Ilyia Kaushansky

Paul van Dyk is considered by many the top trance DJ in the world. He has been DJing all over the world for more than 10 years, consistently plays great sets and produces incredible music.

Unfortunately, for the past couple of years there weren't any live recordings of his sets with good sound quality. Thus, imagine my excitement when yesterday one such recording finally became available for download. You can download the set at www.tranceaddict.com. Not only is the sound quality really good, but the set itself is amazing to say the least.

A word of warning: Do not listen to this set while doing homework, or any other important work; productivity reduces to zero. It took me over 30 minutes to write this post, while listening to the set.

About a month ago I wrote a report about my co-op experience in the United States for my Visa sponsorship agency. One of the requirements of the report was to write about 10 impressions that I had of the US. I decided to post this part of the report here(with slight modifications). Note that these were my impressions, hence not everything here may be absolutely accurate.

1. Americans seem to be more interested in politics than Canadians. During presidential elections most people were following it very closely. I haven't seen such interest in Canada.
2. Amerians seem to be very patriotic of the United States. There are lots of American flags everywhere.
3. The weather in California is beautiful. Possibly the best weather I’ve seen in my life. It was nice and warm during the day, and chillier at night; just perfect.
4. Americans are a lot harder working than Canadians. It was not uncommon for me to be at work past 7PM, with half the company still there. At first I thought it was like that only at Google, but after talking to more people it became evident that people in the United States (or at least in Software Industry) tend to work long hours.
5. Universities are beautiful. During my stay in the US I visited Stanford and UCLA. Both schools look gorgeous. Not sure how their Computer Science program compares to that of University of Waterloo, but walking around the campus of Stanford and UCLA made me wish I was a student there. University of Waterloo is really ugly compared to these two schools.
6. High prices of housing in the Silicon Valley. Although I knew that house prices were really high in the Bay Area, it was still shocking to learn that a small one bedroom apartment in San Francisco can cost around $600,000. This is really disappointing, and I’m not sure how people can afford to buy a house in their lifetime, unless they are lucky and win lottery or get good stock options.
7. People really like baseball and football. I knew that those sports were popular, but I never realized the extent of their popularity until I actually spent a few months in the US. It was crazy! Football is almost equivalent to popularity of Hockey in Canada.
8. Pretty much everybody has a car, and people are willing to drive long distances. I was amazed to see that some people commute more than an hour each way to work everyday. I never had a car in Canada, and never really needed one. It was a different story in California. I felt like I couldn’t get anywhere without a car. Sure there are trains and public transport, but it’s not nearly as good as public transport in Toronto.
9. The little differences like the metric system (temperature in Fahrenheit, distance in miles, weight in pounds) turned out to be surprisingly difficult to adjust to.
10. Number of restaurants. It seemed that wherever I went in the Bay Area, there were restaurants all over, and many of them were busy. Not sure whether it’s like that only in the
11. Bay Area, or everywhere in the United States, but it seems that people rarely cook at home and only eat out. It was a bit surprising since in Canada most people try to eat at home.

Now that I've graduated, I think it's time to reflect on some of the good courses that I've taken.

Math 145 (Advanced Algebra 1)

A slightly better name for that course would have been Introduction to Number Theory. This was by far the most interesting math course I've taken at UW. There was very little brute force work involved in the course since most problems involved proofs rather than straight forward calculations. The problems were challenging enough to be interesting, yet easy enough to be solvable within a reasonable amount of time.


CS 241 (Foundations of Sequential Programs)

This may come as a surprise to some, but I found this course to be my most challenging course taken at UW. The first few weeks of the course were relatively easy though - we learned assembly and some basic computer architecture(mostly about stack organization and registers).

The remainder of the course proved to be much more difficult. We learned about regular expressions, DFAs and context free grammars. All of that was new to me at the time and to be honest I had trouble understanding that material at first.

The last part of the course involved learning scheme programming language. It wasn't as interesting to me; however the scheme assignment was pretty fun(I remember solving one of the problems during sleep).

The main assignment of the course was to implement a compiler for a simple programming language. It was a great assignment; I really enjoyed it. It was after I completed this assignment that I decided to take the much dreaded CS444(Compiler Construction) course. More on that later.

CS 360 (Theory of Computation)

People either love this course or hate it. I loved it. Most of the problems involved rigorous proofs, often using induction. My solutions often spanned many pages(I tend to write unnecessarily long proofs). During the course we digged deeper into regular expressions, DFAs, context free grammars and learned about Turing machine. During the last part of the course we were introduced to the notion of solvable/unsolvable problems. Unfortunately the course has changed since I took it; i'm not sure about the specifics of the change but the course doesn't appear as be as interesting anymore.

CS 354 (Operating Systems)

This was my first course involving a big programming assignment. We had to implement an operating system based on NachOs. It was during this course that I was introducted to all-nighters. During the course we learned about process scheduling, virtual memory, file system and various other operating system related stuff.

Since I took the course it was merged with Concurrency course and renamed to CS350. From what I undestand, the course became a lot easier as a result of that change.

CS 452 (Real Time Systems)

Arguably the most challenging course at UW. There was even an article about the course in Toronto Star.

I was looking forward to that course since the 2nd year of university. The course involves implementing from scratch(in a group of 2) a real time operating system for i486 processor and then writing an application for controlling trains(all within 3 months). Needless to say taking this course requires a lot of dedication and work.

Implementing the operating system was not too difficult and we've done it successfully. Writing the application for controlling trains was a different story. We spent about a month working on it 10-12-16 hours a day. Unfortunately it wasn't enough and our application wasn't nearly as good as we had hoped.

Nevertheless it was an awesome learning experience, and I would recommend this course to anyone who enjoys challenging programming.

CS 444 (Compiler Construction)

This course involves implementing(in a group of 3) a compiler for a subset of Ada programming language.

The first assignment was relatively easy, but not very interesting. We had to fix the grammar for the language, then implement a lexer and a parser. The greatest strength of our parser was error recovery(thanks to Sergey who've implemented it within 2 days of hard work).

Second assignment was very tough and time consuming. It was also extremely interesting since we had make a lot of non-trivial design decisions. I feel that it was one of the best assignments I've worked on while at UW.

Third assignment wasn't as difficult as the second one. We quickly implemented about 70% of the requirements and then.. then I left to Montreal for a week and Sergey lost interest. Only Thomas continued to do work. Everyone's interest resurfaced on the day of submission; it was really fun finding and fixing bugs 5 hours before the deadline. At the end we submitted a relatively decent compiler which unfortunately lacked support for exceptions and nested procedures. In addition to that, the compiler had a curious bug with array indexing. Oh well. We ended up getting a decent mark.


So there you go. These were were my favourite courses taken at UW.

On April 22, 2005 a bunch of us (Alex "Bombardir", Egor, Lena, Olya, Tanya, Timur and myself) departed on a trip to Dominican Republic. We went on an all inclusive vacation to Santana Beach Resort.

All of us had an amazing time. As expected, most of our time was spent in the pool drinking. At nights we went to the local disco, which generally played pretty horrible music, however it didn't bother us much since we were all pretty drunk.

Some highlights of the trip included partying on a boat, recording some funny music videos and just chilling on the beach drinking and smoking.

Overall it was a really fun vacation ! Here are some pictures.


Cheers !


I am smiling at the camera. Sanya is drinking. Someone's priorities are screwed up.


Olya looks happy. I look puzzled. Hm...


Still Life picture(aka Naturmort)

And just like that the university life is over. It is still a little difficult for me to believe that from now on there will be no more school, no more assignments and no more exams. WOW !

I thought for a long time what to write in this first post-graduation post, and eventually decided to just post a bunch of pictures that show my life during university years.

And so, without further adiue here is a selection of pictures taken over the past 5 years.


Sep 5, 2000: Walking to university for the first time. I would take this road to school pretty much every day for the next 4 years.


Sep 5, 2000: First day of Frosh Week. Pink Tie is a symbol of Waterloo Math students. Our cheer was M-A, M-A-T, M-A-T-H, MATH ROCKS !


Sep 2000: Celebrating beginning of university. Who would have thought how quickly we'd be finished?


Dec 14, 2000: End of term. First term involved a lot of drinking. What you see on this picture is me posing as a super-man with 'UW' spelled using beer bottles


July 21, 2001: Rowing in Algonquin. That was one awesome camping trip !


Dec 25, 2001: In Montreal: Danny(aka Pushkin), Vovan and myself. I absolutely love Montreal and try to visit it at least once a year.


August 2002: In front of Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with Danny. I've known Danny(aka Pushkin) since 1994. We both attended the same school in Israel. Those were awesome times!


August 2002: In Ibiza. If I look tired in this picture, that's because I probably haven't slept for 2 or 3 days at the time. Why - you ask? Come to Ibiza and find out!


Feb 2, 2003: Viva Nightclub in Toronto. I partied quite a bit during university and just had to include one the raving pictures here.


June 29, 2003: Don't remember anymore where this picture was taken. All I know is that it was during some camping trip.


Late August 2003: In Cuba with my ex-girlfriend Tanya


Oct 2, 2004: This picture was taken at the first ever Love Parade in San Francisco. What an amazing time it was!!!


April 16, 2005: Myself and Alex: Former Real Time partners now sitting in the lab for the last time