Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Programming

Announcing the CSE Programming Contest

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I’m happy to announce the CSE Programming Contest that I am organising together with my colleagues Sudha Cheerkoot-Jalim, Anwar Chutoo and Pascal Grosset.

Please get the official announcement then fill in the registration form and return it to us by this Friday.

The registration is open to any undergraduate student from the University of Mauritius (including non-CSE students) but we will have to choose (using some magic formula) 40 students to participate in the contest on the 11th of October 2006 at 14:00 as our biggest lab (the MCID Lab) can only accomodate that number of students.

Please note that each of the 40 selected will have a Kubuntu Linux PC with ISO C/C++ and Java 5.0 compilers. Eclipse (with CDT) will also be installed but, of course, one can also use vi or emacs or kate (etc.) and the command line.

The problems will be really tough… but fun to solve! And we have not yet decided about the prize (if any…)

Good luck!

Programming at Google and in class…

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By now, all of you know that Google is THE company where bright people want to work. Just look at what Peter Norvig, (arguably) the best AI expert in the world, says in his résumé:

Note to recruiters: Please don’t offer me a job. I already have the best job in the world at the best company in the world.

While reading Steve Yegge’s blog today on Good Agile, Bad Agile, I came across his description of how software developers work at Google:

There are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

Developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

Developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it’s not their main project.

There aren’t very many meetings. I’d say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.

It’s quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

There aren’t Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I’ve ever seen.

Even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don’t work insane hours unless they want to.

… which I summarise by saying that at Google, software developers are treated as intelligent human beings and are encouraged to create and have fun at the same time.

Now I understand why the brightest want to want there!

As a Lecturer, I find it rather disturbing that we tend to train students otherwise. Could we

  • Act as tech leads who actually participate in the software development process together with the students?
  • Let students move from project to project until they feel comfortable?
  • Let the students come up themselves with interesting projects to do?
  • Encourage them to use 20% of their time to work on something personal?
  • Socialise more?

Can this work? Or will the students just take us all for a ride? Will students stop respecting us if we socialise too much? Will students be able to come up with interesting projects to do? Or will they just Google up something already done and copy paste from that?

Are we ready to act as intelligent people?

How to make Coverflow perfect (IMHO) in iTunes 7

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I love Coverflow. I was using it before when it was still a standalone app. And I’m using it more and more now that it is integrated into iTunes 7.

I tend to browse my albums by year but I’ve noticed something fishy. Basically, when you sort your tracks in iTunes by year, it does a secondary sort by artist name. This is fine for normal albums but really crap for compilations. For example, this is what I get by sorting by year:

Notice that the compilation albums ‘Made in England’ and ‘Made in England 2′ have songs (namely Why and Wot) before The Chemical Brothers’ album and some songs after (Should I Stay Or Should I Go et al.)

And, as expected, when you use the Coverflow view, the compilation albums appear many times instead of only once. For example, ‘Made in England’ would appear both before and after ‘Exit Planet Dust’.

The solution is easy: sort by year then by album name!

Unfortunately, iTunes cannot do this directly… but only indirectly. Here’s the secret:

  • Identify a tag that you do not use (I’ve chosen Grouping),
  • Select all your songs in iTunes,
  • Run the following Applescript in Script Editor (found in /Applications/Apple Script):

tell application “iTunes”
    set theSongs to the selection
    repeat with theSong in theSongs
        set theKey to ((the year of theSong as text) & ” ” & the album of theSong)
        set the grouping of theSong to theKey
    end repeat
end tell

  • This script goes through all selected songs and change their grouping tag to the year followed by a space followed by the album name (it runs rather slowly by the way…),
  • You can then sort your song collection by grouping,
  • And when you use Coverflow, you have each album only once!

Problem solved!

Thanks to codepoet for inspiration. Disclaimer: Backup your songs if you are not confident enough.