Courselect received a “small” refresh tonight with textbook purchase and selling feature! I’ve already went ahead and added a few books to the system so that you can see how it works. Technical stuff aside for now, I find this feature incredibly useful!

In the screenshot below, it shows prices from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. The book is listed at $89.50 at the university book store; Amazon.com shows a price of $46.54. That’s almost half off! If you have an old book that you want to sell, it is as easy as entering the ISBN or UPC or SKU of the book and selecting the checkbox to sell your book if you have an account.

I’ll admit that this UI isn’t exactly the best right now, but I’m just trying to get the core features out the door before I do some insane UI improvements.

If the course doesn’t show any textbooks right now, all you need to do is enter the SKU or ISBN of the book to let the website do the searching work!

Now, the geeky stuff.

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From the lack of blog posts in the last 2 weeks and a load of obscure Twitter messages, you may have guessed that I was up to something. Well, your suspicions are very right!

I hereby present you with, Courselect, preview edition!

What is it you ask? Well, it is an attempt at unifying all information that you ever want to know about a course you are thinking about taking. It also helps you figure out what course you want to take. This is a preview release of the website so it doesn’t have all of the scary features yet.

The scary features takes a bit more time to polish up. They also require lots of data. Courselect currently indexes 2,637 courses, 9,222 classes, and 9,372 course instructors offered at University of Waterloo and its affiliated campuses.

All that. Crammed into about… 2 megabytes.

Courselect - Displaying a course

How is this better than the existing system? It doesn’t have that silly “hours of operation” to begin with. Although they do have a valid argument in that university students should all be in bed by midnight. Hah! As if! Have they not heard of the Operating Systems course?

You are also able to search across all of the courses for topics that you are interested in. For example, “MIMO control systems theory“, “Stochastic Calculus“, “Roman history“, or even “Game theory“! I’ll admit that the natural language search is still a big lame-O right now, but I just don’t have time to build up that dictionary right now.

There are known issues with the website already, and I’m working on getting them fixed up for the next release with the new features. If there’s something that doesn’t give you the “right vibes”, leave me a message. If there’s something really cool that you wish Quest did, leave me a message as well.

This was done with on average of 3-4 hours per day over the entire duration of roughly two weeks by myself. I sure could’ve used some help, but it’s been a good exercise in rehabilitating my coding and database skills. I learned a whole lot about optimizing systems like this during this time, and then some more about database cloud organization. Now I just need someone to hand me over a few server racks to start me up some experiments!

Alright, enough of that nonsense. In one of the future refreshes, I’m planning to complete one or more or none of these features…

• Search by instructor
• Course historical data display
• Schedule builder
• Academic profile tracker
• Course suggestion
• Course t***** we’ll keep this under the wraps for now

Let me know what you think!

Again, the URL is http://www.uwlive.ca/courselect/

Note: A lot of the features above would’ve been implemented for this release, but… I accidentally got hooked on this silly game. Look at those computer requirements… oh yea.

Marks are once again dissatisfactory, but there’s an overall significant improvement in my GPA even with the course overload and the OS course. The much anticipated Business Finance marks are in and they were slightly lower than my expectation. Oh wells, better try harder next time! Had I done a little bit better on the essay portion of the final exam and get a few more marks, I would’ve got 100% in the course. =(

Well not all marks are in. I am still waiting on the marks for Cognitive Science, but hopefully he’s finished grading all of the essays. I say “he” because there is only one poor TA marking 130 final exam essays by himself. I suppose that the university is really short on budget with the money now moved towards the much needed campus beautification eh?

I just wrote two exams back to back, PSYCH/PHIL 256 and ECON 371, this evening. Although I feel that I was adequately prepared for the exam, I think the answer key to the ECON 371 (Business Finance I) exam will start like last year’s exam…

It seems that the exam was much too long, even though there was no essay question. That extra length should not affect anyone’s mark unless there is such a person as a “long exam specialist” who has some special ability, independent of knowledge or skills, to write tests quickly.

Nevertheless, because of 電風扇理論 and maybe the fact I was under the impression that the exam finishes at 9:30 (instead of 10), I gunned through all of the question with half hour left to come back to the totally insane proof question which I eventually got. Now… I’m just hoping for that 3 digit mark… especially after the bell… =x Good thing I studied like mad for it. (Very very very very) Unfortunately, since it is an overload course and designated as DRN, it will not be counted towards my GPA.

And hugely thanks to my slack off efforts in Digg-trolling, I wrote about crazy diffusion spectral imaging in neuroscience research in one part of my cognitive science (PSYCH 256) final exam. Mmm… freshness.

Alright, 3 exams done with just 3 exams left over the next week! *crunch crunch*

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a fobby music video, so here it is.
And, dang… I need to get that haircut. And the socks too.

Update: Bonus video after the break

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When I accidentally typed in the wrong domain today for one of my projects, I was greeted with a page similar to the one above. Rogers is now not only inserting “quota warning messages” into your web browsing, but also replacing the standard “domain not found” screen in most web browsers. Quickly checking the HTTP header of this web page, just as I had suspected, Rogers did not adhere to the HTTP protocol standard and it returned a “200″ header (it means everything went alright… but it didn’t). I don’t think ICANN will be very happy to find out about this.

Just about 15 minutes ago… an insane amount of rain came down. It was just dying down when I snapped this picture out the window towards the park trail behind the apartment.

I was just about to upload this photo when all of the sudden a huge flash of light fills my room, the lights all went out, HUUUUUGE thunder, and the power goes out. It came back on right away, but my ThinkPad dock was already going all wacko because it didn’t think I would be “undocking” and “docking” so fast.

Gah… gotta reset all the clocks again… they should really have clocks with small built-in capacitors for things like this….

Via the Sir Issac Newton exam

Facebook launched their new profile design (beta) just a few hours ago. Here’s a quick screenshot of the new homepage.

You can convert your account to the new Facebook profile by going to www.new.facebook.com and your account will be changed to use the new Facebook design. If you want to go back to the old design, there will be a link in the top right corner of the page to switch your account back.

I’m not quite sure if I like the new design just yet. I’ll have to take it for a spin tomorrow and then perhaps write an update to this post. The most dramatic change in this update is the tabbed profile page which removes a lot of the clutter. I can’t tell you how good it is at removing the clutter just yet… perhaps I should do some Facebook creeping to find out… jk

Those sneaky corporations. Good thing that I am quick to realize that a longer and skinnier surface actually has less surface area than their old more squarish jugs! </nerd>

My utility has decreased