Archive for December, 2004

Python Software Foundation Grant

Thursday, December 30th, 2004

Greg Wilson has been awared a grant from the Python Software Foundation to revamp his course on "Software Engineering for Scientists and Engineers", and put it under an open license, so that it can be used at other institutions. W00t!

Why I Teach

Thursday, December 30th, 2004

Every term, a few students ask me why I teach when the university doesn't pay me for doing it. Here's the answer I gave a CSC207 class at the University of Toronto in December 2003: When I was your age, I thought universities existed to teach people how to learn. ...

Earthquake Relief

Tuesday, December 28th, 2004

This page lists ways you can help the victims of the recent Indian Ocean quake. Please be generous; please, contact you member of Parliament (if you're in Canada) and tell her/him that you'd like Canada to be generous too.

How Much to Charge For Software

Thursday, December 16th, 2004

Yet another essay from Joel Spolsky, this one on how much to charge for software. This guy writes too well...

On Being a Small Independent Software Vendor

Wednesday, December 15th, 2004

Ever thought about setting up your own company, and marketing your own software product? You should read this first.

Google Gets Better Again

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

Do these folks ever sleep? Google is going to scan and index some of the world's greatest libraries.

Two Essays from Paul Graham

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

Two essays from Paul Graham, one on why nerds are unpopular, the other on writing essays. Interesting reading...

What Trac Says About Python

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

I've seen several posts recently about Trac, a baby-SourceForge built on top of Python, SQLite, and ClearSilver (a language-neutral HTML templating system). If you haven't seen it yet, you should check it out: it's less than 6000 lines of Python (and 1800 lines of HTML template), but offers bug ...

Schneier on Personal Online Security

Monday, December 13th, 2004

Bruce Schneier is probably the industry's best-known expert on computer security. Judging from his books and web articles, he's also a tremendously sensible person. This article is an updated description of what (little) you can do to make yourself more secure online. Highly recommended.

Unicode in Action

Sunday, December 12th, 2004

From Pat Smith and Jeffrey Jia, who've been working on the Psiphon project: One of the more challenging parts of getting Psiphon up and running was the internationalization and localization of the interface. The problem was Unicode. As we discovered, Unicode (or rather, pretending it does not exist) is a big problem in software. In ...