, 2 min read
Suppose you want a program, or a process to be precise, to open 10,000 files simultaneously. For some reason, I thought that, by default, this would be possible, but it seems that Linux sets the the default limit to 1024 files on most distributions we checked. First of all, check how many files…
, 1 min read
Kurt shares with us his thoughts on software complexity: Over the years, I’ve noticed that in programming, as in other systems, there seems to be a fairly invariant rule out there: You can never eliminate complexity from a system, you can only move it from place to place. Yep. This is yet…
, 2 min read
According to the Guardian, we are on the brink of a revolution which includes China becoming an exporter of degrees: David Graddol, an applied linguist, said China, which has traditionally been a major source of international students, was repositioning itself as a net exporter of higher…
, 1 min read
China soon to export degrees?
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Workshop on Service Oriented Techniques at ICEC06
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My friend Yuhong is organizing a Workshop on Service Oriented Techniques at ICEC06. Yuhong is cool and the workshop looks quite respectable so if you are into this sort of thing, consider submitting a paper! Service oriented techniques are used for building software applications that use services…
, 1 min read
Some anti-McDo activists have come up with a “The Sims”-like McDonald’s Videogame. My wife spent the week-end playing. I think she managed to take the company up until 2045. The graphics and sounds are gorgeous and the simulation is really interesting. Appears to be Flash driven. I usually…
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Giving Efficient Distance Lectures on a Budget
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Web Service Stack Smelling like a Dead Corpse?
, 1 min read
As part of CS6905, I lecture from my basement near Montreal, to New Brunswick in Easter Canada. Sounds crazy? Well, according to my collaborators, this works well for everyone involved. We use webhuddle to broadcast the lectures. We are short of a video stream, but it seems that it is not a…
, 2 min read
Tim Bray wrote this morning: “I think the WS-stench of something WS-rotting from the WS-head down is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.” This is coming from the inventor of things like XML and Atom: while he might be wrong, he sures knows a lot about XML technologies so maybe we ought…
, 1 min read
I’m a vim user myself, and I’m unlikely to switch, but I find this claim that Eclipse is fast becoming the dominant non-Visual Studio IDE interesting: Here is my prediction: In five years Eclipse will be used in 70% of enterprise development regardless of the programming language (excluding…
, 1 min read
Firefox Extension Development Tutorial
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Through Downes, I got to this Firefox Extension Development Tutorial. Maybe I ought to try my hand at fixing the “browsers lack a good text editor” problem. Well, this will have to wait after I prepare my lectures for CS 6905, prepare week 7 of INF 6460, mark the homeworks for INF 6450, finish…
, 1 min read
When only 2.5% of your students are female
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The head of the CS Department at Purdue University is reporting that only 6 out of 155 freshmen are females. That’s a meagre 2.5%. Does it matter? Yes it does. When half the population thinks that a given field is without any interest, you have a serious problem. Elsewhere on this blog, I…
, 3 min read
I teach XML. It is neither a glorious nor a prestigious task, but it is fun. I must admit that I am quite a bit of a hacker. While I’m a trained mathematician and some of my papers contain highly non trivial mathematical results, I also enjoy the elegance and the simplicity of something like XML…
, 1 min read
Here are quotes from a nameless recruiter working for a nameless school: (…) The approach to discuss computer science with the legions of students who express interest in math and don’t know what to do with it, has not worked well. As a general rule the word “computer” is not associated in…
, 1 min read
Long File Support in GCC (C++)
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This is a boring technical post. GCC 3.4 has long file support builtin for C++ see the _GLIBCXX_USE_LFS flag in “c++config.h”. If you check the file “g++-v3/istream”, you’ll notice that the “seek get location” function is defined as “seekg(off_type)” where “off_type” is a…