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By Chris Kale
A big "Hogtown" hello to everyone back in CS at the University of Windsor. I can't believe that it has been seven months since I gave up the C.S.S. Presidency. And what have I been doing in those seven months, and why should you care? I'm working at the IBM Software Development Lab in Toronto.
The IBM Industry Internship Program (IIP) gives Computer Science students a chance to get experience in "The Real World" (I hate that expression) in their chosen career field for a leader in the industry (no, I haven't been totally brainwashed). I know that IBM has already made a presentation on the IIP to students at Windsor. For those of you that missed it, I'm sure the C.S.S. exec, or the Computer Science secretaries would be able to give you more specific information, but this is what it boils down to. You take one complete year off school, and work sixteen consecutive months. You meet a lot of people. Everyone assumes you're a student from the University of Waterloo. And you spend more money than you ever thought you would.
IBM targets schools that do not have Co-op programs, like Windsor, for its IIP students. I believe that there are other companies with similar programs, and the School of Computer Science is trying to entice them to come to Windsor. The biggest benefit of the program is that IBM knows that they have you for sixteen months, so they can put you on projects that are more involved. You can spend two months training, and learning everything you can about your project, and then be productive for the remaining fourteen. Whereas a Co-op student, who is only working for four months at a time, may get stuck with a cheesy-do-little job. That is not always the case, but I met a guy from Waterloo in May who spent four months at IBM pushing VCRs around the building and setting them up for presentations. Not really career advancement for a CS major.I think the biggest concern that I had about the program was being able to fit in. I mean, I had a little computer work experience, but nothing that would compare to people working at IBM. I also thought it might be a sea of blue suits , red ties, and short hair. My manager met me on my first day and almost fit that description - his suit wasn't blue. As we wandered around on the whirlwind tour, I saw that not everyone was dressed formally. I finally met my supervisor. He was wearing a Labatt's t-shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes. He asked me, "Why are you wearing that tie?" I instantly felt at ease.
The other thing that I had going for me was that everyone saw me as a student. They didn't expect me to know everything right away. Oh sure, they wanted me to turn my PS/2 on immediately, but that's what 60-104 is for isn't it? The people here were, and are very supportive of everyone, full timers, and students. Everyone is assigned a mentor. Your mentor is a full time employee working on your team, and is responsible for assigning you work. But they're also your first point of contact. If you have a question, just ask your mentor. ANYTHING! IBM does not want you to sit around and wait for someone to ask if everything is ok. This is not a restaurant. My mentor graduated from the University of Toronto in 1989, and he was also an IIP student, so he could identify with my concerns, and problems. That helped me a lot.
The major thing that you'll notice if you work for IBM, is that everything is reduced to an acronym. Not a big surprise if you think about who you're working for. I'm currently in D.S. - Distributed Systems. It's kind of like networking, and distributed processing. Allowing a number of computers to work together to solve a problem, and communicate with each other. The other three students from Windsor that were accepted this year are Shawn Laliberte, Lisa Fisher, and Gerry Greenwood. Shawn is in AS/400 - IBM's product to compete against UNIX. Lisa is in C370 - Mainframe C Language, and Gerry is in Workstation Database. We all enjoy what we're doing, and in talking to everyone, IBM seems pleased with what we are doing too. We're doing our best to try and make CS students from Windsor look good.
Living in Toronto is not as bad as some people make it out to be. Yes, everything is expensive. Yes, the city is really, really crowded. Yes, the air is polluted. But there is a lot to do here. Being a life-long Maple Leafs fan, ok - I'll admit it - go ahead laugh, and boo me if you want, I can now watch them LIVE, and maybe win once in a while. Actually, one of the Vice Presidents of IBM Canada GAVE me two free Leaf Tickets because I have my pennant sticking up on my office wall. If you don't mind the BIG CITY, then living here is no huge deal. And if anyone is planning on moving up in September 1993, I know where there's a nice 3 bedroom townhouse available....
I think that's about all for now. If you have any specific questions on the IIP, or IBM you can give them to Al Siodlowski (Your beloved Wisdom Editor) and he'll forward them to me. Hopefully if all goes well, the questions and answers will be printed in the next issue of Wisdom.
Good luck to everyone on their finals - that's one thing I definitely do not miss! Have fun! And, yep it that time of year already, Happy Holidays!
Chris Kale
Our new sweatshirts will have the C.S.S. logo on the front. On the back it will have a neat slogan. All we need now is the slogan! So we are asking you to come up a neat slogan. The prize to the person with the best slogan is a free sweatshirt and a mug (with the new logo on it). Please bring in the slogan to the office by no later than Wednesday January 27th (4:00pm). That night the winner will be chosen.
from John A. Barry's "Technobabble", MIT Press, 1991
Our program, who art in Memory, Hello be thy name. Thy operating system come, thy commands be done, at the Printer as they are on the Screen. Give us this day our daily data, and forgive us our I/O errors as we forgive those whose logic circuits are faulty. Lead us not into Frustration, and deliver us from Power Surges. For thyne is the Algorithm, the Application, and the Solution, looping for ever and ever. Return.
On Wednesday, 27th of January, the Computer Science Society will once again have a Looney Movie Night. The theme for this round of movies will be "Lord of the Rings" by Tolkein. We will have "The Hobbit" and The "Lord of the Rings".
As usual we will have pop and pizza, all for the incredibly low price of only one dollar. We will hold it again at the Grad House (on Sunset near Lambton Tower), upstairs starting at 7:00 pm.
Several other Looney Movie Nights are being planned. Keep your eyes opened for posters!
From: Cori Lewin (Comedy from the Internet)
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?" One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said.
The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes. "The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, `Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message `Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king had the computer scientist's head chopped off, and they all lived happily ever after.
by the 2nd Yr. Rep. - C. Cabreros
How was everybody's holidays? Great? Wonderful? Too Short?? Mine was very relaxing. Welcome back to another semester here at the U.
This month the Computer Science Society ( C.S.S. ) has many things planned. Starting this week Jan. 18 - Jan. 22 we will be holding a pool tournament, more details will be found elsewhere in this newsletter.
For all those people interested in playing volleyball we will be trying to get the courts booked on Fridays, and maybe the odd Saturday or Sunday. If there's enough interest for basketball, we could try and book those courts also.
The CSS executive is here for you. If you have any questions, concerns but most of all ideas for events that you would attend. Please don't hesitate to come up and talk to any of us.
Back to January. The week of 25th- 29th (last week of January) the C.S.S. will be having on the Wednesday (27th) a Tolkein Looney Movie Night to "RING IN THE NEW YEAR!!! ".
Also the idea of a ski trip is being tossed around, if you are interested please leave your name in the CSS office (5108 Lambton Tower). We'd like to make sure there's enough people interested before we make final preparations. Please let us know because we need a minimum number of people to go.
And for you creative Computer Science Majors, we are having a contest for a slogan and picture for the backs of the CSS sweatshirts. The one that gets chosen will get a sweatshirt at no cost. So get those ideas in to the exec by JANUARY 29th, 1993. Enclosed there will be an order form for sweatshirts. Deadlines and other vital stuff are here in this edition of the Wisdom, so continue reading there's more interesting stuff.
HAVE FUN!! GOOD LUCK IN YOUR STUDIES!! CHRISTINE
by Amie Flexner
On 11 Nov. I attended Autofact, an international expo for today's automated and integrated factory. This show had a lot of exhibitors displaying hardware, and various types of software, mostly CAD/CAM/CAE, or some other similar systems. The Expo took place at Cobo Center in Detroit for three days. Among the represented companies were SGI, SUN, Hewlett Packard, Autodesk (which puts out AutoCad), Apple Computers, Cray, AT&T;, Digital Equipment, along with many others.
I picked up a lot of materials from various companies as I walked around the expo, these are available for people to peruse, and/or borrow in the CSS office for the duration.
The 300 companies displaying their wares were spread out enough that there was no way for me attend all their booths in the limited time I was there, but I did do my best. I watched some demos on some fabulous programs, and saw some things about some really neat relatively new companies and the things they are putting out. One of these was called Wisdom Technologies and is doing a number of things that sounded fascinating as I listened to their sales pitch.
Feel free to come up to the CSS office to learn more, either by talking to me, or by looking through the available materials.
This year the C.S.S. is looking into a ski trip. The trip would involve leaving here on a Friday night by bus and staying at a hotel for the night. The next day would be skiing, skiing and more skiing then at night back on the bus for Windsor. The locations being looked into are northern Michigan and Ontario.
The price and location will be determined if enough people want to go. If we get 25 or more people signed up, then we would have enough to fill a bus and to get group rates on the lift and hotel rates.
We will have a sheet in the office (LT 5108) for people to sign up. Signing up doesn't mean a commitment but rather signals that you are very interested in going and also so that we know if there are enough people to go through with this.
by Christine Cabreros
It started ar 11:45 am and ended at 7:15 pm. The movie that began the night was Monty Python: In Search Of THe Holy Grail. This movie had the greatest crowd of all the movies. It was humorous in the Monty Python way. So all those Monty fans that missed out on all the fun, may be next year. During the short intermission some of the fans left to class and elsewhere but we moved on. We served subs from `The Subway' for $1 and pop for $0.50.
Next up on the agenda was Predator II. A good violent film to get the blood moving since the temperature of the room seemed to be getting dropping. As most remember the film was about aliens or in this case predators from another planet in search of the greatest warrior to be found in New York City.
Following this film was, (suspense here), you got it, Star Trek VI, which was another popular gathering of people. People waiting to watch this movie came in during the intermission just to find a seat. (Sorry, no popcorn!) The subs were disappearing and there seemed to small mutterings of wanting some warm food such as pizza. This muttering was hushed as Captain Kirk was volunteered to escort the Klingon Ambassador to a peace talk. By the end of the movie everybody was engrossed when the plot to foil the peace was thwarted. People enjoyed themselves to the max. Pizza came and there was a sudden rush for the warm food. Things were going marvelously.
The last movie was Sister Act starring Whoopie Goldberg. This must have been the funniest movie of the day, the whole room was filled with munching and laughing people. At the end we knew it had been a success. Everyone left with smiles and mutterings of `when's the next movie night?' and what does that tell you???
The Computer Science Society Executive thanks everyone who attended and we hope to see more of you out to the society's events.
wisdom@cs.uwindsor.ca