| CS Department Guide For Freshmen | March 15, 2005 |
We have talked about producing an unofficial guide for freshman computer science students produced by the ACM. Hopefully, this guide would contain information about the department and major that, until now, has only been available through word-of-mouth and personal experience. The goal of the guide would be to welcome freshman to the department, encourage involvement, and make their introduction to computer science as painless as possible.
Some ideas for what to include for the guide include
- descriptions of classes and professors written by students containing information that may not be available through course evaluations
- description of the different labs and research opportunities available for students
- an introduction to the world of computer science TAing
- descriptions of resources available to CS students, like the ACM, WUGS, and how to find Ms. PacMan
- an introduction ot basic computing skills that CS majors will need, like using unix, SSH, Pine and HTML
However, we're looking for input from as many students and professors as possible. The more people involved the better. If you have an idea for something that should be included or would like to contribute to the booklet in any way, please leave a comment to this post.
Our goal is to make this available for freshman next Fall.
| Library Management | February 20, 2004 |
As you may know, ACM has an ever growing library of computer related books. At one time we maintained a list of the books, in hopes of using a free barcode reader to set up a basic lending library. At the time, however, we had no way of demangling the CueCat's output. That's all ancient history now, so our library project can proceed without having to worry about barcode mangling and serial numbers.
The first step in this project would involve developing a script capable of taking a scanned ISBN, querying an online databse (ie amazon.com) for the book info, and adding the book to a MySQL database on our server. Something like this will undoubtedly make updating/maintaining a book list much easier, and beats entering the title, author, etc. by hand. Secondly, we'd need something that would allow ACM members to quickly checkout books. The act of checking out a book would be useful for both ACM and the borrower for remembering who has what book. It would be entirely honor based, but without it, I know I'd forget that I had borrowed a book. The sooner we get this application developed, the sooner we can let members take books from the library.
| LoungeCam | February 18, 2004 |
At the end of last semester, ACM got a nice LogiTech web cam. The plan is to mount it in the lounge, hook it up to one of the computers, and use it to stream video onto the ACM server. In order to do this, we'll be developing a client to run in the background of the iMac in the lounge, which queries the camera and sends the data over the CS network to the server. The server in turn will publish the video to the website. The trick will be to only send video frames with significant change to the server, in order to conserve network bandwidth. Charlie and I are going to be working on this project, and it's not really that big, but it's worth mentioning the web cam in case someone else wants to develop their own application for it.