Mansour Moufid “hacks” Carleton U’s campus card and emails

The latest “student hacker” story hitting the the media (after the MIT/Boston subway case) is a Canadian 2nd year Math major student at the Carleton University, who “hacked” the campus card and student emails. I use “hacked” in quotes as the police news release says that the systems were breached via “Keylogger software and Magnetic stripe card reader”; and even though Mansour Moufid wrote the keylogger himself (as is said in this CBC article) — this is hardly something innovative, or insightful. It was a “hack” in a mass-media sense of the word.

The most important programming language

One of the common questions that comes up among students new to Computer Science and Programming is along the lines of “what is the best programming language?”. And the the brief answer to that is simple:


You’re doing it wrong.

Learning Before Learning (or getting ahead of school curriculum)

Original image by Tony Targonski

This post, as many are on this blog, is inspired by a post on the forums. A user (Banished_Outlaw) asked some questions about Scheme, and one of his concerns was that he wanted to learn the language before school started, thinking ahead of U Waterloo. Though Professor Prabhakar Ragde (PR) warns [...]