[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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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/programming/New_CS7004_hardware_arrives] So for CS7004′s labs, I wanted to have one large-ish, deep-ish, multi-step, interesting project. And I’ve thought of one and I’ll write it up as we go through it (no fair readers here learning before the students!).
But here’s a sneak peek at the hardware they’ll be using 
(Assuming, of course, that I can get the sodding thing to do what it needs to do!)
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Well that didn’t go too badly. General course overview and a probably over-long “what is an embedded system” lecture. No-one overtly fell asleep at any rate. And everyone enjoyed the videos of the explosions.
So what the heck, enjoy – Ariane 5 Flight 501. An example of what can happen with unsafe datatype casting 
Next talks are on the hardware used in embedded systems, starting with the microprocessors and microcontrollers.
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Why Joel Spolsky was wrong about ‘duct tape programmers’ being good programmers.
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