Archive for December, 2005

Executive Version of Software Carpentry Course

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

I'll be teaching a shortened version of the Software Carpentry course at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Software Engineering in Toronto early next year. For more information, or if you are interested in taking part, please see the IASSE's web site. The dates are: January 16-20: one lecture ...

Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

Grain of salt and all, but this is an interesting trend indicator. What really made me gnash my teeth was the discovery that some Pythoneers are responding by building still more web frameworks for Python, instead of throwing their weight behind---well, OK, it's not clear what they would throw ...

Teaching Computer Science in 2006

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

I have accepted a half-time teaching position in the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto for 2006. As well as teaching some regular courses, I plan to supervise some undergraduate programming projects1 and work on DrProject and Software Carpentry. [1] Which means that I'm looking for CS ...

Perforce to Support DrProject Development

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

We are very pleased to announce that Perforce Software Inc. is contributing CDN$12,000 toward the further development of DrProject. Founded in 1995, Perforce is known for its fast software configuration management system, which is used by over 170,000 developers at 3500 organizations worldwide. According to Christopher Seiwald, founder ...

Science is Beautiful

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

I've never understood people who find science cold or threatening---not when it comes up with things like this. To quote Primo Levi, "What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism."

Guidance on Running Undergraduate Software Projects

Monday, December 5th, 2005

As regular readers know, I supervise senior undergraduate software engineering projects on a semi-regular basis at the University of Toronto. I keep thinking that someone must have written something for students (and supervisors) explaining how to do this, but every time I've gone looking, I've come away dissatisfied. ...

Reversing and Podcasting

Monday, December 5th, 2005

Want to know why I'm a programmer? Because everyone in my family is good with their hands except me. My siblings are a goldsmith, an occupational therapist, and an industrial designer; my dad built a house around us as we were growing up; and if you gave my ...

One Useful Book, and One Less So

Monday, December 5th, 2005

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then usefulness must be in the hand of the... of the... Hm. I bet that if I could come up with the right noun, that saying would catch on. Anyway: if you're involved in open source software in any way, shape, ...

How Do You Want to See Source Code?

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

I ran a post-mortem for this term's run of the Software Carpentry course on Monday. Students gave me a lot of useful feedback, which I'll post as soon as I find my notes ;-). One comment that's got me thinking was about the way sample programs are presented ...