| < August 2006 | Matthew Loar > Blog | November 2006 > |
This week is going to seriously suck. Not only do I have the usual two assignments due Wednesday morning, but I also have a midterm for CS 498sh on Wednesday morning. I haven't been to that class since the first day, though I was watching the lecture videos last night, and I was very glad that I had not gone to class since the first day, since the lectures were tedious and useless.
I can't wait to get out of here. Every day it becomes more painfully apparent that this supposedly top-tier engineering school is a bastion of incompetence and financial mismanagement. From professors who don't know anything about the subject matter to IT officials clueless about basic security concepts to an 80 -million-dollar building where the thermostats don't work, I wonder every day how it is U of I manages to stay at the top of the charts. My guess is it's self-fulfilling. The high ranking attracts the brightest students, the brightest students succeed despite the poor quality of instruction, and get the best positions in research and industry, perpetuating the myth that this school is a nexus of exceptional teaching.
Anyway, I just got an email from Microsoft saying that they have processed my
reimbursement and I should receive it soon. Yay!
Yesterday was a horribly busy day. I won't bore you with all of the details, but at one point, I was taking resumes for Microsoft. Yeah.
Today won't be much better. Besides two classes, a work meeting, homework due at midnight and homework due before the professor's administrative assistant arrives tomorrow morning, I am currently waiting for the UPS man at my apartment. Hopefully he'll get here before I have to leave.
Anyway, I was looking on the newsgroup for help with one of the problems, and
I found this link. That's what I feel like doing right now, to be honest.
From Computer Security by Matt Bishop, the text for CS 498sh:
"Theorem 3-4. [450] For protection systems without the create primitives, the question of safety is complete in P-SPACE."
That's a good example of what the book contains. I will grant that protection
models are a worthy topic in a computer security class, but the sort of
pedantic mathematical definitions of "safety" and "security" that they have in
this book I find pointless. This is just the kind of thing that ivory-tower
academics discuss while the department they work for leaks students' social
security numbers.
| < August 2006 | Matthew Loar > Blog | November 2006 > |