There’s so much hype and “research” and overall nonsense thrown around about the attention span of the average student that it’s really hard to figure out what’s actually happening. Are all students screwed? Are they in the same boat they’ve always been in? Should I be doing something as a professor to deal with the …
Continue reading DPS924 Part4: Distractions and attentionOoh, for a second I thought I would be forced into using OWA for reading my email! How horrible. There are no instructions on the ITS Services site, and the instructions I found in another student’s post didn’t work. Turns out they are mostly correct but not 100%, here’s what works for me: IMAP: pod51018.outlook.com:143 …
Continue reading DPS924 Part3: Setting up myseneca email using IMAP/SMTP and ThunderbirdHad my first lecture yesterday. What an experience! I was absolutely sure that it won’t be much like when I was an actual student at Seneca, but it turns out I was wrong. Turns out I felt exactly the same way as I did when I was a student. It’s hard to describe that feeling. …
Continue reading DPS924 Part2: First lectureI’m taking DPS924, an Android programming course here at Seneca. I’m officially registered in it as a student, and even paid 20$ for it (I get a special deal as a faculty member :)). Why on earth would I be doing that? Because though I’m more familiar with Android internals than most – I have …
Continue reading DPS924 Part1: What’s wrong with you?I post something on this blog occasionally about APNG and about how I’m no longer involved with it and about how this guy Max Stepin has been driving it for years. The last thing I mentioned on the topic was him adding APNG support to Chromium, which was very cool. Now he’s planning to create …
Continue reading Kickstarting APNGI always thought I’m pretty good at learning languages. After all I lived in 4 countries and at some point in my life spoke fluent russian, two versions of romanian, and english. But I’ve been trying to learn french for over a decade with no success. I used to think the reason is no immersion …
Continue reading Learning frenchI used to have a Sansa Clip Plus. After years of awesome service the clip from the Clip Plus broke off, which made it much less useful. For the last year I have been using a Sansa Clip Zip – a much newer model. I wasn’t as happy with it as I was with the …
Continue reading Rockbox firmware for Sansa Clip ZipI’ve gone on my honeymoon to Peru a couple of weeks ago and now that I’m back I’m going through my email. I have a spam filter but sometimes things go through it, especially if it’s something unusual. I’ve already deleted 4 spam messages, every single one of them in Spanish. I don’t even remember …
Continue reading When they know too much about youI got a few requests from readers of my Newfoundland trip to give them maps so they can more easily figure out where I’ve been. Should be easy given that I recorded most of the trip using a OpenGPSTracker, but that’s a story for another time. This post is about the dying practice (not art) …
Continue reading We used to write real shell scriptsIt occurred to me recently that when it comes to a software project – it takes more than just code to make it successful but at the same time we typically only measure the scope of a software project in lines of code (LOCs). In most organisations it’s laughed at as an official measure of …
Continue reading Measuring project effort in something other than Lines-Of-Code