Chris Johnston

I found this article on The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security on digg.com. It is a very interesting article that every sysadmin or computer security person should read. Unfortunately, I do not understand enough about computer security to really comment on the views and ideas presented in the article. However, I can say that the article itself is very well written and does an excellent job of community the ideas that it contains. It also should make you think as it forces you to examine your own views about computer and network security.

One thing that really bugs me about the labs in the computer science department at Ryerson University is the complete lack of open source software installed on the lab computers. All the workstations have Rational Rose, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Maple, MatLab, StarOffice, and other proprietary and paid for software. Yet, nowhere can you find Eclipse, NetBeans, JEdit, or OpenOffice.org. This means that in order to do Java assignments you have to do them at home because they don’t have a decent IDE anywhere. The don’t even have a decent text editor installed.

You would think that a University, the institution where open source was born, would want to install as many open source applications on their computers as possible.

Now, I agree that most of my suggestions for OSS listed above are Java centric, but that is because I am Java guy. It is what I notice first. However, since Java seems to be the number one language in use today, you would think they would put a higher emphasis on Java software.

At Ryerson, the language of choice is C, however, in order to do C programming, you have only two choices — vim and emacs. Both excellent editors, but neither what I would called modern IDEs. Or you can use Visual Studio .NET on the Windows side of things.

I wonder what it would take to get the sysadmins to install something like Eclipse or NetBeans onto the computers?

This is just a geek thing. The Improved Sorting Algorithm Demo page has 3 java applets running on it, for each applet you can select the sort that that applet will perform. The applets are modified versions of what are in one of the Java tutorials on the Sun website. The really cool thing about this page is that it allows you to see graphically what each sort is doing and how each sort works.

Listed below are several links I found for working with Sun’s JOGL libraries.

The JOGL Project hosts a reference implementation of the Java bindings for OpenGL API, and is designed to provide hardware-supported 3D graphics to applications written in Java. It is part of a suite of open-source technologies initiated by the Game Technology Group at Sun Microsystems.

JOGL provides full access to the APIs in the OpenGL 2.0 specification as well as nearly all vendor extensions, and integrates with the AWT and Swing widget sets.

In order to make this all work, you have to actually install two sets of files. The first is the jogl.jar file — something most java programmers are used to working with — and the second is a set of .dll files. This last part caused me no end of trouble. In order for your code to run, you have to install two dll files, these are jogl.dll and jogl_cg.dll. The files need to be installed as follows:

• Copy jogl.jar into your $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext directory
• Copy the two .dll files (jogl.dll and jogl_cg.dll) into $JAVA_HOME/jre/bin

Then, in your project, make sure you add the jar file to the classpath in order for your code to compile.

Here are the links I found that helped me:

• How to: Getting started with JOGL
• JOGL: A Beginner’s Guide and Tutorial
• The JOGL project website
• NeHe Productions - This site is not specific to Java, but it is an excellent resource for OpenGL and most tutorials include a Java version

I found this link on the Digital Media Minute website. It is to a wiki containing a list of Ajax Libraries. Each entry gives a brief description of the library followed by its pros and cons and a link to the website for the library being discussed.

Why do textbooks have to cost so much? First you have to pay tuition, then you have to pay for all the books. A hundred plus dollars for a single book? It’s a rip off. On the other hand, if you get the right book, the knowledge you get from the book is priceless, so maybe in the end it all even outs, but still. I am a starving student, I can’t afford all these books.

I have some complaints about the quality of my university education here in Canada. Now, I have only been to one university — Ryerson — so my sample base for these complaints is not exactly large. However, I am going to make the generalization that my complaints are probably accurate for just about any university in Canada.

My first complaint is against my Profs. If education is about communicating ideas to students in such a way that those students can understand and build upon those ideas then why are so many professors hired who can not communicate? Either the prof does not speak english well enough for students to understand them or they simply can not communicate an idea well enough for someone to understand it. Both are equally wrong. Both should get a teacher fired. Now, do not misinterpret my first remark as racist or anti-immegrant. I have had some excellent professors that had accents and were very definitely not born in this country. My complaints are simply against people who can not speak english well enough to communicate. I have known a few third and forth generation Canadians who I would put into this category.

My second complaint is about professors trying to teach things that they have no experience with. I currently am taking a course on Software Engineering in which the professor is teaching XP (extreme programming). I asked the prof what his professional experience was with XP and said he did not have any. Something is wrong with that. Just because he read it in a book and tried it out a few times does not an expert make. And profs should be experts at what they teach.

Unfortunately, university professors are not hired for their teaching abilities, they are hired for their PhDs and/or their area of research. The universities don’t have if professors can teach. Teaching is just something that they do on the side that interrupts their research.