Greg and Kat's blog

My turn to write an update…

We started today by happening to find the same cab driver as yesterday. His total English consisted of “Hello” and “Welcome to Hangzhou”. To be fair, that’s more English than we had Mandarin to offer, so good for him.

With a complicated series of hand gestures and pointing, we managed to communicate that we wanted to go back to the silk market, and that he was pretty sure we should go and drink some tea (at the place where he gets a kickback, I assume). With an even more complicated series of hand gestures, we decided to spend two hours at the silk market, then he would meet us to go to the tea thing.

The silk market was properly open this time, so we got a bunch of stuff.

The tea place was basically a tea tasting in somebody’s house (where the whole little village seems to be dedicated to this industry) and then getting the squeeze to overpay for some of the local (and apparently very high quality) tea. We totally overpayed for some tea, and everybody was happy.

Then we headed to Zhejiang University, the other half of our Dual Degree Program.

We met Xiaolan, the staff member who oversees the DDP from the ZU side. She took us to Baoshi Hill, to the north of West Lake. Nobody had mentioned this hill to us before and it’s not big in the guide books we’ve seen, so I’m going to say it’s totally underrated: there was a stunning view of the West Lake and the city. Even though the day was a little overcast, it was worth the climb. [KS: This place is totally in the guide book. There is a pagoda on the hill that we also saw. The view was totally worth the multitude of stairs!]

We met up with Qing (CS instructor and woman who Janice is staying with) for dinner at a restaurant I didn’t catch the name of, but was obviously an upscale kind of place. The food was entirely unlike anything we have had before, but it was unbelievably good. I had come to think that you could pretty much sample the food of China in Vancouver, but I was obviously wrong (or haven’t looked hard enough for Hangzhou/Zhejiang food). [Edit: the restaurant was called “Zui Bai Lou” and is on Dragon Well Road in Hangzhou.]

Then Qing took us for a drive around West Lake at night and back to the hotel. Xiaolan and Qing were excellent hosts and wonderful people to spend the afternoon with.

Hangzhou summary: two days isn’t enough, but you can pack a lot into two days if you try.

A few more pictures up.

Kat and I are clearly in Hangzhou and are both trying to remember that it is pronounced something like “hangjoo”, or possibly “hangjoe”, based on our careful study of announcements in airports. It seems like normal people would have worked that out before they got here.

We have Janice’s number and will be calling her to get together and see the city today.

Otherwise, nothing to report, really.

As some of you know, but we haven’t mentioned here yet… Kat and I are heading to China for a vacation. It’s the first travelling Kat and I have done together for a long time: all of our travels for the last few years were to-and-from North Carolina.

We’re leaving April 13 and starting the trip with three days in Hangzhou, which is where Zhejiang University is: the home of our Dual Degree Program. Janice is there, as are a bunch of students I know from CMPT 120. It will be nice to see them.

But mostly, after a thousand meetings talking about the DDP as an abstract concept, I want to see the damn place. Hangzhou is supposed to be one of the places Chinese people go on vacation in China, so I have a good feeling about getting to hang out there for a few days.

Then, we’re going back to Beijing and joining a tour, “Yangtze Interlude”. Our tour has day 1 == April 16, so you can do the math if you really want to figure out exactly where we are on each day.

The tour is pretty much “tourist highlights of China”. Since I have never been to China, that seems appropriate. I have also never been on a package tour. I suspect that somewhere around day 13, I’ll hear myself say something like “we already saw three ancient temples; why the hell would I want to see another one?”

Anyway, several of the hotels on our itinerary claim to have Internet access, so I’m hoping we’ll at least be able to post updates here and perhaps some pictures.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a couple of queries from high school students that all boil down to “is there some way I can get involved this summer?”

Last year, I managed to work with two students on demos that our recruiters could use at career fairs, etc. The thought has occurred to have somebody this year work to help set up a high school robotics competition (which I have had in mind for a while, but never had a chance to implement).

To be fair, I have only had four such inquiries, but based on the metric standard ratio of asked to unasked questions, I’m going to assume those four questions represent 40 people out there somewhere who are actually interested. These have been students finishing grades 11 and 12, who are planning to study CS, and want some outlet for their interest before they show up as a first year student.

Can anybody picture a good way to set up something like a “bridging program” for such students? Imagine a half dozen grade 11/12 students who plan to study CS, can program in some minimal way, and want to (let’s say) volunteer a few weeks of their time to get some good CS experiences.

I feel like there’s a good idea in there somewhere, but I just can’t quite see it. Thoughts?

Okay… it’s Ada Lovelace Day and the goal is…

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire…

Having just been (gently) ambushed to post something, I have only been mulling this over for a few minutes. It’s a tall order.

Old profs? All I’d really have to say is “she taught that course well” (and I don’t have many examples since I was a math major in undergrad and took relatively few CS courses). Colleagues? I certainly admire some of the women I work with, but it would be a little weird to write about them.

It took be a while, but I finally figured it out: the SFU WICS girls (but only if I can apply the label “WICSies” to them).

I have hung around university student groups in one capacity or another for the last 15 years. I have seen ups and downs, highs and lows, frantic activity and stagnation. I have never dealt with a group like WICS before.

The whole group is uniformly positive and constructive. They all understand the group’s mission and have a huge variety of ways to work towards it. I count many former members as friends and as some of my most interesting students.

I certainly wish we had 50% women in CS. Still, I can’t help but thinking that if we did, WICS wouldn’t be as wonderful as it is, and I’d be a little sad about that.

I’m in the process of learning the Java Spring web framework (motto: there’s nothing another XML configuration file can’t fix). This has turned out to be a bit of an exercise in frustration: I have always had trouble dealing with Java tech because of their jargon-filled docs. Actually, it’s not even the jargon per se, it’s that the jargon is all Java-specific.

An example: the term “servlet container”. A “servlet container” is a web server that can run a servlet. That’s all. There’s no need for a new term: just say “web server that can run a servlet” or even “servlet implementation” and you’ve removed a whole layer of jargon that people have to learn.

As I was exploring Hibernate (which can integrate with Spring) today, I went to the Hibernate home page and realized I had another example of why I hate the Java ecosystem. Their front page contains this description of what Hibernate is:

Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom – including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections.

Well… I suppose that’s pretty informative if you’re willing to parse through the overly-dense sentence structure and already know how the Java world uses all those terms. And, the page contains this diagram:

Riiiiight. That totally clears things up. Perfect for first-time visitors.

Now, compare a similar (but admittedly less-powerful) Python technology: the home page for SQLObject. They have this description:

SQLObject is a popular Object Relational Manager for providing an object interface to your database, with tables as classes, rows as instances, and columns as attributes.

I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more clear and concise description of ORM than that. It’s followed by a dozen-line code example of how to work with SQLObject in Python which more-or-less demonstrates exactly what the tool does, how it does it, and what it can be used for.

Basically, the message I get from the Hibernate front page: “boy, this sure looks enterprisey“. From SQLObject: “oh, I see what this tool is for”.

Just to be a little constructive, let me take a shot at rewriting the Hibernate intro:

Hibernate is a powerful Object-Relational Mapper for Java: it lets you save object instances as rows in a relational database, and retrieve them later. Hibernate supports most object-oriented programming techniques, including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections.

Okay, that’s off my chest. Bring on the Java fanboys…

I spent the weekend trying to get together a paper for WCCCE 2009 (Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education). WCCCE is a fairly small, local conference. I always like going: the people who go pretty much all know each other, and it’s a good chance to talk to people from other schools.

What I wanted to do was look at the Subversion version control repositories from the last few semesters of CMPT 470. I figured I could make a good story out of it somewhere: there’s a lot of data in there. I assumed there would be some correlation between the way the repository was used and students’ marks or peer evaluation or something.

There wasn’t. Bupkis.

Anyway… I could have tried to sell a paper along the lines of “hey, look how unquantifiable this marking thing we do is”, but that’s pretty unsatisfying. I thought I was going to have to give up on the whole thing, or at least wait until next year and take some time to analyze things in a less frenzied way.

But, just before I sent the email calling the whole thing off, a thought occurred and I proposed a workshop instead:

Using Subversion in Your Class

In this interactive workshop, we will explore the use of the Subversion version control system in a class, particularly one that involves group work. Topics will include the basic usage of Subversion, creation of shared repositories given various technical restrictions, resources for students, and discussion of how instructors can enhance their teaching using a version control system. Participants with laptops will be invited to explore a shared repository as part of the workshop.

That’s a lot better than some dodgy paper: it’s something the people at the conference might actually want to hear about.

The lesson: Everything has a good idea in it somewhere. Unfortunately, you might spend your weekend fruitlessly doing statistics before you find it.

I’m starting to really see the mixed-blessing of having a study leave (or “sabbatical” if you like). As I mentioned before, the purpose of the leave is essentially to do stuff that you didn’t have a chance to while teaching.

Here’s the problem: I can always find time to do most of the stuff I really want to do. What’s left are tasks that I had been putting off because I didn’t really want to face them.

Case in point: This month is pretty much dedicated to CMPT 165 distance ed revisions.

The old 165 distance has gotten a little crufty, and needs some attention. I had already done the work on the course content and Study Guide. Now just have to do the assignments, exams and final admin stuff. What parts of teaching do I hate most? Yup. Those.

And the kicker is that I know that no matter what I do, half of the students taking 165 are going to hate it and me anyway. They want an easy no-work credit and are still going to find that if they don’t know any tech anything, it’s going to be a University course worth of work (but realistically, no more than that).

Feh!

Okay, let’s start with the facts: I have a cold. Now, a cold isn’t that big a deal. It’s not like I have a touch of the hanta virus or something.

But, I hate it. It’s never going to be bad enough that I can properly complain about it, or even take time away from work with a clear conscience. I’m just going to be vaguely annoyed for the next week.

I wish I could take the whole cold and pack it into 24 miserable hours rather than have it drag on.