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It’s been decided. Impresario is scheduled for public release on June 1st. Among other cool new features, it will feature a setup wizard to facilitate deployment. I hope everybody will enjoy the release.

Exams were over more than a week ago. 3 of the 4 grades are already posted, the only grade missing being that of the capstone project. I can be sure that I’m graduating on time because there is pretty much no way that I can fail the capstone project.

So there you go, I will be officially a new graduate student for hire on June 2, when the graduation approval will be posted.

For those of you who don’t already know, I will be receiving a B.Eng degree in Software Engineering.

I figure that besides actively job hunting through craigslist, newspapers, and whatnot; it would be a good idea to tell you, my dear readers, that I’m for hire, in case I miss some really interesting job out there. For details on my background, skills, and qualifications, you are welcome to take a look at my résumé.

Send me an e-mail if you believe I can be of service to you. Don’t leave comments as I’m afraid the anti-spam plugins may eat them.

From the reactions we gathered at the capstone demo, it appears that many people like our product. Now here is a great news for those of you interested: the development of Impresario is entering phase 2! That’s right, even though we have already handed in the product for evaluation, we have decided that we are going to keep improving it.

The scheduling plug-in is the one of the first components that we will upgrade.

After 4 years of blood, toil, tears, and sweat, (most of) my friends and I finally got our iron ring this Friday, March 24th. Having this special symbol of the engineer on the pinky feels great but it’s also difficult to not notice its presence. For instance, washing your hands with the ring on really hurts because it’s pointy and you rub it all over against your off-hand.

I’m not going to talk about the ceremony itself unless there is popular demand.

The evening of celebration was great. After the ceremony and the cocktail, our class of SOEN students went for dinner at La Cabane Grecque. Being part of a small program at university is great because we can go to a restaurant and celebrate with literally all of our classmates, plus some friends. We somehow got two TA’s, Stu and Daniel, to join us. But then again, it’s not so hard to invite Stu as long as we mention “alcohol” - just kidding.

After dinner, it was drinking and dancing at New Town. Ok, I’ll admit it: SOEN guys are not the wildest dancers, with a few exceptions. In fact, the lounge was already packed with other engineering students, so ordering drinks was a feat in itself. In the end, it was more like chilling than dancing but none of us (the guys) seemed to mind. It was still cool though because Fareena joined us for a bit and we even dragged Ahmed to the club downstairs.

I’m getting a bit sleepy and I don’t know what else to write for now. For pictures, please visit the gallery. (God, I look like such a retard when I smile while being drunk.) One of the TeamSuperGood members will post or has already posted a username and password on the SOEN 490 mailing list so you can also upload your pictures.

I don’t like many of my “fellow” students.

Among all Concordia students, the engineering and computer science guys are probably the filthiest. The men’s washroom on the 8th floor of the Hall Building has a constant smell of pee and its toilets are full of toilet paper turds. Seriously, how hard is it to properly aim at and flush the urinals? And why won’t the building management place a garbage can in the washroom so people don’t have to throw litter everywhere? Isn’t it less work than removing litter from the whole washroom?

Engineering and computer science students are also some of the noisiest people around Concordia. The difference in noise level between the 11th floor (where the economics people are) and the floor of engineering and computer science is incredible. Sometimes my team even has to retreat to the 11th floor to work because it is simply so much quieter, but then we get weird looks from the economics people.

If any of you has been visiting this blog through Mozilla with the Tidy-based HTML validator extension, you may notice that the page now validates perfectly with no error and no warning at all, instead of having 1 warning like before. The problem had to do with the Flash movie from YouTube. The HTML code that YouTube supplied contained the <embed /> tag, which is not recognised by the W3C’s HTML and XHTML specifications. Being a standard-compliant freak, I have been asking around for weeks about how to get rid of the warning; and then, just an hour ago, I read the HTML 4.01 specifications again and found >this<.

Before - the original code from YouTube:

<object width="425" height="350">
    <param name="movie"
        value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iIIoc8R26iM" />
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iIIoc8R26iM"
        type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
        width="425" height="350" />
</object>

And after - the new code I figured out:

<object width="425" height="350"
    data="http://www.youtube.com/v/iIIoc8R26iM"
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
    Yellow Fever
</object>

Notice, however, that Microsoft Internet Explorer does not understand the second, correct version. It is a long-known fact that Internet Explorer’s HTML rendering engine is broken in many different places, with respect to the W3C specifications. Therefore, JavaScript needs to be used to determine which version to use:

<script type="text/javascript">
IEString = '<object width="425" height="350">'+
  '<param name="movie" '+
  'value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iIIoc8R26iM" />'+
  '<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iIIoc8R26iM" '+
  'type="application/x-shockwave-flash" '+
  'width="425" height="350" />'+
'</object>';
MozString = '<object width="425" height="350" '+
  'data="http://www.youtube.com/v/iIIoc8R26iM" '+
  'type="application/x-shockwave-flash">'+
  'Yellow Fever'+
'</object>';

// The "browser" string is assigned by a nice
// browser detection script from quirksmode.org
if(browser == "Internet Explorer")
  document.write(IEString);
else
  document.write(MozString);
</script>

I hope this little piece of information helps those of you who want to use Flash on your webpages while being standard-compliant. I admit that the script does not take even other browsers like Opera, Safari, and Konqueror into account. I have not used those browsers long enough to know their behaviours off the back of my head. You are welcome to leave comments to help me improve the script. Notice also that, due to the default text processing options of WordPress, just pasting the script section inside a post usually does not work. You need to employ one of the solutions described >here<.

Note: In order to not waste your time, I have decided to present the morals of the story before the actual story.

Morals of the story

• Do the simplest thing that works;
• Adopting a standard is not necessarily the simplest thing that works, depending on how you do it;
• Look for reference implementation(s);
• Look for intelligible documentation;

The actual story

Some of you know that I have been working on the capstone project since September 2005. We’re 10 people in the team and our project is about creating an extensible, web-based, software project management system, using Java Servlet and JSP technology. Eliott and I have been in charge of the task scheduler component since the very beginning.

Being the 2nd biggest standard-compliance freak in the team, I have decided that the task scheduler needs to support some existing calendar format. After some research, Eliott and I have agreed that the RFC 2445 iCalendar format would be the way to go for a few reasons:

• It was already supported by major calendar programs (e.g. Mozilla Sunbird, Microsoft Outlook, and Apple’s iCal);
• There was already a Java library (iCal4j) for working with iCalendar files;
• The specifications for the format were publicly available.

We were quite excited because iCalendar seemed like a “big thing”, so we quickly grabbed the iCal4j library and started experimenting with it, while it was still at version 0.9.16. Soon though, we began running into problems.

First of all, learning to use the library was a disaster. We had no clue where to start and none of us knew the iCalendar format very well. The only documentation that the library had was some semi-complete JavaDoc. There was no tutorial and the introduction page on the official iCal4j website had some strange sample code that didn’t make much sense (e.g. one example involved creating an event, but then the sample code never showed how to insert that newly created event into the calendar object). This was our first mistake: to believe that the iCal4j library would be as good as an official reference implementation. This, combined with our inability to decipher the RFC 2445 specifications, made our life pretty miserable. Actually, I suspect the IETF is to blame for not writing intelligible specifications. =P

Once we began to get the hang of iCal4j, we produced some rough design, by deciding what functionality we needed and hence the classes for datasource and domain logic. We started coding and soon realised something fishy going on. Because the iCalendar file does not function like a database, everytime a single event needs to be read or added to the calendar, the whole iCalendar file needs to be read from disk, converted to a Calendar object, and once the event is added to the Calendar object, the iCalendar file is completely overwritten. This operating scheme is, of course, extremely inefficient and cannot be used with our system, where we expect hundreds of concurrent users. The fact that Mozilla Sunbird had switched its main storage from the iCalendar format to a simple database system confirmed our suspicion. Our solution was then to create a CalendarRegistry, which manages the reads and writes of iCalendar files, and at the same time provides protection against the concurrency issue of lost update.

The solution was far from perfect, however, as we found out soon after that the Java Virtual Machine has a limit on the amount of memory it can use, which seems to be 64 MB by default. Having the CalendarRegistry keep too many Calendar objects in memory was therefore also a bad idea.

In the end, we realised that the simplest thing to do was to just use a database for storage and add the functionality of importing from and exporting to iCalendar files. A few months of development time were lost, and we were sent back to the sketch board.

After reading Kathy Sierra’s post about her coffee table, I have decided to show off my coffee table, too. Ok, I don’t exactly have a coffee table, but I’ll show you what I have on my desk anyway.

Books

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms - one of the Four Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature;
• Book of Han;
• The Art of War - the original by Sun Zi; probably the best known of the Seven Military Classics; I also have another version with annotations by eleven Chinese historical figures, including the ambitious Cao Cao from the period of the Three Kingdoms;
• Kong Ming’s Art of War - Kong Ming (Zhuge Liang’s courtesy name) is a great politician, strategist, and tactician of legendary fame from the Three Kingdoms period; many people’s favourite character in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, mostly for his wit, sense of honour, and loyalty;
• Wei Liao Zi’s Art of War - Wei Liao Zi is not as famous as Sun Zi or Kong Ming, but still a great strategist and political theorist; another one of the Seven Military Classics;
• Questions and Answers between Emperor Taizong of Tang and Li Jing - another one of the Seven Military Classics;
• Four Books - the reference for Confucianism;
• The Heavenly Sword and the Dragon Saber - wuxia novel by Jinyong;
• The Deer and the Cauldron - another wuxia novel by Jinyong;
• The Legend of the Condor Heroes - another one by Jinyong;
• Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty;
• Le Petit Prince - (finally some non-Chinese stuff, haha);
• Technology & the Future - this is actually a required textbook of one of our engineering core classes; I kept it because it is an interesting read;
• Invitation au latin, 4e - Highschool textbook to learn the Latin language and Roman history; written in French;
• Invitation au latin, 3e - Despite the number, it is actually more advanced than the 4e.

Please note that I would rather read the Jinyong novels than watching any of these movies: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers. I consider the Hollywood effect dangerous and harmful to the proper development and preservation of the authentic wuxia genre.

Music

I have so much music that I can’t make an exhaustive list of it, so I’ll just list my favourite artists and albums in general.

• Yoko Kanno - I basically listen to anything she composes;
• Yuki Kajiura - another composer whose works I listen to indiscriminately;
• Joe Hisaishi - this guy is like the appointed composer for Hayao Miyazaki; indiscriminate listening; although the Princess Mononoke sound track is by far my favourite among his works;
• all sound tracks of Serial Experiments Lain;
• all sound tracks of Full Metal Panic!, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, and Full Metal Panic!: The Second Raid
• most sound tracks of the Gundam meta-series

Warning: Politically incorrect content.

There goes my life objective… XD

If you do not see the video below, it is because you are using a broken browser (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer). Please use a better, and generally more secure browser (i.e. Mozilla Firefox).

I figured my friends should not suffer too long for my depression; so in an attempt to find something hopefully interesting to talk about, I have decided to write about some of my leaving impressions as I’m graduating from Concordia in a few months.

The feature of this first post is the 7th floor of the Hall building, the so-called cafeteria. Any student who has been at the Hall building in the past 2 or 3 years must remember how horrible the place used to be. The tables were dirty, the microwaves were filthy and frequently out of order, and the chairs were so out of balance that just putting a jacket at the back of one would tumble it.

Last summer, renovation work started on the 7th floor, so we basically lost the cafeteria for a good period of time. Students were forced to eat at the little Tim Horton’s snack shop, though they still provided microwave ovens. Renovation lasted until the end of Fall semester, when the 7th floor was gradually re-opened.

The change was enormous. Effective eating area got almost doubled, and there is even room with nice couches and low tables for students to chill at. We got all new tables and solid chairs, if only a bit awkward looking. For the moment, the tables and chairs are still clean. I hope Concordia keeps up with the maintenance.

Also, the renovation on the washrooms just finished around a week ago, though I must say that the washrooms of the 9th floor could have benefitted much more from a renovation.

At this point, something was still missing from the equation. I went to eat at the cafeteria two weeks ago and the first thing I noticed was a huge line up for two microwave ovens. Boy, was that amusing. I could not understand what was going on. Enlarging the cafeteria and then removing microwave ovens simply did not make sense. It turns out that we were getting 8 brand-new microwave ovens, in addition to the two old ones that were kept. These new ones even come with braille. I’m happy for the new students who get to enjoy the new facilities, but sorry for the graduating students who had to put up with a crappy cafeteria for the past 3 to 4 years.