[digg=http://digg.com/programming/Joel_Spolsky_Snake_Oil_Salesman] If there is a lecturer in TCD’s CS department that doesn’t know of the problems and issues Joel just raised in his Capstone Projects post, they’re a rare bird indeed. But what Joel hasn’t mentioned — and what those lecturers can tell you because they’ve been debating it for decades, writing papers on it, holding conferences and have published peer-reviewed journals on the topic, as opposed to Joel’s one blog post — are that there are very specific and very good reasons why CS and CEng undergraduate courses don’t get to cover all the industry tools Joel uses.
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[digg=http://digg.com/playable_web_games/Bejeweled_Blitz_fails_to_reseed_its_random_function]Like many people these days, I use facebook to track what’s going on with friends and family I don’t get to see as often as I would have done in years past. Long work days, large numbers of balls in the air and general “stuff” prevents actual face time far too often, but while it’s not the same as a night spent laughing over a beer, it’s better to note that a friend has a new job or that there’s a new baby en route or whatever over facebook than not at all.
And of course, facebook has games. Which is handy sometimes, for those moments when you have literally six or seven minutes to fill – too much time to sit still and be bored, too little to get anything real started. Personally, I play bejewelled on facebook for those moments. It’s been set up rather nicely there – blitz games of one minute, with scores being tracked so that friends compete in weekly rankings and little medals at various scores and scores being classed as being in the top X% globally and so on. The thing about this is that now you have a large community of people (over five million within six months of its launch according to Popcap, who wrote the game), all competing against one another – so now it’s important that it be fair or it feels like it’s not worth playing. Unfortunately tonight I noticed that someone’s been too clever.
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I went a little mad for an hour there after being assigned my first course to teach, and afterwards found I’d ordered the R800, Logitech’s top-of-the-line presentation remote/laser pointer. Here’s what I think of it so far.
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[digg=http://digg.com/hardware/Wi_Fi_Direct_a_bomb_Bye_bye_Bluetooth_Don_t_be_daft]
There’s a fair amount of buzz going round at the moment about Wi-Fi Direct, the latest thing from the WiFi Alliance people. It appears for all intents and purposes to be a version of the 802.11 Ad-hoc mode, designed to allow for connections between individual devices without the use of an AP or router, which led to bnet.com claiming it was a “sales bomb” that would somehow destroy Bluetooth, kill the majority of AP sales, kill all the companies who make connector cables and create a large security problem to solve as we all switch over to using WiFi Direct to hook up our various gadgets. And they’re not alone in suggesting this is a bluetooth killer.
Baloney. Utter rot. Nothing of the kind is going to happen, and it’s pretty obvious why. Taking one worry at a time:
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[digg=http://digg.com/educational/Reddit_Math_Puzzle] So it’s not nonlinear math, but this made for a fun five minutes over Sunday morning coffee. There’s a number of ways of solving it, I went for the geometric one myself but the same answer comes out in the end for all of them, hopefully 
And it’s nice to think you could still pass the Leaving Cert if you had to sit it again tomorrow, so hooray for Reddit.
Enjoy over coffee today! (My scribbled answer after the break…)
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