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My UX teacher at university consulted with our province on the design of new highway signs (I think it was for the icons that tell you what's at the next off-ramp/service centre). So, it certainly is possible to consider the use case (user-centred design is what she specializes in) and design the signs accordingly.

With Fluid, you don't do anything from the web developer's prospective. The Fluid app just packages a Web site as a separate application. So, what this means that any user can take a Web site and make that a separate app if they want it.

That really depends. Sometimes, things can be pretty generic or the main site can be badly organized. In that case, I find that a folder in my bookmarks bar with links can be a lot faster. Even without using the bookmark, autocomplete in the bookmarks bar can be faster than a search engine.

In other cases, it can be a pain to get specific enough. If I want the English version of Chihayafuru Volume 1, but on Bookwalker, not Kindle/Comixology? How much typing am I going to have to do? Note that if I'm not specific enough, I'll get a bilingual edition meant for Japanese people to learn English as the first result. It's an imported physical book and not a digital one, either.

One of the professors in my former department was an astronomer from the US Naval Observatory. He's applying techniques he developed (along with other techniques astronomers use) to get better resolution MRI images.

I had tons of notes related to Trade Wars and planning my moves.

I played some MUDs during university in the early 90s, but once I realized how much time I was spending on them, I decided I needed to stop for the sake of my grades. Of course, getting the original Civ game right before exams one year wasn't a good thing either from that perspective.

FF7 is an excellent JRPG, but for a different (and more modern) take on JRPGs, I recommend the Persona series, especially 4 (Golden if possible) and the latest 5. Persona 3 is excellent as well and similar in style to 4 and 5, but not quite as polished.

Persona blends building relationships (which helps with your Persona customization and hence dungeons) along with doing various day-to-day tasks such as studying, getting a part-time job, going on dates, and even minor things like taking care of a houseplant all of which help improve various stats. Some activities aren't available if you don't have a certain rank in a stat.

They provide an interesting exploration into various challenges in the modern world, but without coming across as heavy-handed.

I think the only real problem is that Persona 5 holds your hand for a very long time as it introduces the system so it's not until around the end of the first boss area that all the options open up which is about 6 hours into what can be a 100 hour game.

My only problem with doing everything in Matlab (which I used to do) and exporting the PDF is that you can't really match the fonts easily to the main document. I picked a set of fonts (math and normal) for my Ph.D. thesis and I wanted the fonts in the figures to match those in the main body. Using matlab2tikz did that for me.

You could probably do the same thing but do the export of the tikz file instead of the PDF. That's basically what I do.

I love matlab2tikz. I used it for all my plots in my Ph.D. thesis (and I had a lot). I also really like latexmk.

For non-plots I love Sketch (http://sketch4latex.sourceforge.net) which is pretty great for doing diagrams with 3D objects, especially if you use the sketch-lib (https://alexdu.github.io/sketch-lib/) which provides a bunch of useful simple objects to manipulate.

I know many profs who decided to switch from industry to academia because they had enough money and wanted a less hectic lifestyle. A very large number of professors actually do contract work for companies.

Even a former Master's supervisor of mine (who is officially retired) still does consulting with companies (typically game developers as he specializes in splines in computer graphics).

I'm actually in Engineering and at least in Canada, there's actually an accreditation body that reviews the engineering programs to ensure they live up to a standard. If the program meets that standard, the graduates only have to take a law and ethics exam (in addition to the experience requirement). If you're outside that system, you have to take a series of exams on the material. I know that it's different in the US, though. I believe that you do have to take a set of exams on the core material for your type of engineering as there's too many programs to properly vet all of them.

I know that at least one former Amazon CTO was an excellent coder, although he didn't really do much (if any) while as CTO.

I don't know of many companies that have a "Chief Data Scientist" that reports directly to the CEO. In all honesty, they're more likely to report to a CTO.

Also, there's a reason why the C-suite people have the word "Officer" in their title as they're officers of the corporation and that implies additional legal responsibilities. It's not necessary that it be in their official title, but it typically is.

You're assuming that you are the one doing the posting. If my parents and my sister are on Facebook (they are), I'm in their address book and if that got uploaded to Facebook (quite likely), I'm there now despite the fact I don't have an account. Plus, you can be tagged in photos as well. Plus, they have their cookies which allow tracking of you across large parts of the web.

Note that in all of this, I'm not using Facebook at all and not even visiting it. But, I'm in their system with data about me that I didn't put there.

Another thing with services like Facebook is that even if you're not on it officially, you're likely in the database as people will tag you in photos and have you in their address book. Then, there's other things like their cookies on web pages around the net.

The thing is that if you're actually teaching C++ (which I have done), there's still the C parts that you actually have to teach as well that are common between both. So, if you know C, you don't need to learn those over again. I actually took a course at one job on C++ for C programmers back in the 90s and it was very well done for the time.

True, modern C++ is quite different. But, there's nothing from preventing a C programmer from starting as a "bad" C++ programmer and learning new techniques as they go.

A few other data flow programming languages, LabView (which has been around for a very long time) and is extremely popular for data acquisition (it's basically the goto choice most of the time) and the Houdini computer graphics software (there's other examples in CG as well). I pick Houdini because there's a version people can download and try. It actually works pretty well for most things.

The C++ template system alone makes it very difficult. Plus, many people have a habit of writing a mess of interconnected classes that become very difficult to pull apart to understand what's happening.

During my Master's (and my Ph.D.) I was using a finite element approach developed by a former Ph.D. of my supervisor(s). So, I asked for the code. I got back a mess of C++ and it was dependent on a linear algebra C++ library that wasn't around in the same form. I spent some time trying to reason out what he was trying to do, gave up and wrote my own in Fortran in about as much time as I spent trying to understand his.

What I love about Python is that it's so similar to how I've written pseudocode over the years. So, I often do quick prototypes of ideas in it, even if the final product isn't in Python.

Like you, I'm basically a C programmer at heart. But, to get efficient at some of the Maple code I had to write for my graduate work, I learnt a number of their functional tools so I now think quite a bit about using some of those as part of my toolset. I'm still largely a C-style programmer, though.

Working with the SymPy project helped me in my Python style.

Apple shut down iAd. That article isn't about Apple's ad business, although certainly some developers have in-app ads, but now they're moving away from iAd.

They're looking at search ads for apps in the app store, but that's pretty limited to just the store.

In the original show there wasn't a currency but in order to have aliens who exhibit avarice and the worst part of capitalism they had to include a currency (latinum, I think it was called).

My big problem with OneDrive is that it complains about some of my filenames and won't sync them until I change them to meet their requirements. So, I'm only using their free plan until that changes. I only have a few things there right now.

I order from Amazon about once a month, possibly more. UPS is usually okay, but it really depends on the driver. One of the drivers is actually stellar, others are average, and I've had drivers who just put up the couldn't deliver sticker despite the fact that I was home all day and didn't get buzzed.

Purolator was terrible, but the last time was during the whole Canada Post upheaval and they were swamped. It was "Out for Delivery" for about 5 days.

Canada Post is much like UPS in that it depends on who is making the delivery. I've had some excellent ones, some average ones, and others who just put up the sticker without contacting me.

I was co-supervised by a professor in CS for my Master's degree and during my Ph.D. I did most of the CS numerical programming courses (and I did most of the computer graphics courses during my Master's). There won't be many CS courses for a Master's degree that I'd be interested in. Plus, I'd be forced to take a number of undergrad CS courses just to meet their requirements.

A big problem I have now is that I'm overqualified for a lot of jobs. Getting another grad degree probably won't help. To be honest, if I was to get a CS degree, I'd probably go straight for the Ph.D. instead. There's some things in computer graphics I'd love to explore. Unfortunately, the prof I'd want to supervise me left and is now working at Intel last I checked.

The design pattern book came out 22 years ago so they were certainly named as such.

My first Unix programming job had me first learn RCS and then we later switched to CVS. I used CVS personally for years after that until I switched to Subversion, then Mercurial, and now Git. What I'm doing isn't that different from when I used RCS. There's more steps because of the added complexity but it's roughly similar.

Back in 1996 I was using CVS at work. Before that it was RCS or SCCS (RCS was the first version control system I used). This was at Bell-Northern Research and Nortel, which was not a bastion of cutting edge techniques. ClearCase was pretty commonly used as well (it came out in 1992).

Automated testing wasn't science fiction. It was regularly done, just as system or integration tests. You'd see who did the commit that broke the build. This was before QA even got to do their work. This was something done across the company and I'm certain that it wasn't the only company that did this.

In my mind, it's one thing if a Web site that I go to learnt about me based on my interactions and a whole another thing when people start correlating data across sites. That's what Facebook is doing with its stupid buttons on nearly every news site.

Amazon knows a great deal about my buying habits but that makes complete sense. Facebook knowing what articles I read from the Globe and Mail and the CBC is something else.

So you didn't get the MMR vaccine? If you didn't, it's not just measles that you didn't get vaccinated for.

I had none of those required courses in high school aside from one PE course. In grades 7 and 8 we had combined shop and home economics courses (in each year) which I thought was a good idea since everybody learnt to cook, sew, and do some basic carpentry. I saw so many people who couldn't cook at university. That would have been different if people learnt to cook in school.

This was at the university level. The problem is that my engineering department has a hard time fitting in courses. If you need an additional CS course that's one course covering something else that doesn't get included. We already merged our separate probability and statistics courses into a single course to make room for more intro materials.

For accreditation, all of our courses are broken down into having some of: Math, Intro Science, Engineering Science, and Engineering Design (and possibly none of these). You need a set amount in each category to get accreditation. Other departments have the same requirements, but their programs are designed to meet it. My department lets the student decide most of their upper year courses from across the university. So, if you decide to take a bunch of CS courses, you'll miss out and need to make it up on other courses. By the end, you need more Engineering Science and Engineering Design which isn't hard to do if you have mostly engineering courses, but pure CS courses basically give you nothing on these.

Until you actually participate in these kinds of discussions you don't know how carefully the overall curriculum is planned. Students going through my program have had a number of excellent suggestions, but it's hard to make changes and still meet all the requirements.

My department used to have more courses per term. Originally, there was 7 a term (I think), then there were 6. They've since moved to 5. That means you get 40 courses instead of 48 or 56.

The problem with what you're asking is that it's one more course you're trying to fit into a curriculum. My engineering department already gutted their first year calculus course by making most of it (about 3/4) pre-calculus after finding out that a majority of students weren't prepared.

I was asked to tutor a first year engineering student in programming as she was failing. I ended up spending most of the time helping her conceptualize the problem and breaking it down into steps. Once she learnt that, she could manage the syntax aspects of C++. She ended up with a grade in the 60s which isn't bad considering she had a grade in the low 40s after the midterm.

When I was a TA for thermodynamics, I noticed that we would get a bimodal distribution on the midterm exam. Thermodynamics isn't hard once you understand it. We'd get the people who didn't understand with grades in the 40s, but the people who did had grades in the 70s and 80s. The prof said that was pretty common. The objective was to get as many people from the lower curve to the upper curve by the end of the term. You'd typically have around 3 to 5 of a class of 80 fail by the end. Those were the people who just didn't get it. I'm sure that thermo is one of many courses like this.

During my Ph.D. I tried tracking down the reasoning behind a couple sets of assumptions made in non-uniform torsion of beams (e.g., twisting a beam with one end fixed). It turns out that they just kept the same assumptions from uniform torsion (just twisting the beam but with no ends fixed) without checking if they still held (they don't). All because nobody thought to check if the assumptions might be in conflict. The uniform torsion models go back to the mid 1800s, while the non-uniform torsion models are from the early to mid 20th century. So, it's been over 60 years people have been working with wrong assumptions.

One problem is that they collect "shadow" profiles of people who aren't even on the service. If someone who has your contact info is on the service, they'll start a profile of you based on that. Plus, there's many web sites that are connected to Facebook and send info back to it without you even knowing about it, just by having a Facebook share button on the page. It's very difficult to avoid having any of your data on Facebook's servers.

Thanks for the info. It's a bit expensive for me. I've been wondering about a good long term project and this might be it. I'll have to think about it.