Define a simple structure for each question that you put in there. You should have such a block for each question.

% ————————————————————————–
\section*{Question 1 (5 points) }
Here you can ask the weird question …
%Time: \textit{5 minutes}
\newline \textcolor{blue}{Answer:
This is the right answer to the weird question!}
\vspace{40mm}

Use latex counters (really cool!) to generate the question number. This way you are sure to have all the questions numbered correctly even if you move them around or add/remove some.

% ————————————————————————–
% Set-up question number auto-generation.
% Just use \arabic{question} to insert the question number (auto-incremented value) and use \stepcounter{question} to go to next value.
% Each time a question is commented out, the questions will be re-numbered correctly.
\newcounter{question}
\setcounter{question}{0}

% ————————————————————————–
% The above question block becomes:
% ————————————————————————–
\stepcounter{question}
\section*{Question \arabic{question} (5 points) }
Here you can ask the weird question …
%Time: \textit{5 minutes}
\newline \textcolor{blue}{Answer:
This is the right answer to the weird question!}
\vspace{40mm}

Use conditionals (if-then-else) to easily toggle on and off the generation of the answers in the final .pdf. When working on the exam questions it’s good to have the answers there so that you can calibrate the time required for each question, but you don’t want the answers there for the final print-outs! Also, having the answers in there can be quite helpful during grading.

\usepackage{ifthen}

%————————————————————————–
% We can use the \answers command defined below to control if the answers to the questions are generated or not in the PDF
% Should we include the answers in the PDF or not?
% Setting the value to _false _ will not generate answers while setting it to _true_ will generate the answers
\newcommand{\answers}[0]{false}

% ————————————————————————–
% The above question block becomes:
% ————————————————————————–
\stepcounter{question}
\section*{Question \arabic{question} (5 points) }
Here you can ask the weird question …
%Time: \textit{5 minutes}
\ifthenelse{\equal{\answers}{true}}{\newline \textcolor{blue}{Answer:
This is the right answer to the weird question!}}{}
\vspace{40mm}

Comment out questions that you don’t need rather then deleting them – who knows when you might need them! Also for commenting out questions use LaTeX block commenting rather than per-line comments!

\usepackage{verbatim}

% ————————————————————————–
% The above question block becomes:
% ————————————————————————–
\begin{comment}
\stepcounter{question}
\section*{Question \arabic{question} (5 points) }
Here you can ask the weird question …
%Time: \textit{5 minutes}
\ifthenelse{\equal{\answers}{true}}{\newline \textcolor{blue}{Answer:
This is the right answer to the weird question!}}{}
\vspace{40mm}
\end{comment}

Doing the total points from all the active question is also simple. We define two counters – one for the total points and one for the total number of questions, as well as the command “points” that sums up things in the two new counters.

\newcounter{totalpoints}
\setcounter{totalpoints}{0}
\newcounter{totalquestions}
\setcounter{totalquestions}{0}
\newcommand{\points}[1]{#1\addtocounter{totalpoints}{#1}\addtocounter{totalquestions}{1}}

% ————————————————————————–
% The above question block becomes:
% ————————————————————————–
\stepcounter{question}
\section*{Question \arabic{question} (\points{5} points) }
Here you can ask the weird question …
%Time: \textit{5 minutes}
\ifthenelse{\equal{\answers}{true}}{\newline \textcolor{blue}{Answer:
This is the right answer to the weird question!}}{}
\vspace{40mm}

% ————————————————————————–
% after all the other questions
% ————————————————————————–

The exam has a total of \value{totalquestions} questions that are worth \value{totalpoints} points.

[Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/osucommons/3946087716/, under no known copyright restrictions]

So before going into the actual project, I took up some tasks:

• Get some reading done on C++ to brush up things
• Get the dev environment working

The two books that I started to read are both by Scott Meyers “Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs” and “More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs“. Also I took a C++ Primer on the desk “just in case”. Both of them are great lecture and go straight to the sweet-spot – no beating around the bush.

Next, I came the dev environment set-up, where I took the following decisions:

• Use Eclipse CDT
• Use Boost (v 1.40) libraries for extra stuff
• Constantly build both x86 and x86_64 branches
  • Have cross compile on Ubuntu
  • Use gcc -m32 or respectively -m64 to compile
  • Get the Boost libraries (both shared objects .so and statically linkable ones .a) for both 32 and 64 bit set-up in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64
• Go with statically linked libraries as much as possible (as it keeps the library mess at a lower overhead in a cluster set-up)

Among the speakers: Bogdan Naumovici, Dumitru Popescu and Mircea Toma.

Enjoy TEDx and TED!

• Talk only of GTalk – this way I was able to get all my conversations into the gmail inbox. Well, this normally does not work out due to human inertia. Of the people I frequently talk to too few actually use GTalk…
• Use multiple transports (jabber feature). Well theory is nice, but practice proves to be different. All the tutorials and free servers out there that you can register with in order to get yahoo or msn transports in GTalk – well they work for one week (all of them) “its by design” i guess
• Use Pidgin all over the place – office desktop, home laptop, home desktop any other mobile gadget I have around. Uhmmm – it works, it logs everything in plain text, but then how do I synch this different places? Well, I use Dropbox. This works nice, it’s ok – I can even access them online, but they are not in the same place with the emails, and i can not search them online (locally grep does wonders).
• Skype? well just forget getting the logs out of Skype in a human readable form and sync-ing these over multiple machines – I gave it up.
• SMS – that’s too out there. Can’t even envision doing that today.

Now I’m at a loss – I’ll stop IM-ing and just tell people to mail me. Or I can spend endless hours coding up my own hammer that will knock out every nail, or I can wait for Google Wave maybe? Looks like it’s the hammer I could use for all these nails!

or:

E o insula micuta pe coasta Bulgariei in Marea Neagra (a mi se ierta reclama facuta turismului Bulgar, dar calitatea serviciilor e peste ce avem noi) – total atipica pentru coasta Bulgara. Nu e stil Mamaia – e vechi, cu bun gust, putin refurbrished dar in rest lasat in timpul lui! Mancare undeva intre bucataria bulgara si cea mediteraneana, oameni primitori – ce mai!, un mic paradis!

Bun, dupa ceva delectare in soare si mare si mancare, back to #zh, inceput de semestru, un curs nou – Advanced Systems Lab – System Performance Evaluation – e foarte misto, si imi place la nebunie sa ma implic!

Apoi mi-am reluat lumea in cap si m-am apucat sa scriu un paper despre baze de date, sisteme multicore, scalbilitate, replicare, distributie – the normal buzzwords care dau bine intr-un paper :) Sa vedem ce iese … fingers crossed.

[Image is taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmaritimemuseum/2843691060/]

Pentru cei nerabdatori, ascultati aici – gratie Trilulilu.

More on this can be found here:

[Cotidianul] Doi studenti clujeni campioni mondiali la dezbateri

The contest is open to all university students and features in its 5th edition two tracks: the hardware design contest and the software design contest.

Digilent Hardware

• VHDL digital design based on Digilent FPGA boards
• Microcontroller projects that demonstrate Digilent’s embedded control boards

A little more unclear in specifications, but allowing more creativity, the software track requests the use of free or university (Technical University of Cluj-Napoca) supported development tools and frameworks.

Imprezzio Software

• Software applications (I think this means desktop applications?)
• Web applications

If you are interested, keep in mind the following key dates:

• Contest start date: December 11th 2008, @16:00, on Baritiu 26, Cluj-Napoca
• For the undecided, the last minute registration can be done on January 9th 2009
• An the for those who started a project, don’t forget that the final presentations are on May 9th 2009

In order to register (either as an individual or as a team of up to 2 members), use the following email addresses, for each of the two tracks: hardwarecontest [at] digilent [dot] ro and softwarecontest [at] imprezzio [dot] ro.

More on the event on the news page at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.

UPDATE: The contest poster:

Installing JVM and Ruby on a linux machine on which you only have rights in your home folder may be tricky.

Below I post a few hints on how I managed to have Sun’s JRE and Ruby running.

Sun’s JRE

First I installed the JVM from Sun onto a machine on which I have root privileges (running Ubuntu). At this point, you should get a folder like /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/ on your local machine which contains Sun’s latest JRE.

For deploying the JVM onto a cluster machine all you need to do is create a folder on the cluster machine in your home directory like ~/tools/java/ and copy the content of the local JRE installation (/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/) there.

Also, you need to create a folder like ~/tools/java-conf/ and copy there all the content of the /etc/java-6-sun/ directory. This contains the JVM configuration, properties, management and security related settings.

Once this is done, you need to go through the copied JRE files and change the link files in order to point in the right direction – meaning to the configuration, properties, management and security files in ~/tools/java-conf/ on the cluster machine.

Almost done, all you need to do now is create a symlink (ln -s) to ~/tools/java/bin/java in the ~/bin/ directory. Most probably this is in the PATH already.

Now you should be able to run $java MyClass on the cluster machine.

Ruby

As far as I have seen with Ruby, installing it is not as easy as with JRE. In my case I had to compile Ruby on the cluster machine and also change the location of the libraries so that they get placed in the user’s home folder.

I have followed the following steps in order to get a successful Ruby installation:

1. Create the ~/tools/ruby/ and ~/tools/ruby-code/ folders on the cluster machine. ~/tools/ruby/ will contain the Ruby installation while ~/tools/ruby-code/ will contain the code from which we will build Ruby. Once you complete the following steps, the code folder ~/tools/ruby-code/ can be deleted.
2. Download the latest Ruby code from here. When I did this, the latest recommended Ruby version was 1.8.7-p72. After you downloaded it, extract the content of the .tar.gz into the ~/tools/ruby-code/ directory
3. While logged into the cluster machine, cd to ~/tools/ruby-code/ruby-1.8.7-p72/ (the last folder in the path might look different if you are setting up a newer/older version of Ruby) and run the ./configure binary. This should generate the config.h and Makefile files.
4. Edit config.h and look for the following 8 #define statement (they should be the last entries in the config.h file): RUBY_LIB, RUBY_SITE_LIB, RUBY_SITE_LIB2, RUBY_VENDOR_LIB, RUBY_VENDOR_LIB2, RUBY_ARCHLIB, RUBY_SITE_ARCHLIB, RUBY_VENDOR_ARCHLIB. The values you place in here should be absolute paths pointing towards sub-directories of the ~/tools/ruby/ directory on the cluster machine. As an example I have values something like:
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/site_ruby/1.8
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/vendor_ruby/1.8
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux
5. Run make in ~/tools/ruby-code/ruby-1.8.7-p72/
6. Run make test to verify
7. Edit the rbconfig.rb file, such that TOPDIR = ‘/home/tsalomie/tools/ruby’ and DESTDIR = ‘/home/tsalomie/tools/ruby’ unless defined? DESTDIR
8. Run make install
9. Create symlinks to ~/tools/ruby/bin/ruby and to ~/tools/ruby/bin/irb in your ~/bin directory
10. Enjoy Ruby!

In order to get it running, I had to go through a “couple” of steps:

• Remove the previous installation of OOo:

  > sudo apt-get remove open-office.org-core

• Download OOo 3.0 from here and choose the Linux DEB version
• Open a terminal and cd to the folder where you saved the downloaded .tar.gz file: OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz
• Extract the contents of the .tar.gz via:

  > tar xvzf OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz

• Go to the DEBS foloder

  > cd OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358/DEBS/

•  In order to install i386 on AMD6:

  > sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture *.deb

• Navigate to the desktop integration folder:

  > cd ./desktop-integration/

• Install desktop integration (ie. menu support)

  > sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture *.deb

• Done!

Happy running OOo 3.0! (and you can kind of open Office 2007 file formats too – I haven’t seen yet a good pptx in OOo 3.0 – but who knows – maybe one day!)

What I don’t get is: Windows Vista supports unicode for folder names, and so does the underlying API for accessing the file system. Then why does Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 go around the API? This is the only explanation I can find for this missbehavior – it makes me feel like in the days when everyone avoided the whitespaces in the path …

• Milano – 1 day, just visiting the city between two flights
• Porto – 2 days, top notch city, good Porto wine, nice people
• Lisbon – 3 days, could have been better – nothing to comment (except for poor public transportation) but I expected more je ne sais pas quoi
• Algarve region/Lagos – 6 days, just r’n'r sun, hot, small golf-like beaches
• Sevilla – 2 days, impresive
• Sziget Festival – 6 days, no comment

When the GMail era started, I stopped using Yahoo Mail for good and switched to my Google account only. Today, a little bit late for my taste, I came across the free Zimbra Desktop by Yahoo!. It is an email client for Yahoo mail accounts, GMail account as well as any other POP3/IMAP mail servers. Part of the larger Yahoo! Zimbra Collaboration Suite (a Exchange/Outlook wannabe).

I have tried it out – but it seems a little bit sluggish, although it also incorporates Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, etc. besides Mail. Tried it out of curiosity, but I think I’ll still stick to Outlook and GMail via the Web Interface (lately storage in the cloud with high availability is no longer an issue … so I don’t feel the need to have local copies of my email anymore).

Anyway – congrats Yahoo! for reopening (up to a point) your email for free.

Having finished all my work load I started touring off the country on the soon to become traditional summer starting route: Sulina in the Danube Delta, Vama Veche as the last “sanctuary” on the Romanian Black See shore and the Fagaras Mountains as the highest spot in the country. All in all I spent around 2 weeks around the country, without any worries, under the perfect July weather. I collected some of the photos I took and placed them online:

• Sulina and the Danube Delta
• Vama Veche
• The Fagaras Mountains

Unfortunately my holiday came to a rather short stop after 2 weeks as I had to return to Cluj for a couple of days in order to sort out some administrative problems regarding my future (more about that to come) and to download the photos I took so far :)
After some days spent in my dear home town, we went to the Garana International Jazz Festival. I had heard about this festival before, but it had never actually caught my attention as much before. This year, as a spur of the moment we just jumped into a red car and drove all the way to Garana (close to Resita in the Semenic Mountains) to enjoy one evening of incredible jazz music and atmosphere out of the three nights of the festival. Camping by a small river close the Trei-Ape, the whole experience was incredible! Starting with this year Garana is on my to-do list each year!

For the time, I am still in Cluj until next week when I will start a short journey around Portugal and Spain. If you’re around Porto, Lisbon, Algarve, Cadiz or Sevilla in the next weeks, drop a line!

Note:
1. On the technical side of this blog entry I have ended up using w.bloggar as the favorite tool of trade. I set it up on my USB key (it’s portable, and fully feature packed) and managed to write the entire post before Windows Live Writer installed on my machine (my ex-favorite tool of trade). It was incredibly slow for no apparent reason.

2. Still on the technical side, I received a Beta invite from DropBox - a new online storage and sync service. For the time they offer 2GB free space during beta, sync-ing between any number of PCs computers (as Mac is also supported), automatic upload and sync between online computers, shareable documents, automatic photo gallery generation for photos, undo-deletes, file version history and a small nifty and smart client application. The only con I found so for is that the location of the root of the synced hierarchy can not (easily) be moved out of the My Documents. If you want to try DropBox I still have around 10 invites so just drop a line and I would be glad to send them out.

3. I’ve been tagged by .marius in the “Winamp leapsa” … I will take up the challenge but after I clean up my playlist :)

Update: I have uploaded some poor quality photos from Garana here – still better than nothing!

Playing with it is as simple as it gets – and it migh even reduce the complexity of the original Google home page! (at least for those that are more into keyboards that mice …)

Hope you’ll enjoy it and it will become your new browser home page – as it sure has for me!

Later Edit [5 minutes later TBH]: I would really like to get a grip of what the following command does:

… and maybe even how to write those extensions :)

I will be staying in Zürich up to the middle of June, working on my Bachelor’s Diploma at ETHZ, within the Globis Group (Global Information System Group) lead by Prof. Moira Norrie, and under the supervision of Michael Grossniklaus and Andrei Vancea. My work will revolve around the Avon project. I will return with more details as I will get a better grasp of them too :)

Let’s take a short look at the following code:

private String sqlConnectionString;
private SqlConnection sqlConnection;
private SqlDataAdapter sqlDataAdapter;
private String sqlSelectCommandString;
private SqlCommand sqlSelectCommand;
private SqlCommandBuilder sqlCommandBuilder;

Here we have setup the variables that we shall use: we see the SqlConnection, SqlDataAdapter, SqlCommand and SqlCommandBuilder objects. Further on, we use these as follows:

sqlConnection = new SqlConnection(sqlConnectionString);
sqlSelectCommand = new SqlCommand(sqlSelectCommandString, sqlConnection);
sqlDataAdapter = new SqlDataAdapter(sqlSelectCommand);
sqlDataAdapter.MissingSchemaAction = MissingSchemaAction.AddWithKey;
sqlCommandBuilder = new SqlCommandBuilder(sqlDataAdapter);

The big anti-pattern that I am talking about is the last line of code, on which we create the SqlCommandBuilder object. The constructor of the SqlCommandBuilder object takes an SqlDataAdapter object as parameter and modifies it (creates the appropriate CRUD logic)!

I do not think that it is correct to pass in a parameter to the constructor of an object and expect to get it modified! It is not explicit, and it has no explanation to what happens! Constructors should never modify the parameters they receive. They should only set up their "this" based on the parameters.

The SqlCommandBuilder object that we created is never used from that point onward in our code! We created an object only to inject functionality into the SqlDataAdapter!

I consider that the elegant solution would be to have a static method in the SqlCommandBuilder class that operates on the parameter SqlDataAdapter.

I still can not understand the reason or the justification for this constructor in the SqlCommandBuilder class. If any of you can give me a good reason for this, I would very much appreciate it.

Just check out this way of work!

Well?

I won’t go into depth, but the latest and coolest two things that I found are:

1. Hold down SHIFT and then right click on a file in Windows Explorer – then you’ll see a new item on the contextual menu called: “Copy as Path” – yeah finally this is supported natively by the OS :D The print screens below show the contextual menu without/with holding down shift:Without shift held down:

   

   With shift held down:

   

   You might also notice new items in the contextual menu such as “Pin to Start Menu” and “Add to Quick Launch” – which are also pretty cool, but I don’t tend to use them as often as the “Copy as Path” one :)

2. The second nice thing I found [and which tends to make the "My Favorites" keys on my MM-Keyboard obsolete] is the shortcut combination for the links in the Quick Launch Toolbar.For example if my Quick Launch Toolbar looks like this:

   I can start the Microsoft Internet Explorer by just pressing the Windows Key + 3.

   Generalizing an application from the Quick Launch Toolbar can be started by Windows Key + #, where # is its position number in the Quick Launch Toolbar.

Although simple tricks, these tend to be a couple of the most useful ones I’ve stumbled upon while using Windows Vista.
Hope they’ll help you as much as they are helping me now!