Archive for May, 2005

Powers of 10

Monday, May 30th, 2005

Years ago, I read a book called Powers of Ten, which showed the structure of the physical universe from the subatomic level up to, well, everything, really, in 10X jumps. This map from National Geographic uses the same trick to go from our Solar System to the universe as ...

Navigating Source

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

One of the minor items on my to-do list is to replace the default Trac graphics on the Argon web site with ones that include some reference to the University of Toronto and our hippo mascot. Having spent half an hour on Friday talking to a colleague about how ...

MySQL, LiveJournal, and Real-World Web Sites

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

This talk from the last MySQL conference describes what LiveJournal (a blogging portal) has had to do over the past few years to meet its users' growing demands. It's an insightful look at what you have to do in practice to make a workable web.

Schedule Games

Saturday, May 14th, 2005

Jeff Atwood has created an index to Johanna Rothman's postings on Schedule Games. Those of you who've been building software for a while will recognize at least a few of these. Those of you haven't---one day, you will.

Recommended Reading

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

I have updated my recommended reading list; it now includes descriptions (many of them culled from my reviews for Doctor Dobb's Journal), and cover images that link directly to Amazon. Enjoy... Later: I've added five more books to the recommended reading list: Feathers: Working Effectively with Legacy Code Levine: Linkers and Loaders Margolis ...

Dr Requirements

Friday, May 6th, 2005

We're about to kick off another summer of work on Hippo, our baby-SourceForge for student use. I'm pretty excited: five good students will be working on it full-time, on five brand new machines (thanks to a donation from the Jonah Group), starting from a freshly-refactored version of Trac that ...

Crash This Party… Tomorow

Thursday, May 5th, 2005

MIT is holding a party for time travelers. Their logic is that you only need one, since everyone who qualifies to attend, can.

Misdirection and Javascript

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

When I was twelve, I spent $3.95 on a book that promised to teach me how to do magic tricks that would astound my friends. I didn't make it past the second chapter ("No way---I have to practice!?"), but I still remember the way the word "misdirection" was set in bold face every ...