Archive for December, 2005
Friday, December 30th, 2005
Here's a tree view of my computer's file system, courtesy of SequoiaView. The big yellow block is M4A music files; the big green one is MP3's, the gray rectangle in the upper right hand corner is pagefile.sys, and the gold-gray-and-blue fishscales in the middle near the bottom are the ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, December 29th, 2005
This article, by Eamonn McManus, is a nice little summary of API design principles. It contains a bit of motherhood and apple pie---nobody would ever set out to make an API difficult to learn or hard to use, for example---but the specifics are good (particularly the discussion of why ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005
The US Dept. of Energy has just announced the next round of funding for SciDAC, its flagship supercomputing program. US$67 million per year for three to five years. Supercomputing Online reports:
Research proposals funded under the SciDAC program will help create a comprehensive, scientific computing software infrastructure that integrates ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
I'm teaching a cut-down version of Software Carpentry at the IASSE in two and a half weeks. I'll have students half days for the weeks of January 16 and 23, and full days for the week of February 6. That's only 20 lectures (rather than 26), so the question ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »
Monday, December 26th, 2005
A nice list of some things that Eclipse does better than Visual Studio (which is still my favorite IDE). I got it from Mike Gunderloy's always-excellent Larkware blog; if anyone sees a follow-up post describing things that VS does better than Eclipse, please let me know.
(And note in passing ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, December 24th, 2005
2005 was an excellent year for books. Not only were there a lot of good ones, some covered topics that hadn't been covered before (at least, not well or recently). Fogel's Producing Open Source Software, Doar's Practical Development Environments, Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Thompson and Chase's Software ...
Posted in Books | No Comments »
Friday, December 23rd, 2005
I finished rewriting the build system for the Software Carpentry course notes yesterday. Doing so was an extended form of procrastination: the system I built over the summer and used through the fall was adequate, but I wanted to clean a few things up, and then, well, I might ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
From Elizabeth Keogh:
When you do the same thing again and again, and expect a different result, that's insanity.
When you do the same thing again and again, and get a different result, that's stateful programming.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
Amateurs playing chess think in terms of positions; sharks care more about combinations of moves. Amateurs think, "I'm going to build a pawn wall, get my bishops onto good squares, and castle so that my kind is somewhere safe." Sharks think, "I'm going to advance this pawn so ...
Posted in Research | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
Bruce Schneier, on revelations that President
Bush authorized the NSA to engage in domestic spying:
Any debate over laws is predicated on the belief that the
executive branch will follow the law.
Vladimir Bukovsky (who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons for human
rights activities), on the ineffectiveness of torture:
...why would democratically elected leaders of ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »