Greenfoot Slides

Several times ago, I've made some introductory slides about programming Java using Greenfoot framework. The links are below. Actually, I've announced it in the Greenfoot mailing list as well.

• Introduction-1
• Introduction-2
• Introduction-3
  

Approximately, at the end of July, I was informed that the book is delivered to the market. Well, it might not cover all aspect of Java programming in Greenfoot, but at least my book is released before the official Greenfoot book by Michael Koelling and Paul Henriksen. But don't worry, the book is for local readers only :-)

Greenfoot

Last year I gave a programming lecture for a special class sent and sponsored by the government (DIKTI). I have no formal CS background, but I do programming a lot for my research. The class participants were mostly new to the programming world. So, I could not start with an applied programming lecture without mentioning some basic programming principles first.

Then, I was looking for an appropriate didactical tool and found BlueJ. It is a nice tool for learning object-oriented programming (OOP) using Java language. The interface is quite simple and rather self-explanatory. BlueJ seems to be designed with a strong didactical background to make the users familiar with OOP. I was using BlueJ for the lecture, even though I used the text from Lewis & Loftus.

Several time later, I realize that Greenfoot which is also developed by the BlueJ personals, is actually more interesting. Greenfoot enhances BlueJ with graphics. In Greenfoot, you can see "the thing" you program and you are dealing with as good as you can see its action. It can be used to develop simple game scenarios. And someday it might become a more sophisticated 2D Java game framework.

Network Recovery and Survivability

I've been requested to fill two or three lecturing sessions in the "MBA Telecommunication" program. The lectures shall cover some or specific issues related to network management. I've been also told that the class audience consists of managers which possess a diverse, mostly non-electrical-engineering background. But they do affiliate with telcos. Now, the question is what topics shall be addressed?

At a glance, I come up with the idea to focus on "Network Recovery & Survivability" (NRS). Why? There are many reasons of course. Nowadays telcos compete each other intensively. In order to survive, they rely heavily on their service offerings. Thus, service reliability becomes a very important aspect in this area of business.

We might still not forget the impact of the Taiwan's earthquake on the telecommunication services in Asia more than one year ago. It is clear that we cannot fight against the nature, we just can try to prevent such natural disasters from happening and to prepare everything necessary if they do happen. As a discipline, NRS gives all considerations to manage and to condition our networking infrastructure in providing high quality telecommunication services.