1. Practice the fundamentals. Don’t spend all your efforts on popular languages and tools, and the skills listed in the job advertisements. Instead, master your skills in statistics, computing, databases, operating systems, computer architecture, computer networks and discrete mathematics. Try to solve problems in Donald Knuth’s “Art of Programming”. If you can solve most of the problems, your skills in computing are not bad.

2. Seek more challenges. Experience in programming can reinforce your knowledge. Try to accumulate the experience of writing 100,000 lines of code when you are in your 4th year.

3. Practice, practice, practice. Do not underestimate any of the actual work, such as seemingly simple coding or testing. You will gain professional experience pursuing and paying attention to the details of the code.

4. Don’t forget about mathematics. Math is gymnastics to your brain. Math is everywhere. If you are particularly interested in math-intensive tasks, such as video and image processing, you will need these skills as your tools.

5. Develop a team spirit and to learn how to work well with others.

6. Encourage innovation, and don’t necessarily stick to the authors code in the books.

7. Work strategically. Try to find meaningful and interesting summer job or part-time job if it does not affect you schoolwork. Go find a place that pays attention to programming. Working with a good boss, your code will be used by clients. Don’t rush to become a boss. Your goal must be to learn from other people. When you are working or finding a job, don’t only look at benefits and the job title. Pick an environment that encourages learning, a company that is willing to train employees, and a company that regards you as an important person. Last, but not least, pick a good boss.

This is good advice. If I may, I’d like to expound a bit on a couple of them.

Seek More Challenges: Writing 100,000 lines of code by your 4th year of college is an impressive feat by any standards. Even if all that code is spread across a number of different languages during your college career. However, you’re not going to hit that level just doing your homework in the CS department. You need to code on projects or just for fun outside of school, and you need to find the time to do it.

There’s more to just reaching 100,000 lines, though. It’s about discipline. It’s about learning fundamentals. It’s about finding the very difficult scenarios, and how to solve them. Ultimately, writing 100,000 lines of code before you even graduate, is about experience. You will be properly molded as a programmer and developer.

The #1 challenge that students face, however, is finding what to code. How do you just sit down at your computer, and start coding? You need a project, or a problem to solve. You need something that will keep you motivated to write the problem. www.pythonchallenge.com is a perfect fit. Each page on the site presents you with a problem. You code the challenge in the Python programming language and modify the URL with the answer, moving on to the next challenge. Although it’s a far cry from writing 100,000 lines of code, it’s a good challenge that will stretch your mind, and get you coding. There are many other examples and challenges online to get you coding.

Don’t forget about mathematics: Coming from a Mathematics major, I can back this point up until the cows come home. Programming and software development require a great deal of logically thinking through problems. Just the other day, a friend of mine and I were discussing technical questions that are asked in software development interviews. Usually, they are fairly nasty, going back to the fundamentals that you learned while in college, or studying. However, most of the problems presented, if they’re a good interviewer, are logic-based, and this is where your skill as a mathematician will shine.

For example, one question in just such an interview could be “Here is an array of randomly placed integers. Write a program that sorts the array.” While your skill as a programmer will shine, your skill as a mathematician will shine brighter. Even if the syntax is bad, and would not compile, the logical thought process behind the algorithm is what the interviewer will be looking for.

I’ve heard complaints from students year-round that what they are learning in math class, they will never use in their career, or in real life. My rebuttal has always been that they are further from the truth than they realize. By learning the math skills that they are, even if it is differential equations or triple integrals, they are honing their skill in logic. Being able to sit down, and workout even the most insane and unrealistic math problems means that you are able to think through a problem, and come up with a solution, going from one step to the other. If you can do this without a well-formulated equation sitting in front of you in black and white on textbook paper, then you are skilled indeed. Learn math.

Finally, work strategically: When looking for a computer programming or software development job, as the tip suggests, look for a job that encourages growth and an employer that is willing to train your, increasing your skill and potential. There are good programming jobs and there are bad ones. The bad jobs will put you in tasks that are mundane, and don’t stretch your imagination. The same thing over and over. Initially, there may be a learning curve when hired learning the task, but after several repetitions, day after day, the learning curve levels and the job becomes boring and mundane.

So, you want to pick a job that takes you from the mundane to the exciting. The only jobs that encourage this culture are jobs that encourage growth and learning. For example, at my current job at introPLAY, I recognize, as well as my boss, that my Python skills are very new and unexperienced. While I was hired for my frontend skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the company I work for fosters the training and learning that is necessary for me to learn Python and help progress the speed of development for the company. Even more so, as is with most web development positions, new problems present itself daily, and I am constantly battling how to tackle the problem at hand. This mental stretching and learning is a great work environment.

So there you have it. Some great advice for CS students looking to get into the field. To be honest, I wish I would’ve known some of these tips when I was attending school. In fact, I wish some of the faculty would’ve taken the time to go over these as well. These tips are pearls of great worth, and if taken seriously, will propel your development career far and fast.

One year ago, I was elected as the Chair for the local ACM chapter at WSU. Unfortunately, it ended in tragedy. I would like to share this experience with you.

Becoming the ACM Chair actually extends a great deal back. Long before I even knew what the ACM was, I was just atteding school for the first time. I had just entered the CS department, and began taking my first CS classes. There was, and still is, a large ACM logo banner in the halls of the department, that is used for ACM activities. I noticed that the banner hadn’t been updated in a number of years.

Well, being new to the CS program, I was eager to make some friends. I met many friends, but a few stuck out to me more than any others. Two of which are John Linford and Mike Ferguson. At the time I met these individuals, John was a lab aide for the department and a passionate Linux user, and Mike was the ACM Chair and the Microsoft student ambassador.

Being the student ambassador, Mike help set the department up with Microsoft development software. This was accomplished through the ACM and the MSDNAA. To help increase ACM membership, students could download the software, only if they were ACM members. Needless to say, it didn’t work, and now, you just need to be taking registered classes for the semester.

I began helping Mike with distributing the Microsoft software. Eventually, he asked me if I would like to join the ACM and become an officer. I said yes, and thus my involvement with the ACM began. This was about three-and-a-half years ago.

By the end of that spring semester, ACM elections were up, and John was put in as the new ACM Chair. I also ran for office, and was elected as the Vice Chair. John and I had some great ideas for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, getting the faculty involved with those activities proved to be a challenge. We were able to get some of the faculty to show up a one activity though.

With the few activities that were held that year, which were completely planned and organized by John and I, our advisor, Ron Peterson, was never involved. Well, I shouldn’t say never. He did show up to a programming contest and another activity. If it wasn’t for John constantly on Ron’s back about the various activities, the ACM that year wouldn’t have had any faculty involvement at all, and our advisor would’ve never attended.

A year later (one year ago this spring), elections came up again, and I ran for ACM Chair. I won and I was eager about the upcoming year and the activities that we would hold. However, the officers that were elected, as well as our advisor himself, did not share in the same excitement level that I did. Also, one year ago, I was able to identify that our website needed some serious help. But I’ll get into that in another post.

John and Mike both designed websites to help the students. When becoming ACM Chair, I was concerned about keeping the code on those sites updated. After receiving instructions on how to modify the code, I quickly found out that only John and Mike had the permissions necessary to do so. The two sites in question are the Orangeforum and the WSU ACM Chapter. Both are still to this day very out of date, and the permissions have yet to be chaged.

I have sent numerous emails concerning this permissions issue, mainly because John and Mike have both graduated, and the result is always the same. Let someone else worry about it. Which is rather unfortunate, because students are losing interest in the program. Not because of these two sites, but because the paradigm of lazy thinking and procrastination.

I was not taking any classes the summer semester following elections, but I wasted no time planning for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, the ACM advisor and my officers did not share the same level of excitement. Several weeks into the fall semester, I was forcibly removed from my position as Chair by the advisor. I share with you the conversation that existed between myself and Dr. Peterson.

Ron: I’m removing you as the ACM Chair.
Me: Why?
Ron: Because you have not attended our meetings or activities.
Me: You mean our one activity and our one meeting?
Ron: Yes. You have shown no effort or interest in the group.
Me: Okay. Whatever. I am far too busy this semester anyway to worry about this. I won’t lose any sleep.
Ron: Umm hmm.
Me: Well, will you do me a favor?
Ron: What’s that?
Me: Will you make sure that the next ACM Chair knows that it’s either your way or the highway?

Dr. Peterson accused me of showing no interest in the group. I can easily prove this accusation false through a series of emails. The first email was sent to the ACM officers with ideas that I had that would make the upcoming year great. The email is dated Aug 25, 2005.

This Fall Semester is going to rock! I am excited to work with each one of you to see what can we can accomplish this semester. First off, I would like each of you to come up with a few short ideas or principles that we can piece together for a mission statement. A mission statement will generate focus for the upcoming year.

Then I would like you to think of some activities that the students or community would like that generate excitement and interest in the computer science program. For example, I think we should have a programming contest among local high school students and hold it at Weber State on a Saturday. We would invite, Roy High, Weber High, Ogden High, Bonneville, Ben Lomond, etc. First place would get say an X-Box, Visual Studio 2005 (if it is available) and a gift card to a restaurant. Second place could get Visual Studio, and third could get a gift card. All participants could get a t-shirt. I think we have enough money this semester to pull somehting like this off fairly easily. Ron, can you confirm? Of course, we could come up with the puzzles and choose the language(s) to program in. The only thing is we would need some help getting the information to the local high schools. Anyway, think of stuff along those lines.

Lastly, we need to schedule a time for a meeting. Unfortunately, my schedule this semester sucks. The only time I have available is M-F early morning to 8am, or Saturdays. I work 9-5 M-F and I don’t get home until around 6:30 ( I commute from Murray). I would like to hold a meeting at least once a month to see how things are coming along also.

Let me know what you guys think. If I didn’t email someone or you prefer another email address, let me know what their email is and forward it along. As far as I am aware, I have the following list for our officers this year:

Chair: Aaron Toponce
Vice Chair: Ryan Lindeman
Seceretary: Levi Slade
Treasurer: Robert Bruderer
Liaison: Trek Potter
Davis Faculty Rep: Delroy Brinkerhoff
Davis Student-body Rep: Jake Reed
SLC Rep: John Kennedy

Thanks for volunteering your time this year to help make WSU CS a great department for a great school. I look forward to working with each of you.
- –
Aaron Toponce
WSU ACM Chair
WSU CS Webmaster
OALUG Install Coordinator
Registered Linux User 377079

The only response I received from this email was from Trek Potter mentioning that he would not be able to participate due to his busy schedule.

The next email was directed to Mike Ferguson who had just recently graduated. Seeing as though he was our Microsoft student ambassador, I figured we could get some involvement with Microsoft. This email was also dated Aug 25, 2005. He responded immediately.

I have a couple ideas for the upcoming year that would involve Microsoft, and I am wondering if you can help. I have emailed my ACM officers, and have run an idea by them and I would like to run the same by you. I would like to have a programming contest among local high school students. For first place, if I can get it cleared, I would like to hand out free an XBOX 360, Visual Studio 2005 and a gift card to a local restaurant. Second place could get Visual Studio. Third could get a gift card.

I didn’t get a chance to finish the email. My palm slipped on the touchpad, and sent the email. Anyway, is it possible to hand out those prizes? I think both of them (the XBOX 360 and VS 2005) will be available in Novemeber, which would push the programming contest back to that month, unless you can get your hands on them earlier. Also, how much would it cost? Would we be able to get VS2005 for free? How about the XBOX?

Let me know.

Thanks,
Aaron Toponce

The next email was from the advisor Dr. Peterson about a planning meeting.

All officers who can come are invited to an ACM activity planning meeting called by Vice-Chair/Director of Chapter Activities, Ryan Lindeman.

Meet Thursday, September 1st, from 11 to 11:30 a.m. in the CS Dept Conference Room, TE 110H.

I quickly replied mentioning that I could not attend due to work. Unfortunately, I don’t have the email saved, as I replied from work, and I don’t keep my messages that far back. I asked if there was another way for me to be involved. I brought forth a couple of ideas, such as netmeeting or instant message. I never received a reply, and the meeting was held without me. I also sent out an email requesting a copy of the meeting minutes. To this day, I have still never received a copy.

At this point, I am beginning to wonder if I am actually still the ACM Chair. Aside from the responses from Trek and Mike, everyone of my emails have gone unanswered. Needless to say, I was beginning to feel frustrated. And it wasn’t over yet.

All of the sudden, out of the blue, I heard there was an ACM sponsored programming contest that was held a week prior to me hearing about it. In other words, it was scheduled and planned without my knowledge. However, no one attended the contest, including faculty. Dr. Peterson was the only one to arrive, according to students who delivered the info to me.

Undaunted, Dr. Peterson rescheduled the programming contest. This time, I received the email. It was the first of October, and I was heavily involved with the Ogen Area Linux Users Group. Luck have it, the group was holding an install fest, and I was the install fest coordinator. Putting priorities in line, the install fest was more important to me than the programming contest. Here is the email that was sent to myself and some faculty members. The subject of the email was “ACM Programming Contest this Saturday”.

Here is a link to the contest announcement.

Please encourage your students to attend and give them extra credit or some other motivation if you feel it is appropriate.

http://icarus.cs.weber.edu/home/rpeterson/pub/ContAnnounc05.htm

I sent an email asking to reschedule the contest at least one week later. Again, I don’t have the email as it was sent from work. As predicted, I never received a reply.

A couple weeks later, while giving my proposal to the faculty regarding the new CS site that I was going to redesign, Dr. Peterson approached me, and told me that I was no longer ACM Chair.

It was actually a great relief to no longer be involved. What I found interesting, was that all the remaining officers, except for one, lost interest in the group before that fall semester was over. Could it be that they were also treated with the same lack of respect that I was?

At any rate, my experiencs with the group were negative. Personally, I feel that the ACM is an old mans group that will be dead in a number of years. I am glad to no longer be associated with them. However, I wish the group the best. Especially, the local chapter at WSU.

For most the day, I have been upset, and very, very frustrated.  I have been trying to deal with it as best I can, and I don’t think anyone really understands how frustrating it trully is.  However, it is now water under the bridge.  Maybe some day, I’ll despense with the details, but as for now, I am letting it go.

If any of the CS faculty read this blog, thanks a million for giving me, a student, the opportunity of a lifetime!  I really enjoyed every minute with the site, and working with each of you.  From what I have felt, every CS faculty member has been more than supportive.  Again, thanks.

First off, why else have web pages at a university, if not to increase the students learning, participation and interest in the school? In other words, are not school web sites to benefit the student? Sure, there are administration sites, but even indirectly, they are for the student.

I saw a need in the department, and decided to take the bull by the horns, and do something about it. The web page designed at the time was horrible. There was next to no information on the page, and there was no reason why a student would want to visit it. So, I created a proposal for the CS department, got approval, and got to work. I spent literally hundreds of hours designing the page. Six weeks before the deadline, my laptop hard drive crashed, and I lost everything. Panicked, I downloaded the Drupal CMS, and begin redesigning a theme to fit the needs of the school. The end result, if I do say so myself, turned out great. The faculty was pleased as are many of the students. The Dean, however, is not.

When I began work on the site, I had a number of goals in mind. First, I wanted to have a centralized place for all the CS faculty with their information. I wanted to integrate tightly graduation information, course and degree information, scholaraships, advising hours, and more. I wanted the site to be informational also, so I put up HOWTOs covering downloading and installing software from the MSDNAA, remote desktop into Athena and using SSH with Icarus. I had in mind students getting more involved with local clubs and organizations from the school and community. Lastly, I wanted a frontline streamlined page with computer news. I have been able to achieve all those goals. I have set out for more, however, I doubt I will see those into realization due to the recent facism of the Dean.

Because I designed the site with the student in mind, I think that the students should be able to make the choice, rather than the Dean. After all, don’t we live in a Democratic country? Are not decisions made by the people and for the people? So, to make my voice heard, and the voices of many students, I put up a poll about which site is better. My site that I designed with Drupal, or the COAST site?

I have a few gripes about the COAST sites. First, it’s the same across the board. Every COAST site are exact replicas of each other. There is no originality, quality or uniqueness to any of the pages. Second, because the pages are just flat HTML, many features are lacking, such as an RSS feed, polls, MySQL server integration, and dynamic pages, such as searching, email integration and scheduling. Thirdly, the CS page has never been a COAST site, so I don’t see the urge or necessity to make it one now. Plus the fact that many pages exist under the Weber.edu domain that are not COAST sites (Math, Botany, Chemistry, Geography, Geosciences, Microbiology, IS&T and Foreign Languages just to name a few). If we are going to change one, we better change them all, which is just silly.

In my opinion, the COAST site should exist as a template for departments who do not want to take the time to design a page. With the COAST templates, setting up a page is easy with “fill in the blank” web publishing. However, if a department wants to break away from the COAST implementation, they should be encouraged to do so. Not allowing them do is not becoming of democracy in the least. There is no given information anywhere that I can find, except for the identity marks page, that tells about how deparment pages should be designed.

In a nutshell, I am disappointed in my school. Aside from many other valid concerns that I have, I feel this one cuts the deepest, as I feel rejected as a web developer. More and more, I wonder why I am attending WSU, and not the UofU or Utah State or some other university. The politics and bureaucracy that swell within the school administration go deep and spread like a bad virus. Unfortunately, it is the students who take the hit.

I hope that students will make their voice heard about which page they like best. If it is the COAST site, then so be it, but I think the majority of students will vote for the redesigned site that I built. As such, I hope that the Dean will listen to what the students want. After all, it is the students who should be able to decide. As mentioned before, are not the purpose of school sites to benefit the students?

I am hosting the latest Ubuntu stable release (Breezy) for all three architectures as torrents.  I plan to expand my collection by including the previous releases of Hoary and Warty, and also include Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and nUbuntu.  This includes the DVD and CD isos.  When future releases come out, such as Dapper in June, I will host those as well.

Why?  Because I want to give back to the Ubuntu community what it has given to me.  Ubuntu is the best Linux distro out there, and rock solid.  Even the hard core Debian advocates agree.  So why not make it available for everyone, regardless?

Continuing on that topic, I would like to see Weber State University be a mirror to many of the popular Linux distros.  Not only for the outside world, but for in the network too.  How cool would it be for students to download the latest Linux distro on a 100/10 network?  Talk about speed.  The UofU and BYU mirror distros, so there is no reason why WSU can’t.  I think I’ll send the network admin an email.

Anyway, hosting the Ubuntu torrents makes me feel like I did a good deed.  Kinda like giving community service.  And the best part, is there is no work on my end.  I just let my computer sit and seed.

First, we need some serious marketing and advertising afoot. The department is losing students. Each year, the number of students entering the CS department is less than the year before. And from what I hear, we are the only undergraduate school in the state where this is happening. Now, granted, there may be some demographics at play. WSU is a commuter school, however, I can’t help but wonder if it goes further than that. I would imagine that we would want to focus strongly on recruiting high school students from around the area, and I would think that clubs, organizations and incentives are what would drive them here (aside from whether or not they’ll make millions with their degree when they graduate).

Second, faculty/student involvement only exists on a classroom level. It just doesn’t extend beyond that. If it does, it is because students want that interaction, and make it happen. For example, the last ACM Chair held activities that got the faculty involved. It was not the other way around. The only activities that the faculty try to put on, are the programming contests, and it is because their is pressure at a regional level. If they held these contests because they enjoyed it, students would know about it every semester. Sadly, the last contest only brought in two people, and that is because the contest “judges”- two professors, talked about it in their classes. There were no flyers, and only about two weeks notice.

Thirdly, the department is not run very democratic. I say this in the kindest way, and very politically. First, why is there a seperate login in the computer science labs for the students aside from the normal school login? I can see strays wandering in, and using the computer lab, but what is the concern? The reason this is such an issue, is the lab aides are constantly bombared with “What’s my login” or “I forgot my password” or “I can’t login at all”. If they would just stay with the rest of the school, I would imagine that those questions would be very minimal. Second, where is the student involvement at all? Using Utah State as an example, many students, who are not lab aides- just regular students, administer their own server using the school network. There are wikis, blogs, home pages, irc servers/channels, email servers, and much more that are not owned by the school. Again, I see the security concern, but if we monitor wireless activity and have protocols in place, we most certainly can implement the same protocols on student servers. But it extends beyond just allowing student administration to servers. It extends to clubs and organizations, and the ability for students to “get involved” with the departement on a personal level.

Okay. There are the generalities, but what about the technicalities?

• High School and even Junior High School marketing and involvment. Rather than just wSU students at programming contests, why not high school students with large prizes held evey semester.
• IRC network. We have more than enough bandwidth, and it would get students involved with other students, and even faculty. Setting up IRC servers is easy, and maintaining them just as easy.
• Student administration with pages. This goes to the main CS site, as well as other sites too. Including, but not limited to, the Orangeforum, the ACM site, group, club and other organization sites, etc.
• Faculty involvement outside of the classroom. This means attending local group meetings, and advertising them in class. This means creating activities, or notifying them of local news events, and providing a way to get everyone involved. The most successful teachers are always the most involved in their students lives.
• Unix, Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc. Why are there absolutely no classes teaching these absolutely powerful operating systems? Why do we have a very expensive Sun Solaris lab that never gets used? In fact, all classes need to be reworked, with this area completely overhauled.

Again, I am not bashing the CS deparment, nor do I hate it. I just see some areas of improvement that I don’t think are being looked at. Have I discussed this with the faculty? To a degree, yes, I have. However, I do plan on discussing it more with a few other faculty members. My involvement with a couple LUGs will bring it out of the woodwork more than anything.

Laslty, I just want to say, that I think the department, for the most part, is doing an okay job, with the Department Chair, doing a phenomenal job. Unforunately, I believe the focus as a department is either lost or off-sight. Either way, though, I enjoy many of the teachers there, and have enjoyed many classes. Just a little frustrated, that’s all.

• The Windows 2003 terminal server is great, but needs a lot of work. I am talking TONS of work. Why when I login, I am told that certain software has been disabled, other software crashes, and I need priveleges to install a plugin for my Firefox browser? Please. At least this time I can launch it. Last time I visited, I couldn’t even launch the browser or any software for that matter, saying I did not have admin priveleges.
• I was removed as ACM Chair because I missed ONE meeting and ONE activity. Not several like the ACM advisor was saying. Besides, I sent out several emails about programs, ideas and activities that we could hold as a group, and NO ONE responded. Not even the advisor. Yes, I still have every email, and I plan on posting them here when I get the time. When I asked if we could reschedule the meeting, I again DID NOT receive a response. And the notice for the activity was only two weeks, and scheduled on a day that I had a Linux Install Fest that I was in charge of. Yet the advisor has the balls to remove me, because I am not complying with his schedule. Oh well, the ACM is a dying old mans club anyway. Good to be out of it.
• I am receiving anything but cooperation with the web page that I redesigned. I will admit, that the majority of frustration here stems from miscommunication. However, it’s stagnant. First off, the department doesn’t even own their own cs.weber.edu subdomain. It belongs to the school. Second, it seems no one is willing to talk to the school to get them to point the subdomain to the Linux server, where the page is being hosted. C’mon people. Let’s get on the ball here.
• I am learning more at home, then I am in class. Maybe this stems from my interest in computers and programming languages, but the teaching cirriculum needs to be overhauled. Let’s get half the the professors fired that are stuck in 1985 and refuse to teach anything new. I mean, for crying out loud, I am not interested in, nor do I think many of the students are either, how signals are carried through a wire, or how to allocate registers in RAM. Also, why are the networking majors taking tons of programming courses, and the software engineers taking tons of networking courses? Did I miss something here?
• There are virtually no UNIX or Linux courses being taught at all. Yet, we have a $50,000 Sun Solaris UNIX computer lab, and half of the south lab are SuSE 9.3 Linux machines. The amazing thing, is faculty members complain that they never get used, and they should ditch it. I agree. If you aren’t going to teach the students anything but Windows-only, then yeah, it’s a waste of space. Frankly, I think it is sad that the department has become a Microsoft shop. The teachers treat Linux and UNIX as a hobbyist operating system, and because of that, the graduating students will never get the full education they need, and they will not get far in the computing industry.
• Faculty involvement is a joke, to say the least. Everyone is just too busy. It’s one thing or another. And I was removed from the ACM as Chair because I missed one meeting?!? When was the last time a faculty member attended, or even encouraged students to attend, a programming contest? Huh? When was the last time any faculty member used the Orangeforum (okay, one professor does, but he’s it). When was the last time a faculty member told their students about some conventions or workshops being held in the area? Yeah. That’s what I thought. It’s work then home, right?
• The Orangeforum and ACM site are a joke. A sad, sad joke. Yet again, no one is willing to do anything about it. The Orangeforum needs serious work. The code can’t be maintained, because the students who have the only access and permissions to modify it, have graduated, and are long gone. We just need a new forum, one that isn’t built on top of permissions, and that the faculty can have access and control over. I have presented such a forum, and it was shot down. Same goes with the ACM site. Only two students have access, and they both graduated a long time ago. So there they sit, seriously out of date and looking horrible, and no one is willing to do anything about it. Frankly, because they are on IIS servers, and .NET code, I look forward to somebody exploiting a hole, and defacing both sites. Maybe that will get them in gear.

There you have it. I could go on. In fact, later today, I will. I’ll expand on each of these in more detail. Maybe each in their own post. However, right now, I need to get to work.