UBC Computer Science Home Page
This is the World Wide Web home page for the University of British Columbia
Computer Science Department. The weary cyberspace traveller might like
to know that we're located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Since we were the first HTTP server in BC, you may have
come here expecting to find
the University of British Columbia or
the province of British Columbia.
Fortunately, you can
get there from here.
Paths to all the nooks and crannies of this web can be found here.
They're broken down into major categories and presented in a narrative
style. If that doesn't appeal to you, there's a
menu-style list of everything here.
Computer Science Department
You can read a little
about the department and
see the
people behind it and
what they do.
Several of our research groups maintain their own webs. There's
LCI
(Computational Intelligence),
Imager/GraFiC
(Computer Graphics),
E-GEMS
(Electronic Games for Education),
SCV
(Scientific Computation and Visualization),
DSG
(Distributed Operating Systems)
MAGIC
(Media And Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre),
and
DBSL
(Database Systems Laboratory).
Technical reports
on the research done in the department are available on-line.
We have a web server
just for our undergraduates
which is mostly directed at them but contains some general interest material.
There are many different ways, electronic and otherwise, to
contact the department. If you'd
like to apply for graduate school here,
we have some
application forms available.
There are other
forms for internal use
and
a list of upcoming department events.
Or you can
create your own customized list.
Check out our list of seminars and
speaker series featuring people from the department and around
the world.
The department is involved in
CICSR, the Centre for Integrated Computer Systems
Research.
Using and Building the World Wide Web
For those of you just starting to use WWW, there are some
hints on using your Web browser.
After that you may want to
learn about HTML, the lingua franca of the web. Or you can just
jump right in and find out how to
make your documents available to the world.
There's a few other things our server allows like
adding to your userinfo page.
There are web browsers for the Macintosh and the PC.
You can even read about
setting up your own HTTP server,
but CS people probably don't need to go to the trouble.
Facilities
The department's computers consistly largely of UNIX workstations with some
Macintoshes and PCs lying around. There's lots more to say about the
facilities, but no one has written something down to reference. Some
system documentation like the software catalog,
UNIX manual pages and GNU emacs
texinfo is on line.
Library
The department has its own
reading room,
but you should take a look at the list of
electronic jounals
and other on-line information. Besides all that, we've got the
meagre beginnings of a virtual library including such things as:
The UBC library has its own telnet-based
card catalog to which we've hacked
up a reasonably spiffy way of
finding what books you have due.
Gateways and Special Services
We have some gateways to USENET news
and anonymous FTP that are must sees. The first
is a multi-part article decoding service -- it tramps through various
newsgroups hourly; finds multi-part or encoded articles like images,
sounds, shar files and the like; and assembles them into an easy to
view and easy to download form. The second is a gateway to our
anonymous FTP archives at ftp.cs.ubc.ca
and features the ability to browse straight into zip files without
having to load them entirely over to your site.
The open government mirror is a copy of the
web created by Industry Canada to explain some of the whos and hows
of Canadian government.
And then there's Mr. Spock quotes.
This Web Server
A few documents here refer specifically to this server. Some
daily and hourly usage statistics
are available along with a list of what's
new here.
UBC, BC and the World
If you're looking for UBC related information, starting with our
list of UBC information servers
may help. Our teeny British Columbia
page will guide you to many other web servers in province.
Looking for something but don't know where to start?
Two suggestions come to mind.
First is the
Internet Resources Meta-Index which has a bunch of
possible starting points mostly consisting of searchs and
some subject indicies. Second is the collection of
USENET FAQs. It's essentially the collected wisdom of many
USENET groups whose topics are quite diverse. It's much more useful
than it sounds.
-- George Phillips (phillips@cs.ubc.ca).