Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

ACO, a multidisciplinary PhD Program in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization at the Georgia Institute of Technology, will be streaming live lectures by four prominent computer scientists. Live web streaming available at no charge.

Theory Day Celebrating 50th Anniversary of Foundations of Computer Science and 20th Anniversary of the ACO Program at Georgia Tech Held in conjunction with FOCS 2009 on Saturday, October 24, 2009 in the LeCraw Auditorium on the Georgia Tech campus. The event will be webcast live from the link below and will consist of one hour lectures by

12:30-1:30 Richard Karp, University of California, Berkeley         What Makes an Algorithm Great?

 1:50-2:50 Mihalis Yannakakis, Columbia University          Computational Aspects of Equilibria

 3:10-4:10 Noga Alon, Tel Aviv University           Disjoint paths, isoperimetric problems, and graph eigenvalues

 5:00-6:00 Manuel Blum, Carnegie Mellon University          Can (Theoretical Computer) Science come to grips with Consciousness?

The times listed are EDT, same time zone as New York.

To register, for more information and to watch the lectures live please visit

    http://www.aco.gatech.edu/conference/focs-aco/

Videos of the lectures will be archived at the same location.

ACO is a multidisciplinary PhD Program in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization at the Georgia Institute of Technology.


via Jeff Bergman

Paul Sheriff will be speaking to our user group Wednesday night on Debugging tips and tricks. With his interactive and easy to understand presentation style, his sessions are highly recommended. Details below.


Abstract: If you have not really dug into the VS.NET debugger, then this seminar is for you. You will explore all the various breakpoint, tracepoint, data tips, and the myriad features that this powerful debugger let’s you use. You will see how to set conditional breakpoints, learn to filter threads based on their thread id, and learn the difference between the Watch window, locals and immediate window.

You Will Learn:

   1. Set breakpoints with hit counts, filters, conditions.
   2. See how to use data tips, visualizers, and make object ids
   3. See when objects are about to be garbage collected
   4. Learn how exception handling can be used as a debugging aid

About the Presenter: Paul D. Sheriff is the President of PDSA, Inc. (www.pdsa.com), a Microsoft Partner in Southern California. Paul acts as the Microsoft Regional Director for Southern California assisting the local Microsoft offices with several of their events each year and being an evangelist for them. Paul has authored several books, webcasts, videos and articles on .NET, SQL Server and SharePoint. Paul can be reached via email at PSheriff@pdsa.com or at Paul Sheriff's Inner Circle (www.PaulSheriffInnerCircle.com).

Meeting Agenda:

    * 6:00p Mixer/Networking/Pizza
    * 6:30p Presentation Starts
    * 7:30p Break
    * 7:45p Presentation Resumes
    * 8:45p Raffle

Directions: Park in parking structure at 570 E Huntington Dr, Monrovia, CA 91016 . Meeting is across the street in  605 E Huntington Dr. Once parked, use the overhead walk way to get to the building.  The meeting will be right inside the door after the walk way.

This is a Green Dot Corporation sponsored event. There is no entry fee and the event is free for attendees.

Tomorrow I will be speaking to the Southbay.NET users group in Torrance. Following is the abstract of my talk. For details and directions, please see the link below.

Web Application Testing using WATIN
Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 6:30 PM

Web application testing is a tough task especially in the ASP.NET web forms environment where model‐view‐controller boundaries intermingle. To solve this presentation is a premier to WatiN (inspired from WatiR, its Ruby counterpart), a feature rich and stable framework. WatiN is developed in C# and aims to bring you an easy way to automate your tests with Internet Explorer and FireFox using .Net. Watin is open‐source functional testing tool for web‐applications which simulate the user actions (filling/submitting form), drives the browser and allows you to do your web application testing in a convenient and developer friendly way. This talk focuses on how you can use WatiN to do web application testing and integrate it with your acceptance testing framework. The presenter provides a step by step guide to build test frameworks for your website using WatiN. This is a code intensive talk so those allergic to slides are encouraged to come.

For details and directions.