UCOSP Project Completion

The Fall 2009 Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) run by the University of Toronto have completed.  I participated in the WikiDev project for CS499 course credit.  The following is our screencast.

Microsoft Interview Question

I recently had an interview with Microsoft where I was asked a simple, yet interesting problem solving question.  It goes as follows:

I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 999.

The sum of the digits is 14.

You must figure out what my number is by asking me any 3 questions, which I will answer.  However, you can’t ask for individual digits, or questions that give the answer away (such as ‘what’s your number plus one?’).

It’s quite a simple problem if you know how to do it.  I managed to solve it correctly, but was a bit disappointed at how long I needed to think about it due to the pressure of the interview situation.

Book Review: Taming American Power

(Note: this book review is an excerpt of an essay written by myself for the PSCI281 course at UW)

In Taming American Power, Stephen Walt has written what is effectively a guide for understanding how other states view and deal with American primacy and an attempt to prescribe what he sees as the ideal foreign policy that maximizes harmony and minimizes threats to American interests.  He refers to this as an “offshore balancing” (12) strategy.  He begins by describing how America became so powerful and why other states may view the situation as unfavorable.  He then outlines the many strategies that states use to deal with American primacy.  Concluding with essentially a to-do-list, he describes how he thinks the U.S. should conduct itself to preserve its national interest.

One of the main purposes of his book is to inform Americans, particularly of outside views of the United States and of the consequences of previous foreign policy decisions that presumably do not get much attention in the mainstream media.  He explains why American power is a problem to an audience that may not realize it or have thought about much, and why it is important to study how other countries view the United States.  He writes, “The more we know about the ways that others view U.S. power, and the more we understand about the strategies they are using to deal with it, the better equipped we will be to fashion a foreign policy that will maximize global support and minimize opposition” (18).  This understanding of strategies is what Walt devotes two chapters to.

He makes a very convincing, albeit understandably pro-American argument for the future of U.S. foreign policy.  However, it’s unlikely he has convinced any neo-conservatives to change their mind.  His moderate views are hard to find fault with since they are neither strongly conservative nor liberal, but some of his biases do show in his writing.  For example, he is a sharp critic of the war in Iraq, which he references throughout the book, as well as the U.S. position on Israel.  Regardless, his examples of the different strategies in use were plentiful and informative, and it was very easy to agree with his conclusions because they were straightforward, logical, and seemed like common sense.

ARWU Rankings

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has released their results for 2009.  The usual suspects topped the list: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge, MIT.  The University of Tokyo was 20th, and the University of Toronto was 27th.

Out of a total of 501 schools, the University of Waterloo ranked 201st – 302nd overall (apparently tied with about 100 others).  For the Computer Science category: 52nd – 75th, out of 100 schools.  However, this is not surprising given the ranking methodology used.  The number of faculty and alumni winners of the Turing award, plus the the number of “highly cited researchers” and “papers indexed” are all measured in absolute terms, which puts UW at a disadvantage since it’s still a relatively young school and has only recently started to expand its graduate program.  Hopefully we’ll see Waterloo move up the rankings in the years to come.

First Snow?!

A depressing day in Waterloo as we are subjected to the first (yet short-lived) snow of the season.

International Domain Names

According to this article, Icann has approved the introduction of domain names for non-Latin based scripts to go live next year. Everything from Arabic to Chinese. I’m sure the creators of phishing sites will love this, but on the bright side, maybe I’ll be able to snatch the オーウェン.com domain, or move this blog to オマシューズ.wordpress.com!

UW in the Fall

Just a few random pictures of the University of Waterloo campus.

Japan Video Compilation

The following is a video compilation of clips from my stay in Japan.
Enjoy!