Archive for December, 2006

Getting work done.

Friday, December 8th, 2006

There is an excellent post by Jason Fried on how to actually get some work done in an invasive work-environment. I was pointed to it here.

It seems funny that, while email is asynchronous, most people tend to answer their mails immediately upon receiving them. As Andy Smith indicated (point 3), IM can be used asynchronously too. But people seem to be even less inclined to use it that way. The bells ans whistles in the email, IM, and IRC applications are not very helpful. We should really try harder to use these tools in a way that benefits our workflow.

So, if I don’t answer your email/IM/IRC message as soon as you’d like, I’m most likely not dead, but simply trying to get a continuous workflow. Yes, ironically, I’m writing about this instead of continuing the work I was doing.

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Academic year shift

Friday, December 1st, 2006

Yesterday, a proposal was made by the KULeuven to shift the start of the academic year to September 1st, instead of October 1st. The rationale was that the exams could then take place prior to the christmas holidays (a two week holiday), and that students could then actually party without fearing the upcoming exams.

It seems that the students the national television interviewed were also proponents of this idea. This seems quite silly to me. First of all, a lot of students party for three months and start studying during the holidays. Second, the holidays effectively add two whole weeks of study, which increases the odds of passing the exams. Third, I think there will be no more time to have an extra week in which lessons can catch up in case of absence, or classes that were skipped due to days off during the semester. Now there are five to six weeks after the christmas holidays in which the exams can be organised, usually one week to catch up, if necessary, one week to study and then the exams spread over the rest of the examination period. Add to this two weeks of holidays to study, and then cram it all into four weeks, max. Indeed, there are twelve weeks of classes, i.e. that would be from September 1st to November 30th. Christmas holidays start the week in which December 24th falls (in time for yuletide). This gives students at most 23 days to study and do the exams.

Clearly, a silly proposal for silly students. Which increases the odds of it passing.

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On the joys of C

Friday, December 1st, 2006

Half a year ago, I posted about the lack of programming language knowledge the CS students have, and which they require for courses besides the actual programming courses. Yesterday I was assisting at a practicum on operating systems. The assignment was quite easy: add some code to get a working linux module that allows mounting and reading a tarball. To my horror, the following snippets were jotted down in the students favourite editor (pico). FYI, bd is a char*, and points to the header of the tarball. Find the errors. Pick your favourite one.

  String name;

  char *tmp;
  strncpy(tmp, bd[124], 12);

  bd.substring(124,136);

  printk("size = " + this_tar->fileinfo[next_inode].size)

And, oh joy! Who needs compiler warnings or errors anyway? Crap spouted to the screen can be safely ignored until we get a kernel oops, or better, a automatic reboot.

We really, really need to teach these kids something besides Java. There is supposedly a C course compiled by students that they very urgently need to read!

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