Day 2 in this city. Today, I explored my surroundings, and to my pleasure I found that there is a Metro and Shoppers Drug Mart (they call it Pharmaprix here in Quebec) right by where I live! Also, it seems that St. Joseph’s Oratory is in my backyard.

After 2 tries I successfully (I think) acquired a weekly bus pass. Apparently, in Montreal it goes something like this, first you must have an OPUS card, then you “load” trip plans onto the OPUS card, here I am, thinking it will be a paper pass, I tried to purchase a weekly plan at Shoppers without the OPUS card, and the kicker, the cashier spoke only French, so that was no go, then second try, after more researching, I found out that I needed the OPUS card first, with some broken French and half mixed English, I was able to acquire an OPUS card and a weekly pass.

I need to learn French.

Work is interesting, never the less, busy, hectic, and I’m just getting the round of thing. I get to work Downtown which makes commuting easier.
Error: the communication with Picasa Web Albums didn’t go as expected. Here’s what Picasa Web Albums said:

No album found.

Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life. I woke up at 7:30am, said my goodbyes with Kevin, having crashed on his couch last night.

Today I am going to Montreal. I am taking the Grey Hound to Toronto, then the Via rails to Montreal.

Getting off the train station at the Central Station in Montreal give me the first shocker, everything is in French, and there is almost no English subtitles. While my luggage was still checked in, I found a McDonalds to grab a quick bite, and second shocker, even McDonalds are in French. Thank god that the cashiers spoke English. This is going to be a fun 8 months here.

While procrastinating for my exam today I wrote a quick Chrome extension.
Step 1:

Install the extension

Step 2:

Configure the extension by giving it your Quest username and password.

Step 3:

Visit CAS enabled site as usual.

Step 4:

????

Step 5:

Profit. Well automatic login.

Thoughts? The extension is unfortunately not idiot proof yet…

Still can’t believe how these guys would do free tutoring for first year BIO classes.

FINALLY! Open data from the region of Waterloo and the GRT!

I can finally create the Android App that I wanted to create from CS446!

Region of Waterloo Open Data Catalog

Open Data Waterloo Region (Twitter: @OpenDataWR)

General Transit Feed Specification Reference

Made a quick proof of concept of the application:

The user now can check the next bus without wasting text messages, as well as can do it without an internet connection.

The app can also map out the bus route, and the user can know where exactly to get off, etc.

However, one thing that would be great, is if GRT can release live data, thus the riders could track exactly where the bus is, and would have a more realizable schedule than ever. Also this could have the potential to replace the GRT Trip Planner.

New apartment in Montreal! Can’t wait

Oh Desire2Learn, you are a truly a joke.

Probably have been solved if you guys had say… redundant data centers with fail overs hosting the LMS?

Guess not.

This post is for rooted phones only.

Memory editing allow you to:

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I don’t read your diary, so you don’t need access to my account.

tl;dr: Fuck you.

I am currently in my 4A term at the University of Waterloo majoring in Computer Science, I am quite shocked to see how much the University is babying the students these days. (Although, I would bet the elder generations would say the same about my year, anyhow).

Both CS135 and CS136, Designing Functional Programs and Elementary Algorithm Design and Data Abstraction respectively are first year courses designed for Computer Science majors, or for those who are highly interested in Computer Science.

As a course designed for CS majors, you would at least expect the University to get the student’s hands dirty and possibly a little hands on experience with computers. With that in mind, in my first year CS135 and CS136 was Scheme (now they call it Racket) and C. We were expected to do homework either by: go to a computer lab, SSH into the linux servers, or work on our personal machines. We were expected to submit our code solutions by either Odyssey (http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/odyssey/) which is a frontend for the `submit` command, or submitting the code with the `submit` command via SSH. Also the course content, (imo) covered more materials as well, not just that, but we were expected to write the proper code as well.

After talking to a bunch of first year students in CS, I’m shocked to see that:

1. They are distributing a Ubuntu VirtualBox virtual machine to 560 students for the purpose of doing their assignment. (Say if the installation was 2 Gigabytes, then a little over 1120GB was sent across the campus network.)
2. They are giving the students a fancy “RunC” script to compile their assignments, run their assignment, and acting as a fancy error wrapper, which will inform the students of any compiler errors, and memory leaks via valgrind. (The student need to hit ctrl – r to run this script)
3. They are giving the students a “uwbackup” script to back up their files to their student accounts. Which is in essence a fancy scp wrapper.
4. They are not asking the students to do the proper coding standards. ie) The students does not need to check whether `malloc` or `realloc` has returned a NULL or not. (This is 3 extra lines of code, for the love of god, thanks to you, I’m actually afraid to use programs written by a first year UW student.)

As of this, I am seeing a lot of incompetencies in the students, some does not even know how to use the terminal, never mind compiling their C program with gcc.

This is quite shocking to see, especially now, when there are more competition than ever. One would expect the university to somewhat prepare the students with all the skills that they can develop in 8 months. Since how the hell would a student get a co-op job if they have no previous experience, and the University is babysitting more than ever? Also, since when did we became Laurier?

You tell me.