Crimson Crux

I got this news blast from the UP ACM e-group:

UP ACM, UP CURSOR and UnPLUG
invite you to attend

K.I.S.S.S 2008
Knowledge, Information, and Skills Sharing Sessions

on JUNE 21 and JUNE 28 at the UP Alumni Engineers Centennial Hall (commonly known as UP Eng’g Lib 2 and Computer Science Department)

June 21
9-12 pm - GIMP
1-4 pm - Macromedia Flash

June 28
9-12pm - PHP with MySQL
1-4pm - HTML/CSS

This is a FREE tutorial.

Registration starts at 8:30 am and 12:30 pm

You can register at our KISSS webpage.

See You There!

On a side note, it feels good that the student org I helped resurrect a few years ago (UP ACM) is very much alive and kicking today. Keep it up, guys.

I was supposed to post this great news a few days ago, but a rash of offline events (LIRA, komiks, etc.) kept me from blogging. I got this from the UP CS Network mailing list (edited for clarity):

The First Philippine National Programming Competition (ACM-ICPC Philippines 2007) was held last October 20 at De La Salle Canlubang. Fifty teams from 24 different schools in the Philippines joined the contest, and we are proud to announce that out of the 50, 3 teams from UP Diliman, specifically from the Department of Computer Science, got into the Top 10! Well, that’s not all because one of our teams happened to be the ACM-ICPC PHILIPPINES 2007 CHAMPION!

Congratulations to

Marte Raphael Soliza
Ralph Rainier Pineda
Reginald Eli Deinla
ACM-ICPC PHILIPPINES 2007 CHAMPION

Ralph Justin Arce
Vanessa Rose Castro
James Wyson
ACM-ICPC PHILIPPINES 2007 FIFTH PLACER

John Kristofferson Sanchez
Wigi Vei Oliveros
Pio Ryan Lumongsod
ACM-ICPC 2007 NINTH PLACER

and, last but not the least, the Champion Coach who helped the UPD teams make it this far,

Sir Eric Tambasacan
UP DILIMAN TEAM COACH

Again, Congratulations!!!

Many thanks to Diwa del Mundo for pointing me toward Dr. Rafael Saldaña’s blog post on the official results of the prestigious competition. The top 10 teams and their schools:

1. University of the Philippines Diliman - “U.P Morons”
2. Ateneo de Manila University - “cxxC”
3. University of the Philippines Los Baños - “Heaven”
4. Ateneo de Manila University - “Team Automata”
5. University of the Philippines Diliman - “Team 43″
6. De La Salle University Manila - “DLSU-2″
7. Ateneo de Manila University - “Excessive Output”
8. De La Salle University Manila - “DLSU-1″
9. University of the Philippines Diliman - “Team 45″
10. Ateneo de Manila University - “eTeam”

You can check out Dr. Saldaña’s blog archives for the complete rankings and the programming problems given to the contestants.

Congrats to the aforementioned students for doing UP Diliman proud — this is a worthy advance gift for the school’s upcoming Centennial, and a great follow-up to UP ACM’s 4th international award last July and the recent Yahoo! Philippines Hack Day.

Mabuhay ang Unibersidad!


P.S. Do greet my dearest Ia Lucero a very happy birthday!

To quote the Inquirer article:

Five computer science students from the University of the Philippines Diliman showed their programming skills to executives of Internet giant Yahoo! in the first Philippines Hack Day contest.

Ralph Justin Arce and Wigi Vei Oliveros won the gold medal for their project called “YM Status Logger,” which tracks the Yahoo! Messenger user’s status.

Meanwhile, Abigail Yacat won silver for her “YM Conversation Distributor” project, which describes how a user can distribute private conversation to other users.

Bronze medalists were Vanessa Rose Castro and James Wyson who developed the “YM Thesis Mate,” helping thesis makers edit their documents collaboratively using YM.

All three winning projects used application programming interfaces (API) from Yahoo!

At least four of the students were my orgmates in UP ACM. Congratulations, guys!

Also, check out a video of the 1st Philippine Yahoo! Hack Day.

(Via Ia’s email.)

The following is a sponsored review.

Some of us might already know what the acronym “CSV” stands for, at least, in the software and programming world. CSV stands for “comma separated values” or “comma separated variables” (and also “comma-separated list”), and CSV files are commonly used to transfer big amounts of tabular data between companies and/or applications that aren’t directly connected.

Back in my college (BS Computer Science) days, we used CSV quite a lot, especially when dealing with database projects. It’s a simple file format that saves a lot in terms of disk space, and it’s supported by a lot of spreadsheets and database systems.

(more…)

It’s quite refreshing to see computer science blog posts like this that discuss sorting algorithms. In a time when many blogs churn out rehash after rehash of news items (or worse are simply splogs), an original, lengthy, and “deep and dirty” analysis of the shell sort algorithm is a treat to the mind.

The blog entry, titled Shellsort Optimization Project was written by a good friend of mine and former UP DCS coursemate. (I’m not sure if he wants his name to be divulged, as his own blog is written under his nickname.) He’s an intelligent fellow, and it shows through his post.

(more…)

[Ed. note: This is courtesy of the first, and possibly only, guest writer for Crimson Crux -- Ia Lucero of Qwerky. Take it away, Ia.]

I’ll be straight. This article caught my eye simply because it was about software. I saw several good things mentioned in it, including:

1. Favoring fresh graduates instead of requiring at least two years of experience
2. Being involved with open source applications
3. Founding an incubator firm with a Filipino name (”Simula Labs”)

But this one left a mark:

“Another Philippine-based software firm, Exist Engineering, is now working with local universities to design courses that will prepare fresh graduates for a software engineering job at the company.”

And I just had to protest. (more…)

If you ask me, I think it’s impossible to declare one piece of software as king over all others…but heck, that’s how it goes with everything in life. Everybody’s got their bets on what/who gets to be on top. But saying “heck, that’s how it goes with everything in life” is the easy way out, too.

Fortunately, Charles Babcock of InformationWeek unflinchingly barrels through the slew of great software made through the decades and arrives at a tough decision. Among the heavyweights he considered were Java, Google’s page-ranking search application, the Morris worm, and the first Apple Mac OS.

In the end, Babcock arrived at one champion, which is…

(more…)

“Its creations earn patents, outperform humans, and will soon fly to space. All it needs now is a few worthy challenges.” — Jonathon Keats, Popular Science.

No other two lines can more effectively sum up Stanford University professor John Koza’s “invention machine”, a network of 1,000 computers that creates innovative (sometimes startling) designs from the most basic code — all without human guidance. (more…)

Finally, the news that the IT world has been waiting for! Sun Microsystems has finally seen the light, or more specifically, saw that open source holds the key to Java’s future.

“At this point, it is not a question of whether, but it is a question of how,” said Rich Green, Sun EVP of Software at the annual JavaOne Conference at San Francisco.

(more…)

Or so Damien Katz writes. Several of those signs:

• Java is all you’ll ever need
• You take great pride in the high volume of code you write
• You model all your code in UML before you write it

You be the judge. Damien’s entry has generated quite a good discussion.