My job—teaching, research, advising, students, colleagues, university, and everything else
Even with the fear I mentioned in my last post, I keep doing this. Here’s the recording of today’s lecture for those who had to leave early for the holiday:
Sorry about inconsistency of my voice. I kept moving away from the internal microphone, so there are many frequently fading voices. I think I should get a Bluetooth headset.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Your instructor.
Scary (at least to me) news delivered today through ACM TechNews:
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i14/14a01301.htm
I guess it’s at least partly true. For example, some people might prefer lecture recording to actual in-person lecture. And if lectures are recorded and available online, why not best ones, or suitable ones for individual students? I fear that most professions might be obsolete within a century, ha, and we all will be hooked on the matrix. 
-H.
Here’re the links to the video I mentioned in the email:
Click here for the first example.
Click here for the second example.
Use these video lectures for studying and solving the homework problems.
-H.
This is the recording of Java Swing GUI programming guide. As mentioned in class, it uses the Vending Machine example we’ve worked on. The link is as follows:
I’m afraid the recording is not very satisfactory. It seems there’s some issue of audio-video sync. I’ll need to present a summary of this video in class next Tuesday (11/18/2008). You are still expected to follow this tutorial.
This is the recording of a part of today’s (10/30/2008) COMP SCI 256 lecture explaining how to use Eclipse for the beginning Java developers.
http://icsa.uwgb.edu/~songh/screencasts/eclipse/eclipse.htm
I don’t know why, but I had some trouble playing the video with my Firefox, but didn’t with Internet Explorer. If you have the same issue with your Firefox, try IE.
Again, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me. You can ask your questions by leaving comments here.
-H.
An interesting article about the major and the profession at the verge of a serious economic crisis.
Am I in the IT profession by the way? Also, other interesting articles delivered to me as ACM CareerNews Alert:
-H.
A dear friend of mine reminded me of this song this morning in his email. Looked up YouTube and there are plenty of this song’s recordings. I wanted to test how the video embedding works and also wanted visitors to enjoy this music for a while. It is “Moments in Love” by “The Art of Noise.”
Wow, it’s really easy to embed a YouTube video!
What a great set of fall photos… I’d like to take some photos myself and upload some of them here. Stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy these:
http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/10/gallery_top_10_fall
-H.
In a previous post of mine, I talked about using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to install a Linux distro on a Windows PC. I mentioned that recent distros (like Ubuntu 8.04 or Fedora 9) couldn’t be installed on MS VPC 2007, so I had to try the one I succeeded before–Fedora Core 4. Meanwhile, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my old laptop and it works great. I think between Ubuntu and Fedora that I’ve used, Ubuntu would be easier for new comers. So anyway, I wanted to investigate any further about how to install Ubuntu 8.04 on MS VPC 2007, and there are already extensive blog discussion about it. Here’re the links: here and here. The “unrecoverable processor error” seems to be the result of recent Linux kernel’s embrace of virtualization (it’s in a way funny that virtualization support hinders virtualized Linux. I know the paravirt-ops support is for Linux-host virtual machine server and here we are installing Linux as a guest) and as soon as it’s disabled, the install process moved on. So after quite a while, I was able to run Ubuntu 8.04 on MS VPC 2007. However, the performance was not very acceptable and the screen resolution is even harder to set than the installation itself. In the meantime, I remembered blog comments about Sun’s VirtualBox. Many commenters wrote something like “After spending five hours fighting with this with no complete resolution in sight, I gave up and switched to VirtualBox. It just plain worked. Stop wasting your time with VirtualPC before claims more precious hours of your life.” I didn’t know there’s another virtualization product available, so I wanted to give it a try. The result? I have to say “fantastic.” First of all, the installation was a breeze. No need to tweak any parameters like MS VPC 2007. Second, the performance is great. I don’t feel my Ubuntu on VirtualBox is a virtual machine. Its response time is almost like a native installation. Third (and probably the most), I couldn’t believe the seamless mouse integration without those annoying mouse lock. Usually, on MS VPC, because Linux is not supported officially, once mouse is clicked on a guess OS instance, it’s locked there and has to be unlocked by a host key, which is like right Alt key. VirtualBox, on the other hand, support most Linux distros with guest additions. Once the guest addition is installed, the mouse is fully integrated without annoying mouse lock and your guest OS instance is just like other desktop applications. What’s more cool is that the X server’s screen resolution is automatically adjusted when the VirtualBox guest OS’s frame is resized. See the screenshot below.
I’ve never seen this kind of thing before even with VMware (maybe it’s just because I used it quite a while ago, not recently). Full screen mode works on my dual head setup too. Whenever I tried a full screen mode on my dual monitor setup with other virtualization platforms, things didn’t go well. Something strange happened and the desktop (both the host and the guest) got garbled. No such problem with VirtualBox. Full screen mode of a guest OS instance on my second display works just fine as expected.
I think VirtualBox will be my primary virtualization platform. I didn’t like VMware very much because it installed strange network adapters and started quite a few services (daemons) even when I didn’t want to execute a virtual machine. Again, it was like a year or two ago, so things might have changed. Anyway, I requested that VirtualBox be installed on our lab PCs. There are plenty of computing resources (Core2Duo with 3GB MM and hundreds of GB of unused disk space), and I think with VirtualBox people would have no more excuse for not trying Linux any more. If you haven’t, you should try it out!
When I have some free time in my office, I’ll upload my initial VirtualBox virtual hard disk image for Ubuntu 8.04 and make them available for download for UWGB community. I’ll also upload my initial Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 virtual hard disk image for Ubuntu 8.04, but notice that the screen resolution is only 800×600. There’ll be links to those virtual hard disk images when they are uploaded. I’d say everyone should try it out.
-H.
At this time of uncertainty, turmoil, and anxiety, here’s an interesting article about this financial crisis and the major of computer science:
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/09/28/1824232.shtml
I’m really not sure if that would be the case. We’ll have to see, but it looks to me that the crisis is far much graver than such anticipation…
-H.
You are currently browsing the Goritaboon Sunsang Talk @ UWGB CS blog archives.