One of the best aspects of my job as computer science professor is that I
keep learning new stuff. This semester, I am teaching a software engineering
class. Cinequest, the organization that puts
on the annual San Jose film festival, approached the CS department, asking for
help with their mobile initiative. We jumped at the chance, and now my students
are hard at work designing and prototyping...
When I traveled to the U.S. as a nerdy teenager, I was fascinated by those laminated reference cards. It seemed yet another example of boundless American optimism that one can cram an entire semester's worth of information into two pages.
When Jill Tomich from dzone approached me to do a digital version of such a reference card for JavaServer Faces, I remembered that and agreed. Jill did a...
Being a Linux user, I watched those applet dragging demos with envy when they only worked on Windows. When the release candidate of JDK 6 update 10 (now there is a product name only a mother could love...) came out, I was eager to try it out on Linux. Initially, I was held back by a factor entirely beyond my control, i.e. my cluelessness and unwillingness to read the docs. Thanks to Aaron Houston...
This semester, I am teaching the undergraduate programming languages course
at SJSU, a required course for CS majors. The course has two objectives:
To give students significant exposure to a programming paradigm other
than OO
To make students understand the process of translating a high-level
language into machine (or VM) code
The canonical way to meet these objectives is to teach...
In this blog I reflect on what I learned during my summer vacation, about
standards, folding travel beds, and snatching defeat from the jaws of
victory.
1. It's About Standards, Stupid
I spent the summer
in Switzerland (as a guest lecturer in the international summer school at HEIG-VD) and in Germany. In Switzerland, the
visiting students were very cell-phone savvy--they picked up a SIM card at...
