Dave Kellam

There are some articles popping up on news sites about Northface University, a new computer science school in the States, that’s heavily backed by corporate sponsors (not that most schools aren’t). You pay $60000, do a CS degree in two and a half years and get a bunch of certifications. I equate it with a diploma mill or maybe a nerd mill. Yeah, they’re going to pound out good corporate citizens that have tons Microsoft and IBM training, but they won’t be well-rounded.

Meanwhile, my school has been heading in the other direction, trying to give their computer science students a more balanced education. I was one of the first to get a redundant sounding degree, that I can see them renaming: Bachelor of Computing, Subject of Specialization Computing. It’s essentially the same program as the old B.Sc but they require at least 5.0 credits to be in courses other than Math or Stats and 1.5 of those credits in the humanities.

One of the big things that people are starting to realize is that computing is everywhere now. It’s not just mathematical theory and producing hardware. Almost everyone in a modern environment uses some form of computing at home and work every day. And they’re not all dorks. What may seem like a simple and intuitive interface to the programmer is not for the end-user. Computer Science should act as a technological bridge between Arts and Science; their needs to be programmers with backgrounds in fields like biology, chemistry, economics, english, and fine arts, that help produce intuitive software.

The world needs hardcore dorks like the ones Northface will produce. But we’ll also need computer scientists who understand people as well machines, so we can stave off a citizen’s revolt against computers and technology.

Was sick of the red. Here’s something different but the same.

Depending on how long you’ve know about this site, you may or may not remember Conform. It’s a project that I used to run for Suffocate.org (an old group of designers). I decided to revive it about a month ago and received pretty good response. I’ve been almost finished for awhile, and I wanted to have at least four images finished before it went live.

Parts of the design are a bit hacked, but it should probably be valid CSS (I haven’t checked yet). It may look like shit in some browsers, it’s fine for now though. I could sit around and keep tweaking it but i’d never get it finished. There are some things I still have left to finish, like the bottom tagline thingy, it will have more variations. And the etc section, it’s empty right now. The archives are sparse too.

It’s now loose on the world. With that, I’m going to return to Brockville for a night and then go camping for a night, so I won’t be around to fix problems. yea.

the Conform Project — Go there and check it out.

I figured it was time to post some fun stuff on Bush; considering there’s an American election coming up and I wasn’t a big fan of him last time he ran.

First off, Bush was a cheerleader in college. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just seems kind a gay. I’m told he’s not big fan.

Next up, there’s the ol’ nosepickin’ video. We all go digging, but we don’t all own the Texas Rangers and have designs on national office.

And some tidbits from a Washington Post article, circa the 1999 campaign. This first one’s fun:

In the fall of 1967, when huge numbers of college students were marching on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, Bush was quoted in the New York Times defending the branding of fraternity pledges with a hot coat hanger, saying the resulting wounds resembled “only a cigarette burn.”

Looks like he had a penchant for torture nice and early in his career. Or at least claiming that it wasn’t torture. Ha ha, easy there Mr. Koppel, I call that the ‘Spirit Hood’.

I can’t always be harsh with Bush, sometimes he really does help give back to the people. The stellar athlete put in his dues and gave Yale and enduring legacy:

Stickball had always been played at Andover as a casual after-dinner pickup game, but Bush institutionalized it, his title duly noted in the school yearbook: “High Commissioner of Stickball.” He organized campus teams into a league that included every last uncoordinated soul who wanted to play. For this, many a former nerd is still grateful.

That’s about it, although a few more couldn’t hurt. He fell off his bike again, but that’s not surprising. Castro thinks all the coke Bush snorted and the booze he drank made him stupid. Bush was given elephant dung stationary by the Sri Lankans.

I watched I, Robot last night with Alanah; it’s good and it’s bad. Wired sums up the movie best, If you shut off your brain, it is fun to watch. If you’ve spent time thinking about robotics and a.i. and delve deeper into some of the plot elements the movie can get convoluted and stop making sense. The look and feel of the movie was pretty slick. Their vision of the future is a reasonable adaptation of modern cities and what technology we may see in the future.

I haven’t been hanging out with the computer that much the last little while, that means fewer posts. Next week I’m running a computer camp, so we’ll probably see a few more.

Summer does offer the opportunity to spend a lot of time outside; it’s fun to go wandering around downtown. Yesterday, I picked up three books from a cut-rate bookstore: The Erye Affair by Jasper Fforde, Moody Food by Roy Robertson, and In America by Susan Sontag. They should keep me busy for a little while. I also found a really cheap pair of shorts and t-shirt.

The design for the Conform Project is half-finished and the series has been started, so it should be appearing in the very near future.

Here are eight simple steps for securing your pc. If you use Windows, please… just do it. If you’re at Queen’s, you can get Symantec Anti-Virus for free from Packman.

1. Run Windows Update regularly.
2. Install ZoneAlarm (Firewall)
3. Buy and install NOD32 (Anti-Virus)
4. Install WinPatrol (Anti-Hijack)
5. Buy and install AdMuncher (Ad and Popup Blocker)
6. Install and run AdAware (Anti-Spyware)
7. Replace Internet Explorer and Outlook Express with Firefox & Thunderbird
8. Disable Autorun.

The list is completely ripped off from Everything Hurts.

The Estonians have won the Wife-Carrying Championship for the seventh straight year. The winners of the annual contest are awarded the wife’s weight in beer and a sauna. See previous posts (link 1, link 2).

On of my favourite quotes from an interview he did with Wired.

Alan Tudyk played Sonny, so he was there but had the tight green suit on. We kept calling him – and all the robots who had green suits on – the Irish speed-skating team.

I guess it’s really the concept of weird Irish Speed Skating team in my head. Apparently, if he got recruited by MIT but wanted to rap instead.

I would have made a billion dollars and been broke by now. I’ve always dreamed of a computerized classroom. You’d come in and the teacher wouldn’t have to take roll – every desk would have fingerprint roll. They could track you from one class to the other. Computer engineering would’ve been the only way for me to go.

It’s weird, I’d never really considered Will Smith as one of sci-fi’s champions. He’s done quite a bit of it though.

Gonna head down to a pub with Alanah to watch the final Euro 2004 game. On wednesday when we were watching Portugal win, there was an old English guy, an old Scottish guy and an old Irish guy sitting beside us. When the English guy left, the other two started mocking his mannerisms, it was pretty funny.

Haven’t posting much lately, guess I just haven’t been around the computer as much. Been doing a bit of work on the Conform Project and getting things ready to go soon.

Today, we receive news of yet another major Internet Explorer vulnerability. It seems that IE and Microsoft IIS server are working in tandem to infect computers on the internet. Point of the article? You should stop using Explorer. Why I liked it? One of the reasons is this quote:

He said Microsoft was aware that operating systems had vulnerabilities, but added that it was an industry-wide problem.

Software? Bugs? No way.

The other reason would be the inset picture near the bottom of the page, read the caption (screencap). They probably did a lot of poking around in the stock-photo archives to find a gem like that.

Brainfuck is a Turing-complete programming language that can be implemented with the smallest possible compiler. The language has eight statements that perform pointer operations.

Example: Hello World

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]
>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.
>.+++.——.——–.>+.>.

The programs tend to be a little on the complicated side. The programs can be run on a turing machine, which can accomplish any computing task.