Archive for February, 2006

Second Lecture on Object-Oriented Programming

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006

The second lecture on object-oriented programming is now on the web. This describes operator overloading and static methods, and includes the design patterns material that was in the old design lecture (which has been removed---the general consensus was that it didn't work). As always, comments are welcome.

DemoCamp: Googling for People

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006

People talk a lot about on-line communities, but there are things that only the in-person kind can accomplish. Take last night's DemoCamp 3, for example. Ninety-plus people crowded into TUCOW's offices in Toronto to watch half a dozen demos projected against a white-painted brick wall with a nail ...

DrProject: Switching to Kid

Monday, February 20th, 2006

Chris Lenz, Jason Montojo, and I began work on refactoring DrProject in early January. One of the first decisions we made was to replace the Clearsilver templating framework with Kid, an XML-based alternative. Now that the work is done, we've learned a few things about Kid that others might ...

AAAS Annual Meeting 2006

Monday, February 20th, 2006

Wednesday, 11:10 p.m.: phone call from Air Can'tada saying that my Thursday morning flight to St Louis has been cancelled because of bad weather. Next available is 4:00 p.m. Friday afternoon---two and a half hours after my workshop is due to end. No, they can't help me find ...

Reminder: DemoCamp3 in Toronto

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

From Joey deVilla, a reminder about DemoCamp3 in Toronto on Monday. (And from me, fatigue: Air Canada called at quarter after eleven last night to tell me that my flight to St Louis this morning was canceled. I found space with Delta, but thanks to a few tornadoes, ...

Two Links via the Accordion Guy

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

Two interesting links from Joey deVilla's TUCOWS blog: Ten Things a Web Developer Should Do for a Client Things Everyone in IT Should Know

Entry-Level Requirements Engineering Revisited

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

Try googling for "open source" "requirements engineering" or "open source" "requirements management". Lots of links, but nothing that leads to a mature (or even adolescent) open source requirements engineering tool that would help me keep track of: what I'm supposed to be building; where that requirement came from (i.e., who I ...

Data Lineage

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006

The January 2005 issue of ACM Computing Surveys (vol. 37, no. 1, if you prefer) has good review by Rajendra Bose and James Frew titled "Lineage Retrieval for Scientific Data Processing: A Survey". In it, they look at what scientists do to keep track of what data they have, ...

Lecture on Binary Data

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006

The Software Carpentry lecture on binary data is now up on the web. The content of this one has been fairly stable for a while, but that just means that all the bugs will be in the details---comments and corrections are greatly appreciated.

Reminder: Toronto DemoCamp 3 is Next Monday

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Toronto's DemoCamp 3 is next Monday (Feb 20). We'll be showing off DrProject; hope to see you all there.