More on ISIEA09 (and on Malaysia)

One thing I didn’t notice right away is that the number of female participants (including presenters) at the conference was very high.

In Canada and the U.S., it seems that women are not that interested in the hard sciences like maths, engineering, or computer science. And that’s not because they are kept out of those faculties; quite the contrary: there are numerous incentives and wooing programs; or that they can’t do it: they just don’t care, it seems. Women study more than men (in a 2:1 ratio in universities, at least in Québec) but they do not choose engineering, maths, or computer science; they prefer health and care studies, like medicine, social works, etc.

Here, in Malaysia, there seems to be a large number of women studying in engineering, computer science and maths; at least a great deal more than in Canada. I wonder if we could borrow their strategies to get women to be interested in engineering and sciences or if it is rather the result of a fundamental cultural difference between our two countries. I say I wonder if it’s not cultural because a large percentage of the women (but not all) wore a conspicuous hijab headscarf.

Readers, any ideas/impressions on this?

Nonce and other Frobnulated Words

Language is always fun to use to better effect, whether it is to make your point or break your adversary’s point. All natural languages are rich and contain a number of regional, rare or made-up words. French has a number of them and so does English.

Rare, nonce, or simply made-up words show up in comedy, literature, and even programming. As I am not a native English speaker (which I am sure you gathered by now by reading this blog) I do often read books about English to better my grasp of the anglo-saxon language. Not all of them too serious.

Third day of ISIEA09

On this last day of ISIEA09, a lot of the participants have already left. This gives me the impression that many participants just left as soon as they had presented their paper. I feel sorry for the last presenters who spoke before almost empty rooms. I think that it is rather rude, nay, even cheap to run away as soon as your paper is presented.

Compounded with the fact that a lot of presenters didn’t even show up—there was a lot of them—the last day at ISIEA09 was rather intimate. On the good side, it meant more time to discuss between talks and some exchanges were rather good. This being said, I think ISIEA should adopt the same ‘no show’ policy other conferences have. Unless you cannot show up because some case of force majeure, your paper is withdrawn from the proceeding and you are banned from the conference for a number of years. That’s harsh, but that prevents situations where 20-25% of the speakers do not even show up.

Second day of ISIEA’09

ISIEA’09 is the most varied conference I attended so far. Usually, conferences are more or less focussed on a specific topic. Here, everything vaguely industrial is a welcome topic: one speaker discussed optimal pump control to avoid cavitation, another an automatic ablution machine using machine vision… I think this kind of conference is very stimulating because you get to discover areas of research you did not necessarily knew about.

*
* *

I presented my paper on the speeding up of motion estimation in video coding using SIMD instructions and approximate metrics—I will put the paper and the slides online when I return. I think the presentation went pretty well, as it drew some attention.

First Impressions on Kuala Lumpur

I arrived at Kuala Lumpur for ISIEA’09 yesterday. After a good night sleep (the trip from Montreal takes something like 28h, door to door) I set out to visit a bit. My first impression is that Kuala Lumpur is a safe city, filled with friendly people. I visited the Menara Kuala Lumpur and the Petronas Towers (although I will have to return as the skybridge was already sold out for today).

This is the second time I visit a country where I do not speak the language at all, but the people here know a little English and seem to be willing to help if they can. I like the people here. They’re polite, warm, and industrious.

The conference begins tomorrow. I am eager to see what’s hot on the Asian computer science scene—this is an Asia-centric conference, for a change.

Generating Random Sequences (part I)

Every once in a while, we need a random sequence. Whether to test a data structure’s performance or to run probabilistic unit tests, the provided rand primitive from your favorite programming language has several limitations. First, it’s been known for a while that if most implementations of the C standard library rand() function are not very random, despite being “good enough” in great many cases. Second, and more importantly, it does not allow you to easily control the period nor to generate a permutation on , for example.

There are many methods of generating pseudo-random number sequences. Not all exhibit the same properties and, accordingly, a method may be more useful in one case and perfectly useless in another. High quality pseudo-random number generation is a notoriously hard endeavor, but there is a number of very simple algorithms that will get you out of trouble for certain specific tasks. Let us consider, for example, the example where the pseudo-random generator must generate the numbers in exactly once, in a random order, of course, in exactly draws.

The Zune Freezes: More on Unit Testing

Do you remember the epic fail that bricked the Zune a whole day on the last day of last year, a bisextile year? I described here and here how this error could have been entirely avoided using basic unit testing.

You probably remember (if you read the original post) that I first claimed that it’d take a few seconds to check all possible dates but in fact it ended up taking something like 90 minutes. This week, I come back on unit testing of a very large domain under a time constraint.

A quick Bash Fix

Remember, not too long ago I told you how to shorten path names in a Bash prompt? Well two things. Apparently, there’s a similar mechanism in Bash 4.0 with PROMPT_DIRTRIM(which I haven’t tried yet). Second, noticed that I’m frequently using many terminals opened on many machines, and I’m not always sure which is which. Using uname -n in the terminal spews the machine name, but it’d be much better if the name appeared in the terminal title bar. To do so, use the same prompt I used previously, and add $HOSTNAME (a Bash variable that holds the machine’s name) in there:

PS1='\[\033]0;$HOSTNAME: $(shorten_path "${PWD}" 50)\007\]$(shorten_path "${PWD}" 50) >'

(again, use the view plain mode if WordPress messes up the syntax again)

What’s a Good Color Scheme?

Although EMACS is growing old, filled with passé idiosyncrasies, and rather complicated to tweak, I grew accustomed to it and is now my main editor. I use it for shell scripting, C++, HTML, even. But to use EMACS properly, or a least make it enjoyable a little bit, one must do a fair bit of configuration. Key bindings to match modern keyboards, adding the macros you’re using the most, and, finally, adjusting the color scheme so that your eyes do not bleed after a few hours of work.

But what is a good color scheme?

Suggested Reading: La Nouvelle Grammaire en Tableaux

Marie-Éva de Villiers — La Nouvelle Grammaire en Tableaux et Recueil de Conjugaison — Québec Amérique, 2009, 324 pp. ISBN 978-2-7644-0690-8

(Buy at Amazon.com)

Normally, I suggest English books, but since I know a certain part of my lectorate is French-speaking, I will make, now and then, an exception.

Un ouvrage de référence indispensable s’il en est un. Ce guide de la grammaire Française en plus d’être le plus à jour, a la particularité d’être très clair et complet; comme son titre le laisse entendre, l’information est présentée par tableaux, du genre if-then-else, chacun d’une grande simplicité mais aussi très complet. Pour comprendre l’usage du subjonctif plus-que-parfait (dont l’usage rare se fait trop souvent le prétexte aux phrases phonétiquement ambiguës — et aux farces salées) il suffit de consulter le tableau « concordance des temps dans la phrase. » Des néologismes ? Aucun problème ! Consultez le guide d’usage et de formation des néologismes.

Une lecture obligatoire pour tout bloggueur, thésard ou communicateur!

(hit Google Translate for fun)