Noulakaz
The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.
Anya is five years old today!
Christina and I are so proud. Five years is a very important age. It’s when Anya stops being a baby and becomes a big girl… I am happy that Kyan and her go along so well. It’s a joy for us to have two healthy and happy kids :-)
So, once more,
Happy 5th birthday Anya!
I can’t resist showing you a picture of her when she was a baby. Time flies!
I’ve just watched Liverpool destroy Derby 6-0. Liverpool has played four matches and, normally, should have won all of them but Mr Styles thought otherwise… This is not as big an issue though as Liverpool is now top of the Premiership.
Liverpool already had the best defense and midfield in England. Now we have the best attack: Peter Crouch, Dirk Kuyt, Fernando Torres and Andriy Voronin. 11 goals in 4 matches is a good return on investment, don’t you think so?
I believe Liverpool will win its 19th Premiership title at the end of the season. If you really want to know why, it’s because Liverpool has for, the first time in more than one decade, the best squad among all the teams in England.
Number 19 is coming home :-)
I am going to teach my first module at Masters level tomorrow: Software Architecture.
Of course, I am delighted and a little bit worried at the same time (sic). Teaching at Masters level is a new experience for me. But, to be frank, I can cope :-)
During the semester, I intend to make my students understand that building large-scale software is tough if one wants the software to be achieve qualities (like reliability) while respecting costs and deadlines. This requires the software to have a formal architecture. The nice thing is that this is a 2+2 module (i.e. 2 hours of lectures + 2 hours of lab weekly). I intend to make the students work on design patterns and existing frameworks a lot.
I am also thinking about making the students work out the architecture of (a small part of) an existing open-source software by themselves. This is bound to be (pedagogically) cool…
Programming Languages
During the second semester, I’ll also, for the first time, teach Programming Languages to a group of 200 second-year students. My intention is to show them the value of alternative programming paradigms in addition to what they already know (i.e. imperative with C/C++ and stateful OO with Java).
I’ll introduce them to logic programming, (lazy) functional programming, message-passing concurrent programming. I am leaning towards Prolog, Haskell and Erlang respectively. But I may also adopt the more radical Mozart.
And, naturally, I will also introduce them to the power of Unix scripting using, guess what, Ruby!
PS: I am assuming here that UoM will still exist in some weeks :-)
21 August 2007 @ 18:31: an update
I’ve just finished my first ever Masters-level course and it has been great! Now, I can go and have something nice to eat :-)