We are also … Unhindered by Talent

Some deluded people believe that textbook orders for Fall Semester were due a month ago, but I’m never, ever close to on-time on these things, and am just now getting to it in a serious way. I’m teaching three courses in the fall:

• Models of Computing Systems
• Fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets
• Refactoring

I’ve taught Refactoring several times and have a pretty good handle on that. Fuzzy Logic I’ve taught once before and am pretty comfortable with. The Systems course, however, is one I’ve never taught before and am still struggling with on a number of levels, including the textbook.

Any suggestions and ideas on any of these would most certainly be appreciated. I’ll say a little more about each course below the fold for those who want all the gory details.

Models of Computing Systems This is one of our three core courses (the others being Algorithms and Computability, and Software Design and Development), is a 5 credit course (4 hours of lecture and a 2 hour lab each week), and is intended to expose students to computing systems using a layer model that includes as major topics

• Assembly language and a quickie overview of basic architecture
• Operating systems basics, with an emphasis on processes, process management, and threading/concurrancey
• Computer networks
• System administration, including the installation, configuration, and management of common tools like web servers

I’m planning to use x86 assembly for the first item, and the sysadmin work will happen on Linux boxes. I’m planning (still in a vague way at the moment) to try to use computer security issues to motivate/illustrate a number of key concepts in this course. Things like file system and disk structure can be pretty abstract, for example, but I’m thinking that doing a lab where we see how those decisions lead to lots of “erased” data being recoverable might make it seem more “real” and significant.

I realize that no book is going to cover all these things, and on-line resources plus lecture can provide the necessary background for several of these. This course has typically using a “standard” OS book like Silberschatz, et al, but this is large and expensive and really only addresses one of the four topics. If anyone knows of a good book that would touch meaningfully on more than one of these areas, though, that would be really helpful.

Fuzzy logic This is a 2 credit elective course, and should provide a reasonable background in the theoretical definitions and concepts in fuzzy logic, as well as giving the students a chance to apply those ideas. (My current plan is to write robot race car drivers using fuzzy notions of concepts like fast, slow, near, and straight.)

I’m probably more interested in solid coverage of the theoretical material than the applications side. The students will benefit from a good introduction and reference on the mathematical material, and I can probably handle the motivation and application side in class pretty well.

When I last taught this (Spring, 2006) I used An Introduction to Fuzzy Logic for Practical Applications by Kazuo Tanaka, translated by T. Niimura. That book actually worked quite decently. There were some predictable translation issues, but nothing that we couldn’t manage.

Refactoring This is also a 2 credit elective course. I’ve taught this course several times, and I’m likely to again use a combination of Fowler’s Refactoring and Kerievsky’s Refactoring to Patterns. Fowler is the “standard” in the field; the first five chapters of his book are absolutely classic material on the realities of software development and should be read by pretty much anyone who aspires to write good software. Kerievsky’s book builds on Fowler and does a really nice job of demystifying design patterns, converting them from magical insights codified by geniuses into things you could discover on your own through careful refactoring. When I last taught it I think I had Kerievsky as the required text and Fowler as the optional book. Given that together they still add up to less than $100, I’m tempted to require them both. We have lots of copies of Fowler in the lab, though, so I might just require Kerievsky again. Ideas/thoughts on this would definitely be appreciated.

One of the problems we’ve run into in this course in the past has been attempting refactorings on code with limited automated testing. Without good tests you lose your courage to refactor mercilessly, or you have false courage and end up breaking things without realizing it until (sometimes much) later. With only 2 credits to work with, however, you don’t want to spend two weeks writing unit tests for a system before you can start refactoring it, especially when you don’t really understand what the units are and what they’re supposed to be doing. This time I’m planning to use BDD tools like Cucumber, RSpec, and JBehave this time to more cheaply write high level acceptance/functional tests that exercise the key parts of the system in meaningful ways without getting bogged down in a bunch of poorly understood unit tests. We’ll see how that goes.

Wrap-up

So, there they be. Any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, especially on the Models of Computing Systems course.

If you haven’t seen this amazing show reel from Danny MacAskill, it’s time to stop what you’re doing and gawk.

In fairness, I think the opening trick on the cast iron fence is perhaps the best thing in the video, but it’s totally worth the price of admission – hard for me to imagine doing such a thing.

Then, for a little context, check out this Edison footage of bike tricks from 120 years ago. Sure, it’s not MacAskill, but it’s a whole ‘nother era in terms of gear, both bike and camera, and it would be interesting to see what Neidert was able to do without the constraints of a small stage and a short one-take camera set-up.

I don’t remember who on Twitter tipped me to the MacAskill video; vitjan via Shadowhand gets the thanks for the Edison footage.

Today is the start of the 2nd Annual sUMMer Jazz Experience, which Sub-Evil Boy will be participating in. Registration is from noon to 2pm, with a little welcome address at 2 for the families before they abandon their offspring to the Demons of Jazz Music.

Those keeping track at home will note that noon-2pm interacts oddly with our family radio shows on KUMM on Sunday mornings (Sub-Evil from 10am-noon, WeatherGrrrl & I from noon-2pm). Sub-Evil’s show should survive largely intact, but our show may get cut off towards the end.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but even hip radio DJs sometimes have parenting responsibilities :-).

Wowzaa!

Watch the truck at just after 20 seconds in. Apparently no cyclists were hurt, but you don’t have to tweak that situation much for this to be a major catastrophe. Sadly scary incidents like this are a regular occurrence in a world that caters to cars at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists. This one happened to be caught on tape and the group of cyclists the truck was passing happened to contain Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, so it’s gotten a lot of attention.

This sort of stuff frankly scares the crap out of me. I love biking here in quiet little Morris, but I just don’t know if I’d have the nerve to cycle in “real” traffic in a “real” city. I certainly didn’t when we were in Colchester.

Thanks to colchester-cycling.org.uk and velorution.biz for the pointers.

I’m completely exhausted. I had the pleasure today of explaining a little bit about computers and algorithms to some kindergarteners, and it just about wiped me out :-).

Timna Wyckoff (one of our biologists and mother of a kindergartener) arranged to have all the local kindergarten kids comes to the science building for 90 minutes to learn a little bit about science. They were divided up into groups of about twelve, and each group spent about 30 minutes at three of the six stations we’d set up.

I talked with them about their experience using computers at school (mostly “playing games”) and how the computer did things like draw pictures on the screen. (We determined that it wasn’t elves or fairies or tiny mice with little glasses and hats that took coffee breaks when you turned the computer off.) We then talked about how computers are machines, like their fridge or a car, and let them look inside a couple of old boxes destined for the scrap heap. This led to a bit on how computers are general purpose machines instead of single purpose machines (”Can you drive your fridge to the store?”), and how what the do is determined by the program they run. It turns out that computers are in fact machines specifically designed to follow lists of instructions, and programs are lists of instructions created by computer scientists that tell the computer how to do certain things (like draw dinosaurs on the screen). We then headed into a semi-tangential (but concrete for 5 and 6 year olds) discussion of recipes as a instructions, and people as machines for following those instructions. Finally, if and as time allowed (and it varied quite a bit across my three groups), they all got numbers, stood in a line, and pretended they were a computer running through the bubble sort algorithm. (Yeah, bubble sort. Don’t shoot me – it’s easy to run through with little kids.)

I spent a total of 90 minutes doing this three times, plus some setup at the beginning and tear down at the end, and I’m exhausted. If nothing else, this reinforced my belief that a good teacher of young kids is a real treasure. These are bright, enthusiastic kids, but they don’t always focus real well, and my short morning is enough to send me scurrying back to teaching adults. (To be honest, my students don’t always focus well, but they’re much less likely to distract everyone around them in the process.)

This was my first time doing this, and my little script was an amalgam of lots of ideas from KK, Timna, and WeatherGrrrl, and various students and alum responding to my request for ideas on Twitter. Many thanks to all of them for their ideas and feedback!

I spent a lot of time on the road to & from the Twin Cities in the last few weeks, so I used that chance to catch up on some old podcasts and explore some new ones. A really nifty discovery this weekend was a panel discussion on Web 2.0 by the smart folks at ThoughtWorks. The discussion is led by Martin Fowler. Fowler goes through Tim O’Reilly’s seminal “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” from 5 years ago, where O’Reilly lays out what he believes to be seven defining principles of Web 2.0. Fowler and the panel discusses each of these seven principles, looking at how they’ve held up over time. While the panelists didn’t think that all had held up equally well, in general O’Reilly had successfully identified many of the key trends. One might think this conversation is pretty esoteric, but I think it would be understandable and valuable to anyone looking to better understand what the web has become (and is still becoming). Definitely recommended!

It’s interesting to see in what ways various organizations do and don’t “get” these changes. Sadly, the U in general and the Morris campus in specific, for example, aren’t generally real on top of things when it comes to modern web technology. What’s particularly frustrating is the U’s unwillingness to work with and empower their users to help generate and manage content and value. Big Web 2.0 successes like Google and Amazon, Twitter and Flickr are all about leveraging user generated content. The U has its little fits in that direction (the U of M wiki, the UThink blogs), but they’re always peripheral to the life of the University, always in the back alleys instead of on the front page.

The ThoughtWorks discussion runs about an hour, and they divided it up into three chunks for podcasting. Unfortunately they haven’t released a new podcast since last July, so it appears that I’m late to the party and the party may be over. I look forward to listening to their other podcasts, and I certainly hope that they start making new episodes sometime soon.

If you’re interested you can find all their podcasts on the ThoughtWorks What We Say page through either RSS or iTunes.