Computer Science | Grinnell College

• United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks, November 4, 2004.
• R. Singel, Twitter, Facebook attacks no surprise to security experts, Wired.com, August 6, 2009.
• R. Singel, Is there rhyme or reason to the attacks on Twitter?, Wired.com, August 6, 2009.
• Domain Name System (Wikipedia).
• ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), DNS Distributed Denial of Service, March 2006.

Also worth reading, not required: J. Davis, Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web, Wired 16.12, November 24, 2008.
Presenters: Martin & Max

This Friday, Jesse and Shitanshu will be leading a discussion on the SMTP application-level protocol and one of its most popular uses, spam. Please read this article:

• E. Allman, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, the FTC, and Spam, ACM Queue, Oct 2003.

For additional background, also read about SMTP.

As usual, we'll be meeting in JRC 224A at noon. Hope to see you there!

This Friday, Jordan and Alex will be leading a discussion on the Internet Engineering Task Force, the body which governs Internet protocols. It's very different from how you might imagine a standards organization, and Alex and Jordan have some great questions to discuss.

The main article for Friday is

• P. Borsook, How Anarchy Works, Wired 3.10, Oct 1995.

Those who are registered for the course or interested in further technical background should peruse the following Wikipedia articles. While Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, it gives a reasonably accurate overview of many Internet-related topics, and it is cheap.

• Communications Protocol
• Internet Protocol Suite

As usual, we are meeting on Friday at noon in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!

Welcome back! This semester, CS Table will be conducted together with the 1-credit special topic course CSC 295, Socio-Technical Issues in Computer Networks. We will consider issues from access and net neutrality to censorship and denial of service attacks. Registered students will be expected to lead discussions throughout the semester; all other interested students are welcome to attend and participate in discussions.

We will be meeting in JRC 224A. There is no reading for this Friday. Our agenda:

We'll consider metaphors as a way to consolidate our prior knowledge of how the Internet works (and perhaps learn some new things as well). Registered students will sign up for the first round of presentations.

A schedule for the entire semester is available at http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~davisjan/csc/295/2010F/.

Hope to see you there!

This Friday at CS Table, we will be discussing a classic in computer science, Donald Knuth's Turing Award lecture speech, "Computer Programming as an Art".

Knuth, Donald (1974). "Computer Programming as an Art". Communications of the ACM 17 (12): 667–673.

This document is available at http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf and elsewhere.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

The Spring 2010 theme of CS Table is Software Design.

Contact Professor Rebelsky for further information or for a printed copy of the document in booklet format.

For Friday's CS Table, we will examine some Web security guidelines in some depth.

The Open Web Application Security Project (2010). OWASP Top 10 - 2010 rc1: The Ten Most Critical Web Application Security Risks. Online document available at http://www.owasp.org/index.php/File:OWASP_T10_-_2010_rc1.pdf.

The reading is a bit longer than most, but can be skimmed fairly quickly by those who just want an overview.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

The Spring 2010 theme of CS Table is Software Design.

Contact Professor Rebelsky for further information or for a printed copy of the document in booklet format.

At noon on Friday, 12 February 2010, Computer Science table will consider the topic of Code Review. Our reading will be a code review document provided to us by a Grinnell alum. Note that the reading is proprietary, but not confidential. Hence, you are free to read and discuss it, but you should not distribute it to others. Contact Sam Rebelsky for a printed copy of the document.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

The Spring 2010 theme of CS Table is Software Design.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

This page provides a record of our activities for Fall 2009.

28 August 2009: What I did this summer

Students and faculty shared their summer adventures and misadventures.

4 September 2009: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. (2009). Hello World: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program. The Chronicle Review 55 (20), January 23, 2009, pp. B10-B12. Available online at http://chronicle.com/article/Hello-Worlds/5476/.

11 September 2009: Technology and Disability

Shinohara, K. and Tenenberg, J. 2009. A blind person's interactions with technology. Commun. ACM 52, 8 (Aug. 2009), 58-66. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1536616.1536636

18 September 2009: Under the Hood

Spolsky, Joel (2001, December 11). Back to Basics. Joel on Software. Web page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html.

25 September 2009: Software, Copyright, and Patent

Boyle, J. (2009). What intellectual property law should learn from software. Commun. ACM 52, 9 (Sep. 2009), 71-76. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1562164.1562184

2 October 2009: History of Programming Languages

A lecture by David Kay entitled Why So Many? A Historical View of the Early Development of Programming Languages. Held in Science 3821.

9 October 2009: Video Analytics

Dr. Harold Trease of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will speak on Video analytics for indexing, summarization and searching streaming video and video archives. Held in Science 3821. Pizza and pop provided!

16 October 2009: Language Humor

Stepney, Susan (ed). (n.d.). How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot. Web resource at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/foot.htm. One of the more extensive of the many variants of an article from the December 1991 issue of Developer's Insight.

23 October 2009: Fall Break

30 October 2009: RAID

Patterson, D. A., Gibson, G., and Katz, R. H. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international Conference on Management of Data (Chicago, Illinois, United States, June 01 - 03, 1988). H. Boral and P. Larson, Eds. SIGMOD '88. ACM, New York, NY, 109-116. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=50202.50214.

6 November 2009: Knuthian Humor

Knuth, D. E. 1984. The complexity of songs. Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 344-346. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358027.358042

Quux, The Great. 1984. THE TELNET SONG: ("Control-Uparrow Q."). Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 347-348. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358027.1035691

13 November 2009: The Economics of Open Source

Spolsky, Joel (2002, June 12). Strategy Letter V. Joel on Software. Web page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Perens, Bruce (2005). The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source Software. Web page at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385.

20 November 2009: Computational Thinking

Wing, J. M. 2006. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM 49, 3 (Mar. 2006), 33-35. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1118178.1118215

4 December 2009: In re: Bilski

11 December 2009: End-of-semester Wrapup

On Friday, 29 January 2010 at noon, we'll have the kickoff meeting for the Spring 2010 Computer Science table. We'll chat about what happened during break, about the first week of classes, and about plans for the semester.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

Come join us for the final CS table of 2009. Friday, 11 December 2009 at noon in the PDR at the top of the stairs. Chat about how your semester has gone and what you're hoping to do over break, the insane amount of snow, cool topics in CS, what the iPhone Apps exco should build, and other topics of interest.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in Rosenfield 224A. All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.