Aaron Toponce

I only have a few minutes to post before I have to run into work, so I'll keep this short and to the point. I am beginning to grow tired of the Computer Science program at Weber State University. If you are a professor or faculty member of the department reading this post, I am sorry, but it's true. I am frustrated, and I am putting my frustrations out on the keyboard. Here are some of the issues that I have with the department:

• 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.