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Showing posts from August, 2005

Books, sofa, and coffee

This is the second time I went to that coffee shop in Riau street, Bandung. (I won't name the place, since it might be considered advertising.) As usual, I brought a book (usually a couple of books) with me. The place was nice and cozy. I wen straight to the middle room, turned right to a room which has three nice sofa-like chairs. I ordered a hot latte, slouched and started to read my book. This was just perfect. And then, it happened again. I just couldn't continue reading. My imagination ran wild. This time I was thinking about writing a book on the art of programming. Or, a book on the real life of programmers. I am teaching a course on programming this term. Actually, the first class is going to be this coming Tuesday. I just want to teach the real thing, not just the theory. Okay, I will do that. I tried to cotinue reading. Again, I just couldn't do it. Now, I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about (advanced) physics, about Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem. N

Teaching programming to EE students

It's that time again. Time to teach second year EE on programming. This is their first formal course on programming. Perhaps, this is also their last time? I had only one formal course on programming and that was FORTRAN. Anyway, what should I teach? We already decided that it's object oriented and C++ is going to be used as the language. Walter Savitch's "Problem Solving in C++" is the textbook. There were a lot of discussion before we came to that decision. Unfortunately, I didn't make notes (and am to lazy to write them down). Every year I re-think about it. (Perhaps, it's time to write the arguments down?) Here's an issue that came my mind recently. High vs low-level programming UML or higher level "coding." This is great, but I am afraid that my students would not understand low level coding. Remember that they are EE, engineers. They are not computer scientists. They may have to work with devices with low level programming, such as (mic

Scrapbook: Kingston, Ontario, Canada

I found an old picture, taken in 1987 (or 1988?) when I visited friends in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. At that time, I was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. We were part of Indonesian students sent away to get post graduate degrees. They were in Computer Science (CS), while I was in Electrical Engineering (EE). From left to right: Fahren (IPB), Budi (ITB), Yugo (UI).