Archive for March, 2006
Friday, March 31st, 2006
It's time to start thinking about what to add to DrProject this summer. Please vote for any two of the following; I'll collate and re-post.
web-based administration interface
user-oriented pages
status dashboard
manual RSS feeds
continuous integration
pluggable authentication
web services
shared bookmarks
calendaring
1. Web-Based Administration Interface
Instructors and TAs should be able to do simple things (like add a ...
Posted in DrProject | No Comments »
Thursday, March 30th, 2006
OK, I'm a little late hearing about this, but: there's a company in the States called SeaCode that thinks it's figured out how to get the cost-effectiveness of offshore programming without the management hassles of an eight-hour time difference. Their solution? Stick a bunch of programmers on a ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, March 30th, 2006
You can tell book publishers are feeling insecure because they're trying to sell us insecurity. O'Reilly books used to be called "Learning This" and "Programming That"; now, we have "Missing Manuals" (what does the geek in the cubicle next to yours know that you don't, and is it going ...
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 30th, 2006
I spent some time yesterday chatting with Koushik Sen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois whose work has been picking up prizes. Koushik's "concolic" technique combines concrete and symbolic evaluation: basically, he uses program analysis to identify paths through the code, then works backward to generate unit ...
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
I'm having trouble printing PNG images with (supposedly)
transparent backgrounds, and I'm hoping one of this blog's readers can
help. Here's one of the images from the Software Carpentry course:
[image not available]
If I open it with the Windows Photo Printing Wizard (on XP), it
shows up as dark blue lines on a ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
We've run into a rather annoying bug in DrProject. I've been keeping some brief notes in this ticket, but I'll try to organize my thoughts better here.
First, some background. DrProject is run as a cgi script under Apache and is backed by PostgreSQL. Every so often (almost daily), ...
Posted in DrProject | 2 Comments »
Monday, March 27th, 2006
Never mind telecoms, internet, and television; the real convergence story is the way that real and fictional worlds are becoming ever more closely intertwined: you will soon be able to earn points toward World of Warcraft gold on your credit card, and Creative Home Engineering will build a secret passage ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, March 27th, 2006
This article, from Jon Udell, describes how he used online services to highlight a section of trail that he'd cleared of trash. He sent the map, along with a letter, to his local newspaper, to encourage others to pick up where he left off. Things like this make ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, March 27th, 2006
New Scientist is featuring a story from Denmark that the appearance of photosynthetic life may have led to the formation of continents (or at least aided it). Sadly, two of the three Google Ads that came up when I viewed the page were selling creationist literature...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
A report from Microsoft Research called 2020 Science got a lot of press this week: Nature seems to think it's the biggest story of the year so far, and The Economist gave it three full columns. Sadly, amidst the gush about how computers are revolutionizing science, no one mentions ...
Posted in Research, Software Carpentry | No Comments »