Donnie’s Blog

This is my busiest term all school year, since I teach my database systems course this term. I decided to try something new this term - instead of hand-coding the website for my database course, I have been using Moodle to manage the course.

So far, I really dislike it!

This is actually a step forward, since I used to really hate it. Now that I have used it a bit, I realize that Moodle really does have a few things going for it. It’s easy to work on draft assignments and then make them available when they are ready. It’s also really nice to be able to upload various peripheral files that the students will need; Moodle’s file management capabilities are quite nice.

The thing that I am totally annoyed with right now is that I can’t assign partial points to assignments! I can create an assignment and say that it’s worth 45 points in total, but then I can’t give somebody 39.5 points for their work. What gives?!

The other thing that always annoys me when I use Moodle is that it’s not just a piece of software to help me do my job; it promotes certain alternative teaching philosophies. I don’t want to use a piece of software that lectures me on how to teach; I want a piece of software that will let me publish assignments and other course-related materials, and let me track the students in the course.

Leave me alone, Moodle! Just help me do my job.

Saturday, November 10 was the ACM regional programming contest. Caltech won yet again… Go Caltech!

This year was definitely one of the least intentional wins. There was little interest in an ACM programming contest track for CS11, so we just didn’t have one. Then, two weeks before the contest was scheduled, some all-star students expressed interest in going, so we arranged it. And they won! Caltech rocks.

Anyway. Hopefully we won’t do it this way ever again. Next year I want to really try to drum up interest in the contest and actually get 3 or 4 teams out there. But at least we were able to land the win this year!

A week ago, Caltech had its very first olive harvest. Caltech has many olive trees all over campus, and usually they are quite a nuisance because they fall on the ground, get squished under foot, and leave oily splotches on the concrete for months. In the past, the grounds crew would spray the trees to get them to produce less, but then two students decided to pick some olives and make olive oil out of them. (A very clever way to avoid homework, I must say.) Once the students succeeded at producing some actual olive oil, the administration decided to make an annual event of this.

So, call me crazy, but I would think that after an “olive harvest,” there wouldn’t be any olives on the trees anymore after that. Yet for the last week I have been walking around campus and looking at those trees, and guess what — still lots of olives.

I’m pretty annoyed by this. My coworkers think my standards are too high, but if you’re going to do something, do it right. No Olive Left Behind.

Yes yes, I just wrote about getting a new Canon 40D camera, but DSLRs aren’t always convenient, so it’s nice to have a point-and-shoot camera for casual use. I was initially looking at a much smaller and simpler P&S camera, but then I remembered that I’m an obsessive-compulsive control freak. Fortunately the G9 just came out, so I thought I would give it a try.

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This quarter’s Engineering and Science magazine has a really fascinating article in it by Nate Lewis, analyzing the problem of providing energy for the entire planet. Here is a link to a PDF of the article. Check it out!

I wrote a fun little program for computing the closure of a set of functional dependencies this week. Functional dependency theory is the foundation for Third Normal Form and Boyce-Codd Normal Form, and a variety of other neat things you can do with relation schemas. An interesting and powerful set of ideas, but I think that most database designers don’t really use functional dependency theory so much. But it is fun to play with!

Anyway, a lot of the problems are very simple in that they work with abstracted schemas, such as R(A, B, C, D, E), and if you take a set F of functional dependencies against the relation R, you would like to compute things like “What is the closure of F?” or “What is a canonical cover of F?” Then you can answer questions like “What are the candidate keys of R, given F?”

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Boy, the day classes end, we get word that there are 132 students pre-enrolled for CS11 next term. What is going on?! The students sure seem to love CS11. My hope is that about 85% want to learn C, OCaml, Haskell, or Python.

Anyway, it sure is nice to be able to focus solely on grading for a while. Hopefully I’ll get caught up on this in the next couple of days, and still get to sleep a reasonable amount every day.

With all the guest lectures the CS department has been having lately, the staff has branched out a bit with the flyers:

It’s kind of funny. It’s to the point that a plain old white flyer would stand out!

I just finished preparing the 18th lecture in my database course. That’s 2/3 done - only nine lectures left!

Of course, grading is another matter entirely… sigh…

There have been a lot of visitor lectures so far this year. Quite a few of them look pretty interesting, especially the upcoming lecture by RMS. But I mainly like these lectures for the opportunity to snag a free brownie…