In my college’s department mailing list, there is an interesting discussion about the quality of IT bachelor degree in the workplace. There are some reasons behind that:
- The bachelor graduate worker lacking practical skills. They can not answer a fundamental question that every IT or computer science graduate should know.
- The bachelor graduate worker also lacking soft skills, like how to speak with the higher-ups and communicate with another workers.
As a result, the companies prefer to hire a vocational IT graduate. Why?
- A vocational graduate sometimes have the practical skills that a bachelor graduate didn’t have. Computer science or IT is a wide spread knowledge. It means you didn’t have to go to the college just the learn how to program. It’s all over the clouds. So the learning materials are reachable to everyone.
- Vocational graduates are easier to manage. Some of them have more respect to the higher-ups than the bachelor graduates.
- The standard salary for the vocational graduates is less expensive than the bachelor graduates. Combine this factor with better skills and higher respect means that bachelor graduates’s job are in a grave danger.
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Howdy,
When I was in my college, I tried to implement Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) as a foundation for a distributed Geographical Information Systems (or better known as GIS). My academic advisor at that time told me that this idea is not entirely new, but there are still a lot of people didn’t know about it yet. So with this topic as my thesis, he wished that one day people will know about this technology.
The implementation that I made was quite simple actually. But let me tell you the complete story. At first, I was thinking about develop a geographical operation that can be operated via web service in the clouds. After some weeks of analyzing and gathering informations, I found out that this work could be really hard and time consuming. I didn’t have background in geography–I’m a computer science student–and I didn’t have much time before the next graduation. Finally, I just created a spatial data repository and make it accessible across the network using GeoServer,an Open Source implementation of WMS and WFS. I, then, created a simple web application to pull the spatial data and display it to the browser. I also provided a simple data update feature, utilizing one of the feature of WFS. I used OpenLayers to create the application. It’s really simple actually.
In my graduate study, right now, I want to try something entirely different. I want to explore MapReduce, a programming model for processing a large scale of data in a distributed environment. I heard about this model from some mailing lists and websites, surprised that the paper [pdf], the lecture notes and videos are easy to get. So, for the time being, I decided to do some experiments in order to learn something about it.
It’s still a plan in my head actually. I never talked about it to my thesis advisor (because I have none yet). But I can predict some problems that I will be dealing with if I do this research plan. They are:
- The case. I don’t have any idea about the case that I should solve with this research. My college’s advisor told me about doing something in bioinformatics like genome assembling. I think I will cosider it. But I’m open for an idea.
- The machine and its network. The lab are always busy with the other graduate student. Fortunately, one friend of mine told me that there is another place that I can use in the campus to do experiments. But I should create a permission letter first. Okay, I’ll do it.
In the mean time, I’ll focus myself to learn about MapReduce. Maybe I’ll post something about it in this blog. If you have a suggestion about what should I do with this programming model, let me know. I’d be really glad to hear it.
Credits:
EDSAC pictures, copyrighted Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Howdy,
It has been a long time since my last post in this blog. I just wrote some posts in my old blog when suddenly it’s already 2010. Wow, time really waits for no one. So in this post I wanna sum up what has been happening in the last year. Well, I don’t actually do anything big actually, but I made some progress in live, I guess.
Here I come. I spent my first months in 2009 in my homeland. I was recovering from my illness and successfully gained some weights. I did some theme for this blog, exploring with domain and paid-hosting, maintaining my virtual social live in Facebook and Twitter. Anything that can be done in the house, I’ve done it. Oh yeah, I also created a simple blog aggregator or usually called planet to lists all of my class’s blog posting. Continue reading
There was once a man who went on a journey to correct his regrets. He tried his best to change the past. Unfortunately, the door to miracles never opened for him. He realized at the end of his journey, no matter how hard he tries to change his past, he cannot change himself. That is why he tought, instead of regretting about the past, what’s most important is to change the present for the future.
(taken from one of my favorite movie series)
Howdy..
Okay, I just got this first assignment. Me (and all the other students) must submit a paper about some topics provided by the teacher. Because this is my first time, I just do what I can. I wrote it like I used to write in blog. By the end of the day, I finally finished about seven pages of them. I printed it out, booked it, and submitted it to the academic. Then, I sent the pdf version to the teacher by email.
On the next day, I met my classmate. He asked me about the paper. I told him that I have sent the pdf version of the paper to the teacher email and have submitted the “real” paper at the academic. He told me that he’s using chm format for the paper. Continue reading
