Nick Parlante

At present, my most interesting project is javabat.com which is an experimental online code-practice tool, where you can play with little sections of code in the browser.

I'm a lecturer in the CS department, and I also work part-time at the world's greatest search engine.

Mac OS X users: check out BackupRecent a free, simple backup utility.

  • CS108 "Object Oriented Systems" which is all about applying Java and OOP to large projects
  • CS193i "Internet Technologies" which is a programmer's tour of the combination of tcp/ip, sockets, HTTP, HTML, CGI, and other standards which make up the Internet.
  • The Nifty Assignments archive. Run as part of the ACM CSE, this is a neat library of great assignments gathered from instructors all over. Each year, there's a Nifty Assignments session I run at the SIGCSE conference. Applications etc. are done in the Summer.
  • The Greatest Pointer Recursion Problem of All Time
  • The CS Library project which edits together CS education materials. There are some extremely popular documents here on linked lists, binary trees, etc..
  • The Binky Pointer Video the infamous Claymation animated short about pointers.
  • JavaDoc Fast are you tired of hunting through Java Docs the lame old way? Try my super wizz-o way that uses Javascript to actually do something useful.
  • Here's a little Java Application that rolls the dice for the game Settlers of Catan
  • An analysis of the dice odds in Settlers, for those who are truly addicted to the game

EMail: nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu
Phone: (650) 725-4727
Office: Gates 190 -- first floor in the South facing "B" wing.
My current office hours are always listed on the course pages of whatever I'm teaching, but in fact I'm generally around Mon, Wed, Fri. Feel free to call or stop by.
Map to my office.

Below here is embarassingly old material, back from when I was a dishevled Grad student, as opposed to my new persona as a cranky, dishevled old man. At one time, I had a promising career writing party flyers, such as from the infamous Spring Fling party
Consider the words... "sunny, "tropical," "tawny," and of course "fruity!" -- no other big house in the greater Menlo Park area comes to mind quicker than the Big Happy Home (especially when you add in words like "couch," "ESPN," and "burrito.")

Who is this guy anyway?

Of course everyone's personality can be reduced to a paragraph! I like talking, reading, playing, teaching, snacking, and building things which seems to match up pretty well with my job as a lecturer in the Computer Science department. The funniest thing every said about me was by Liz Peters who described me as... "He's 5'8, but he plays 5'9." These little self-personality-summaries combine all the charm of writing a college application essay with all the truthfulness and self-deception of a singles add-- so I'll leave it at that and you're welcome to track me down and say hello in person which is pretty easy since I have office hours that are deserted except right before assignments.

I used to live in a big blue house in the Big Happy Home (BHH) in Menlo Park with a bunch of cheerful young folks/hoodlums-- where "young" is defined in the traditional way to be however old I am currently. Then our landlord decided that he wanted to move back in, which began the tale of horror of finding a place to live in the Bay Area. That unholy epic ended with our finding the BHH 2.0, and the whole tragedy is amply documented in my haiku ("Evil Ex-Landlord") found on the flyer for our BHH 2.0 housewarming party in the BHH Document Archive.

Big Happy Home

The great and brave story of the BHH 2.0 ends in the swampy atmosphere of a little drama I call "booted out by landlord, yet again," for which there is no haiku as yet, but there is a flyer.

The official BHH page is now a living ruin -- our Mrs. Bates -- a testament to a time back when we were fun! There's a secondary BHH Documents archive including old party flyers that help reinforce the past-tense nature of my fun-having days!

Quotes

I've put in some more 108 type quotes now that I'm teaching it for the umpteenth time.

"Committees can criticize, but they cannot create." (Ogilvy on Advertising)

"Sleep optional but not recommended." -CS107 student

"Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence." -Charles Kettering

"We don't have time to stop for gas-- we're already late." -Old software project planning proverb via Mike Cleron

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." -Unknown

"Plan to throw one away." - Fred Brooks

"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site." - Frank Lloyd Wright

"Hardware is just software that's hard to edit." - Unknown

"This time for sure." - Common phrase among computer programmers and used-car salespeople.