother nature, because that bitch is fucking awesome. The rest was pretty much “OMG, dinosaurs are soooo rad, and I know Unix!”. Or something like that. I don’t actually remember a big speech about playing god being in there, though I think they added one in the movie adaptation. I thought that Jeff Goldbloom talking shit about science was a bit out of place, seeing how the entire breakdown of security in park was basically the fault of Newman from Sinefield. But I digress.

My point is that there is no compelling reason not to clone a dinosaur. If we could do it, it would be an awesome experiment, and we would learn a lot from it. Hell, we are already cloning Woolly Mammoths so I really don’t see a problem here. What is the ethical conundrum here? How could an embryonic Jurassic lizard fuck things up for everyone?

I mean, maybe if you let it gestate, be born, then feed it for a few years, let it grow to full size, then piss it off and let it loose in a major city – yeah, that could be a problem. Not a problem with science itself mind you, just a problem with your stupid brain not comprehending the fact that it is not actually legal to release large wild carnivorous animals in cities.

Do you know what you call a scientist who clones a T-Rex, and lets him grow to full size without putting in appropriate safeguards? A fucking idiot who deserves to be eaten. Here is a little anecdote about elephants you might have seen on a motivational poster somewhere: allegedly circus animal trainers tie a baby elephant’s leg to a wooden post to prevent them from wandering off. Over the years the animal learns that tugging on the rope is fairly useless, and by the time they are fully grown they actually stop trying. So when the trainer ties a mature elephant to a tiny wooden stake, with a flimsy rope that would never hold it, the animal stays put because it remembers the rope being unbreakable.

While this story is likely bullshit, it illustrates an important concepts: we know how to deal with big animals. The reason why we don’t have elephants, lions, tigers and dragons rampaging though the cities every other day is that we have devised methods to tame and subdue them. Also, dragons don’t exist but that’s besides the point. While a Tyrannosaurus might be big and scary, it is an animal just like an elephant. Put it in an elephant pen with a huge ass reinforced fence (you reinforce the fence by weighing the damn thing, cross comparing with elephant weight and adding shit to the fence until it can withstand that much weight) and it will stay put. Unless it can “Hulk jump” like a boss, of course. But that’s not really something the animal can keep hidden. If it never jumps while it’s a baby, it likely won’t jump when it’s mature. And if it does jump like a motherfucker, then you put a roof over the pen.

In fact, you don’t even need to build all of this in advance. You will have plenty of time to incrementally improve your new pets habitat as it grows. A baby dino can probably be kept in check with a piece of rope, and a rubber band around it’s snout. If you are worried about it rampaging across the city, you can humanely put it down long before it becomes larger than a horse.

Unless of course you happen to be an idiot who thinks that cloning means “to make an exact copy, like on a xerox machine” which it does not. And being a humanities major does not exempt you from this little thing called “research”, which I affectionately call “five fucking minutes with Google”. I would hope that any aspiring literary genius wanting to write a story about the dangers of cloning would take at least 5 minutes to make sure they know what they are talking about. I mean, it’s not Hollywood kids – if you want to make literature, then you need to at least try to make sense. Unless of course you want to write the next Twilight or 50 Shades, in which case college education is the worst thing you could do to your brain. If you have ever taken a single literature or creative writing course, you know way to much about story structure, plot, character development and literary devices to write like Stephanie Meyer or E. L. James.

What I would really like to know is the reason why the creator of this image thought that the job of a humanities major is to teach scientists about ethics. Last time I checked, morality fables were kinda low brow. A story titled “A scientist made a dinosaur, and then got eaten because hubris is bad” ain’t exactly something to aspire to, isn’t it? It’s very much an old and tired cliché. I’d hope you would encourage students to write something more ambitious than that. To say something new and interesting about the human condition.

A wise man once said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think I just proved that. I created well of a thousand word shaped knowledge bearing data objects, ranting about a very dumb image from the internet. I ought to have better things to do with my life than that, but I do not, and that’s why you love me. If I wasn’t around to tell you about all the insignificant stupidities that really grind my gears, who would. I provide a valuable public service here, damn it!

Jeffrey McManus is a Pokemon of the Troll CEO variety and he runs some sort of online learning program that bootstraps young programmers with some basic functional programming skills so that they can go into the corporate world and piss everyone off by using bubble sort for everything. Or something like that. I don’t really know, nor do I care. The point is that in order to promote his ventuee he made a delicious and relevant troll bait titled: More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs.

Oh yes, he went there. And you know what? It worked. I bit the bait hard – I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. This is more or less an epic Dvorak style trolling and I fell for it and it’s too late to stop now. I started writing a response in his comment thread, but then realized it was long enough to be an entire blog post.

So here is my response. I know you shouldn’t feed the trolls but I just couldn’t resist. I put rel=nofollow on the link above, and I’m going to quote parts of his article below so you don’t even have to click on it, in an attempt to minimize the amount of Google juice he can get from me.

Let’s start at the top, and see what this guy has to say to support his outrageous claim:

Most undergraduates and professionals actually want to learn applied software engineering, not “computer science”. Most companies want to hire college graduates who know applied software engineering. But most university CS programs don’t actually teach applied software engineering. This isn’t to say that CS isn’t useful or valuable (even to someone who goes on to become an applied software engineer). But the majority of university CS programs are oriented to training undergraduates to become either systems programmers or academic computer scientists. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t what most 18-year-olds who enter undergraduate CS programs actually want to do…

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most 18-year-olds who enter undergraduate programs don’t actually want to learn calculus either. Or science for that matter. If I had a dime for every student I heard complaining about having to take “stupid math and science” classes I would have like a big jar of dimes.

By that logic, Math departments should not teach students calculus, differential equations and theory but instead focus on accounting and financial statistics. Actually, let’s close Math departments too, because Business School already does all that applied stuff. And then we can funnel all that money into Football (cause that’s what University of Florida did)!

I think Mr. McManus is mistaking what the purpose of a university is. If you want to learn a trade, you should go to a trade school. There are plenty of programs out there that teach applied software engineering and they don’t take 4 years, and do not come with a set of liberal arts requirements. The purpose of a liberal arts college education is to take an uncouth rube, and forcefully impart eye opening knowledge and culture into his or her frontal lobes. Once they are knowledged up and cultured enough, you help them focus their interest on one area of academic excellence. Or if you fail, and the knowledging up and culturing does not take root, you put them in the Business department which functions as a kidney of every university – it gather the academic refuse and salvages what it can before evacuating them into the world.

I’m not saying that universities should not offer courses that may help students find jobs in the industry. They should, and most are. It’s just that this is not a primary role of a university. Almost no BS or BA degree (other than Busness School degree – because, you know – kidney) guarantees you a job in your field. BS in Chemistry does not mean you are trained to be industrial chemist. A BS in Physics does not make you a rocket scientist. It only stands to reason not to expect a BS in Computer Science to make you a Software Engineer.

What a BS or BA really means is “you are certified to have a broad theoretical knowledge in this field”. You know a lot of theory, now you need to be trained to do a job. Why do companies hire students with CS for programming jobs? Because in theory, they ought to be easier to train to your specific purposes.

If someone goes to a trade school and learns to program in Java, he only knows how to program in Java. If someone gets a BS in Computer Science the expectation is that they not only know how to program, but also how to teach themselves a new language and possibly even how to write a domain specific language to resolve an particular issue. Not that this is often a good solution. The point is that when you hire a kid with CS degree the expectation is that they can grasp non trivial things easier than someone who just learned a trade.

For example, a CS graduate should be able to figure out that the proper way to sort products in the web store he is building for you is not by average rating, but by Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter. This is why CS is a science and why we make CS students take so much math. Because regardless of what people in the industry might say, that stuff is crucial.

It should not be necessary for two universities located within commuting distance of each other to have the same academic department (this goes for any department, including English Literature as well as CS). To put this another way, wouldn’t it make more sense for UCLA and Cal State LA to have a single, combined computer science program that’s among the best in the country, instead of two mediocre computer science programs?

And how do you propose to do that? How do we share resources between two competing universities? Who gets research grants? Who gets the prestige? How is that shared department managed? Which dean decides what curriculum is going to be taught? When a student takes a course, which university gets paid for it? Do they split it down the middle? How is grading handled?

Also, how do you expect students get from one campus to the other if they don’t have a car? Do you set up a shuttle service? Which university pays for the maintenance? Do you maybe have the professors drive between campuses instead?

Honestly, this is a logistics nightmare. This is one of those awesome ideas that sounds great until you spend 5 minutes to actually thing about it, only to realize it is not feasible without complete overhaul of the way both universities would be managed.

Unless of course Mr. McManus means it should be done the U of F way – fire or humiliate all the profs at university A, and force them to seek employment at university B thus “merging” the departments. But then you just funnel students to another university…

Most university computer courses simply aren’t that good if your goal is to get a job doing applied software engineering. This is because the Ph.Ds who are teaching in these programs generally got their degrees from five to ten years ago at a minimum, when the tools and tactics for software engineering were very different. The industry simply changes faster than academia. Most (not all, but most) universities just can’t keep up with this pace of change using the standard administrative playbook. This isn’t a criticism of the smart, hard-working folks who work in our CS departments; it’s a criticism of the way their departments are organized.

While this might be true, it does not mean we should start shutting down CS programs. Here is a newsflash: most universities have shitty departments. If you go to a university which does not focus, fund or care about CS then you will likely not get the best CS education. This is mostly common sense. Most universities have small, under-funded physics departments too. Should they close them as well? Oh wait, never mind. Physics degree does not teach you a trade, so of course it is useless in McManus’ eyes.

You could of course ask what is the point of having a bunch of shitty departments instead of a few good ones. After all, no one who wants to study computer science would purposefully pick a university with a small, underfunded and poorly performing department, right? They would go to a reputable school that invests in CS.

See, the problem with this is that a lot of students don’t know what they want to study when they apply to colleges. Did you know what you wanted to do for the rest of your life when you were 17? I know I didn’t. I did not declare my major till the second semester of my junior year. I knew I liked technology, but I also liked science. I had as much fun in my Bio/Chem classes as I had in my programming ones. I also loved to write, and read. So my first two years in college I wavered between Biology, Computer Science and flirting with humanities. I could have went either of these ways.

That’s really the point of liberal arts education – your first few semesters you do an in-depth exploration of all the subjects that interest you and figure out what do you want to do for the rest of your life. And if you find something you really love, and your university has a shitty department in that field, you can always transfer to a different university with a stronger program in that direction after two years.

University academic departments in general should have limited charters and should be reorganized frequently. (Again, not just CS departments, but all departments.) I spent nearly all of my undergraduate career working in academic administration, and I can say that academic departments exist mostly to protect resources (mostly money and people). They don’t really exist to serve students. One good example is cited in an awesome book on educational reform called Crisis on Campus by Columbia professor Mark Taylor: one of the most pressing problems that humanity has today is obtaining clean drinking water. Yet no university has a Department of Water. Why is this? Because campuses are an endless successions of zero-sum games: the formation of a new department necessarily means that resources must be taken away from existing departments, so existing departments viciously defend the status quo, even when that doesn’t align with reality. Computer science education has not been in alignment with reality in a long, long time.

I’m sorry but “Department of Water” is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life. Should we also have the Department of Soap? What is being proposed in this paragraph is a trade guild system, not an academic reform. McManus is essentially saying that we should identify external environmental issues and structure our education around them. So people would have degrees in Water Reclamation, Industrial Pollution Management, Food Shortages, Overpopulation, Solar Energy and Rodent Extermination. What a splendid idea.

Fuck math, science, arts and humanities – they haven’t been aligned with reality since Pythagorean times. From now on, we don’t teach Computer Science – we are the “Making Enterprise Server Side Applications using Java” department. Give me a break.

Once again, this was never, ever supposed to be a purpose of universities. Universities teach you liberal arts and the big picture stuff. They are not supposed to teach you how to solve specific existing problems, but how to identify, classify and approach problems and how to teach yourself new things in order to resolve them. Problems we see in the world right now, may no longer be problems in 4 years when the current batch of college graduates leaves the university seeking jobs. If we teach them only the things that are useful and relevant right now, then they will leave our establishment with a body of knowledge that is at least 4 years stale, if not more. This is silly. What you are supposed to learn at a university are the things that are timeless – principles, ideas, philosophies, paradigms, the scientific method. Big picture stuff. Universities are designed to produce educated, cultured and knowledgeable citizens who can apply their education in many different domains and to many different problems.

Besides, the department of Water has the same problem as the department of Computer Science – it does not give graduates a clear career path. What kind of job training would Dept. of Water provide? I could go out on a limb and argue that graduates from department of water don’t really need the broad theoretical background in water shortage related issues. Instead they should be taught applied salt water reclamation because that’s what most of them will probably end up doing.

You need to have a good basis in algorithms and higher math to be successful as a software engineer, and computer science provides that. That’s probably true for systems programmers. It’s not really true for the remaining 99% of software engineers, the vast majority of which will never do pointer arithmetic and shouldn’t really have to. (If you accept this argument, then you must also accept the notion that all plumbers must have the ability to smelt copper and forge their own pipes, because how could you possibly lay pipes effectively without having ever created one with your bare hands from elemental materials?) Otherwise, you’re just enforcing the priesthood of the technologist, which is not a good thing for the profession or for society.

Wow… Really? You are going to compare programmers to plumbers now? What happened to “Software Engineers”?

Throughout the entire article McManus uses the phrase “Software Engineering”. When see that label, I think about designing, and building very complex systems. You know – engineering stuff. Plumbers don’t build complex systems – they screw pipes together – usually use a blueprint given to them by someone with a degree in hydroelectric engineering. I’m sure most students who take CS at a university level have higher aspirations than making GUI buttons in Visual Studio – which is a comparable type of work to that of a plumber. To design these complex systems however they will need knowledge of algorithms.

Also, pointer arithmetic? Where did that come from? Pointer arithmetic is plumber work. You can teach an orangutan to do pointer arithmetic. That is not computer science at all.

To Summarize

McManus is dead wrong because he either does not understand what computer science is, or pretends that he doesn’t for the sake of the argument. He is either quite good at trolling, or he is ignorant accidentally created something twice as inflammatory as he intended to because his complete lack of understanding of the subject.

Computer Science is an academic subject. It is a very expansive field of study that extends above and beyond what McManus seems to deem practical “applied software engineering”. In my CS career I have worked on a quite diverse set of projects:

• Protein molecule folding (biochemistry)
• Genome analysis (biology and bioinfomatics)
• Unattended automatic database integration (database theory)
• Simulating excitable media using cellular automata (medical field & cardiology)
• Feature extraction and hyperspectral image processing (aeronautics and military applications)
• Online Commerce Applications (shopping cart, product ratings, etc)
• Practical Steganography applications (we devised a way to embed lyrics directly into mp3 files)

A friend of mind did a thesis on intelligent text parsing and built a system capable to auto-magically grade homeworks to a certain degree of accuracy. Bunch of kids I knew designed a galactic collision simulator for the physics department. I don’t know – maybe I was just lucky to end up in a cool, agile and flexible department run by a lot of passionate people. But you know what – I got to work on a lot of interesting projects from various fields. And as I was working on these projects I was thankful that the university and the department had the foresight to make me take all the prerequisite science and mathematics classes, because they were fucking useful and relevant to just about everything I was doing.

My department also forced me to learn not just Java but C++, Perl, and Lisp. And because I was already multi-lingual I went ahead and learned Python and Ruby for fun, and LaTex to write my Masters Thesis.

The degree opened my eyes and taught me that I could use my skills in many different ways. I could actually do science wit it. I could work with other scientist and solve really interesting problems. I could work for the military… Or NASA. Or I could go into medical infomatics and work with healthcare providers. I did not have to sit in a cubicle and write Java back end applications for a bank or financial company.

And sure, I actually had 3 semesters worth of Software Engineering instruction which was actually very, very useful. But it was not the focus of the program. Especially since I did not exactly end up being a software engineer. I ended up becoming an IT Admin and PHP hacker, but it was mostly circumstantial and random. Thanks to my education however I was able to quickly pick up the new skills and adapt. And I could do it again, and dive into a drastically different technology niche if I had to.

McManus however seems to think that the only thing we should be teaching kids is how to build enterprise level web applications using, I don’t know, Java and Agile methodology. That’s dangerously short sighted.

One semester I had two girls give a presentation on history of computing, and between them they pronounced ENIAC in about seven different ways, none of which were right. Another semester I had a guy who did a pretty decent job talking about mobile computing but… Well, his resources were at least 5 years out of date somehow. He never mentioned the iPhone or Android and his presentation implied that things like localization, and high-def phone cameras, ubiquitous data coverage and augmented reality apps will be things of the future. I ended up giving him full credit, because he technically fulfilled all the project requirements – only docking few points for failing to check date relevance of his data. Oh, and there was also that one girl who claimed that hackers have been messing up the internets since the 1800’s. Granted, that example is mostly a typo but a rather funny one.

I generally don’t mind when students do their projects about non-tech related stuff. Especially since the entire thing is more about the process rather than the content. And it sometimes it actually works quite well. In the past I listened to a passionate presentation about the literary works of Kurt Vonnegut, an in depth study about the causes and treatments for Malaria, and amusing insights into the elusive worlds of competitive river dancing and cut-throat whiffleball pitching competitions. That said, I usually encourage people to write about technology, and provide them with a near little file called project_topic_suggestions.pdf which outline a 20-odd different interesting topics that could be worth looking into.

Everyone’s favorite topic from that list is of course social networking. Everyone wants to do that one, and I usually end up parceling it out into chunks on a first come, first serve basis. The first group to approach me gets to talk about facebook itself. The second gets to write about social networking in general. The third has to focus on internet privacy issues but go beyond just social networks and etc..
I also have topic suggestions that suffer from the opposite problem. No one ever wants to touch them. For example, at some point I added software patents as a possible research area, but no one ever took this bait. I suspect that my students simply don’t care about that issue as much as I do. And why would they? They are not programmers, so in theory the debate on validity of software and process patentability does not involve them, even though it really does. The legal blackmail, and patent licensing deals have direct impact on software prices, and solvency of small indie dev shops – and the customers will feel the impact of these back-room deals deep in their wallets. But the whole thing is so abstract that it does not even register on the radar of non-programmers.

Future of computing is also one of the avoided topics. I basically ask students to look into things like quantum computing, bio-computing, developments in artificial intelligence, progress in robotics and etc… You would figure that at least one per year, there would be a futurist in the classroom who would jump on that. But no. No one cares about my pet “trawl singularity hub for bleeding edge stories about computing and see which ones stick” project.

Then there are topic suggestions that are no longer relevant or interesting, even though they once were. Here are couple of examples:

Back in the mid 00’s I added topic called “Software Monoculture” suggesting that students take a long hard look at Microsoft’s dominance in the OS market and their impact on software ecosystem as a whole. I wanted them to see how smaller companies can be completely wiped from existence on Microsoft’s whim, how they embrace and extend open standards into oblivion, and what do these things mean for the industry. This was a big thing in the last two decades, but as I mentioned the other day, we are in a much, much healthier place right now. Microsoft is no longer the 800 pound gorilla able to bully the entire computing world, and the explosion of mobile and web services made platform independent design the norm rather than the exception. So the entire topic is slightly outdated – more of a historical footnote than anything else at this point.

Another extremely topical subject: folksonomies. Remember when this was a thing? It exploded in the early 00’s and revolved around the neat idea that you can add a semantic layer to your web services, by crowd sourced tagging systems. The expectation was that once the system has enough users, some sort of tagging consensus would emerge from the initial chaos. Back then it seemed like a huge thing and a lot of companies jumped on the bandwagon. Technorati became the leading tagging service for the blogosphere, Flickr became the folksonomy hub for picture sharing. In 2007 an empirical study on online tagging systems was published, proving that the idea was actually sound. In most large folksonomies and ontological consensus did emerge, even in the absence of centralized vocabularies. Crowd sourcing categorization and organization of your data turned out to be a valid, albeit chaotic and unpredictable approach to semanticizign the web. But by that time no one cared anymore. Tagging and tag clouds became a standard feature in most web services and by extension ceased to be a hot buzzword. I have not heard the actual term “folksonomy” uttered in years. So this topic will likely get nixed by next semester. No reason to include something that is no longer relevant.

What topics should I add to my list? What would be topical, relevant and interesting research topics for today? What kind of things could I give to non-techies that would be both relevant to their mundane analog lives, but also would trick them into learning more about the wonderful digital garbage dump of awesomeness the rest of us live?

I taught this course for several years now so I have noticed several interesting trends. I’m actually kinda upset that I never thought to collect some anonymous statistical information from my students. Nothing personal – basically what OS they use, which browser they prefer (and whether they know what a browser is), what search engine do they use, what kind of broadband connection do they have, whether they use a laptop or a desktop, etc… It would be very interesting to have some actual data that would show me how these things change over time.

In the absence of solid data here are some of my casual non-scientific observations:

Dialup is a fable

No one uses dialup anymore. When I started teaching, I would usually ask my students how many of them had dialup, and see a few hands going up. Each semester less people would raise their hand, until there were none. I started asking people if they have ever used dialup – and initially some people did admit to using it. Now when I ask this question I usually hear crickets in the room. This semester someone told me that their grandparents used to have dialup “a long time ago”. Another student was bewildered by the concept of a modem – a mysterious magical device that can turn “the internet” into sound wave type signal that can be transmitted over a phone line.

Floppies are funny

This semester when I brought some floppy disks to class. First I picked up the 3 1/2 inch disk and told them how it could only fit about 1MB which is less than your average mp3 song. Then I pulled out the 5 1/4 inch floppy and few people cracked a smile at the size of it. So I grabbed the 8 inch floppy and everyone lost it. All I need now is few more props and I can totally be a prop comedian like Carrot Top… You know, minus the incredibly goofy look.

Thumb drives are on the way out

I would say that cloud storage has caught on with the masses but that wouldn’t be true. What is true however is that most mail services have decent sized mailboxes these days. This means that college kids can now implement their own cloud storage solution without worrying about space limitations. This scheme is called “let me email this to myself”. I hate when people use email for storage, but hey – it works. It even does versioning – as a side effect of course. None of my students would ever consider a version control anything – but you just can’t update an email attachment in place. Not via webmail at least. So they must email themselves the same document as they work on it.

There are still some students using thumb drives to store their homework, but this is a fading trend. Besides email, the increasing popularity of laptops and notebooks is another contributing factor that will eventually kill off the thumb drives on college campuses.

Macs are increasingly more common

When I was a GA back in 2004 I was actually surprised to see mac users in my classes. This is no longer the case. Last semester I had about 5 or 6. This semester I believe the number was close to 10. That’s out of 25 students.

You would think that this would be a good thing, right? Mac users are usually Windows converts. This means they have been exposed to two operating systems. They knew one way to do things, then they had to learn another way. This usually dislodges something in your brain and causes you go “Aha… OSX and Windows do the same things in conceptually similar ways, even though the details are different”. This is the clue that Windows only users are missing. Once this idea pops into your head, computers cease to be these arcane magical devices and start make some sense. Or at least it was true in the past – almost every single Mac user in the class possessed at least a tiny amount of clue. They were a joy to work with.

But as Macs started gaining mainstream acceptance it seems that users developed strategies to switch operating systems without ever obtaining the clue. As a result, they are the most difficult students to work with. They can’t open OOXML files, they can’t do the HTML file because TextPad automatically goes into WYSIWYG mode when you use it to open a web page. They also love to submit homework in weird file formats. This semester several people sent me .pages documents.

Btw, this is how you peek into .pages file:

1. Rename to .zip
2. Unzip it
3. Go to the folder you just unzipped and locate the QuickLook directory inside
4. Open Preview.pdf

I believe this method only gives you a preview of the first page, but fortunately this was all I really needed (the homeworks are usually short).

The awareness of Wifi security issues remains constant

I always ask my students the following question: “Why are wired networks more secure than wireless ones?” The student reaction is the same every semester. It is a blank empty stare. So I wait. Invariably someone finally blurts out one word:

“Encryption?”

I should be used to this by now. It never, ever changes. And yet, I die a little bit inside every single time they do this to me. Sigh… You can actually see it in their faces – none of them has ever actually considered that when you use a Wifi network your data is literally flying through the air, where anyone can intercept it.

Fun fact: the students who loudly express that war driving is “really creepy” are usually the same students who openly admit to stealing wifi from their neighbors.

Students don’t do phone calls anymore

I give my students my Google Voice number in case they need assistance. I also put that number on the syllabus and in the CMS where it can be easily available. No one has ever called me. Not a single student. When I used to put the extension of the adjunct office on the syllabus, I used to get messages from students and I would always get them like a week late because I would be on campus only once or twice a week, and would sometimes forget to check the messages (and I never really bothered to figure out how to do this remotely). But since I got google voice, not a single phone call.

Quite a few students texted me on that number. We communicate via text or email. That said, I usually try to reply students as soon as I see an email or text hit my blackberry – even if just to say “I will look into this”. So maybe they haven’t had a reason to call.

So this is my list of reflections. Maybe I will start collecting random statistical data via an optional anonymous survey next semester. It will probably take me a little while to see new trends emerging. Sigh… I could have been doing this since 2004. Why didn’t i think of it back then?

All in all, it served me well for over a year. Lately though I started having problems with it. It would just stop working for me in the middle of the class forcing me to use the keyboard to advance slides. Students were slowly getting accustomed to the 5 minutes of extra time at the start of the lecture as I tinkered with the damn contraption. Sometimes I was able to coerce it to work. Other times, I had to stop messing with it and start the class.

Eventually I figured out what was wrong with it. The spring that holds the single AAA battery in place lost some of it’s “springiness”. It became less “springy”. It “de-springified” itself, so to say. As a result and the battery gained unexpected freedom of choice. It could choose to stay in place or slide slightly out of position. The battery cover was not designed support it, and it did not hold it in place. Instead it gave it just enough space to slip off the connector, but not enough space to rattle around. So you wouldn’t know the battery was lose, until you popped the cover up, and pushed it back in.

Any sudden movement had the potential of shaking the battery out of alignment again, forcing you to pop the cover again to restore power to the device. It’s actually very distracting when you are trying to teach something.

So I decided it is time for a new “clicker”. I also decided I’m not going to go for the cheapest thing available this time around. I believe that the Targus was pretty much the crappiest model available, and I’m actually amazed it lasted that long. It was sort of an experiment – I actually didn’t know I would use it so much. I ended up liking it, and now I consider the clicker/laser pointer combo to be an indispensable tool.

I believe that if you are going to be using something a lot, then it’s probably a good idea to invest a little bit of money into it. For example, I spend most of the hours in my day typing on a keyboard and using a mouse. I go to work, and I type and mouse around for about 8 hours. Then I go back home only to type and mouse around some more.

It is in my best interest to ensure that the keyboard and the mouse I use so much are of decent quality. That’s why I’m using the Sidewinder mouse and the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Both are high end items that I paid premium for, but hey – it was worth it. You can save on other things, but these two items are essential tools that I use both for work an for play.

Same goes for the “clicker”. I teach once or twice a week, and I sometimes do get to present in front of people for other purposes. It is not an essential tool for my job, but it helps. So I picked the Logitech Cordless 2.4 GHz Presenter which was one of the higher end toys. I don’t think it’s top of the line, but it seemed like a good investment. Besides, I never really had a bad experience with Logitech products – their mice and keyboards are usually very dependable. So I was hoping they use the same quality control for their “clicker” things. Here is a picture for you:

Yes, it does look a little bit like an electric shaver/hair trimmer from afar. It’s smaller than that though. It is much smaller than that. Something that big would be impractical. Here is another picture, this time with someones hand so that you can see the scale of this thing:

As you can see, it’s quite handy. It fits well in your hand, and is larger than the Targus model, which is actually a good thing. You can get a better grip on it, and the sleek elongated shape makes it easier to hold while you are pointing at things. The USB connector slides right into the unit which means I won’t loose it or forget it as easily. It always annoyed me that the Targus model did not provide this feature.

One of the very crucial things with these presentation tools is that they absolutely need to work out of the box. I need to be able to walk into a classroom, plug it in and go. Installing drivers is out of the question since the school machines are pretty tightly locked down. I’m happy to report that this model worked flawlessly under Windows XP. I haven’t tested it under Vista yet, but I assume it won’t be much different.

And yes, it has an LCD screen. Why would it have and LCD screen? Well, it’s a timer which is what really sold me on this model. You see, keeping track of time has always been an issue for me. When I do presentations, I’m in full screen mode which means I don’t see the clock on the screen. So if I need to check the time, I have to look at my watch… Which is my cellphone. Yeah, I actually don’t own any wrist mounted watches that work – the batteries run out in all of them, and I have been to lazy to go see a clock-master-repairman-guy to perform the sacred ritual of battery replacement.

Yeah, I did replace my watch batteries once or twice but half of the time the operation involved me putting dents and scratches into the back panel, loosing the rubber insulation parts and not sealing the thing properly. So I’d rather give the nicer, more expensive watches to a professional. But I’m kindoff scared – there is an off-chance that I do in fact have latent superpowers (something that I have always suspected) and the watch-guy may turn out to by Sylar and he will remove my brain or something.

Ok, that was a Heroes Season 1 reference if you haven’t caught it. I haven’t really watched the show since then – I will need to catch up one day. The first few episodes of season 2 failed to capture my attention. But I digress..

Back to presentations, and checking time. Looking at my cell phone is probably not the best time keeping solution. It’s hard to do it discretely. I would sometimes take it out, and put it on the desk for easy access, but most of the time I forget and leave it on my belt clip. So if I need to check the time, I have to reach for my belt, un-clip the phone and push a button so that the front LCD display lights up. The Logitech Presenter tool has a built in timer that you can set yourself. It’s actually very easy one-button set up. Each time you press the “timer” button you add 5 minutes to the counter and it starts counting down back to zero. At any time you can glance at the display to see how much time you have left. When the countdown reaches 5 minutes it will alert you with a slight vibration. It will do it again at the 2 minute mark to let you know it’s time to wrap up. The signal is inaudible when you hold it in your hand. It can also be a bit startling at first. I knew it was coming, but it sort of surprised me during my first lecture. You get used to it though, and it is a very helpful.

This particular “clicker” comes with a nice little protective case you can slide it into so that it doesn’t get too bumped up in your backpack. The button locations are pretty good, and the laser pointer is bright and… Pointy?

I only used it couple of times, but so far it has been performing flawlessly. I must say I’m happy with the purchase, and I recommend it to anyone searching for a good presentation tool. The timer is a life saver, and it is worth getting it fro that feature alone.

On the final exam I decided to include an extra credit question to see how many students have retained any understanding of that lab session. It asked the students to draw two squares of different color on the canvas and it was worth 10 points that would get added to the student’s total score. I wasn’t really looking for 100% correct solution – merely an attempt that would show some degree of understanding of the question.

Since the question was optional and also non-trivial, I expected many people to skip it. Surprisingly quite a few students answered it with a high degree of correctness. In fact, I was surprised that more people attempted to answer the LOGO question rather than a very similar optional question which asked them to write down the syntax for a HTML table. But perhaps it’s because the HTML exercise we did was right after the midterm, while the LOGO lab was 2 weeks before the final so it was still fresh in their memory.

Most of the answers were either correct, or close to be correct. Only one made me laugh out loud though. And it’s not because I’m an evil bastard and I laugh at students failure. It’s because it was a genuine attempt at humor. I decided to scan it in and share it with you:

Get it? I said “Write Tortue Logo code” and he did. Anyways, I found it amusing. I reminded me of the infamous find x problem that has been passed around on the Internets for ages now:

Find x is so ancient it doesn’t even seem to have an original source. That is, I’m sure there is one but I have no clue what it could be because just about every blog, forum and image board has posted and re-posted it a hundred times over without any attribution. In fact, I have seen people claiming that this image is not actual genuine scan from a test, but just something that someone did as a joke. Perhaps, but the limited amount of teaching experience that I have tells me that it probably is genuine. Especially since now I have my own variation on the same theme.

The question is – was this a homage, or an original attempt at humor that just turned out to be derivative. Cause, as you probably know we have exhausted almost all original content left in the universe around the turn of the century (if not earlier) and almost everything that is being created now re-uses old themes, tropes and ideas. This is especially true for internet culture which thrives on memetics, repetition and self referential humor.

Then there are things that should not be automated, mechanized or put online. One of these things is test taking. I dislike taking electronic tests, and as a rule I avoid giving them. I simply think they do not work as well as most people think they do. Sure, they are easy to administer, easy to grade, and easy to generate and randomize. You can build a database of questions, rate them by challenge level, and randomly generate unique tests of equal difficulty ad infinitum. But I believe they are not entirely fair to the students who take them.

For one, students are trained to take paper based tests. In most schools and universities, nearly all exams are administered using traditional methods such as blue books, or Scantron sheets or simple printouts that students fill out by hand and turn in. When you ask them to take an online test, you are working against years of conditioning and test taking habits. They are faced with unfamiliar format, unfamiliar input methods and a new interface. In fact a lot of test taking engines introduce distracting or stressful features that may negatively impact final scores.

For example, some electronic tests like to display the test score, or notify the taker whether they got the question right or wrong immediately after they have submitted the answer. I believe this is a mistake as it may easily create a negative feedback loop. A student who gets many questions in a row wrong, gets progressively more and more stressed. Each wrong answer adds to the pressure to the point of panic where most of the concentration is lost.

Displaying a ticking clock, elapsed time, or time left for the test may have similar effect. Students often start to do a lot of random guessing when they notice they are behind the clock. This goes double for engines which require that questions are answered within some specific time limit. Especially if test penalizes you for leaving blank answers.

These distractions and negative feedback loops do not exist in paper based tests. Students have unlimited amount of time to work on each question, and can keep track of the elapsed time at their own measure. They also do not know whether or not they got a given question right or wrong so they do not have to think about their score until after the test. Naturally, over time they could learn to ignore these types of distracting feedback. But this takes practice, and requires a uniform interface. But as I mentioned above, most students do not get to take online exams very often and thus lack the familiarity with the medium.

Electronic tests require a different test taking strategy. For example, one of the fundamental test taking tips is to skip difficult questions and then get back to them at the end. This prevents you from getting stuck on a difficult problem, and loosing too much time. Good test takers will tackle problems in an increasing order of difficulty to maximize the number of correct questions. Is this possible with electronic tests?

It really depends on implementation. Some test engines do not provide this functionality. Others do it by looping the questions around. When you deplete the list of questions, it starts showing you your skipped questions. Unfortunately most implementations do not allow for the level or prioritization allowed by a paper based test.

Electronic tests also do not allow you to back-track and “fix” the previously answered question. Test takers are often discouraged from doing this, implying that their first instinct is usually correct. Of course one has to remember most tests are flawed in such way that one question may give hints for solving a previous one. I will give you an example. Let’s say a test taker is asked for a definition of a buzzword, given 4 choices. He eliminates two of them right off the bat but not knowing the definition he makes a guess. Later on, the buzzword comes up again in one of the answers and through elimination the test taker is able to extrapolate that the have answered the previous question wrong.

Some people may say this is irrelevant, because the test taker did not know the answer to begin with. But the ability to connect the two questions, and correct the answer shows that the test taker is good at logically reasoning out hard problems based on given information. It may also indicate deeper understanding of the subject at hand. This is more valuable than mere ability to regurgitate memorized material and should be rewarded.

Electronic tests hardly ever allow you to change an answer that was already given. In fact, test engines that immediately indicate success or failure to answer a question make this type of reasoning impossible.

Not to mention that the test takers attention span may be different depending on the medium. It has been shown by countless studies that people tend to get bored and distracted with electronic, online and on-screen media much faster than with paper based media. That’s why most Youtube videos are short. That’s why blog posts tend to be short, and digestible in one sitting. So using medium that is commonly associated with fast paced, short attention span, burst communication to administer a long, drawn out test is not the best idea. Because of this attention span dissonance, a lot of electronic tests tend to seem more draining and exhausting than they should be.

These are the reasons why I dislike taking, and/or giving tests using electronic medium. I prefer good old scantron technology which combines a paper based test with a machine assisted grading. You just need to make sure you bring #2 pencils for everyone.

Of course, if you ignore the attention span problem, it would be possible to design an electronic test that would aim to emulate paper based experience. Make it look like an actual test booklet with several questions per page. Each question would have an active area where the student would check or type in answers. The engine would allow the student to scroll up and down, and flip pages, answer questions in random order even read the whole test without answering any questions without penalty. It would also have to allow the student to go back and fix previous answers at any time. In fact, such an interface could be easily designed using the all-present Web 2.0 design style and philosophy. But I haven’t seen anything like that in use yet. Have you?

Besides, a multiple choice tests can be machine-graded whether they are administered online or not as long as you use Scantron or similar scannable test sheets. Essay questions on the other hand must be graded “by hand” regardless of the medium. Online versions remove the issues with deciphering illegible handwriting, but other than that offer the same grading experience. So why not give students the paper based tests they are used to. If for nothing else, just for the tactile experience.

These addresses are incredibly common. Chances are, that if you have a shell account on some unix system somewhere the PUBLIC_HTML folder in your home directory maps to a publicly accessible URL just like that. Hell, you don’t even need a shell account. Any service running on top of a *nix stack that allows you to host more or less complex web pages will be using addresses like that.

Those of us with linux and unix experience know this pattern intuitively. The fun starts when you try to spell out your URL to a complete technological neophyte. Average user has no clue what a tilde is.

Man, I really apologize for using this stupid meme

I’ve been doing this for quite a while now and it almost impossible to give this sort of URL to people in any other form than a clickable link. You just can’t spell it out:

You say “tilde” and you get a blank stare. Swung dash or a wave dash are not much better.

You refer to it as the “squiggle”, “the squiggly line” or “the wavy thing” and they begin to suspect you are just fucking with them.

Really, the only reliable way to tell students what key to press is to say it is to the left of number 1 key on the keyboard and hope they can distinguish left from right. But if they press it, they get the tick-mark so you need to remind them to press it with a Shift key. Which means you sort of have to stop spelling, and get this awkward sentence out:

“Now, press shift, and the key directly to the left of number 1 key on the main keyboard (not the number pad) together”

If everyone is sitting at a keyboard, this may have a chance of working. Still, You will likely find out that some people have funky non-standard keyboard where tilde is done by pressing Fn+Shift+Scroll Lock or something equally stupid. Other people will tune out either the first or the last part of the sentence and either press and hold shift, or insert a tic-mark into the URL. If your students are not sitting at a keyboard, you might as well not even bother. They won’t retain the location of the key, won’t write it down, and will claim they couldn’t access the website later on.

You can’t write it on the board because they won’t be able to copy it properly. You can’t give it to them in a handout because they will just skip that character. Yes, roughly 60% of my students can’t access my webpage given a hard copy of the syllabus. And it’s not just at the begging of the class. I’d be fine if I only had to explain this once at the begging of the semester, but my students just don’t retain this info no matter what I do. I go through this awkward thing every single week and I’m sick of it.

I have been thinking about a solution for this issue for a while now and came up with 3 potential courses of action:

1. Host my course related stuff somewhere else
2. Buy a cheep domain name
3. Use a free subdomain

First alternative is not very attractive. I have this web space provided by the university under a .edu address and I don’t really feel like relocating my files elsewhere and paying for hosting out of my own pocket. So number 1 is out.

Number 2 is a bit better. I looked around for cheap domains and I noticed that .info is essentially worthless. At the time of writing this Godaddy.com was selling .info domains for $0.99. That’s per year folks. I don’t know – that seems dirt cheap to me. I think I could totally swallow 99 cents per year for the sake of convenience.

Then there is number 3, which is just like number 2 but less expensive. The only difference is that I would not get a nice domain name of my own. I would have to settle for a nice subdomain.

In case you didn’t know, there are plenty of services on the web where you can get a subdomain for free. I mean, you you could set this up yourself. Once you buy a domain, you can set up as many c-names as you want, redirecting subdomains to different IP’s or ULR’s. There are sites out there that have pools of reserved domains for that very purpose.

Probably the most popular, and least shady of these is DynDNS. They are probably best known for providing free subdomains for computers with dynamic IP addresses. For example, you might remember my private NetHack server used to be located at luke.kicks-ass.org. That was a dyndns subdomain – I didn’t actually pay for something as silly as that. I simply signed up with them, installed a small updater app and bound my dynamic IP to that address. But they do more than just basic DNS mapping.

Their WebHop service does exactly what we need here. It is a redirect to an existing URL, combined with an optional domain masking.

Only issue here is a small choice of intuitive and easy to remember domain names. Most of them are either hard to remember (well, for people who can’t figure out tilde at least) – like dyndns.com, silly and informal (kicks-ass.com), or cryptic (mine.nu). Not a great selection for a course related site but it might work for you. It worked well for my nethack server for example.

There are dozens of other services like that all over the web. ShortURL is another one, with it’s own pool of silly domains. Once again, I haven’t found anything remotely memorable or usable on their list, but it does not disqualify it as a service.

In fact, just check out the Guide to Free URL Redirection site for a very comprehensive list. Especially look at the Shortest Free Url’s section for a good selection of 3-4 letter domains. Caveat Emptor: some of these sites will inject popups and/or advertising frames when redirecting so be careful.

90% of them are useless to me at this point. At least for this particular school related project. But I’m putting this here because I know someone will be able to use them just like I did for that server. A lot of these domains are great for personal web pages and/or myspace profiles. I actually know few people who created a dyndns accound just so that they could have a kicks-ass.org subdomain.