Versión en Español

Teaching

Courses I teach

• Redes de ordenadores II (Computer Science, 5^th year)
• Fundamentos de ordenadores II (Telecomunications Engineering, 2^nd year)
• Past courses

Asking for Tutorials

The following guidelines will help you get a tutorial and will boost your benefit and enlightenment from them. They will also save you and me a lot of time. If you chose to ignore some of these guidelines I will happily ignore you in favor of other students that doesn't.

• Tutorials will take place at my office.
• Tutorials tipically last between 30 minutes and an hour.
• To ask for a tutorial, send me an email and wait for my reply. Common waiting periods are between 1 hour and 2 working days.
• Don't ask me for a tutorial in person, there is a great chance I forget about it.

In your email, you must:

• Clearly identify yourself and the course you are taking.
• Include a detailed description of your questions/problem. This will allow me to prepare our tutorial session and estimate its duration (allowing me to schedule more tutorials per hour). If your doubts are mainly technical, read Asking me technical questions and consider if solving your problem by email would be better than a tutorial.
• Include at least 4 time slots for the meeting. My favorites are Wednesdays 17:00-18:00 and Tuesday 12:00-13:00 (CET/CEST).

Asking technical questions

Write your questions to my email address. I will try to answer on the same day. Save your time and mine by writing your questions properly:

• Please include in your email the source code of a very simple and complete program that I can compile and run in the labs, make sure the program reproduce your errors/problems. Don't send me pseudo-code, excerps of your code or your whole lab assignment. Send me only valid code ready to be compiled and run in the labs, the smaller and simpler the better. Include all the needed code, compilation instructions, tests, network traffic captures, examples of your errors & how to reproduce them.
• Don't send me your guesses, if you were right, you will not be needing my help. Send me the facts and let me do the guessing.
• I will do my best to help you, but I don't have a crystal ball, nor I can read your mind or access your computer at home. So please, do your best to anticipate everything I need to solve your problem. Given my email reading habits, every additional question I have to ask you will delay the final solution for about a week.
• Send me only plain text or open & well known binary formats, like pdf or pcap. Don't send me screenshots of your code or errors, just plain old text.
• Don't ask several, unrelated questions in the same email, write me several emails instead. They will be easier to manage, search and reference and the easy anwers wont be delayed by the tricky ones.
• For better and faster answers, please read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way (about 1 hour of reading time). This document is entirely unrelated to the UC3M, please don't bother its authors with your questions about our courses.

Research

My research topics

I'm member of the Pervasive Computing Laboratory. My main research topics are:

• Making the most of multihomed devices
• Transport protocols, with especial interest in SCTP
• OS to applications APIs

Some research results

• Journal Publications
  • Alberto Cortés, Carlos García-Rubio, Celeste Campo, Andrés Marín, Florina Almenárez, Daniel Díaz, "Decoupling path failure detection from congestion control to improve SCTP failovers", IEEE Communication Letters, volume 12, issue 11, November 2008 Pages: 858 - 860, ISSN: 1089-7798, DOI: 10.1109/LCOMM.2008.080884, local copy, BibTex
• Conference Papers
  • Alberto Cortes-Martin, Carlos Garcia-Rubio, Celeste Campo, Estrella M. García-Lozano and Alicia Rodriguez-Carrion, "Selection and Publication of Network Interface Cards in Multihommed Pervasive Computing Devices", 2011 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, pages 239-244, March 21-25, 2011 in Seattle, USA, ISBN: 978-1-61284-936-9, download from conference webpage, local copy, BibTex.
• Research Projects
  • 2008-2010: Easy Wireless 2, a CELTIC-Avanza I+D project.
  • 2005-2007: Easy Wireless, an ITEA-PROFIT project.

Service

Journal paper reviewer

• Computer Communications, Elsevier, ISSN: 0140-3664

Member of the Technical Program Committee for conferences & workshops:

• JITEL 2009
• OMNeT++ Workshop 2011

Misc.

Recommended Readings

• Online articles:
  • "Why hardware documentation matters so much and why it is so hard to get" by Theo de Raadt
  • "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" by Rob Pike
  • "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" by Eric S. Raymond
  • "Things I Wish I'd Been Told; Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science" by Craig Partridge. I will pay 50 Euros to anyone who writes a similar paper about being a Spanish Phd. Student
  • "Is Programming Obsolete?" by Brian Harvey
  • "Revenge of the Nerds" by Paul Graham.
  • "The importance of stupidity in scientific research" by Martin A. Schwartz.
  • "Stop the Numbers Game" by David Parnas.
• Books (there is some kind of order here, but don't take it too seriously):
  • "The UNIX programming Environment, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
  • "The C Programming Language, Second Edition", by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
  • "Notes on Programming in C", by Rob Pike
  • "The Practice of Programming", by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
  • "The art of Unix Programming", by Eric S. Raymond
  • "The C++ Programming Language", by Bjarne Stroustrup

My things

• My software
• My docs
• My log

My rants

I'm sick and tired of how CS is been taught:

• Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?
• How Should We Teach Computer Science?
• Revenge of the Nerds

See also...

• IT Department main page
• UC3M University main page
• GAST grants (In Spanish)