This year, I really had a heavy teaching duty between December and February. I overhauled the TOP module quite heavily: the lecture went from about 100 slides to over 200, like I said previously. Concerning the practical labs, I changed considerably 2 of them (knapsack and pyramids) to better organize things between on board work sheets and practical labs. I came up with a new one about recipients, to close the track on recursion of the module.

I also remade from scratch (or almost) the course on distributed systems. I played a lot with tikz and beamer to find a more pedagogical introduction to distributed algorithms. Also, the lectures on P2P were a bit refreshed to cover modern material such as botnets and anonymous P2Ping. Finally, I added a practical lab (using SimGrid of course) in this lecture. The result can be found here.

Finally, we also revamped the C and Shell lectures this year. That's still organized as a bunch of lectures in small group with a white board instead of a beamer plus a bunch of practical labs. I even posted the results of white boards here in this blog previously. We have a teacher manual, but I must admit that I didn't follow that very closely. Instead, I moved on more funny facts such as how to code in a object oriented way in C (yeah, no bug here, I'm not speaking of C++). I covered about the same content than the other groups (there's 5 classes and I was in charge of 2 classes only, with colleagues teaching to the other ones), but with an original form. Actually, that's why I posted the white board pictures: to keep them for next year, when I'll update the teacher manual. I'm very excited about this way to teach C. I guess I should do a SIGCSE publication or similar on this fact.

Well, ok. I moved a bit far from this post's title: it comes from a stupid song and means something like "yippi, yippi, school's over". Because, yes, I'm done with teaching. I won't have anymore lectures until next September. I'm not completely done with my teacher hat since I still have to rank two exams (see Partiel ce matin), and I'm the advisor of a few last-year students every summer during their internships. But I won't have any lecture to prepare or to give.

So, what will I do of my time you say? Will I enjoy 5 months and half of vacation? Well, not quite. I use a time tracker since the beginning of this year, and here are some stats of the February month. The grayscale level indicate the kind of task I did on specific days. Note that not absolutely all activities are counted in the tracker: when I chat about scientific issues with friends over instant messaging, I often stop the time tracker, considering that this is not pure professional workload.

As you can see, I took 2 weeks of vacation at the end of that month, but even if I stopped working on feb 19. after lunch, or so, I worked 160 hours on that month. You need 4 weeks to reach that if you work 40 hours a week... From that, I were teaching, in front of students, only 36 hours of the total time. As you can see, I have plenty of ideas to keep busy at work.

I plan to blog a bit more about my research activities in the future, so keep reading