I have quite the cold this week.  This is unfortunate because I have a midterm tomorrow in Algebra and five interviews on tuesday.  So if you’re interviewing me this week, please tolerate the sniffles .  To make matters worse, I lost my glasses on friday, which makes class time as useful as Magikarp’s default attack.

In other news, inkblotter‘s requirements are becoming well defined.  After moving away from CouchDB, we’ve been in a bit of a shuffle.  I expect to put a lot of work into inkblotter in the coming weeks.

Today I traveled to the Waterloo office of Kaleidescape by way of Limo Bus.  I didn’t know such things existed, but they do.  They have an epic office, and the co-op employees seemed pleased with their experience.  Many return to Kaleidescape every term.  I love their technology; they create the hardware and software of extremely high end home media systems for managing DVDs and CDs.  I have two interviews with Kaleidescape tomorrow.  Hopefully their as impressed with me as I am with them.  Also, I got my thirteenth interview scheduled today, but it’s conflicting with the four others I have that day.  Oh well, time to email some people and get that worked out.

My most fascinating class this semester is my first university level liberal arts elective, macroeconomics, taught by the infamous Larry Smith.  I have my first midterm in macroeconomics tomorrow, which is noteworthy because up until now, all my midterms have been on engineering or math subjects.  I’m interested in comparing the relative difficulty of the classes.  Up until this midterm, macroeco has been by far my easiest class because I had no homework.  Tonight I spent about three and half hours preparing, and I plan to spend a couple more tomorrow.  This is comparable to my weekly effort put into each calculus and algebra.

On an unrelated note, today I had an interview with Genesys Communications Laboratories, a part of Alcatel-Lucent.  The job is for a research position in mobile software.  It’s the first time the positions been offered, so my interviewer Adrian warned me that the daily job activity would be uncertain and in flux.  He didn’t know what specific platforms or technologies I would work with if chosen.  Still, it’s an exciting opportunity.

Finally, findthehotties.com has been hacked (again), but, have no fear, for at some future, undefined point in time, we’ll fix the exploit!

I’ve had two interviews so far, and at the moment I have ten more to go, although this number is likely to increase as time goes on.  I had no idea I was going to have so many interviews.  The co-op instructor told us that we should all apply for 50 jobs (the max), and that we would lucky to get a few interviews.  I applied to 40 jobs, and I’ve only heard from slightly over half. So, at this rate, I have more than a 50% interview success rate.  Frankly, it’s irresponsible for the University to tell me that I should have applied for 50 jobs.  I have to skip loads of class to attend these interviews, and I have to go – or else I FAIL.

Anyway, concerning the two interviews I had:

• Ipeak Networks – Very demanding co-op position, but also very interesting.  I would writing low-level code for a cool networking protocol.
• Moxymedia – I’d learn how to build large scale web infrastructure using C#/.NET 3.5.  I think the interview went well, and I think I’d enjoy working there.

I’m glad this week is over.  Now to fix FTH (find the hotties), watch some BSG (battlestar galactica), and do some HW (Homework).

I’ve returned to Waterloo from CUSEC.  On Friday, Noah Sugarman and I presented findthehotties.com to the CUSEC democamp.  We were a big hit, but unfortunately, we were hacked by three seperate groups within minutes of finishing the presentation.  Two of the groups personally contacted me with suggestions on how to improve security; of that I’m grateful.  I was surprised when I found out our game was hacked, although, I should have expected it. Firstly, we gave the presentation to a bunch of software engineers, and secondly, my dear friend Karan had warned me that we were doing server validation horribly wrong.  He was 100% correct.

Unfortunately, Noah and I could not fix the site because the hotel took away our internet access for going over our bandwidth limit. (Note: Never stay at a Best-Western).  Today, we finally got the site working again, this time with marginally better security.  To make the site properly secure, we need to do a major overhawl, but that will have to wait because we are both very busy making up school work, preparing for exams, and attending job interviews.

So far, I have five interviews lined up for the coming week.  Finally, I left my fridge open while I was at the conference.  This is most unfortuate because I’d just bought three bags of fresh milk.  Oh well, Murphy’s law, right?

This week I’m at the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) in Montreal. So far, I’ve been to two of the opening day keynote speeches. First up was Leah Culver, a stunning software engineer from San Francisco, arguably most famous for founding the social networking site Pounce, which unfortunately, recently  shutdown.  Leah is an enthralling speaker, and I found her advice energizing.  She suggested that we need to take risks, get out there, push ourselves, and to use the tools we have available.  I’ve been a fan of Leah for a while, because of her use of Django, and success with her free laptop project.

It’s too bad Pounce wasn’t successful, but I’m confident she’ll have a lasting influence on the software industry, as evidenced by her involvement in open source projects, such as OAuth.  Not to mention, she knows quite a few other famous people (some more than merely “internet” famous), to whom I’m now only seperated by two degrees!  I was lucky enough to speak with her for a few minutes before her presentation, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to ask her advice about building a website before she leaves.

I’ll have more to report in the coming days.

Today I did nothing but read job descriptions on Jobmine.  I’ve worked through about 500 descriptions.  Unfortunately, I was kicked off the system again at midnight.  Many of the opportunities are interesting, but it’s a bit intimidated to see that 30-40 people have already applied for the job I’m looking at, and there is only one position available.

I’m surprised by the lack of requests for Python developers.  Most jobs want Java, PHP, .NET, or Perl.  Luckily, I’ve got .NET skillz, and some Java experience as well.  I’ve never liked PHP, so I’ll stay away from those (the irony is PHP was made by a UW grad).  I own a Perl book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. Woops.  Several jobs have request UML experience, which I have none, but I won’t worry about that too much.

I noticed that there were no RIM jobs available.  I’m not sure if I have to apply on their website, or if they will be in the second set of job postings.  We’ll see.

I used Jobmine for the first time today. Jobmine is the University of Waterloo’s online co-op job board. There are about 700 jobs available that fit into my area of expertise (CE, SE, CS). Many of these jobs are available to more than one student, but on the other hand, it’s conceivable that some companies will choose not to hire any students from Waterloo. Considering the economic situation, I wonder if the number of available jobs is lower than normal or if companies are taking less students.

It’s likely to be a very difficult job market this year.  On top of that, the summer co-op is always the most competitive, because UW students must compete with those from traditional schools who are only available for internships during the summer.  Exacerbating the situation, I’m a first year, first time co-op student, which makes me less likely to get a good co-op job, if I get one at all.  The next few weeks should be interesting, to say the least.

Also, I must complain about the quality of the Jobmine interface.  It’s ugly, and un-intuitive.  Sections of the site are located in seemingly random locations, with no thought to asthetic design.  I can’t open job descriptions in a new tab properly, because javascript is used to open the links.  Once you’re on the description page from a job, you can’t actually apply to it unless you go back a page.  The system logs you out every 20 minutes, which jarringly interrupts my job searching.  Jobmine is not available at night, which is why I’m writing this rant instead of applying for jobs!

Resume’s must be uploaded as HTML documents.  If the HTML contains any syntax error, the parser spits out an ugly error description that inevatibly complains that the problem is on line 1 of the document (no it isn’t).  Apparently support for CSS is limited (Why?), and we are only allowed to have 3 different resumes uploaded at once (Why?).  Jobmine provides an interface for adding predefined “skills” to one’s profile, such as “Java”, “MS Office”, and “Project Management”.  Each skill must be added one at a time, and selected from a giant list.  It’s a royal pain in the fanny.

If Waterloo can’t even design a decent website, what hope should we have for the software engineers who graduate from it?

I’m in SE 141: digital circuits, on my iPod touch. We are learning about boolean algebra. I’m not impressed. We’ve been using its theories in our code for years. Although, it’s likely the formal definition will prove to be more useful later.

A couple of days ago, my dear friend Karan shared with me an idea about making a CAPTCHA that forced the user to choose amongst the photos of several women and identify the attractive one. This is a decent CAPTCHA algorithm because bots would be hard-pressed to know what an attractive women looks like in order to defeat it. Karan was being facetious, but the idea intrigued me. It quickly became apparent that it could never be a particuarly effective CAPTCHA because of the limitation of the number of pictures that could be reasonably displayed at once. For example, if nine pictures are shown, a bot has a one-ninth chance of guessing the correct image, which is far higher than for traditional text-based CAPTCHAs.

But, I was not to be deterred. Instead of a CAPTCHA, I along with my friend Noah decided to make a high quality flash game based on the concept of picking out the one “hot chick” from a set of 9 images. The faster you pick the right image, the more points you get. I went and registered a domain, and setup a server. We are currently polishing and improving the game, but you can see our progress at findthehotties.com.

The question is, “Am I losing my integrity by creating the game?” I view it as harmless fun, but maybe others would view at sexist, and degrading. To counteract that, we’ve decided to make a male version as well. If people are really opposed to it, we’ll take it down. Have I gone to far?