repl.ca

Mike was kind enough to point out the wikkid-cool new interface to the graduate course descriptions page. After slapping my forehead a few times, laughing hysterically, having a stiff drink, then praying to God, I decided I had to take action. I created a stronger, faster, better than before version using javascript and css, viewable here. My new implementation of the graduate course descriptions page retains the hard to use ugly-as-sin interface of the current page, while adding the following features: Content stored in regular google-parsable html. »

Many professors would encourage students to try and write the fastest executing program for a given assignment, possibly awarding bonus points to whoever won. During class, they would point out ways to decrease execution time, or decrease memory usage. Such pearls of wisdom included “passing function parameters as bit vectors will save on memory usage”, and the ever-popular “right shifting an integer is equivalent to dividing by two, only faster!” If it ain’t broke… There was one thing, however, that I never heard: optimization is bad. »

Firefox rules. To see why firefox rules, follow these two steps: Get firefox. Get greasemonkey. Now you can start having fun. Possibly the coolest grasemonkey script is Book Burro. When viewing a book on amazon.com, barnes and nobel, etc, Book Burro displays the price of the book from competing websites in a cool little floating window. Last night, I hacked Book Burro to work with chapters.ca and amazon.ca, so now us Canadians can comparison shop with only a single tab open at once. »

I got an invitation to join the Odeo beta this morning in my inbox. Odeo has three sections: listen, sync, and create. Listen lets you browse for podcasts, sorted by popularity, age, and so on. Sync lets you manage your podcast subscriptions, view a list of podcasts from your subscriptions that you have no let listened to, and download the Odeo syncr, a podcast client (you can use any client you want, however). »

I upgraded my flickr account on Sunday. I’m in the process of uploading select photos from the Germany trip, but it’s going to take a while. »

It was a matter of survival, I thought. I found myself in an environment where there were 2 kinds of people: those who used jedit, and those who used vim. The last emacs user had been given a pair of cement shoes. I wasn’t going down that way; not me. So I gave it another shot. Herk had given me a nice wizz-bang demonstration of what an experience vim user can do, and I was impressed. »

In the interest of total media saturation, I’m going to post here an email I recently sent out: ` Sorry for the late announcement, but here goes: The short and sweet announcement (long and bitter follows): This Monday, June 13, at 6:00 pm in teaching lab 3, the Dal-ACM will be hosting a tutorial covering the ins and outs of working on a large Open Source project, GNOME. The tutorial will probably last around 2 hours, and will cover such topics as: software engineering and development tools use in the GNOME project fundamental GNOME libraries a GNOME geography lesson Free software hacking for fun an profit Don’t forget your towel! »

After fighting with my PC for a few hours tonight, getting the network and X working again (the price one pays for bleeding-edge software), I rolled out a new release of gnome-keyring-manager (2.11.1!!). Now if only more programs actually used gnome-keyring. Obviously, I’m back from Germany now. The whole trip was awesome; I’ll probably mention it in more detail once I get the photos online. »

I’m in Stuttgart for GUADEC and it rocks. The conference has been a blast (I suspect it will continue to be a blast for the rest of the final day), and I’ve met lots of awesome people. Plus, I got myself one of the exclusive speakers-only guadec bags. I know you’re jealous. »

I leave for GUADEC today. I’m very excited; not only to I get to go to Europe for the first time in my life, and do some exploring with my dad, I also get to meet some good friends that I’ve made over the past year. Our (father and I) whirlwind airplane tour begins in Halifax, stops briefly in Boston, then Paris, then ends in Stuttgart. It should be fun (I like air travel), and dad will no doubt take many good pictures from the air. »