Hofstra's Distance Learning Master's Program in Computer Science

We're proud of our distance learning program for the Master's degree in Computer Science. Keerat Sharma, a recent graduate of the program, explains on his blog why he got into our program, and what he got out of it.

http://recursor.blogspot.com/2011/04/masters-in-cs-worth-it-after.html

NOTE: His blog post was not solicited by the department.

A good technical blog

Are you interested at all in The Next Big Thing (TM) A.K.A. cloud computing, especially from the point of view of a consumer of cloud computing services? Then you should read Netflix's Tech Blog. They present a lot of the challenges they face and the solutions they've come up with as customers of Amazon EC2.

And now for something completely different

Did you know that the highest rated cable television program, not including sports shows, is ...

Spongebob Squarepants?

Should I be depressed? Oh, barnacles!

A very confusing face.

I was looking for some sample images to process for a program that I wrote when I came across this really confusing image:



Click on the image and you'll see an explanation of why your brain's "autofocus mechanism" fails.

Update 5/7/2011: Sorry, but it appears that the blog I had linked to is now dead. Too bad.

RSA Encryption cracked (?)

RSA is the best-known most widely-used encryption scheme. Anytime you go to a secure website, you're using the RSA public-key cryptosystem. So, it's a bit scary when you see a report about something so widely used as having been cracked. Well, under careful, laboratory-controlled conditions, you can apparently crack RSA, even with very long encryption keys. But I don't think I'm going to stop shopping at NewEgg.com anytime soon.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/09/1024-bit-rsa-encryption-cracked-by-carefully-starving-cpu-of-ele/

Thanks to alumnus Elliot Kaye for this tip.

Honor Society Upsilon Pi Epsilon

For the academic year 2009-2010 the department will induct 9 undergraduate students and 2 graduate students into the Honor Society for Computer Science Upsilon Pi Epsilon (ΥΠΕ). I will let Prof. Ammari do the honors of announcing the official list. I offer my congratulations to the (now) anonymous 11.

More "fun" with 64-bit Windows 7

I am not sure the Universe is ready for 64-bit Windows 7, yet. I need to use Python in one of my classes along with PIL (Python Imaging Library). There is a 64-bit version of Python which installs without a problem. The PIL binary for Windows is 32-bit. Try to install it and you get:


Looks like 32-bit PIL "does not love" 64-bit Python. Not very surprising, I guess, still a little bit disappointing.

Ok, let's install the 32-bit version of Python followed by the 32-bit PIL. This is what I get:



Hmm, looks a little familiar. So, 32-bit PIL "doesn't love" 32-bit Python either, under 64-bit Windows 7.

This is getting ugly.

Also, it looks like Firefox is a 32-bit program. So, that's a little bit of a bummer, although it runs well on the system.

On the plus side, it took me like 3 clicks to get connected to the network printer in the department. I'm holding my judgment on Win 7 64-bit at this point.