Archives for CS7004

Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman

snakeoil 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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Logitech Professional Presenter R800 Review

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.

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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First lectures down…

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 :D

Next talks are on the hardware used in embedded systems, starting with the microprocessors and microcontrollers.

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Duct tape considered harmful

Duct tape prohibitedWhy Joel Spolsky was wrong about ‘duct tape programmers’ being good programmers.