Archive for the ‘Software Carpentry’ Category

Kevin’s Been Busy

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Kevin Brown has been busy --- he's been coordinating, installing, maintaining, fixing, and figuring out how to use a new $20 million supercomputer for cancer research. No word on how much money will be spent training people how to use it effectively, but hey, I'm easy to reach... :-)

What a Proposal Looks Like

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I got word earlier this week that The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) had approved my request for funding to spruce up the Software Carpentry notes, and find out how scientists are actually using computers. I faxed a signed copy of the paperwork down to them today---with luck, work will start ...

Faking Results

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Via BoingBoing, a story about scientists Photoshopping experimental results. Sometimes it's outright fakery; sometimes they're just "cleaning up" or "correcting". Either way, it raises an interesting question: how often are people doing this with computational results? Without scientists' code, or any other way to reproduce their work, we'll probably never ...

Three Weeks and Change

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Everyone's making good progress: Ming and Bing have posted their second demo --- next step is to do some serious design of the final product. After correcting an earlier post of mine, Xuan has blogged a fuller description of what she and Edward are building. Zeev Lieber posted a brief summary of what ...

Programming and Scientific Education on Slashdot

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Via Adam Goucher, a Slashdot thread about whether programming should be part of science education.  300+ comments and counting, almost all relating personal experiences.

Reminded of the Difference Once Again

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Via Irving Reid, a great quote from Henrik Kniberg about how to tell when you're done: So when a team member says that a story is Done and moves the story card into the Done column, a customer could run into the room at that moment and say “Great Lets go ...

Interviewed by Jon Udell

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Jon Udell has posted an interview he did with me last week at IT Conversations. The title is "High Performance Computing Considered Harmful", and slides from a talk of the same name that I gave in Austin are available. Later: here's Jon's summary of the interview. Curmudgeonly? Moi? :-)

Why Don’t We Do This?

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Source Code for Biology and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal from BioMed Central devoted to, well, source code for biology and medicine. It's been around for at least a couple of years; based on a quick scan of four of their most popular papers, they seem to cover everything from ...

But I Was Gone Less than 48 Hours!

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I left Toronto for Austin mid-day Wednesday, and got back at midnight last night. Lots happened in the interim, so here's a linkandthoughtdump (which I bet actually is one word in German): Gave a talk about Beautiful Code to the Austin Python Users' Group Wednesday at Enthought's swanky offices. (They're ...

SE-CSE Workshop

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

One of the downsides of being in Texas is that I couldn't attend the First International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering, which was held at ICSE'08 in Leipzig this week.  Papers are here (I'll be reading them on the flight home); they look interesting, but the ...