The academic year is winding down in Stellenbosch. There is still a lot of administration to take care of beware I can pack away my teaching material, and I have some exciting ideas for next year that I shall sneakily work on when I have the chance. But if I’m lucky, my schedule will be [...]
I indicated yesterday that I would post some photo’s from the weekend, but this will have to be postponed for one day. I am, frankly, beat. Meaning I’m tired, tired, tired. I’ll have to call it an early night. Somehow, I did very little today but I have absolutely no energy.
I mentioned last week that I am working on a nice algorithm. The idea was to implement a decoration for a web page. The decoration comprised a fleet of about 200 dots. They could rearrange themselves into a picture, stay at rest for a couple of seconds, and the rearrange themselves into the next picture, [...]
The first day of the Bridging Course is behind us. What is the course all about? The idea is to provide a five-day crash course in programming for those new Computer Science or Engineering students who have never programmed before. This makes life a little easier for the teachers of first-year programming courses. It also [...]
In this case, WC stands for webcam. After my Tampere Christmas day webcam experiment, I thought it would be interesting to repeat this for other webcams. Several problems arise: (1) there are not many nice webcams available, (2) I have no direct control over the webcams, so I cannot update more frequently than the webcam [...]
An odd part of our English/Dutch/German heritage that permeates all cultures in South Africa is a winter-themed Christmas. As a child I remember that we went out to cut down a stone pine for a Christmas tree (no longer possible, since the bush land has all been developed). The tree was decorated the usual way: [...]
Just back from the airport. Met my brother to give him a gift to pass on to someone else. It’s a bit last-minute, but I was expecting his plans to be different. He’s just back from Joburg and apparently he is off again on Sunday to Namibia. He earns a good living but he deserves [...]
The Southern hemisphere affords its inhabitants with a strange advantage that “Northies” do not enjoy. Like our boreal cousins we have a long holiday in the summer, which happens to coincide with December–January. (Even though February and March are often much hotter). As the year winds down, so does our activity. People pack up and [...]
Here I am, in the heat of the summer (the weather bureau predicted 30 degrees but at the moment it is at least 32 + hot breeze) conducting interviews with prospective Honours students for 2011. So far they are not faring very well: I relatively simple questions (implement a sorting algorithm of your choice; then [...]