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Apparently, today is that day of the year again, the CSS Naked Day. Now, be gone CSS style sheets, show the world that your website is still semantically correct without your fancy tables and none of the atrocious HTML hacking!
I just added another 610 textbooks for the spring term to Courselect. Hoosh! Starting next term, I’ll be adding Biblio.com to the list of book distributors after finally receiving access to their API. Users will now be able to have access to more deeply discounted textbooks.
It is interesting to note that so far there are 356 new textbooks to the system for the spring term so far. That’s the kind of tough business environment that the UW BookStore has to compete with. I bet that they’re working hard on getting your textbooks in stock for May. Meanwhile over in Mississauga somewhere, the Amazon.ca warehouse is fully-stocked and ready to ship out books with free shipping.
Well, enough about other people’s textbooks. Time to read mine for the exams. Or sleep.
Oh, I’ve also taken out the Microsoft Ads on Courselect. They made a whole $63 because of Courselect; I guess that’s pretty cool.
Can someone explain this strange phenomenon? It just won’t go away! Hey, Windows Live Messenger team, I have no intention on watching a movie over video call. Alright? Thanks.
Repo (requested by our diligent ex-PM on the Windows Live team):
- Pop in DVD
- Watch the original Italian Job
- Look for suits as nice as Michael Caine’s suit on the other screen
- Finish watching movie and close WMP
- Send laptop to Sleep
- Wake up laptop
- Pop out DVD
- Get harassed by pop-up windows
- Pop disc back in to make it go away
- Look at dress-shirts and suits
Maybe Michael Caine’s suits just looked too good in The Italian Job.
After the big rush of mid-terms and insane lab report due dates in the last two weeks, I have been busy over the past few days doing a small sprint on writing more stuff into our project specifications. Due to an unwarranted force in the department, we are working hard to make sure that our project will succeed in meeting all of our requirements and expectations of the projects.
With our FYDP now well into the so called “Elaboration / Elicitation” phase of your typical PLC terminology, we have spent a lot of hours over the reading week into the planning for the “big project”.
In consistency with my habit of posting up super vague information about anything that might be important, all I am going to say now is that we’ve named our baby Project IRIS. Just to be nice, I’ve also thrown up our draft logo for your interpretation enjoyment.
We plan on getting a web site for all of this up really soon over up at www.projectiris.com; as soon as Dreamhost tie up everything on their end. By then, you’ll get to find out more about our crazy project.
By the end of next week, we’re also hoping to get our System and Software Requirements Specifications written and sent out to the press. There’s probably going to be a ton of IEEE standard references as well as all sorts of legal references, so you are going to bet on it being boring to read.
With the Quantitative Finance (ECON 405) class that I am taking right now, we are heavily relying on an open source software called “R”. Like many many many open source projects out there, the documentation are written by programmers and not professional documentation writers.
But I stumbled upon this nice little R Tutorial today that covers pretty much everything you need to know to get started with R. I hope all of you who are taking this course now (or in the future) will find this useful.
R is actually a really nice piece of software (and free!). I use R as a really beefy calculator for my day-to-day course work too. Matlab is really nice and powerful, but it just takes too much effort to remote into the terminal server to access the software. If you want to try out the software, you can get a copy of it from their website.
This morning, I received an unexpectedly high number of feedback emails on my phone after I got out of my class in RCH. I thought, “Well, looks like the LJ community really liked it.” I only found out after I got home (and after my nap) from checking my uwlive.ca email that I was mentioned in today’s UW daily bulletin. (Holy smokes! I’m famous! jk)
I was getting all sorts of emails from various kinds of people from around the school, including CECS, the registrar’s office, and the school of accounting and financial management (I’m surprised that they took a look too).
I’m glad to report that Courselect received a healthy 202 visits from 191 unique visitors today. This is twice as good as the initial version! In the new “version 3”, I will be enlisting help from Richard to take on an ever-growing list of feedback and expansion into other projects.
Stay tuned for more updates! 
Finally catching a break in what seems to be an endless stream of cold and snowy weather in the south coast, Andrei and I headed up to Whistler today to catch some good, sunny, and not so cold/windy weather. It is the first time that the weather had been this great up at Whistler in the last 3 weeks that I’ve been back on the better side of the Rockies.
Here’s a panorama from Blackcomb Mountain just beneath the 7th Heaven Lifts. You can see the 6MB monster in its full glory, or view the Photosynth. That little pointy rock you see towards Whistler mountain is none other than the Mt. Black Tusk that I’ve been dying to go back to.
