Items are posted in reverse chronological order (i.e., newest to oldest).

• 5/1/06
  Referring to the Digital Entertainment Conference held in LH 5 last Saturday, Professor Tim Finin says that he " was very impressed by every aspect -- the concept, speakers, turnout, refreshments and organization. You can see some of the pictures I took on Flickr at
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebiquity/sets/72057594120658483/show/
  We're already talking about how we can better support the student interest that DEC demonstrated in interactive entertainment."
• 4/12/06
  You can see the file main.c for the gcc compiler here
• 4/4/06
  There will be a women's rugby game this Saturday, April 8, at 1pm at Walker Field. (That's across from the Fine Arts parking lot.) We are playing Georgetown and it should be a great game!
• 2/28/06
  The Linux Installfest will take place on Saturday, March 11th, from 1 PM to 6 PM in the ECS Atrium. If you're hoping to do a dual-boot together with Windows, please defrag your hard drives and make a backup of the most important data (since foobars do happen). Also, it's a good idea to show up before 4:30 PM because otherwise we might not have enough time to finish the installation.
• 2/22/06
  I've scanned in a copy (.pdf) of the design diagram for Project 1.
• 2/20/06
  We'll release project 1 on Wednesday, and it will be discussed in class Wednesday afternoon. You don't want to miss this (or any other) lecture!
  I'll also talk about placement of preprocessor directives today.
• 2/15/06
  The Lady Retrievers play tonight at 7pm!
  Microsoft will be visiting campus this week to give a company presentation and technical interview workshop (Thursday at noon in University Center 301) and a "TechTalk" on their eHome project (Friday at noon, also in University Center 301). They will be providing free pizza, giveaways, and information about job opportunities at Microsoft. Students are encouraged to bring their resumes.
  Last week I mentioned Thomas Cahill's book, The Gifts of the Jews, in the context of the swtich statement example for the days of the week, and the origin of the English alphabet. Cahill's first best-seller, How the Irish Saved Civilization, is also very good!
  An example of how to use a spreadsheet to trace a program's execution.
• 2/13/06
  An example of how the for and while loops are related is now available. I include a for statement that has no loop body as such.
• 2/8/06
  You may be interested in some sources of technical and professional development information on the web. In recent weeks I have learned of TechRepublic, at http://techrepublic.com.com (Yes, that's two ".com"s) It talks about Windows a lot, Unix somewhat less, and not too much at all about Macs, but I've found it helpful.
• 2/7/06
  The Help Center is now open. The schedule is posted on the Web: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~cshc/
• 2/1/06
  I talked about outsourcing, and the prospects for IT jobs. The list of jobs was adapted from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/emp/emptab21.htm
  For more about the recent changes in the IT sector, especially the impact of fiber optic capacity and the growth of IT in India, see Tom Friedman's book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
• 1/30/06
  Welcome! This course is about problem solving. In fact, computer science in general is about problem solving, although some problems are trickier, or less well-defined, than others. Many of the problems of modern society are multi-dimensional, and have technical as well as social aspects. I recommend Jared Diamond's recent book Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.