Archive for January, 2005
Sunday, January 16th, 2005
I spent Saturday at CUSEC 2005, where I met some interesting people, gave a couple of talks [1, 2], and marveled once again at how well Carleton University has managed to reproduce the neo-brutalist architecture I remember from my 1988 trip to Moscow.
It was an interesting conference: created and run ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 12th, 2005
There are two kinds of people in the open source world: those who are in it to help others, and those who are in for the shouting. Tong Shen and I ran into one of the former this week: his name is Brad Anderson, and he just put together ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, January 10th, 2005
In this morning's meeting, I told the Hippo students that we're going to do analysis & estimation on four things, then (probably) only build three (maybe even two):
refactor Trac to separate the model from the controller (right now, the database interaction code is stirred into the who-what-where-when logic);
add support for ...
Posted in Student Projects | 2 Comments »
Saturday, January 8th, 2005
If you already know what blogs are, and how they work, you can skip down in this posting. If not, read on...
Students who are new to 49X will have heard me say that I'm tracking each project's progress using blogs. A "blog" (short for "web log") is essentially ...
Posted in Student Projects | 2 Comments »
Friday, January 7th, 2005
This story from the CBC is frightening: apparently, due to a computer error, abnormal radiology results for nearly 40 cancer patients weren't sent to their doctors. If FedEx or Canada Post had lost the results, they'd probably be sued; since it's "just" software, my bet is that no one ...
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Thursday, January 6th, 2005
The Edge Foundation's Big Question for 2004 was, "What do you believe even though you can't prove it?" Answers from 120 scientists and others are now on-line. (Personally, I've never given up on the Great Pumpkin...)
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
Those of you interested in security, or writing web applications, may be interested in this article, which shows how SQL injection attacks work.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
A couple of students have ask why we're using Python instead of Perl in this term's projects. After all, Perl is more popular---there are more books about it, and a lot more libraries for it as well.
The answer is that Brent Gorda and I used Perl to teach classes ...
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Tuesday, January 4th, 2005
This blog posting, from ActiveState's David Ascher, describes an art exhibit in Vancouver called Massive Change. It looks fascinating; I hope to catch it when it comes to Toronto.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, January 2nd, 2005
One of the hardest things in any project is to figure out exactly
what you're trying to accomplish. This template is intended to help
software development teams do that by forcing them to state what
problem they're trying to solve, who it affects, and why their
solution is a good one. It ...
Posted in Books, Student Projects | No Comments »