Archive for October, 2005
Friday, October 28th, 2005
"The future always arrives too soon, and in the wrong order." This just blew me away.
(And yes, I should be putting together a mid-term, revising the Software Carpentry course notes, catching up on book reviews for DDJ, and looking for a job---what's your point?)
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 27th, 2005
I have a new theory. It's not about why there are no toilets on the Enterprise (hint: transporters). This one's about why bad software exists.
Fact #1: the two biggest causes of software failure are requirements failure and integration failure: either the wrong thing is built, or the pieces ...
Posted in Student Projects | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Following links from the latest Subtext demo, I came to Martin Fowler's article "Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?". It's well written and thought provoking, like everything else Martin writes, but I think there's one glaring oversight. Two thirds of the way through, he says:
...there are three ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Wondering what to read next? Try whichbook.net. Proof (if more was needed) that everything is still up for grabs when it comes to social interfaces...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
Even Google sometimes gets it wrong---this map of participants in the Summer of Code has me in eastern Kazakhstan. It also appears to have me working for Google, which is just cruel...
(Thanks to Greg Lapouchnian for sending the image.)
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
No, I'm not having morbid thoughts (well, not that morbid)---it's a quote from Charles Petzold's talk Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, which is well worth a read.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
Want to see where Google Summer of Code participants were from? Now you can.
Posted in Student Projects | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
There's a new demo of Jonathan Edwards' Subtext system online. This is the best example I've seen yet of an extensible programming system. It's pretty cool---once you stop insisting that programs have to be directly presentable as ASCII strings, many new thoughts become possible.
Quote: "It's good to remember ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
I didn't go to OOPSLA this year (OK, I've never gone to OOPSLA, despite meaning to several times), but from what I'm reading, one of the most entertaining events was the Scrapheap Challenge, in which participants were given a problem to solve by downloading freely-available code from the Internet ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
For the past few weeks, Heather Mayer has been turning my scratchings into some really rather beautiful drawings for the Software Carpentry course. If you'd like to see more of her work, Pyre is now hosting her site. And if you're looking for a graphic designer, I'd recommend ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »