My CE-160 Class in Ateneo (Nov 19 09)

This is my CE-160 class in Ateneo for the second semester of school year 2009-2010. CE-160 is Automata Theory with Compiler Design for computer engineering students. I have exactly nine students, and this is probably the smallest class that I have ever taught in 32 years. Most of them are either BS Applied Physics or Applied Chemistry, with major in Applied Computational Science. These are nine of the brightest students on campus, because you do not get into any of our allied engineering programs unless you are smart.

My daughter used to tell me this joke about engineering schools. She says that engineering is Marlboro Country -- all you find here are men and horses. This picture shows that Ateneo CE-160 is not Marlboro Country. On the contrary, when I'm teaching this class, I get the feeling that God gave me these good-looking young men and women to teach, in order to inspire me to teach, so that I can inspire them to learn.

God bless these children, and may they all get grades of A!!!

My CE-160 Class in Ateneo (Nov 19 09)

This is my CE-160 class in Ateneo for the second semester of school year 2009-2010. CE-160 is Automata Theory with Compiler Design for computer engineering students. I have exactly nine students, and this is probably the smallest class that I have ever taught in 32 years. Most of them are either BS Applied Physics or Applied Chemistry, with major in Applied Computational Science. These are nine of the brightest students on campus, because you do not get into any of our allied engineering programs unless you are smart.

My daughter used to tell me this joke about engineering schools. She says that engineering is Marlboro Country -- all you find here are men and horses. This picture shows that Ateneo CE-160 is not Marlboro Country. On the contrary, when I'm teaching this class, I get the feeling that God gave me these good-looking young men and women to teach, in order to inspire me to teach, so that I can inspire them to learn.

God bless these children, and may they all get grades of A!!!

Christmas Spirit in U.P. Computer Science (Nov 19 09)

A few days ago, an electrician put up a Christmas Tree of electric light bulbs in front of the U.P.Alumni Engineers Centennial Hall that houses the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Library II. The tree is so simple yet so elegant in its simple beauty. It quickly became popular among students, and in the late afternoons, in the dying hours of daylight, when the darkness of night try to overcome the brightness of day, we see student groups taking their pictures in front of the tree.

But this photo opportunity is a challenging one. The automatic exposure mechanisms of most digital cameras would defeat the darkening effect that you want to put in your picture, in order to show the beauty of the lighted tree. The Canon 450D on auto-exposure setting recommends 1/8 second at f/4.0. I went to manual and took the shoot at 1/10 second at f/5.6, and I got the desired effect of highlighting the tree in front of a slightly darker building. This is the magic of modern digital photography!

Ateneo to Remember (Nov 19 09)

I joined Ateneo de Manila in 1977 (or 1979?) as soon as I got my M.S. in mathematics. At that time, the college complex included Xavier Hall (Admin, Registrar), Kostka Hall (English, Humanities), Berchmans Hall (Mathematics and Management Engineering), Gonzaga Hall (Biology, Physics), Schmidt Hall (Chemistry), PIPAC Building (Philippine Institute of Pure and Applied Chemistry), Belarmine Hall (Psychology, European Languages), and the old Rizal Library (as yet without the extension building).

The new buildings came later: Colayco Hall (now MV Pangilinan Hall), Faura Hall, Dela Costa Hall, Social Sciences Building, Rizal Library Extension, Science Education Complex (A, B, C), PLDT Convergent Technologies Center, John Gokongwei School of Management, Mateo Ricci Hall, Church of the Gesu, and the First Pacific Hall housing the new Rizal Library.

Faura Hall was built at about the time when I got my PhD in Mathematics. I remember a year when an intensity seven earthquake was shaking Faura Hall up-and-down, instead of the usual sideways shaking motion of normal earthquakes. Except for superficial cracks in non-load-bearing parts, Faura is essentially undamaged, thanks to the reliable construction techniques of that time. At the time of the quake, Faura was housing Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics.

Today, I'm very proud that Ateneo constructed three important buildings, monuments to Ateneo's dedication to academic excellence.

The First Pacific Hall that houses the new Rizal Library is probably the biggest single library building in the entire country. The Library houses the main library's collection of books, periodicals, Internet access stations, etc.

The Manny V. Pangilinan Center for Student Leadership houses the student organizations. It is the most beautiful student center in any Filipino university today.

The Mateo Ricci Hall is a student study hall. There are individual study tables, group study rooms, a coffee shop, outlets for student laptops, wifi hotspots, etc. I believe that it is the only one of its kind in our country. The building is named after the Jesuit mathematician Mateo Ricci, and is a testament to Ateneo's dedication to academic excellence.

So if you are thinking of a university which will give you a good Jesuit education that emphasizes academic excellence, maybe Ateneo de Manila is the school for you.

KDE Founder and Smartmatic: Comparison

On November 6, 2009, in Germany, KDE founder Matthias Ellrich received the decoration German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to free software. KDE is one of the earliest graphical desktop user environments (GUI) for Linux and other open source operating systems, and is one of the most powerful and popular GUIs. In Germany, they give highest honors to people who open source their computer programs.

In contrast, in the Philippines, COMELEC will pay computer packaging and marketing firm Smartmatic the amount of PHP7.2-PHP11.4 billion for supplying election hardware and software with source code that no Filipino programmer will ever see, and that Smartmatic and COMELEC consistently refuses to submit to source code review as required by law. In the Philippines we reward companies who break the law.

That is one difference between Germany and the Philippines.

Go figure that out!

sha1sum as Program Integrity Verifier for the PCOS and CCS Pograms (Nov 05 09)

I am a Linux user. Linux is the best operating system for techie people. It is so good an operating system that even the Smartmatic PCOS PROGRAM runs on uClinux, and the Smartmatic CCS program runs on SuSE Linux. The computers that we should trust to run our national and local elections run on Linux!

Linux comes in several flavors, called distributions. A distribution consists of the Linux operating system kernel, together with a selection of utilities that, together with the kernel, makes a complete usable operating system. My favorite Linux distributions are Ubuntu (a derivative of Debian) and Fedora (from which RedHat is derived). The trouble with any Linux distribution is that Linux and the utilities are updated (source code improvements are made) on a regular basis, and the distributions are also updated to catch up with source code improvements. As a result of these improvements, a new version of Fedora, version 12, is coming in a few days, even before I could get familiar with the great features of version 11. So I have decided to change my Fedora distribution to CentOS, an enterprise Linux distribution that is based on RedHat, one that does not get updated as frequently as Fedora. We say that CentOS is built upon a reasonably stable source code base.

I decided to download the CentOS version 5.4 installer DVD from the Argonne National Laboratories mirror at the URL:

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/centos/5.4/isos/i386/CentOS-5.4-i386-bin-DVD.iso

The download took a few hours, since the DVD is about 3.9GB in size. To make sure that there were no errors in downloading, I also downloaded the sha1 hash/checksum file:

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/centos/5.4/isos/i386/sha1sum.txt

This sha1sum.txt file contains the sha1 hash values of the CD/DVD files that you can download from Argonne. The specific sha1 hash value that I am interested in is the line in that file that reads:

d2b36d3f017b2684ac920fab87aaf741bba16ca8  CentOS-5.4-i386-bin-DVD.iso

Now I need to make sure that the DVD that I downloaded does not contain any errors, that I downloaded a correct copy of the CentOS installation DVD. In order to check the correctness of the downloaded DVD (verify the integrity of my download), I just run the "sha1sum" program as follows:

sha1sum CentOS-5.4-i386-bin-DVD.iso

After some wait, the sha1sum program prints out the sha1 hash value of the DVD as follows:

d2b36d3f017b2684ac920fab87aaf741bba16ca8 CentOS-5.4-i386-bin-DVD.iso

Comparing with the sha1 hash value from the file sha1sum.txt, I am able to confirm that my DVD installer is correct and is an authentic copy of the original CentOS installer from Argonne. Now I am happy that I can install CentOS on my laptop.

How does this integrity verifier work for our election programs: PCOS and CCS? This is my suggestion, which COMELEC may or may not implement. After all this is just a suggestion. After the election programs that will run on the PCOS and CCS computers have been source-code reviewed and approved by the Filipino IT community, and after successful testing by SysTest Labs, in front of representatives from all political parties, SysTest Labs will compute the sha1 hash values of the PCOS and CCS programs, using the Linux sha1sum program as illustrated earlier. These two hash values will be printed out and given to all watchers and BEI and BOC personnel. Then on election day, to verify that the programs that have been approved are the ones running on the PCOS and CCS computers, the BEI and BOC personnel will just run the sha1sum program on the PCOS and CCS election programs, respectively. If the sha1sum program prints out a sha1 hash value that is equal to the sha1 hash value of the approved programs given out by SysTest Labs, then the PCOS and CCS programs will be accepted as authentic, since they pass the integrity verifier.

With a program integrity verifier like this, confidence in automated elections will be enhanced, and people will start to trust COMELEC.

The Making of Champions (Nov 02 09)

The world's best collegiate computer programmers are usually decided in February or April of each year in the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). In February 1-6, 2010, the World Finals will be held in snow-covered city of Harbin, China, at the Harbin Engineering University. To qualify to join the prestigious World Finals, a team of three college students currently enrolled in a university (not exceeding five years residence from time of entrance to university) must train under a faculty coach, and come out on top of one of the regional programming contests. In 2009 the Asian regional contests were (will be) held in 15 universities in Tokyo, Hsinchu, Dhaka, Manila, Gwalior-Kanpur, Shanghai, Amritapuri, Harbin, Hefei, Tehran, Wuhan, Ningbo, Phuket, Seoul, and Jakarta, The world's best collegiate programmers usually come from Eastern Europe (Russia) and Asia (China).

On Friday, October 23, 2009, at the Asia-Manila regional programming contest of the ACM-ICPC at Ateneo de Manila University, 55 collegiate programming teams from Hongkong, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines, met and competed for the Asia-Manila regional championship. Ten problems were given, to be solved by each team of three programmers in five hours, using one computer shared by the three team members. The team that solves the most problems in the least time becomes regional champions. The problems were varied, including convex hull computation, composition of polynomials, taxicab distance, expressing a number as a sum of consecutive integers, partial fractions, fitting a quadratic, and classifying typhoons. The contest started late at 10:00 AM and was ended at 3:00 PM. The top six universities were:

1. UP Diliman (regional champions)
2. Ho Chi Min City University of Science
3. National University of Singapore
4. Hongkong University of Science and Technology
5. University of Hongkong
6. Ateneo de Manila University

The champion team from UP Diliman, named "Mga SOGO ni E.T." , consisted of team members Marte Raphael Soliza, Kevin Charles Atienza, and John Eddie Ayson. Their faculty coaches are Dr. Fidel Nemenzo and Mr. Eric "E.T." Tambasacan.

The champion UPD team will join the World Finals in 2010 in Harbin, China. This is only the third time that a Filipino team will be joining the World Finals. Earlier in 2005, a team from Ateneo de Manila University joined the World Finals in Shanghai, China, and in 2006 another team from Ateneo de Manila University joined the World Finals in San Antonio, Texas.