Archive for April, 2005
Friday, April 29th, 2005
Richard Hamming was one of the early greats of information science.
After working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, he spent thirty
years at Bell Labs; he received the ACM Turing Prize in 1968, and in
1987, the IEEE named its Hamming Medal after him.
In 1986, he gave a lecture called "You
and ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 26th, 2005
Alper Ozdamar, a former 49X student, forwarded this link to an article by Hans Moravec on time travel and computing. Fun to read, if you don't mind a little brain-ache ;-).
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, April 25th, 2005
At the risk of turning this blog into adware, my book on Data Crunching is now available from Amazon, or directly from the Pragmatic Programmers. Personally, I think it's beautiful:
Posted in Writing | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 25th, 2005
We had our end of term dinner this past Saturday. Good food and good company---makes it all worthwhile.
Posted in Student Projects | No Comments »
Sunday, April 24th, 2005
An interesting piece by Tim O'Reilly on trends in book sales, and how they reflect (or forecast?) trends in technology. Interesting that Python book sales are now 2/3 of Perl sales, though both are down in absolute numbers.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, April 17th, 2005
...we're rewriting the past. I don't suppose there's any chance they'll stumble over Season Two of Firefly somewhere in there? No? Pity...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, April 15th, 2005
I have a new favorite web site: CleverCS (which just redirects to this page at the University of New South Wales in Australia). It's a collection of papers describing clever ideas in computer science; some recent favorites include:
SCIgen - an Automatic CS Paper Generator
NP-Complete Problems and Physical Reality
CatchUp! Capturing ...
Posted in Teaching | 2 Comments »
Thursday, April 14th, 2005
Sam Ruby has posted a slide set from a recent talk on open source. It includes this:
Larry's Psychological Conjecture:
For normal people, the perceived usefulness of a computer language is inversely proportional to the amount of theory the language forces you to learn.
Is this why Perl, Python, and Ruby have ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
Carl Zimmer's excellent blog The Loom has a report about Spencer Wells' project to map historical human migrations using genetic sampling. (It also has a link to this interactive map of our species' history.) Zimmer says, "You can buy a DNA kit, and hen you send it back ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, April 3rd, 2005
The new hype in software development is Agile Programming Languages. These languages try to speed development time by ignoring traditional principles such as static typing. Unfortunately despite these advances, certain instructors still insist on the tradition of commenting code.
Enter Agile Commenting in the form of the Commentator. ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »