I'm up late having underestimated the time it would take to arrange the [52.223] LLP Practical #05 for my students. Oh well, at least it's done now.

XO/2 - Introduction

XO/2 is an object-oriented, hard-real time system software and framework, designed for safety, extensibility and abstraction. It takes care of many common issues faced by programmers of mechatronic products, by hiding general design patterns inside internal mechanisms or by encapsulating them into easy-to-understand abstractions. Careful handling of the safety aspects has been the criterion by which the system has been crafted. These mechanisms, pervasive yet efficient, allow the system to maintain a deus ex-machina knowledge about the running applications, thus providing higher confidence to the application programmer. The latter, relieved from many computer-science aspects, can better focus his attention to the actual problem to be solved.

XO/2 originates from the ETHZ Institute of Robotics. In the past couple of years I have had the pleasure of teaching and supervising several excellent ETH students when they were studying for a year at Strathclyde.

BBspot - Linux Bashing Now Considered a Hate Crime

BBspot is a satirical news and comedy source and meant to be funny. If you are easily offended or don't have a sense of humor we suggest you go elsewhere.

Via LTSeek - Campus unplugged

Wireless-enabled laptops, combined with a wireless Internet network, hold the promise of transforming American higher education by giving all students instant Internet access wherever they are on campus..... Students can also have ready and frequent interaction with their professors - not to mention the freedom to tap resources anytime, anywhere.

But not everyone is convinced the step is a good one. Along with quick access to academic resources comes the ability to play games constantly, surf the Web in class, and talk online to friends instead of seeing them face to face. Lost in the newly "instant" culture may be time for contemplation, or even unwired solitude.

Also via LTSeek - Boston Globe Online - Colleges target essay fraud

Most of the essay topics on Duke University's application are the typical, window-on-your-soul-in-three-pages variety: What book has influenced you most? Describe a surprising intellectual experience. Name someone whom you admire but disagree with, and tell why.

This fall, however, Duke officials added an unusual question to end with: Is this writing your own?

In Monday's edition of SiT David made some valuable recommendations on how assessments should be constructed in such a way to minimise the potential for plagiarism. Thanks David..

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Wooden Spoons (Some Rules Kids Won't Learn in School)

Claim: Bill Gates published a list of 'Rules Kids Won't Learn in School.'

Status: False.

[This] list is the work of Charles J. Sykes, author of the book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add.

Dave Winer's Moore's Law for software?

I'd argue that a computer science undergrad today should learn C and assembly language, for a complete education, but most of the code the programmer of the future will write will be interpreted and running on a high level virtual machine that optimizes programmer effectiveness.

Dave's a man after my own heart. If any of my students are reading this then go read Dave's article, check out his site, read some of his archived material. You'll learn a helluva lot. I did - and still do. Dave's also the architect of Frontier and Usertalk which together make my favourite programming environment.

The Register:P4: Tom's Hardware has another rethink

A number of Tom's readers pointed out that it was unfair to judge the P4's performance using software not optimised to use the processor to its full potential and towards the end of last week, some dedicated folks at Intel Munich worked through the night to recompile the FlasK MPEG encoder to incorporate SSE2 code and mailed it to THG.

The results were illuminating. The P4's performance jumped from a pathetic 3.83fps to 14.03. Interestingly the 1.2GHz Athlon also improved thanks to Intel's tweaks, moving from 6.43 to 11.14fps.

The Register: P4: total dog or really cooking?

When using the original code, a P4 system took a glacial 19 hours compared with just under 13 hours for a 933MHz PIII. But with code recompiled to use SSE2, the P4 galloped through the test in a shade over seven and a half hours.

"It all comes down to the fact that running today's code the P4 is a dog," Welter told The Reg. "But once the code is optimised for it then it really can wake up and perform quite nicely.

The Register: WinME can't handle more than 512 megs of memory

Windows ME simply can't cope with more than 512MB of memory.

And neither can any other Win9x variant.

And it's a 'feature'. It transpires that Win ME, Win98 and Win95 cannot deal with main memory sizes in excess of 512MB.

Brian Carnell picks up the "Plagiarism' thread on his own site and poses the question "Can Computers Detect Internet Cheating?". I agree with Brian about the problems that arise once search engines have indexed tens of billions of web pages. Cheating will become even more endemic than the 60% of (US) students cited by Brian:

A professor I once had held up a newspaper story reporting a poll in which 60 percent of American college students said they had cheated. "What about the other 40 percent?" he asked rhetorically and then quickly answered his own question, "They're liars" which elicited knowing laughter from the class.

The http://plagiarism.org service is an attempt to cash in on the ever-growing issue of academic cheating and they make some bold claims including:

• Increased Quality. Instructors report that the quality of their students' work increases when they know that manuscripts will be checked for originality.
• Heightened Student Morale. Students themselves report that unchecked cheating and plagiarism by others undermines their own efforts and educational enthusiasm.

I have personal experience of the last point. A number of my students each year 'complain' of the demoralising effect that (undetected) cheating by other students have on their own honest and hard-won efforts. I sympathise with them. I suspect that cheating is more widespread than I'd care to admit. That's why I attempt to set assignments that are not so susceptible to what the Americans call the 'fraternity filing-cabinet' problem.

The commercial service of Plagiarism.org is Turnitin.com:

Turnitin.com provides a simple and efficient means for both instructors and students to ensure the originality of their intellectual property. Documents are simply pasted into a text box and uploaded into our protected systems. Within twenty-four hours users receive one of our custom, easy-to-read originality reports detailing the findings of our extensive database and net-wide searches.

Turnit.com seems to me to be geared more towards those subjects where the submitted work is a report or essay. It'd be interesting to see if they have, for instance, indexed pages of program code so that plagiarism of programming assignments can be detected.

Aa an experiment I am considering submitting this document to several of the plagiarism detectors to see if the quoted paragraphs above pin this document down as similar to the plagiarism.org and turnit.com pages from whence they came.

Incidentally, when I quote from a page I used the cite attribute of the <blockquote> tag to pinpoint the source of the quote. Like so:

Incidentally, when I quote from a page I used the cite attribute of the <:blockquote> tag to pinpoint the source of the quote. Like so: <blockquote cite='http://www.smeed.org/678'>Incidentally, when I quote from a page I used the cite attribute of the <blockquote> tag to pinpoint the source of the quote. Like so: </blockquote>

I wouldn't want anyone thinking that I'd plagiarised stuff without crediting the source ;-)

More later perhaps...