Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3

I just watched a couple of video reviews for Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3, and I am impressed! When Alpha 2 was released, it was very unstable and of low quality in general. I thought for sure Canonical would ship a buggy OS in April, but wow, it turned out better than expected. I am still not a fan of Unity (Gnome Panel guy here), but it looks better than before. I also like how Firefox 4 looks. I have said that I would wait until 12.04, but I am beginning to change my mind. I think I will update to 11.04, but I will wait until the 11.04 Macbuntu theme gets released.

If you have the time and hard drive space, check out Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 for yourself.

Canucks after the trade deadline

I am impressed by what mike Gillis managed to do this year at the trade deadline. He made the #1 team even more complete. for many years now, Canucks GMs past and present have been criticised for doing nothing (or not doing enough) at the trade deadline. Most years this was a fair criticism, as Canucks teams of seasons past have needed a lot of improvement at the deadline.

This year was different. The Canucks are currently #1 in the NHL, so if ever there was a year when doing nothing was a good thing, this was it. Instead, Mike Gillis acquired Chris Higgins and Maxim Lapierre without giving up much all around. Now the team is even deeper and tougher to play against than before. Congratulations Mr. Gillis, you have built a true Stanley Cup contender.

44 days left

Just posting to point out that there are 44 days left in the semester. personally, I still feel like the semester just started. I've been slacking off way too much. I probably should get back on the horse, but I do feel good just slacking off. I have two more midterms coming up, so I should start studying. Judging by the course content, the algorithms midterm will be quite hard.


This blog post counts as school work, right?

Every programmer should know at least one scripting language

I came to this realisation after a recent interview I had. The interview involved some programming questions in the language of my choice. Now, this job would involve Objective-C and Java, so clearly they didn't care how well I knew the syntax of those languages. They wanted to test my knowledge of core CS principles as well as my problem solving skills. I didn't get the job, by the way.

What I realised afterwards was that doing the test in PHP made it somewhat easier to focus on the logic of the problem at hand. So even you hardcore C/C++/Java/C# types need to learn a weak typed scripting language because even if you're a hardcore C guy, you might not get the hardcore C job because you failed to answer a programming question in C.

My suggestions would be Perl, PHP and/or Python.

Technical interviews

I had a very technical interview at a local startup today. I can't say that I completely bombed it, but I did far from well. The lesson here is that if you are a software engineer, prepare for an interview as if it were a final exam.

I did try to study for this interview, but I made the mistake of focusing too much on learning a language instead of the computing science fundamentals (see previous post). Bottom line is: they don't care what your favourite language is. You must be able to come up with a correct and efficient solution on the spot. You must also be able to analyse and explain why your solution is correct and efficient. Study your Big O notation, kids!

Python

As I'm sitting here preparing for my interview tomorrow, it hit me: I'm starting to like Python. The job I'll be interviewing for tomorrow will involve some Python, and I haven't done any in almost two years, so I decided to implement merge sort, quick sort and a few other things for practice. Man, the syntax is so straightforward, and it reads like pseudocode! Obviously Python isn't ideal for everything, but if you are designing algorithms or something like that, this is the way to go.

Reading break

This is SFU's first ever reading break. In general, it is pretty cool to get a week off to sleep in, but I don't really feel like I need it this semester. For me, this semester has been so slack, that week 6 felt like week 2. It will probably pick up though, I still have to do 5 papers, 1 project and 3 midterms. On top of that, I have my co-op stuff to do. Perhaps its not that slack, maybe I'm just lazy.