The Waterloo Experience

Wrapping up

2009-10-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

So this is it, time to wrap up. I do not know if there is or was anyone following this blog, but I am very happy I did it and posted relatively frequently. I now have a rough outline of what I did. I think I will enjoy looking at this again at some point.

Here is the final report I had to write for a little scholarship I received (in German).

At some point I want to start blogging about algorithms, but as I am really busy until mid-December I am not sure when I am gonna start.

Bye bye, see you soon

Iceland Stopover

2009-10-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

So, it's quite a while since I have visited Iceland on my way back from Canada to good old Europe. The time after the roadtrip was incredibly busy, moving out in Waterloo, moving in in Germany (where I stayed only one week) and then some more moving to Zürich, Switzerland where I am currently interning. There will be more moving soon, can't wait for it ... ;-)

I am finally getting used to my new situation here, first weekend alone in Zürich with some time on my hands to get this out and finish up here. Well, the Waterloo Experience is over, but I will benefit from it all my life, both on a personal and professional level. Would certainly not be posting here from Zürich without it.

But back to Iceland. Iceland is a very interesting country to visit. Its volcanic, moon like landscape is a great experience and quite unique. It is also famous for its geysers. You can rent a car and drive a circle ("golden circle") through the whole county in one week without a problem. My stay with Susi was only 2 days so we did not see much besides the capital, Reykjavik. But we will definitely go back one day.

A bay in Reykjavik.

This is pretty much how this cute city looks like ...

The people of Iceland claim to have the oldest parliament in constant operation in the world. The Althing however started as an assembly of Viking lords that only remotely resembled a democratic legislative.

The parliament is located in a nice spot of the city.

The best part of our trip was a bike tour with Reykjavik bike tours, in my opinion a must have on every trip to Reykjavik.
The concept is very well suited for this small city which has lots of things to see but actually has distances that are a lot longer than you might think. The tour guides are excellent: knowledgeable, entertaining and polite. They offer both payed and a FREE (tip based) tour. There is no better way to get to know a little of the real Iceland. Highly recommended!
You can find out more on their webpage and blog.

Our little tour group (excluding me who took the picture) with our tour guide Stefan.

An old wale catching ship we saw on our bike trip. This one is apparently not used any more. Iceland still catches wales, however relatively moderate amounts. This might change now as they will become a member of the European Union.

Roadtrip

2009-08-11T05:02:00.000-07:00

Just sitting in a Hotel in Huntsville, Ontario with good Internet access. The last two days we have been visiting Bruce Peninsula National Park and traveled alongside Georgian Bay. Today through Algonquin National Park to Ottawa.

CS 466 Advanced Algorithms

2009-07-25T17:15:00.000-07:00

My only computer science course this term was CS 466 Advanced Algorithms. The course is basically a continuation of the main compulsive course in algorithms CS 341, which is roughly equivalent to German courses that go by names like "Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen". This means that you should know basic algorithms for things like sorting and basic analysis techniques already. In the ideal case you would also know what a reduction is, as there are some (though not too many).

This term, the course was thought by the fabulous Timothy Chan. He is very enthusiastic and you can tell that he is on top of his business. For each problem, idea or algorithm, he always had some way to visualize it on the blackboard. He was very responsive to student questions and could also handle students that tried to monopolize the lecture by asking questions every few minutes.

The selected material is organized around problems, but there is a clearly visible red line following new algorithm design and analysis techniques. The course covers amortized analysis, randomization and approximation algorithms on the example of more than a dozen problems.

Marking is done in the form of a Midterm, Final and 5 Assignments that were surprisingly work-heavy, maybe 10-15 h on average. All questions are about giving pseudo code or doing analysis, there is absolutely no programming in this course.

If you are interested in Algorithms and Data Structures this course is for you. Next fall 2009 the course will be taught by Therese Biedl. The course should be quite similar with her as I saw her sitting in the back several times. I had CS 360 with her and think he will do a great job with this course too.

PSYCH 256 Cognitive Science

2009-07-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

As I was always interested in Psychology and Philosophy I decided to take a course in Cognitive Science in my last term here in Waterloo. The course is given by the philosophy department and is listed as PHIL 256 and PSYCH 256, but aims at a multidisciplinary audience. So if you think the topic is interesting, you might take it no matter what your background is, it has no prerequisites.

The course was given as a Distance Education course this spring, which was new to me. Distance Education means that all the course material is online or you have to get it form the university book shop. All coursework but the final was also done online, which means I never had to go to university and was completely free in my time scheduling. Of course this is a two sided sword.

Content-wise the course is a survey of Cognitive Science since its beginnings in the middle of the last century. Half of the course deals with classical accounts of Cognitive Science, often referred to as CRUM (Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind). This basically means that cognition is modelled as a kind of mental computation performed on mental representations. Examples are Logic, Rules, Concepts, Analogies and Neural Networks. The rest of the course deals with challenges to CRUM, that ask questions the classical paradigm leaves unexplained like the influence of emotions, the human brain, the world or the human body to cognition.

Assignments and Exams in this course means writing essays, as it is technically a philosophy course. There are 2 assignments, one essay 900 the other 1800 words. Both midterm and final consist of 2 essays each, each of which has 900 words. That means you will learn one or two things about expressing yourself and what a valid and strong argumentation is (or is not).

I found the course rather interesting, but I clearly prefer problem-solving oriented courses like math or computer science. Also I was not too happy with not having to go to a weekly class. It is all too easy to fall behind. There are lots of additional readings (at least from my point of view).

So all in all interesting course, you can give it a try if the topic seems interesting and your like arguing and writing. Maybe you should try to go into a real life - not distance education - course, there is nothing better than seeing real people and having real interaction while learning.

FR 152 French 2

2009-07-23T15:13:00.001-07:00

The course continues FR 151, with the same textbook and is similar in organization and content.

I took the course with Thérèse Sabaryn and I must say that I was a little disappointed first because she seems a lot stricter and dryer compared to my previous teacher. However, as the term passed by I had to change my opinion.

While she is maybe seems a little old fashioned in her teaching compared to others, she is an excellent teacher! You can tell that she really cares that people learn in her class and she is incredibly helpful. She goes a long way with explaining everything very clear and over and over again if necessary. She also did some quite nice activities, for example she brought a complete set for setting the table when we had the according vocabulary. If you are interested, she will always give you pointers on how to improve your French or learn about French culture.

Very nice thing: There was no final! There where lots of small tests, a lab comprehension test, a presentation and a little text to write.

So all in all, I was very satisfied with the course. I learned a lot, I guess your level of French after this course should roughly equal the DELF/DALF level A2. My personal goal is a B1 exam next summer. Hopefully after a month or so of intensive French in France. Let's see if I can get the money & time together.

Long time no post ...

2009-07-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

... because there was just so much going on in my life. My girlfriend Susi is now with me, she is currently taking an English course here.

I applied to a lot of internships and got one in Zurich! :) So I also had to find a place there for September. I got lucky and found one pretty fast.

AND my sibling Isabel and Andreas are coming to visit me for 4 weeks starting next Monday. I am so happy to finally see them again. We will be on a 10 days road trip on the end of their stay, as I still have my last term to finish, final exams are waiting!

CS 454 Distributed Systems

2009-04-23T11:01:00.001-07:00

OK, time to finish off the term. Just wrote my last final in CS 454. The course is a standard part of most computer science curricula and the course in Waterloo is no exception. The textbook used is Tanenbaum's Distributed Systems and the course contents are a subset of the topics covered in the book.

This term Khuzaima Daudjee taught the course. The format of the course where 3 assignments, midterm and final. The exams and the 1. and 3. assignment where more about describing concepts ans trade offs while the 2. assignment is a substantial programming problem, namely implementing a crude version of remote procedure calls in C++. Overall, the course is interesting and not too hard. People who enjoyed their operating systems course will also enjoy this one. The implementation part is however less extensive and there are less "hard facts" that you must know.

The instructor this term was very nice, approachable and willing to help students or provide further information. However the course seemed a be a bit bad prepared. The slides must be a decade old and although he does not seem to particular like the slides himself, he did little or nothing to change that. Another thing is that its really hard to pay attention in lecture as his way of presentation is a bit unexciting. Mr. Daudjee often speaks with the back to the class and does not use the blackboard very often. On the other hand, the discussions in class where really good. All this makes it a bit difficult to capture the structure of the subject, luckily, the book can help here.

Overall a nice instructor and a good course, but I think it could be MUCH better given the very interesting and practically relevant subject.

So, done with the term, 1 1/2 weeks left until next term starts, some time off finally! And even the weather seems nice, maybe some BBQ today. ;)

FR 151 French 1

2009-04-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

OK, with the previous post off my chest I can write a little bit about another course I took this term, FR 151.

I really hated French at school. I don't know why, most probably because my friends did, stupid me. Anyways, after growing up and developing a little bit of the ability to think independently, I came to realize that i like France and that learning foreign languages is cool in general. Well, I was a little late to realize that.

Luckily, I had the opportunity here to start new. FR 151 is not a course for complete beginners, but it could be one. I think if you are it's just more challenging, but still doable. They start completely from the beginning, well knowing that also everyone here in Canada has to learn French (interestingly, not English in Quebec) most of the people forget everything and don't remember a word. So I was fine with my virtually non-existing knowledge of the French language.

I took the course with Julia Nash and I think she is a great instructor. She offered conversation sessions besides class and always tried to came up with interesting content. Really great! I don't think she will be teaching another class here though, think she's leaving University of Waterloo to finish her teaching degree.

The format of the course was 5 written tests (each 10%) , a audio comprehension test (also 10%), participation/attendance (10%) and a final (30%). Think the format is better suited for learning languages then the normal format with midterm/final here. Overall I was very satisfied and will take the follow up FR 152 next term.

For those with some existing knowledge of French, University of Waterloo has a pretty large French department and courses at all the undergraduate and even some graduate level courses.

The Canadian Dream

2009-04-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

We had some excitement yesterday night at our BBQ. First we had problems with a blocked sink and then the overflowing sewage (YES) that was flowing into the basement caused a little cable burn due to the top notch electricity in our house. Even I know that lights are supposed to be connected to the ground and I know *?!% about electricity.

Well anyways, our really nice Indian-Canadian landlord where there pretty fast to help out. They are very helpful but now I know where all the "good" technical work in this house comes from. Apparently they think they are plumbers, and electricians, and ... maybe rocket-pilots? I will not climb into any Canadian rocket in the next time ...

We have some exciting photo coverage, but unfortunately not on my camera. ;) I think Mario, who did a lot of the DIRTY work yesterday, gets the title "Master of Disaster" after last night.

CS 486 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

2009-04-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

CS 486 it the basic undergrad artificial intelligence course in Waterloo. As I am very interested in the topic, I was looking forward to taking this course.

Kate Larson taught the course this winter (it is offered every term). I was not a big fan of her at the beginning, she sometimes seemed unorganized and was rushing through material. However I had to change my opinion (yes, it happens) in the course of the term.

The course covers a pretty big chunk out of the standard AI book, Russel and Norvig's AIMA. I was really surprised how much she was able to cover. We were basically done with the Search, Logic and Planing Topics for the midterm. After the midterm we covered everything that has to deal with uncertainty and learning. We started with ways to do Probabilistic Inference (mainly Bayes Nets), we had a look at Markov Decision Processes and various ways to do planing under uncertainty. Then there was a surprisingly big part on Learning, especially Decision Trees and Bayes Learning (hu ... no wikipedia article here, I should write one ;).

Overall, I learned a lot in this course, also because of the good assignments. We had to implement Bayes Inference, Decision Tree Induction and a variation of A* search, all very useful techniques. I think that you don't really know how something works until you struggled with implementing it.

The professor was very enthusiastic and encouraging. I ended up doing an extra voluntary project on game tree search under uncertainty (expectiminimax) to tackle the card game Offiziersskat. Although I did not have a lot of time, it was great fun. Thanks to Janes who teamed with me on the project, was awesome working with you!

So my suggestion to anyone thinking about taking the course, take it! :-)

CS 360 Introduction to the Theory of Computing

2009-04-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

As the exam period is already half over and I have some time to breath after handing in my last project (a Offiziersskat AI), I will start wrapping up my courses from the winter term by dedicating one post to each of them. I start with CS 360.

I had to take CS 360 as I need a basic theoretical computer science course for my program in Mannheim. So there was really not much of a decision involved in taking the course, having the choice, I would probably have chosen another one instead.

Therese Biedl taught the course this winter term and I must say that the course was quite enjoyable. She managed to explain things very clearly and easy to understand, often providing nice graphical representations of ideas.

It covers various mathematically precise models for doing computation. The "machines" used are the DFA, NFA, PDA and finally Turing Machines. One learns how these machines work and more importantly what languages are accepted by them. Of course there are some theorems to prove so the course is proof-heavy (for a computer science course). The professor however chose to spare us from a lot of the technical details and often provided "picture proofs" or left technical proofs out altogether. So the course should be doable even for people who are not very proof proficient.

The format of the course was 10 assignments, a midterm and a final. The nice thing was that all points missed in the assignments where added to the exams, so you could still get 100% without the assignments. They where however a very good preparation for the exams and sometimes interesting.

Personally, I really liked the professor and her dedication to teaching, but the material its self was not too interesting for me. Virtually nothing taught in the course has practical relevance. The course only touches on the computability part of the whole body of theoretical computer science and completely leaves out run time complexity and complexity classes (like P and NP). If you want that, you have to take CS 365, the tougher version of the course.

The course is not too hard, for me the easiest computer science course I had in Waterloo. This might be a question of your personal strengths. So after all: Very good prof, OK course. For all Mannheim students who have to do that course anyways, take it, I think it might be easier than in Mannheim (only from what I heard).

Catching up ...

2009-03-08T19:15:00.001-07:00

... on what I missed the last 3 weeks. There was reading week (one week without lectures) and my sister visited me. We went to New York City together. Nice and very busy city. Maybe a little bit too busy that I could imagine living there for long. Our budget Hotel was quite OK, but very loud, what did not matter too much as we were educated in the use of ear-plugs.

After that I had a week of fun with tooth pain and learned about my health insurance and the Canadian health system.

Now I really have to catch up on what's going on at university. Midterms are already done and I have to work on several assignments and a course project.

I really liked central park ...

... where we had some encounters with my favorite North-American pet, the squirrel.

Next is a French test tomorrow, then start implementing a little (crude) RPC library for the main assingment in the course Distributed Systems.

New Term: Winter 2009

2009-01-09T21:34:00.001-08:00

OK, everything seems to have worked out with my courses. Although my schedule is not optimal, I like my selections. More on my courses another time.

CS 343 Concurrent and Parallel Programming

2009-01-01T18:25:00.000-08:00

The course CS 343 aims to provide the student with a real ("deep") understanding of the mechanisms allowing concurrent and parallel programming. It is usually taught by Peter A. Buhr and as this course is really "his baby" I would not recommend taking the course when the topic is presented by another lecturer.

The course uses a C++ language extension called uC++ that was developed by Mr. Buhr as a language for teaching concurrency concepts. The upside of this approach compared to using off-the-shelf languages (like Java, Python, Eiffel) is that all concepts can be taught in one language and that concepts can be explained in the fullest possible way.

Mr. Buhr teaches a lot of C/C++ and good programming practises on the way through the extensive assignments. I learned about using the Preprocessor, Templates, Makefiles, Bitfields and Unions. A lot of efford is put into forcing students to document and test their code. Besides that Mr. Buhr cares about speed and let us run several experiments concerning the performance of different programming languages concepts.

What seems a bit odd at first is that almost half of the course talks about advanced means of control flow before Threads are introduced. A incremental learning approach is very nicely used. Out of the top of my head one learns about different forms of exit and transfer of control (goto, multi-exit-loop, non-local transfer), different types of exceptions (termination, continuation, retry, local, non-local, concurrent) and semi and full coroutines before threads.
After the introduction of threads, the course covers all types of synchronization and mutual exclusion locks and of course all the different kinds of monitors. Some ideas to handle complex concurrent programs are introduced like using an administrator and special-purpose tasks (this seems to be the basic idea behind Google's MapReduce and comparable software frameworks).

Assignments where to be handed in every 2 weeks, overall 6 assignments. The assignments were doable (not easy) and always a lot of programming. I might add a lines of code estimate later. I think there are not a lot of courses with more programming involved.

I learned a whole lot in this course (for example C++!). Peter Buhr is an extremely entertaining lecturer, he has very nice black humour and always a funny story to explain a complicated algorithm. Lectures are a "must see". If you have the time and you don't fear programming this course is for you. Highly recommended!

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T15:05:00.000-08:00

We wish everybody a happy new year from Montreal! :-)

CS 458 Computer Security and Privacy

2008-12-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

The course CS 458 Computer Security and Privacy is intended as a first (and possibly only) course in security (The syllabus could be: "What every computer scientist should know about security") for students in their 3rd or 4th year. In Fall 2008 the course was taught by Ian Goldberg, who seems to teach the course most of the time.

The course covers a very broad range of topics and is roughly following the textbook "Security in Computing" (Pfleeger & Pfleeger, 4th edition). Mr. Goldberg added several topics and was always able to give real-world examples out of his head. This greatly improved the lectures in spite of the unavoidable shallow coverage of the topics.

There were only three in general very doable assignments. In addition we had participation in a discussion forum and some short self-tests contributing to the mark. Marking was really fair. Every assignment contained one hard question, but the hard part could be left out without a too big penalty on the mark. The hard questions required writing some code. One asked for several buffer overflow exploits, one for writing a state full inspection firewall, one a little data-analysis script.

Also I have a background in cryptography and application-layer security competitions lots of the covered topics were new to me. I found privacy, database security and biometric encryption especially interesting.

I can recommend the course if you want to learn the basics of computer security. Also, the course is not too hard. Don't expect to learn about cryptography, which is only used as a tool in this lecture. There are other courses for that.

CS 350 Operating Systems

2008-12-25T15:43:00.000-08:00

This is the first of several posts about the courses I took here at University of Waterloo in Fall 2008.

The fist course I want to talk about is CS 350 Operating Systems, a standard course for Computer Science Students. This Fall Ken Salem was reading the course.

You can see the topics covered from the syllabus. The course consists of the usual two lectures a week and three pretty big assignments, of which the later two are group assignment in groups up to 3 students.

The course uses OS/161 a teaching operating system developed in Harvard and also used in the same course at University of Toronto. OS/161 provides the basics for developing part of a unix-style operating system in the following assignments. OS/161 is implemented in C (Yes, real C, not C++ as the syllabus says.).

The first assignment consisted of implementing some mutual exclusion and synchronization primitives like mutex locks, semaphores and condition variables and solving a problem with that primitives. In the following two (group) assignments one builds on that to implement some basic system calls (like write, read, exit, fork, execv) and finally some basic virtual memory management (vm system and on-demand page loading for user-level programs). The two assignments were very work intensive. I think they do a fourth assignment in Toronto/Harvard on File Systems but apparently this was left out in the current course in Waterloo.

Midterm and Final were of average difficulty, the assignments were of exponential growing difficulty (at least to get decent marks). Ken Salem has a nice way to explain difficult topics and was always very helpful. I would rate him the best instructor I ever had (let's see what comes next).

My suggestion is take the course here when you did not hear it yet (in particular when Ken Salem teaches it). A lot other courses build on material covered in this course and the presented material is interesting and somehow fundamental for a computer scientist. But plan with a lot of work with the assignment and start early (I really mean it!). I did not use the required textbook, I would not recommend buying it.

In general it is possible for exchange students to take courses that require CS 350 as a prerequisite in parallel (or more precisely, concurrently ;-)). I did that with CS 343 Concurrent and Parallel Programming and CS 458 Computer Security and Privacy. Also it is of course easier to hear CS 350 before these courses it is definitely doable. And it is hard to find courses that do not build on CS 350.

Recommended!

Christmas ready

2008-12-18T15:20:00.000-08:00

Pretty stressful time the last weeks so I am very much looking forward to 3 weeks of free time with my girlfriend. :-) And I was finally able to get all Christmas presents figured out and got a Christmas tree!

Heading for Toronto tomorrow to stay there two nights with Christian till I pick up my girlfriend form the airport on Sunday.

Winter is here (to stay)

2008-12-08T06:52:00.000-08:00

The Winter is here. The UW Weather Station says:

Temperature (current): -8.3 °C

Temperature (24 hour max/min):

-8.3 °C /-18.8 °C

Which I already consider cold (my Canadian roommate kind of agrees as he does not wear a T-Shirt outside anymore). I was studying in the library yesterday as lectures are over (finished at the end of November) and we got exams coming up. And I have to go out again today for sports and shopping. I would really prefer not to. January and February are gonna be hard with lectures every day in the cold mornings.

Here the proof that it is indeed cold. And we got lots of snow! :-)

The photo features my lovely roommate Janes. He has the annoying habit of answering snowballs thrown at his head for target practice with "tackeling" you. I think it is because he is a football lineman and can't throw. I have to say it's effective though.

On the weekend there was the Christkindl Market ("Weihnachtsmarkt") in Kitchener. There where obviously lots of people of German heritage, a thing always said about K-W, but rarely observed so far. The Market outside was rather small.

But they had Glühwein, of course only allowed to drink in a special area (as drinking alkohol is prohibited in public).

There was more inside. Manly handcraft and home-made food. I bought some speculaas ("Spekulatius") as I was not sure if I could get those in the super market. I am kind of addicted and still managed not to tuch them yet. I am very proud.

Basketball game in Toronto

2008-11-22T13:19:00.000-08:00

I went to Toronto with a university group to see a raptors game. My first NBA (or in general basketball) game. It was really nice, close game, the raptors lost in the last seconds of overtime.
We stayed for the night and returned after breakfast. Nice stay, but too short.

First Snow!

2008-10-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

Hi! Just a quick note on the fact that we had the first snow last night.

As I have a midterm this evening and will not leave the house until then two pictures from the front and back door of our house. ^^

Interesting World Maps

2008-10-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

You probably know these unusual world maps where the sizes of the countries represent something different than its (boring) physical dimensions. The British "Telegraph" has some very interesting ones.

See for example the world map on alcohol consumption.

Secure Software Development: The Tokeneer Project

2008-10-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

Just found an very general and thorough case study concerning secure software development through the RISKS digest. The language used in the project is SPARK a variation of Ada focused on security and integrity. An overview of the case study can be found here.

I really which I had the time to read these 70 pages right away.

Some impressions of Monreal

2008-10-17T14:53:00.001-07:00

Hi! I am back from Montreal since Monday and haven't blogged about it, what a shame! It is basically because my assignments for university keep me really busy.

In the next 3 weeks there are gonna be 3 midterms and 3 big assignments due. So don't expect to hear much from me until the middle of November. ;-)

Last night, I went to the Oktoberfest (attention stupid music!), more specificly to the university night. It was quite ok but overpriced and nothing more than a normal party. They only sold Canadian beer and Heineken! I guess if you want a more traditional Oktoberfest here you have to go another night. Ah, I will just go to the real thing next year.

So, back to Montreal. It is a really great city. While big (second largest "French" city after Paris, second largest Canadian city after Toronto) it is not as stressful as other major cities. I think in this respect it is a bit comparable to Munich. One reason for this is that it is not the financial center of Canada any more with the English businessman moving to Toronto after the cultural and political french shift in Quebec in the 1970th. Another reason might be all the Italian people here (around 200 000) that bring the "dolce vita".

The city is very beautiful and combines its French and English heritage nicely. This might be the only place in Canada that is really bilingual. In Quebec it is supposed to be very hard without English and in the English part basically no one will understand French, I guess you might have more luck in most European countries.

The odd thing in Montreal is that although almost all people speak English, all the signs are in French because of a law in the province Quebec.

We where really lucky with the weather and caught a perfect fall day on Sunday.

Look at the colors! :-)

Our hostel was also pretty nice, only cold water for the shower was hard, but it was dirt cheap (15$), clean, friendly and in a very nice and almost central neighborhood. It was very easy to travel the city by foot (all the sightseeing spots are quite close), at least for the non-football-players among us. ^^

They have a special style here for the entrances of the houses. You can enter every apartment from the outside using stairs. That looks very nice, some of you got wicked postcards. Unfortunately, I send them all. Here is the best picture I have, this was just outside the hostel.

When you walk around in Montreal you realize that this city is a melting pot of a lot of different cultures, not only French and English and also the buildings are pretty mixed. They say they have the biggest number of historical buildings in North America, competing with New York. But they have some skyscrapers too. Look at the Church reflecting in the office building. :-)

Ahh ... and the restaurants and the food! The supermarkets here are way better than the big ones in Ontario. They have a big variety of vegetables, fruits and most importantly (and in contrast to Ontario) cheese and french baguette. Real cheese like in Europe not the fake cheese you get here in Waterloo. Looking at the fotos I took, a lot of them are while eating.

Yes this look on my face is actually delight, I know it is hard to recognice, because I pushed it to the extreme. ^^ The breadth of restaurants and the quality of the food is really amazing. For the breadth part I saw a Tibetian restaurant (the only other I saw was in a Paris) and a "Nutrition Restaurant" (never have seen that before, must be a North American thing).

Ah and by the way these are the nice guys that whent with me to Montreal.

I am really looking forward to my next trip. I will definitely go there in the winter. :-)

VBA programming

2008-10-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

Having earned most of my money so far by from coding VBA I can really relate to this one.

Off to Montreal

2008-10-11T04:30:00.000-07:00

Hi! As unfortunately my status updates (these things on the left) don't seem to work any more I just wanted to drop a quick note that I am gonna be in Montreal until Monday. I am going there with Jan, Elli, Janes, Christian G., Antonin and Dan and we are sleeping in a youth hostel. Really looking forward to it, this is gonna be legen ... dary! ^^

I think I won't read email but I will take my Canadian cellphone.

See you soon! :-)

Little brain teaser

2008-09-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

A little brain teaser from Daniel Lemire's Blog:

You are an explorer who arrived on planet Bypolar. The Bypolarians come in two species: the Falsians and the Truans. The Falsians always lie whereas the Truans always tell the truth. Alas, you do not know how to distinguish them.
In any case, two locals are waiting for you.
First Bypolarian: You are most welcome on our planet. You are safe here.
Second Bypolarian: You must leave at once. You are in danger.
First Bypolarian: Do not mind my friend, he always lie.
Second Bypolarian: Ah… we always disagree.
Should you be worried or relaxed?

Fall's beginning

2008-09-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

As I missed on that in my last posts I just wanted to give you a little impression about my surroundings here in Waterloo and what I did the last days. Might not have too much time for that soon as my math thesis is due soon, assignments are getting harder and midterms are approaching (in October).

I will start with some pictures from the neighborhood. This is my direct neighbor, Janes.

And here is a view of our house (unit 37, notice Jan's Chevy). As you can see, fall begins. :-)

It is very warm by the way, today noon was around 25 degrees. The longitude is actually almost equal to the one of Florence.

And this would be our house from the back-side (exciting! ^^). The room on the second floor to the left is mine.

And we got a lot of squirrels here. They are a bit like nice versions of rats. You see them all the time and some are quite friendly. I saw one on campus that was trying to climb people's feet. And I thought that was a wild animal. I am now sure that you could tame them and have them as pets.

These days I was at some company information sessions at campus and a career fair here in Waterloo. Sometimes you have the impression that the companies are looking for approval by the students here, not the other way around. It is really funny. University of Waterloo has a very good reputation in Canada and USA because of their co-op program. This basically means that the students here do A LOT (from some I heard like 7x4 month) of internships. So graduates already have a great deal of work experience. And they torture you with assignments, what also increases the "hands-on" abilities of the students here.
My roommate Mario went with me to the career thingy. Aren't we looking great? ^^ Oh god, I seriously need a haircut.

So see you guys, I'm doing some more programming ...

The Plan for Fall 2008

2008-09-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

I had my first day of lectures today. All the professors seem pretty nice, both interested and interesting to listen to. They are quite some characters. The lectures I will be attending are (with Mannheim pendants in parenthesis):

CS 350 Operating Systems (Betriebssysteme) will be taught by Ken Salem.
CS 458 Computer Security and Privacy (Angewandte IT-Sicherheit) by Ian Goldberg.
CS 343 Parallel and Concurrent Programming (no Mannheim pendant) by Peter Buhr.

I expect CS 350 and 343 to be hard work with at least 10 hours of programming per week and CS 458 to take approximately half of the work. So I will be at 34 hours for the lectures. That's actually quite nice. Too bad I still have to work for my math thesis, I will give that 12 hours per week as a first try. This sums up to 46 hours of work per week. That should be fine, let's see how it works out.

Here is my schedule (for anyone who wants to call me from Germany, add 6 hours):

Review: First Week

2008-09-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

I wanted to give a little review of my first week here in Waterloo.

We, Jan, Janes and myself, decided to participate in University of Waterloo's orientation week. It was an extra 100 Bucks but we decided that it would be worth it to get into contact with some other students. Well, I can think of better ways now to spend that money. I think the orientation is pretty good for a first year student beginning his studies here in Waterloo. We don't have this kind of thing in Germany and I think we should. For us as upper year and exchange students it was a pretty pointless kindergarden. The people you meet are gonna be 17-19 years old and you won't take any classes with them. Most of the time was spend playing games to meet new people and to strengthen identification with the university. In Germany this would too much resemble NAZI techniques for it to be accepted (and I think that this is stupid).
So, we decided to leave the orientation pretty much on Wednesday. A really negative point about the orientation was the too small international student orientation. It was just a view talks and a tour of the campus. I would prefer a whole week of international student orientation.

We where nevertheless able to meet some nice people. Our roommate Mario (from Marburg, Germany) introduced us to some students of Wilfrid Laurier University, a mostly buisness school located here in Waterloo. At the international students orientation on Wednesday we finally met some internationals from University of Waterloo, all of them from France, except one from Iran. These are all really nice people and we where hanging out with them since then. As they are living in a residence, Columbia Lake Village, we get to know a lot of different people from all over the world.

And that's it for the social part. I managed to do some running, but it is really cold in the mornings (13 degrees) while it can get pretty warm and nice during the day (above 25 degrees). The weather changes really fast here. Just compare these two photos, the first taken on Saturday afternoon after me viewing my first football match and the second on Sunday in the evening when we where riding home from Columbia Lake Village.

That is one reason why you should always have a sweater with you. The other reason is the strong air conditioning everywhere. If you are just wearing a t-shirt you won't last long in a grocery store or a bus or whatever public building or vehicle you can think of.

Our house is already quite OK. What is still missing after this first week is most of the furniture for my room. I am still lacking a bed, a desk and a proper chair. I'm on that. More on my university stuff next time. A happy Christian signing out ... ;-)

Twitterfeed set up

2008-09-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

I set up twitterfeed to post my status updates from facebook ([fb] is prefixed) and this blog ([blog] is prefixed) to my twitter account. Of course this is done by means of an rss feed.

For the blog, the rss feed was easy to obtain, for my own facebook status updates not so much. Here is how you can do it using the old facebook interface. In the new interface, I wasn't able to find the feed. Hope they don't change the address. Does anyone has a clue where this feed is located in the new design? I already complained to facebook, but I doubt someone is going to read it. ;-)

German craftsmanship

2008-09-02T05:08:00.000-07:00

I finally managed to clean my room properly and began making it a nicer place to live. As my abilities as a do-it-yourselfer are often disputed, i am gonna share some insights into my great work with you. ;-)
The former tenant left me a mirror which has 4 spaces for photos. Fortunately, I took some pictures of my loved ones with me, so ready to go ...

I also imported my favorite tools, my swiss army knife and my leatherman. I needed them both because I had to cut the fotos a bit. I found out that the two tools are lacking an x-formed screwdriver.

I did it! Presenting my now personalized mirror .... ;-)

I promise that I will write about something more interesting next time, I just am so proud of my work. *g*

My new Home

2008-09-01T05:38:00.000-07:00

Hi there! I arrived in Toronto yesterday after a very good flight (good weather, nice crew and seat-neighbours). My new roommates (also from mannheim) Jan and Janes where so kind to pick me up. We directly went to waterloo, did some shopping and then started cleaning our kitchen.

The house here is pretty nice, but the former tenants left it kinda dirty, there's still a lot of work to do. Without further ado, here's the picture.

And these two nice guys are my new roommates. There will be two other guys joining us these days.

Yes, Jan was very happy to buy toilet paper. ;-)

Ah, we got no gas at the moment, so no warm water, resulting in very refreshing showers and the impossibility to run the washing-machine. More later, we got to be at orientation at 10 o'clock.

Subversion in Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymed)

2008-08-19T02:52:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Eclipse now comes with build in subversion support. Maybe the days of subclipse are over. The new tool of choice is called subversive. Whats odd is that it does not work right away, maybe because the project is still in "incubation". I am not familiar with the eclipse release-processes.

Here is how I got it to work:

Add the following software repository (under Help\Software Updates\Available Softare)
http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/
Install "Subversive SVN Connectors" (this should be sufficient but didn't work)
Install "SVNKit 1.1.7 Implementation (optional)"

Glad that it works now, I am using it together with texlipse for my math thesis.

Mannheim as a tourist

2008-08-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

As I will only be here for two more weeks I decided to take a tour of mannheim with my girlfriend, but not as locals but as tourists. We started at the jesuit church, then visited the mannheim palace and the water tower.

The jesuit church looks quite impressive on the inside and rather common on the outside.

I just realized last week that I have never visited the mannheim palace although I had several lectures inside the castle and am studying here for years. An asian tourist couple asked me if the tour of the palace is worth it. I had to answer, ... well I've never been there. What a shame.
Now I can tell you the place is worth a visit. You get an audio tour with the normal ticket (5 or 2.5 Euros for students). It's not that good but necessary as there are no written informations available. We haven't taken a guided tour (7 or 3.5 Euros) as we would have had to wait for half an hour. Given the limited quality of the audio guide, I think that would have been a good idea. The normal tour is only available in german, the audio guide also in english and french.

If you really want to you can learn a lot about the history of mannheim in the palace. For sake of completeness (and more importantly for an espresso at onyx) we also visited the water tower. :-)

Lesson learned: There are beautiful places in mannheim. Other good spots to visit would be the luisenpark, the two rivers rhine and neckar or the christ church. Have fun on your next visit to mannheim! ;-)