Insufficiently Random

I passed two of the five qualifying exams required for a PhD in Computer Science. Go me! Now I just have three of them left. I’m taking one as a course this semester and the other two will just have to wait until August when the oral exams are offered again. I opted to put those exams off so that I could spend more time studying, as I will only get one attempt to pass them.

I’m taking a course this semester on computer network security. One of our texts is Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography. The campus bookstore wants $51 for this book in paperback. Searching by the ISBN on Amazon came up with a price of $31.80 for the paperback edition. A savings of $19.20, roughly equal to the cost of 4 lunches on campus. Reason number 1 not to purchase your books on campus.

Schneier (wisely I would say) offers links to his books on Amazon through the Amazon referral program. Except that the hardcover edition link is currently jumping to the paperback edition and is listing at full price ($60.00) while the paperback link is listing for $31.80.

Apparently Amazon doesn’t have hardcover editions available and is instead offering the paperback edition at full price, hoping that you won’t notice since you might be willing to pay more. If I’m going to pay more for a book I want something in return, such as a hardcover. I would rather have the hardcover version of good books like Applied Cryptography as hardcovers tend to last longer around me than paperback covers do.

I’m trying to find an electronic copy of Cook and LeBlanc’s 1983 paper “A Symbol Table Abstraction to Implement Languages with Explicit Scope Control”, originally published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Guess what: 1983 isn’t on the Internet! The IEEE online archives only go back to 1988 right now. Google sure as hell can’t find the paper either, as it hasn’t been posted in electronic form by the authors. So all I can turn up is the citation for the article, and Cook’s homepage.

I’ve gotten so used to having things online that I find it odd when something isn’t available online. One good thing about being associated with RPI is that we have access to both the ACM and IEEE online archives through the library’s research subscriptions. ACM is really quite good; just about everything has been digitized and made available online with full text search. IEEE seems to have made a cutoff at 1988 leaving some important work in computer science (and I’m sure electrical engineering) unavailable.

When its 3 degrees F outside and the library is closed I sure as heck don’t want to drive over to campus to lookup the dead tree version of something! IEEE – please finish your online archives!

I took RPI’s “Programming Languages” course in the spring of 1999. It was the end of my second year at RPI. The course was supposed to teach us about important concepts in programming languages as well as introduce us to different genres of programming, such as OOP, generic, functional, logic, etc.
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What is the practical importance of The Pict Programming Language? Because I have an exam next week which might be asking me exactly that.
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