Category Archives: school and teaching

I might be wrong about this, but I’m partial to the gauntlet method of teaching introductory programming courses. You make the class as challenging and difficult on purpose and make the students sweat. Hit them hard and as early as … Continue reading →

Yesterday evening I created a small pishing demo for my class tonight. I essentially scraped the ebay login site, and made the POST action on the login form forward to a an aptly named pwnt.html. The idea was to illustrate … Continue reading →

Yesterday I went on some sort of massive rant about Java, and programming languages in general. It’s actually kinda ironic that it took me a little over 2500 words to essentially say “I somehow always knew Java was to verbose … Continue reading →

Blackboard sucks. This is the opinion shared by roughly 95% of faculty at my university. But this is what we have, and a crappy course management system is still better than no course management system. So we are stuck with … Continue reading →

I never thought that I will need one of those, but I bought myself a clicker. To be frank, I have no clue what is the proper name for these things but I call it a clicker. What does it … Continue reading →

Since I’m teaching again this semester, so over the holiday break I set up a little website where I could post links, resources and various interactive things that don’t really work well with blackboard. I used my Novell Netdrive account … Continue reading →

The other day I gave one of my sections their final exam. The thing is mostly multiple choice but I do give them couple of optional open ended questions at the end of the test so that they can make … Continue reading →

Apparently some adjuncts teaching CMPT-109 are telling students to create their web pages on Geocities. I’m sorry, but WTF? I didn’t even know that geocities even existed. Sure, they were a big contender back in the midst of .com boom, … Continue reading →

I hate blackboard. I really, really hate blackboard. But it’s better than nothing. Anyone else has this sort of love/hate relationship with the world’s worst course management system? What is pissing me off about Blackboard today? It’s the grade book … Continue reading →

From my email: Lukasz, Due to security reasons related to your pegasus account it has been disabled. Please contact us at csamhelp when you have a chance so we can discuss reactivation. Thanks, Oh noes! 8O Wait. I just remembered … Continue reading →

By this time of the day I’m getting tired of talking about it. But let me do this again for the sake of completion. Next time someone asks me, I can just refer them to this post and not have … Continue reading →

Yep, the defense is tomorrow: Wish me luck! [tags]thesis, masters thesis, ms thesis, thesis defense, defense[/tags]

Just a quick update before I call it a night. I finalized my thesis paper on Thursday and sent it to the committee. In it’s final version the paper was 105 pages long. That and a little over 6000 lines … Continue reading →

People always ask me how many lines I wrote for my thesis research project. I really don’t keep track of details like that – I just concentrate on accomplishing the goals and getting results. But I figured that I should … Continue reading →

I just found out that my thesis extension caused an infinite loop in the MSU administration procedures. Let me explain this: I can’t get a grade for the thesis “course” until I finish and defend it. I can’t finish my … Continue reading →

I just heard that there was a big power outage at MSU just now. I started pinging various hosts on campus and it seems that most of the infrastructure managed by the CORE group just went down. And I suspect … Continue reading →

I know that several people from MSU read this blog, so here is a question: why can’t I do VPN when I’m on campus? Whenever I try to establish some sort of ppt connection with the outside world I get … Continue reading →

Crap! How did he know about this: comic © phd – click to enlarge Actually, it’s going better than this. I’m really close to finishing it. I just got back the revisions from my ultra-pre-alpha rough draft, and it has … Continue reading →

I saw this flier pined on a bulletin board outside of the Computer Science Department at MSU the other day: At first I thought this might be a Computer Science class on translation algorithms. That would actually be kinda cool … Continue reading →

Randoms screenshot of the stuff I’m currently working on: click to enlarge The scrolling text on the left side is the output being generated on one of the test machines at school. It is running in a screen session, and … Continue reading →

I just did a batch of test runs of my NMF code, and I noticed that I forgot to capture the elapsed execution time in the code for the projected gradient approach. I also forgot to use the time command … Continue reading →

Hehe: comic © phdcomics.com; click to enlarge Damn Santa… [tags]thesis, research, comics, phd, school[/tags]

I have been messing around with Google Maps API at work, trying to create a nice overlay showing all the cities in which we provide services. It’s still a work in progress, but I decided to have some fun with … Continue reading →

I just noticed that Montclair has revamped the CSAM website. This is both good and bad. Old site was outdated, and butt ugly. However, the new one has been designed by the same crew of lame mantards who decided to … Continue reading →

I wish I found this one when I was teaching Fluency in Technology at MSU. It could have been a really fun way to show them binary conversions: Binary Fun Flash Game by jw.art The time limit is a little … Continue reading →