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Professor Emeritus of Computing Science
jhoover@ualberta.ca http://www.ualberta.ca/~jhoover  |
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| Hair today (1990) | ... gone tomorrow (2011). |
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H. James Hoover Professor Emeritus of Computing Science jhoover@ualberta.ca http://www.ualberta.ca/~jhoover |
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My job is still to keep the next dark ages at bay as long as possible.Life is too short to waste on fancy web pages. My previous pages were a mess, and many of the links were broken as a result of a file system reorganization, so it made sense to retire them.
I just have a smaller number of more satisfied customers.
The quiet joy and reverent gratitude that arises when a tool, long familiar and perfectly suited to its task, disappears into use—only to reveal its excellence in moments of graceful, seamless function.It is the feeling of being at home in the world through things—not because we attend to them, but because they let us act without resistance. A word for when the ordinary becomes luminous through doing.
The quiet frustration or dismay that arises when a tool refuses to disappear into use—drawing attention to itself through poor design, awkward fit, or constant failure to serve its intended function.It is the sense of alienation from the world of things, when what should be seamless instead becomes obtrusive—a door handle that sticks, a pen that skips, a login screen that forgets you. A word for when the ordinary becomes clunky, obstinate, or unkind through doing.
The sudden rupture in the flow of practical activity when a once-transparent tool or object fails, disappears, or misbehaves—revealing itself no longer as an extension of the body, but as a separate, obtrusive thing.It marks the transition from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand—a moment when the world stutters, and the smooth hum of being-in-the-world is replaced by awareness, problem, or repair.
SyllabusConcrete or Tangible Computing is a work in progress that uses the Arduno platform to present a unified core introduction to Computing Science. Here are my working notes, no warranty expressed or implied.
Course Schedule (Work in Progress)
Functional Programming Notes
Arduino Intro ExercisesThese are based on the original notes that Mike Bowling and I developed in 2011 for CMPUT 274/275, an intro course for Honors Computing Science students. The material remains relevant.
Tangible Computing Course Notes
The online logic part of the course
.zip of online logic part of the course
The full course notes from 2002 (pdf).
Example 1 of Proof By Induction for Math Students
The C source code for Mizar MSE 2000. No warranty, but it did compile and run for me in 2015.
| We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. |
| Carl Sagan |
| Technology, like music, is enriched by variety. |
| Henry Petroski in Small Things Considered: Why there is no perfect design, p 192. |
| "So little time, so much to waste..." |