The convocation ceremony itself was long and somewhat dull, but necessary. Thankfully, it wasn’t too hot in Jock Harty Arena, where convocation has been held for quite some time. This year is actually the last year that convocation will be held there, since it’s being torn down this summer to make way for the grand Queen’s Centre. It was also nice to be back in Kingston and to see all my friends again in one place for one last time before undergrad is over.

But for now, it’s back to the real world!

Our fourth-year project team, consisting of myself and two of my buddies (also in Electrical Engineering), worked on the design and production of a scale model autonomous warehouse robot that would be able to store and retrieve packages from a mock warehouse. This consumed many a late night, but it was nonetheless gratifying to see it all work out in the end. I can’t be sure how many hours we put into the project, but it was definitely a lot.

My last exam was actually way back on the 25th of April (one day after my birthday…), but I didn’t move out until the 30th, and then didn’t fly home until the 2nd of May. I’ve spent the last few days just unwinding and getting things in order. Now that I’ve gotten all that stuff done, I’m looking forward to some time off and getting back into some web development, which I took a break from due to school.

In particular, I’m looking to try out several frameworks, such as Cake for PHP and jQuery for JavaScript. These frameworks look like they’ll make the process of web development easier and more logical - especially with regards to JavaScript. Nowadays, I believe a good framework is almost necessary for JavaScript development - while you should still understand the underlying basics, a framework greatly simplifies many tasks.

My schedule is significantly easier than fall. I have “only” four courses (five if my project/design course is included), as compared to six before. I also hope to be a TA this semester again, helping out in a second-year lab course. And, hopefully I’ll have more time to spend with friends as well. But, as mentioned before, I want/need to spend more time deciding my course of action after university is over. Whether that’s applying to jobs or graduate school, it is definitely the most important and urgent thing in my life right now.

The break at home with family was fun and relaxing. I’ll most likely be heading back there for reading week. But, between now and then, there’s a lot of work to be done.

However, is it possible for a CMS to be counter-productive to those who have to use it? By this, I am referring not necessarily to the readers, but to the publishers that depend on it to disseminate their information. For a university, the publishers of content on the site are usually the professors. Short of the main site that acts to attract prospective student and faculty, a university’s website is mainly used by existing students to get access to course material and to communicate with the professors and teaching assistants. The true measure of a CMS should be how easily it allows the main publishers (in this, case the professors), to put their material on the site and make it readily available in a manner they like.

This is no simple problem. Many professors prefer a simple webpage, that’s plain and to the point - this is especially prevelant in technical courses. After all, it’s the content that counts right? If a student can’t find the important information they’re looking for (lecture notes, example problems), it add a slight bit of frustration that simply isn’t needed when taking a heavy course load.

Take my Queen’s University, my school, for example. They’ve recently rolled out the Apache Lenya CMS in a trial run for the ECE Department. From what I’ve been hearing from my professors, they generally do not like the new CMS. This isn’t so much due to how Lenya works, but rather how it’s been implemented. Take a look at a sample course home page. Though the page very much has the consistency of the main site, some professors are finding this limiting or obstructive. For one thing, the main left navigation always is present, and may be distracting to the main content that is displayed to the right. (This may also be due to the fact that the sidebar doesn’t have a different background colour.) Some professors have complained about this, and others have simply moved their course home pages to their own webspace on the Queen’s server, as seen for this course home page. Some simply prefer a more simplified layout devoid of the Queen’s “look & feel”.

So, is there a solution? I was interested to learn what Waterloo has adopted. Instead of a full-blown CMS, they have adopted templates used through the Adobe Contribute system. Additionally, they offered courses to teach users how to properly use the templates. From what I’ve read, they have lots of custom web applications running, and are unlikely to transit to a CMS because of this. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, and in fact, it may be the best for such a large site as a university’s website, which needs to serve many needs.

So, am I doing a complete 180 and advocating the removal of a CMS? No - not exactly. I just think the whole consistent “look & feel” may need to be tuned down. For the course home pages, a stripped-down template containing only the header and footer should be developed and used. This would allow professors to better present their material in the plain and simple format they’re used to, and would give this material front-and-center attention. This would encourage more to use the CMS; after all, if people don’t use it because they don’t like it, then a CMS is no better than a bunch of disorganized web pages.

School starts tomorrow, and my course load for the first semester is quite heavy. I’m signed up for seven courses (which includes a fourth-year project course), and my schedule includes 8:30 AM starts on most days. I also have a conflict between one of my technical course and an elective course that I really want to take - but it’s only for one particular lecture, so I’m hoping I can work through it. We’ll see.

I think I’m getting a bit tired of this school stuff - I can’t wait to be done this year! (Though this may just be a side-effect of starting up a new school year…)

My research area was mainly in Speech Quality Assessment, which deals with the design of an algorithm that can determine how a human would interpret the quality of a speech signal file that has been degraded somehow. Look for an upcoming entry describing this more in detail.

This summer, potentially the last of my university life, has also been fun, and in retrospect I’m happy with how it went, as I was able to do most of what I had planned or wanted to do. This mainly included getting this website online, learning more about web-development and design, and getting outside more for exercise. Of course, the fact that the summer was so enjoyable will only making the looming school year feel that much more tough - because it’s my last year of studies, I have a pretty heavy and serious course load. Hopefully I’ll make it through without losing my mind!

I’m getting ready to fly back home to my parent’s, who’ve just moved out to Edmonton. I’m looking forward to seeing the new house, and it’ll also be my first time flying in a long time. I’ll be spending about two weeks there, until it comes time to go back to Kingston for school - it should be very relaxing spending time with the family.

Firstly, I am an engineering student, so it’s good to see other engineers out there who have seen the same interests as me. Additionally, it’s good to see that a CMS such as Drupal was chosen, as it’s been making headway in other universities as well. I’ve been playing with Drupal on my test box at home for about a month or so, and so far I’m very impressed with the quality of the system and the modules that are used to extend or add functionality. All of the modules are very structured, and adhere to a strict format, making them easy to install and configure. All things considered, it’s a very professional system - proof that open source software can be up to the quality of “professional” solutions.

Though one thing bothers me a bit. The main Queen’s site is apparently being run off of Apache Lenya, as mentioned above, and a pilot program is currently in the works. It’s been slowly introduced, so far, to manage the ECE Department’s site, and this is intended to test the viability of the CMS. If all is good, it’ll eventually be rolled out to a wider audience, as I understand it. However, with smaller sites such as EngSoc using Drupal (and other groups undoubtedly using something different, or no CMS at all), I wonder what will happen when the time comes for everything to be brought under one umbrella.

I generally don’t like being rigid, but for a site-wide website, I believe a single CMS or at least a unified system should be used. Obviously, this doesn’t mean the current actions towards Lenya or Drupal are bad; they’re obviously better than what was previously being used. But, a single CMS makes things easier to manage. I can understand EngSoc being a bit more independent, since it’s not run by the University, but oneness can have its advantages. Personally, I would have been happy to see everything run off Drupal, but I’m sure the web folks at Queen’s had their reasons for selecting Lenya.

Well, whatever happens, I’m using this opportunity to get involved. (finally) I’ve volunteered to help maintain the EngSoc website for next year, my last year of university, so hopefully I’ll be able to learn a thing or two and maybe improve a few things. We’ll see!

QCARD is the Queen’s system for students to view their timetable, select courses, view marks, and generally carry out boring administrative stuff. (As opposed to the boring work that is school.) It’s generally considered by anyone with a brain to be horribly designed, difficult to use, and lacking a modern look. It surely does not inspire confidence in this institution after you have just plopped down quite a bit of cash to attend what some call, “The Harvard of the North”.

Like most other universities’ registration systems, it suffers from huge traffic and slowdowns right when the preregistration period begins. This causes headaches for the many students who must get into certain courses in order to fulfill their degree requirements and graduate; having your future dictated by the limitations of a computer system is about as pleasant as being audited.

In response to this, Queen’s developed a new preregistration system this time, creating the concept of “Time Tickets”. Basically, each student would be assigned a certain time that they could begin added courses, with precedence given to upper years. Thus, students entering fourth year would be given earlier starting times than those entering third, second, or first year. It sounded like a good idea, but as with anything from Queen’s, I reserved judgment until I saw it.

Preregistration rolls around

My time ticket was for June 28th at 3 pm; I signed on near this time and found the system to be free of slow downs. I was able to add all the courses I had planned to add, all without experiencing any of the previously-ubiquitous “THAT COURSE/SECTION IS FULL AND CANNOT BE ADDED” error messages that seem to always slap you back into reality. A few of my courses conflicted, specifically the complementary studies that every engineering student must take, but I think I should be able to work around it. (Complementary studies are “extra” courses that you are required to take, and they are all non-engineering related, which means the courses can’t be focused on math or science.)

So far, my timetable and course load is looking pretty tough, at least for the fall semester. I’m signed up for the following Electrical Engineering courses.

• 421
• 431
• 443
• 461
• 471
• 422
• 436
• 464

The top five are during the fall, and the lower three are for the winter semester. Additionally, I’m also taking MUSC 052, or “Musical Rudiments”, during the fall, and either ECON 112, ” Introductory Macroeconomics” or CLST 201, “Roman History” during the winter semester, as complementary studies. A project/design course, ELEC 490, also runs full year for me.

So, in short, it’s going to be a tough year, and I’m not really looking forward to it. I’d better get as much relaxing in this summer as is possible, seeing as how I won’t have much time for it once the school year starts.

This is why when my university, Queen’s, decided to try out a CMS, it piqued my interest. I read about the progression of this, from the time they had to get input from various sources to when they had to define criteria that a CMS would have to meet in order to be selected. While these are baby steps, in relative terms, it’s a trip to the moon, since what they had before must have been a horrendous mess to keep up to date and to maintain.

There still is a lot of work to be done, however. The vast majority of the pages that form the Queen’s website still lack a common “look & feel”, which I believe is important for an institution. While organizing everything under a common CMS would take much effort because of the training that all staff would require to adjust to such a new system, (not to mention the adjustment the webmasters of each department would need), I think it is a necessary step in the overall evolution and update of the website.

As an example, Queen’s can look at the University of Waterloo’s website, inter-university rivalries notwithstanding. They clearly have a defined look & feel, and have a nice web development blog that seems to be in tune with current web standards, technologies, and practices. (As evidence, look at their standards-based design for their sites.) Most of their departmental and faculty websites also share the same styles, and standards-based designs, at least on their front-pages, as I’m sure there are a few static back-pages that haven’t been integrated into their system.

With more and more universities making the switch to a CMS for easier management, the upcoming changes for Queen’s could not have come at a better time. I only hope that this pilot project does not get stalled or otherwise delayed; ideally, I’d like to see site-wide changes before I graduate next year.

The presentation is available at the following URL: http://unitstep.net/downloads/school/image-qa-presentation/

A zip file of the presentation is also available. Just download, extract it (preserving the directory structure), and open the “index.html” file in your web browser.

The presentation uses the S5 slide show system, a nifty browser-based method designed by Eric Meyer. Controls are similar to a regular slide show program, with the left and right arrow keys moving back and forward. Hitting the ‘t’ key will also convert the slides into a handout-mode, complete with my notes. A full list of controls is available here.