From Downes’, I got to Going Home, an incredible blog post, read this extract:

I believe that Blogging, and its wider family of Social Software tools, will not only affect education but will shake our entire society to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its arrival the same way that we now look back at the advent of the printing press.

And see how you can relate it to this other extract:

Imagine, it is midnight and you have won your seat in Parliament. Everyone around you is jubilant. But you are depressed. You went into politics to make a difference. You thought that it would be all about the issues. But to win, you had to become a spin expert like all the others. Worse, you know now that you are good at it.

Or this one:

Imagine you are in hospice in Charlottetown. You are scared. You look back at your life. You did all that was expected of you. You have been a pretty good husband and dad. You had the career that your father so wanted you to have. You did him proud, ending up a senior executive of a bank. But you are so sad. You are so sad. You always loved working with wood. After you retired, you discovered that you were a cabinetmaker. And what about Jean? She was your great love but you chose duty instead and backed away. Who have you betrayed the most? You lived all those other people’s plans for your life and you have missed your own.

From Downes’, I stumbled upon this guide to Multi User Weblogging. I’ve had good luck with Drupal so far, but like the review says, it is not easy to personalized. Also, again as the review says, WordPress MU is definitively not ready for prime time.

I learned about something called the BURROUGHS WELLCOME FUND (BWF) which offers funding for post-doctoral work. You must have a science or engineering Ph.D. and not have more than 2 years of post-doctoral experience. It seems to fund you for 5 years which seems cool.

Details: here is a note about it on UQAM’s web site.

Some of my colleagues, including Michel Sénécal et Jean Robillard, have begun using SPIP to develop online courses. I didn’t know the first thing about SPIP and it seems to have a strong “non-anglocentric flavor” (it comes from France) which might explain why I didn’t know about it. It is a free PHP-based Content Management Platform fairly similar to Plone though it seems more versatile than Plone.

From the SPIP web site:

SPIP is a publishing system developed by the minirézo to manage the site uZine. We provide it to anyone as a free software under GPL license. Therefore, you can use it freely for your own site, be it personnal, co-operative, institutional or commercial.

I actually think I will give it a try the next time I develop an online course.

Update: I’m disappointed that SPIP doesn’t seem to generate valid XHTML. It seems to be a recurring problem, but there are some (difficult) workarounds.

My wife and I were sick yesterday, and it just a lot of fun to watch a scary movie with my wife. She gets so scared and jumpy that she adds to the movie itself.

So, I rented Alien. Not the silly modern-day Aliens with computer animation. No, the real thing. My wife had never seen Alien, not one of them. Thanks to DVDs, you can rent old movies and still get fresh images. I just hope our hardware will remain DVD-compatible for a long time because I want to be able to watch Alien with my son when he is old enough.

For some reason, I didn’t recall the cat. My wife noticed the cat right away, and it all came back to me that Alien was a cat-movie, after all. It’d be funny to do an analysis of the movie: I think the cat gets nearly as much face time as the alien…

Verdict? This movie is a true classic. Oh… you could redo it with computer animation, but I doubt you would gain much. This was a true work of art. It still feel fresh. Of course, the computer consoles remind me a bit too much of a VIC-20, but that’s alright.

To my surprise, my wife actually enjoyed the movie, so we are going to rent the whole gang.

Trivia

• Ridley Scott also directed Blade Runner (1982), Thelma & Louise (1991), and Hannibal (2001)
• The original Alien screenplay was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. They also wrote for Alien Vs. Predator (2005), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Alien³ (1992), Total Recall (1990), Aliens (1986), Invaders from Mars (1986).
• Sigourney Weaver also played in Ghost Busters (1984), Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Galaxy Quest (1999). She was 30 years old when Alien was released, she is now 56 years old.
• Not counting Alien Vs. Predator as an Alien movie (Sigourney Weaver doesn’t play in AVP), the first and the last Alien movie are 18 years apart. 4 movies were made: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997). Roughly one Alien movie every 5 years.
• No two Alien movies had the same director.
• It is generally accepted that the first two movies in the series are the best.

My thinking has always been that if you sacrifice everything to your job, then you should not be surprised if you end up at 55 or 65, alone in a house with only a cat and nobody calling you.

The first thing I did when I finished my Ph.D. thesis is to go hunt for a wife. I put everything else aside: research, almost all job hunting efforts, teaching gigs… I often forget about this part of my life, but for almost 6 months, I was doing nothing else, but trying to start a relationship with a woman I’d love for the rest of my life. I found a great, beautiful, extremely smart lady (intelligence was the criteria for me) and we’ve been together almost 7 years now, and we have a great son (14 months old now). Maybe I take it for granted sometimes, but I really shouldn’t. The important point is that it didn’t happen by accident. I worked really hard to find the right woman, and it was my full time job for a little while.

The person I met worked as a freelancer over the Internet (and still does), so moving was not a big no-no: the truth is that you should expect to have to relocate when you hold a Ph.D. and want Ph.D.-level jobs. Sometimes you can have to relocate quite far as well (which I avoided). I also don’t think it is fair to ask someone else to drop everything because you have to move. So, if you just got a Ph.D., the hunt for love is actually more complicated.

I don’t know how many of my colleagues are single. I would estimate that among Ph.D. holders my age, around 30%, maybe only 20% of all of us are single…

Household Opera comments on The “single woman in a rural college town” blues and she cites an interesting account:

When I was not in the classroom, the silence became deafening and I became clinically depressed. I love to read and I love solitude, but like everyone, I need some social interaction.

My colleagues, on the other hand, often worked at home, and when they came into the department, they shut their doors and hibernated. Having spouses and families at home, they had no need to create social relationships at work. I found myself drifting with my only interaction being with my students or a clerk in the grocery store.

I don’t know how real this problem is for single Ph.D. holders. It seems like it can be a real problem, and apparently, more so for a women.

I also think that women may tend to forget too easily that their window of fertility closes around 40. Most woman are infertile at 45. And even if you have kids after 40, they stand a much higher chance of having all sorts of medical conditions. While a 40 years old man can start a family, a woman should think twice about it, assuming she even can anymore.

I think we should rethink the entire academia roadmap. People used to become university professors after getting a degree, maybe a master, then the Ph.D. became a requirement, and now, in many fields, you need at least 4 years of experience after the Ph.D. if you are to get close to a professorship. All the while, the expectations at every step become tougher and tougher. The trend is clear: as competition increases, we will hire older and older professors… and these people have sacrificed more and more for their work…

Note: I’m still very much sick. I talk with a funny, deep voice this morning.

I’ve been suffering for the last two days from a terrible cold. My brain power is running at 20%.

Not only can’t we cure the common cold, but we also cannot efficiently take away the most severe. Yet, we can presumably clone human beings relatively cheaply. It is really troubling.

It goes to show that science is often unable to address common and very important problems.

Whenever I present my research work to my wife, she asks why I’m not working on something really important, like curing cancer or stopping world hunger… I guess the answer is that scientific research is not about solving problems, it is about trying to make some patterns unfold, and these patterns lead you where they do.

Cygwin is a marvelous idea: run a Linux-like shell under Windows. It allows me to run Python, CVS, Perl… almost everything I use under Linux, under Windows. Well, it doesn’t quite work as well, but for small things, it does the job.

One thing that has annoyed me is their implementation of vim. The keyboard support is bad. In my .inputrc, I have these lines

# enable 8-bits characters ...
set meta-flag on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on

They seem to clash with vim in a bad way. Ah! But you can also install a version of vim running directly on top of windows. If you do this, then you can use this other version instead of the one that comes with cygwin.

All I had to do was to create this little script:

 "/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Vim/vim63/vim.exe" `cygpath -w $1`

The trick here is that you need to convert Linux-like paths (like /tmp) into Windows path (C:…). My little script is bad in many ways, but it will work if you call vim with only a file name as an argument.

My solution does fail in some nasty ways. For example, when I do a CVS commit, I can’t enter my comment. Bad.

See also my post Grep is just not for matching lines anymore.

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My favorite Toronto conference has issued its call for papers:

Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Suites & Conference Centre (NEW LOCATION)
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada

Sponsored by:
IBM Toronto Software Lab
IBM Centers for Advanced Studies
in Partnership with
National Research Council Canada

CASCON 2005, the 15th Annual International Conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference held in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.
The Meeting of Minds, as CASCON is otherwise known, is an opportunity to present, discuss, and learn.

CASCON 2005 comprises keynote presentations, technical paper tracks, challenging workshops, Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards, and the technology showcase – a key attraction of the conference. The proceedings from CASCON 2005 will be included in the ACM Digital Library, a “window into the world’s core computing literature”.

CASCON 2005 is focused on five main themes:
- Software Models, Tools, Practices and Engineering
- Database Management, Technologies and Data Mining
- Distributed and Web-Based Systems
- Systems Management and Autonomic Computing
- Privacy, Security and Trusted Systems

Topics within these themes, as well as detailed paper submission information, can be found at http://witanweb.ca/cascon05/

The important deadlines for paper submission are listed here:
Abstracts for technical papers due – Friday, May 13, 2005
Full technical papers due – Friday, June 3, 2005
Acceptance notification – Monday, July 25, 2005
Camera-ready papers due – Friday, August 12, 2005

Yuhong worries about CS students. She points to two recent articles on the CS job market:

• Endangered species: US programmers (David R. Francis ,The Christian Science Monitor ,October 14, 2004)
• Study finds dramatic loss of tech jobs (Ed Frauenheim, CNET News, October 18, 2004)

Here is what she has to say based on the people she talked to:

I recently talked to some master CS graduates. (…) They both said programming jobs are no more and many new hires are master graduates.

Here are two quotes from the second article she cites:

There are certain areas in the technology sector that are thriving. Demand is high for those who specialize in network and IT security.

Technology services companies like IBM and BearingPoint are hiring in the United States, though they are increasingly looking for employees who can combine technology chops with business savvy.

The message is quite clear, I believe. If you want to train yourself or students to produce software (programming or software engineering), you better be damn good because the job market is not there anymore. Will jobs come back? Automobile workers in North America are still waiting for the jobs sent to Mexico or elsewhere to come back. Now, programming or software engineering are not useless skills, far from it, but it might be a better strategy to aim for a business jobs where your programming or computer networking skills can be put to good use, for example. It seems that the job market is moving toward information technology (security, networking, using the right technology at the right time, understanding the implication of a given technology for business).