There’s No Such Things as One Application
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005An interesting little article on why products take so much longer to build than programs.
Archive for March, 2005
An interesting little article on why products take so much longer to build than programs.
Wanted: Web-Based Screen Saver
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005I've decided what I want for (quick check) Saint Zosimus' Day: a Windows-compatible screensaver that will: poll a web site for an XML file containing a to-do list; and display that list whenever my computer goes idle for 5 or 10 minutes. Bonus marks if it'll run on Linux and Mac; more bonus ...
Fasten Your Seatbelts
Friday, March 25th, 2005From Jon Udell's weblog: Civilization took a great leap forward when we learned how to write stuff down. Now we're learning to film our stories and to TiVo them. Fasten your seat belt. Coincidentally, I was commiserating with a fellow professor yesterday about the gulf between what universities have first-year computer science ...
Sorry, Make That _Two_ Rails Books
Thursday, March 24th, 2005As Dave says, the cat's out of the bag: there's a Rails Recipes book in the works. Really, really hope this year's PyCon produces a concerted effort to create (or choose, I'm not fussy) a Pythonic equivalent.
What I’d Say If I Were At PyCon
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005Dave Thomas, of Pragmatic Programmer fame, is working on a new book about RubyOnRails. In my opinion, none of the entry-level Python web programming systems that Michelle Levesque has been studying is book-worthy yet, despite being several years older than RonR. It's things like this that are going to ...
State of the Scripting Universe
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005This article is an extended interview with principals in the Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and PHP worlds. Interesting how much they agree on...
Thirteen Things That Do Not Make Sense
Friday, March 18th, 2005Science is never finished---that's what makes it fun. Here, courtesy of New Scientist magazine, is a list of thirteen things that do not make sense. There's probably a Nobel prize lurking inside at least half of them.
Jolt Awards 2005
Thursday, March 17th, 2005Every year, CMP Media (owners of DDJ, Software Development, and many other fine magazines) hand out Jolt awards in various categories. This year's winners are listed below, with some comments. There's also a new award for exceptional writing in technology and letters, created in honor of Stan Kelly-Bootle (who earned the world's first ...
What Would Google Do?
Thursday, March 17th, 2005One day, I'm sure I'll see a bumper sticker saying, "What would Google do?" They have become this generation's Apple---the hotspot where all the coolest coders hang out. And they now have a page devoted to open source.
Pythoneers at SIGSCSE
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005Several colleagues of mine at the University of Toronto were at SIGCSE 2005 a couple of weeks ago. They came back with lots to report; most interesting for me was the feeling that there's growing interest in Python as a teaching language. One of them said that she ...