We found out recently that my son has a major speech disability and is in all probability suffering from a pervasive developmental disorder, though the final word on that is not going to be in for another few months. The most famous of these is autism. I've moved to Kingston, Ontario, to take computer science at Queen's University. The fam is still in Laval, so I'm going back and forth quite a bit... will be heading up there tomorrow as reading week is about to get into gear (err... "reading week" is what we call "spring break" up here).

It's heartbreaking in certain ways... his little sister is talking more than he is (he's three, she just turned two) and is well on her way to being in real underwear.

As for the school bit... they're starting me at the super basic ("A method is a way of doing something to or getting information from an object. You can pass arguments to a method. In java, you do this by...") level but that's cool... as a self-taught guy, I had some knowledge holes that I'm getting to fill in. So far, I've received a total of three assignments and a midterm's worth of marks and have not gotten under 90%, and the assignment that had bonus marks netted me a 22/20:). One course is a lot more interesting than the other one... the basic course doesn't let us do any design at all, but the other one does. The current assignment is a library administration system (albeit greatly simplified).

I just handed one in... there's a veiled reference to looking up sorting routines "as long as they're properly credited" in the assignment spec so I grabbed and modified Gosling's version of quicksort on the Sun website. For the program, it's complete overkill, but it was fun working it through. That is certainly one powerful little algorithm.

Still gainfully unemployed. Been looking, but the local job market is blowing major chunks these days.

The school thing is in large part being motivated by my son. It's entirely possible that he's going to need care for his entire life... so ensuring the resources that he needs will be there is going to require a job that pays extremely well... though I fervently hope that will not be the case. Also, I'm expecting that we'll find that services for him will be more available here than in Quebec... as we're Anglo, needless to say it's a lot harder to find speech therapists in English in Quebec than it is in Ontario.

The SO and I have gone a long way to patching things up, so that's good news... at the very least, we are quite able to maintain civility between us, which was a lot harder to do before.

All in all, schools going very well, and I miss my family, and I gotta get work soon as I'm going to need cash to get up there and see them.

Hey:)

If they change their minds, let me know and I'll be all over it. You won't need to ask twice.

As for what happened to my domain... I moved and the ISP blew the move completely. Actually, as it turns out... the way the DSL industry is structured in Canada is kind of arcane. My ISP is in competition with an ISP called Sympatico, which is owned by Bell Canada Enterprises. Bell Canada Enterprises also owns a company called BellNexxia, which has the monopoly on DSL wire provision... that is, they provide the connection from this house to my ISP. Their monopoly is in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. They were playing games... 40 days worth of games. I finally got hooked up about a week ago.

I ended up talking to some people about it up here, including a politically active lawyer friend of mine. He's already kicked it upstairs... I was talking to him earlier today and he told me it got really clear really fast to the regulatory bodies that BellNexxia had been screwing around with some companies and making nice to others... to which there is a parent company fiduciary relationship if you know what I mean.

While I was probably the largest pain in the ass to all the parties concerned while this was going on (I was on the phone every day about it) I wasn't the only person who was having problems... found some guys in Quebec who were in a similar boat. Nothing quite like a clear demonstrable pattern of behaviour on the part of a monopoly damaging real consumers to make the politicians take notice... action makes them look good at pretty much zero risk. My problems fixed now, fortunately, but if it also means that other people don't get bent over than that'll make it even better.

Must be a commonwealth thing or something. BCE owns all the copper, and charges BellNexxia, who in turn charges Sympatico (who are not bad from a strictly massmarket consumer perspective but suck if you are at all clewfull and want to do something other than surf and email) and the outfit I use. However, the regulatory agence (CRTC) know that riding herd on these guys (and the other regional monopolies) is very important, and seem to take their job pretty seriously. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the reason that bellnexxia and sympatico are different companies with an "arms length" relationship is because the law here requires BCE (and telus and etc) have to pass all structural changes past them first, and also all new tech that might have an impact on other more open aspects of telecom (like ISPs). I think the CRTC feels that the initial years of the Internet were resisted by companies like BCE (who saw the its potential to kill their long distance profits) and it was the other outfits that actually opened up that market... and that having the 600 pound gorilla come in after the fact was something that doesn't wash well with the man on the street up here.

I guess you could say that the usual street level POV on Ma Bell and the banks is that we've decided not to lynch them... yet. Even better, the lawmakers know this too. Now if only the VPs at these companies could figure out the "yet" part of that statement and its implications for their long term personal survival if they get too greedy...

Though I read one article that looked intriguing... gosling finds the pivot point with (lo0 + hi0) / 2... this one guy I read on the net seemed to think that using rand might provide overall better results over the long haul. It might be fun to come up with some test cases and see what happens... but in the context of my assignment, I kept it bog standard.

I ran some tests online and the quicksort pretty much blows the rest of the sort algorithms I've seen completely out of the water. Very nice. I've got plans for that one already:)

Hehehe

In all seriousness, I've no doubt that there's more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. Actually, in this particular case, I suspect that the quicksort was the best option from a generalised performance pov (lists of names), but we haven't talked about sorting too much in class yet; just a selection sort, very simple, very slow. The flip side of that lecture was binary searching... which is the next area I'm going to apply myself to. Well, after I check out the Radix sort you mention. I'd already heard about heap sort, but I gotta learn some more about it... and this is the first I've heard about radix.

Which is cool... something to keep my brain occupied this evening.:)

...though right now is not really the time for me to get it... going to go up to see my family in a day or two.

Hm. I'm searching around for what kind of resources are available on the net. There's a ton of them, but digging them out is difficult. It's easy to find an algorithm once you know its name, but just finding algorithms is not so easy...

I think the Internet could use a repository of (non-patented open) algorithms, organised by type.