Spam

I just noticed someone is using my e-mail address to send spam. It's just apparent (only in the headers, it's not like they broke in my Gmail account), but I just received an E-mail can not be delivered reply to a message I didn't send. Upsetting.

Anyway, the mail seems sent from a French dedicated server, and it contains a link to a Russian site, probably meant to infect visitors with a virus or trojan of some sort.

Time to find the Report Abuse link on the French provider's site.

Work and fun with BeagleBoard

I'm in my fourth university year now, and I have an important project to do. Its name: Miniature 3D Imaging System. The reason I chose it: I get to play with a BeagleBoard.

For those who don't know, the BeagleBoard is a small (8cm x 8cm) single board computer. It's not as powerful as a laptop: it runs at 600MHz and it only has 128MB RAM, but it's tiny and extremely power efficient (2W, it can run powered from your USB, and it's obviously fan-less). Moreover, it runs Linux!

Another cool gadget that complements the BeagleBoard is the DLP Pico Projector. It's about the size of a credit card, supports a resolution of 640x480, and I used it last night to play a movie on the ceiling right above my bed. Quite an incredible experience, lying down with my loved one and laughing at a funny Korean movie!

A memory of two games

I remember from my childhood, when one of my friends got a computer, we used to go play on the new toy. There were two games in particular that we liked, one of them where you have to place mirrors in the path of a laser in order to direct the beam to hit certain targets, and another one where you built a machine that performed a certain task.

Although I've never really found the same laser game again, I've recently discovered a pretty similar Flash game. Find it here: http://laser.narr.as/

The second one was called The Incredible Machine (TIM). It's a commercial game, and it had sequels. But I've found another Flash game, Fantastic Contraption, which is free to play, and the game-play is somewhat similar to the original TIM. I invite you to play it here: http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/

Have fun!

Laptop problems and Apples

Since the last time I wrote here, my laptop started behaving weirdly. My battery was long time gone, so if I unplugged it, it turned off instantly. The news is now it turns off randomly, even if I don't touch the power cord. I can keep it on about 2h a day, after that it turns off repeatedly (I'm racing against the time now :) I've ordered a new battery, I hope that will help.

So I've been using other devices for my daily routine. I installed Plucker on my Palm Zire 31, and using the Linux pdftohtml command, I got some books there so I can read. I'm also using my girlfriend's Apple iPod Touch*** for browsing the Internet. It's kinda cool what you can do with a tiny gadget like that. Many sites have a mobile version with no useless content (ads) and in a layout friendly to the tiny screen. The one I've been using most is Google Reader mobile. You can try it even on your computer, it's here.

The scroll and zoom operations are so much neater than on a computer. Text input however is terrible. You don't want to be writing e-mails or blog posts on the on-screen keyboard, but then again, it's not supposed to be a computer. I was pretty impressed by the web browser (Safari), and how it renders whole pages in that tiny screen. Except Flash and other such (missing) add-ons, everything looks pretty much like on your computer.

I wonder how the code works on this and other such platforms. Safari seems to render the webpages as images. When you zoom-in, you can notice the lower quality, until the page is rendered again at the new resolution. Also, the webpages are rendered in sections: only the section that fits the screen is generated. When you scroll down, you see empty space and you have to wait for the new section to render. I'm curious if the other candidates (Blackberry, Palm's WebOS, Android, etc) employ the same procedure.

The picture at the top of this post is a Palm Pre. Darn, that gadget is cool (and expensive).

*** thank you baby :)

Resurrecting a blog and an education system

So here I am, resurrecting my blog. It's been quite a long while, two and a half years from what I see in the Archive. I chose Blogspot because it allowed me to use my own domain for free, and I've also imported my old Yahoo! 360 blog.

It's my second attempt to do this, last time (a few weeks ago) I've set up the blog on my own web-server. Unfortunately, it's on a non-standard port, and moreover, the host was off-line quite a lot, so I decided to try again on dedicated service.

Yesterday, Hoai told me she found my CV on-line. I was intrigued at first, but then I remembered I had sent it to some Romanian foundation a while back, when they asked for it and an essay. I want to post that essay here to. I'll translate it for you, because Google's tool does quite a lousy job at it.

Ever since my childhood I liked to play with wires, light bulbs and batteries. My grandfather and his job played an important role in it, considering I lived with my grandparents until my third grade. He was an electrical engineer. We also had a bunch of instruments, components and devices around the house. Not long after I learned to read, he bought me a book, Think Physics, and also a number of other electronics books. In that period, my grandpa made sure I was always thirsty for knowledge. At some later time, when I already had a computer, I started doing programming too. These three sciences have become my favorites: Physics, Electronics and Computer Science.

In Physics, the change occurred in my seventh grade, when my professor called me and three other classmates to his desk and asked us if we wanted to go to the Olympiad. I liked the idea, and with a little study, I was ready for what would later become kinda my job during high-school.

The Romanian education system had an important contribution to my international academic results. The high-school curriculum is more in depth than that from countries. In Romania the competition between students is encouraged. In the United Kingdom for instance, university exam results are given to the students privately, and it is their choice what they tell to anyone else. In these conditions, the competitive spirit is greatly diminished.

Despite this, young Romanians leave to study abroad. The differences between the Romanian and British academic environments are various, starting right from the underlying cultural differences, to curricula, approach and lab equipment. For instance, universities on the island focus more on skills, while in Romania it's more about accumulating information.

If you ask what should be changed, the answer isn't clear. A first problem could be that the timetable is too crowded, but it isn't so everywhere. Even though this is true about the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (PUB), it would be wrong to say the same thing about the Informatics degree from Bucharest University. For previous Olympiad contestants, PUB's degree seems ideal. However, the institution accepts many students - they aren't all Olympiad contestants. Thus we need to think about the other students. The amount of effort required from them seems too much, and whether all modules they have to take are relevant, is debatable. In my opinion, university shouldn't be about getting through the exams, and then forgetting everything. Unfortunately, it is so for many students.

Another problem is professors' attitude, and people's attitude in general. In the west, professors treat students with respect, and are treated back with similar respect. Any student can talk with his professor on equal terms. Teachers actually encourage students to stop them in the middle of the lecture if anything isn't clear, so they can explain again in a different way. From year to year, courses and lab exercises are improved based on feedback from students. According to rumors from some of my friends back home, lecturers don't usually allow interruptions. Often times, they give answers like "I don't have enough time to explain it again" or "you should read the book again". If anyone is brave enough to make comments regarding the curriculum or the lecturer's methods of teaching, he risks having his grade lowered. A story I've heard a long time ago goes like this: a certain professor from PUB (I believe he isn't teaching anymore though), when he'd call the register at the beginning of the semester, he'd stop at a few students telling them "your name is not an engineer's name". Those students would unavoidably fail his course. Of course, this is an extreme case, but it does show some serious attitude problems.

A series of changes are needed in Romania's education system. The first thing I would encourage is totally eliminating cheating and plagiarism. Such attempts should be drastically punished, and supervision during exams should be tight. Students cheat (oh, they sure do!) because they find the exam or the curriculum too hard. In a completely honest environment (no cheating), if more than 10-20% of the students fail a certain course, or nobody scores more than 80% in an exam, that should be an alarm that something went very wrong. Also the grading should be entirely objective, possibly similar to the grading in the Olympiad, with two professors evaluating the same exam independently, and the student being allowed to challenge his score.

Changes would be many. If what I've suggested above was done, the rest should follow automatically.

I hope the status of Romania's academia is not as grim as I saw it when I wrote this essay. After all, I know some teaching assistants and lecturers that try hard to make their classes work. There are people out there who care more about their students than about their paycheck. Unfortunately, they can not make too many changes even if they wanted. And even if they made the changes, a "no student left behind" strategy would impact on the learning experience of the top students.

Back then, I only had the experience of a year of study in a British university. In the meantime, I've spent a year in an American university as well. I might write more about this later. For now, let's just say nothing is in black and white. Life is complicated, education is complicated, international differences are complicated. Fixing a flawed education system I'm quite sure isn't easy either. But how should I know? I'm just a student...

Just a PIC

Just recieved it today from my tutor (thank you, Dr. R). I'll get to play around with it for whatever time I choose to keep it. It's just a PIC microcontroller and a simple circuit board for it. For those who think I'm talking Chineese now, I'll quote a definition from the "Pic C" book, by Nigel Gardner:



Microcontroller = a lump of plastic, metal and purified sand which, without any software, does nothing. When software controlls the microcontroller, it has almost unlimited applications.



Let's see if it can tell me the temperature in my room

First month in UK

It's been more than a month since I have first set foot in Britain. Although I have posted twice in the meantime, I was just boasting myself with my new laptop, without actually giving any information about me or my experience. Well... it's now time...



The first things I have observed were the green spaces, that were acetually taken care of, and the narrowness of the roads. The first two weeks the weather was excellent, only 2-3 rainy days. It took about 3 days to get used to the 25 minute walk from my accomodation to the Student Union building (actually, not the walk was the problem, but the fact I did it 2 or 3 times a day, and that Sheffield is a VERY hilly city ). Most the university buildings are within 5 minutes walk from the Union.



Bus over here is quite expensive. The regular ticket is a bit over £1, and a student weekly ticket is £12. There are some lines though that have a special tariff for students, 50p per trip. I have thus got used to taking the bus to the university and returning by foot (or again by bus if it rains). It is diffrent from the bus in Romania in that you pay at the driver when you get on the bus, and usually the bus does not leave the stop until everybody pays (and everybody does). The bell actually works (the STOP button), and the driver does not stop unless you ring it. Cool, huh?



One thing I have noticed is that everybody is very friendly and calm. When a car stops on the road, the other drivers wait for it to finish it's maneuver (like taking a right turn), and do not hurry to overpass it or horn. If you ask somebody for something, he does his best to help you. It makes no difference that you are a fresher (that is, first year student) and he is a professor. Another thing that kindof surprised me is that when you buy something that costs £0.99, you actually get the 1p change. I once bought something and did not wait for that change. Imagine the seller coming after me to give me my 1p change.



In the international orientation week, they told us something like a joke: In Heaven the chef is French, the policeman British, the mechanic German, the organiser Swiss, and the lover Italian. In hell the chef is British, the policeman German, the mechanic French, the organiser Italian and the lover Swiss. This seems to be true. While the police here are very friendly, the food is at least wierd. Most mornings I eat egg and bacon, and for dinner, the potatoes (either fried or baked) are never missing. Lucky me I like fried potatoes, a dish that is called "chips" here. Although in the beginning I wasn't very happy with the food, I kindof got used to it, and now it's not a problem any more.



Now about academic stuff... I have 6 courses this semester. Three of them are electronics courses: Circuits and Signals (mostly RLC stuff), Electronic Devices (that is, mostly semiconductors), and Digital Systems (well... the name says about what needs to be said). I also have Mathematics, Enterprise and Technology and the so-called Coursework. Electronic Devices is said to be the hardest course in the first year. Could this be why I like it best? The Mathematics really is a waste of time. Not only the difficulty is absent, but some of the british students ask the professor repeat or explain why (x1+x2)^2-(x1-x2)^2=4 x1 x2. Enterprise and Technology is part of the "with Business Skills" degree I have chosen and is interesting; it is not really aimed on learning, but on thinking about some details of the corporate world we all live in. What's left? The coursework... That is the codename for quite a number of things we do in the first year. Almost half of it consists of C Programming. The rest, well, is what we call labs. Just as an exampe, for the coursework we have to build a remote-controlled car until Christmas. There are lots of other things that go into the coursework section.



I am going to end this post now, it's already getting too long. All in all, I like it here, and I had no problems getting used to living and learning in a foreign country.



Bye for now,

Q