Category: Teaching
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Are you positive you tested positive?
If we ever hope to break out of our current pandemic isolation, we need tests to determine who has COVID-19 and who doesn’t. No test is perfect, however, which means any test is going to result in false positives, especially if you are trying to measure a very weak signal. The purpose of this post […]
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10 years, and never missed a day
On May 31, 2000, I formally left United Technologies Research Center and joined the Golden Consulting Group (now BIT Advisors) as a full-time technical trainer. I’m posting now to celebrate the fact that, having just passed my 10th anniversary at a technical trainer, I’ve still never missed a day. 🙂 I spent almost 12 years […]
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My approach to academic teaching
I recently read a fascinating post by Joel Spolsky entitled “Capstone projects and time management”. It’s highly opinionated, as usual, but makes several interesting points about teaching computer science in academia. He basically claims that academic computer science doesn’t teach you to use modern tools, or do version control, bug tracking, teamwork, planning, etc., etc., […]
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Dragons roar, cough, and sputter in Dayton
Tim Kurkjian says you should never miss the chance to go to a ballgame, because you might see something you’ve never seen before. On Tuesday I got the chance to go to see the Dayton Dragons play in their charming stadium, Fifth Third Field (seriously, that’s the name) in downtown Dayton, Ohio. (I’m here this […]
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O’Reilly screencasts coming
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a “digital content director” at O’Reilly. He said he was building up O’Reilly’s catalog of screencasts on technical subjects and wanted to know if I wanted to participate. The plan would be for me to come to California, where a camera crew would record me teaching […]
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Podcast on Pulse in education and training
A couple of weeks ago I participated in a BriefingsDirect podcast about using Pulse in academic and training environments. For those who aren’t aware, Pulse is a product created by Genuitec (the same people who make the MyEclipse IDE) that allows you to manage Eclipse profiles and plugins. I’ve used MyEclipse in my academic courses […]
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NetBeans 6.1 is a lot better than I thought
This week I’m in New Haven, CT, teaching a class that combines UML and Java Web Services (an odd combination to be sure). The client wanted to use NetBeans as their primary IDE, and I always try to accommodate that if I can. My last exposure to NetBeans was back in version 5.5, I think, […]
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Our last, best hope … for message digests?
So I’m teaching my course in Securing Java Web Applications (my third one in the last six weeks) and we got to a section that discussed the MD5 algorithm for generating message digests. One of the students asked, “whatever happened to MD’s 1 through 4?” I simply couldn’t resist saying, “MD’s 1, 2, and 3 […]
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Eight years and haven’t missed a day yet
On May 31, 2000, I officially left my job at United Technologies and became a full-time technical trainer. It’s now been eight years since that day. While I don’t like to talk about personal things here very often, I thought that was worth a mention. That, and the fact that in all the training classes […]
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One of the best things about teaching
I’ve been very busy teaching classes recently (The last four weeks have gone Ajax, Spring, Struts 2.0, and XML and Java) so I haven’t had much time to blog. Every once in a while, however, I try to stop and smell the roses, such as they are. You want to know one of the best […]