Archive for March, 2006
Friday, March 24th, 2006
These links accumulated while I was in Peru:
Why I Hate Frameworks, from the Joel on Software discussion group. Funny, but am I the only one who found the casual reference to killing ex-girlfriends with hammers disturbing? The proportion of women going into most CS programs is still declining, ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006
Update: Previously, I discussed some of the issues we encountered by switching to Kid for our templating framework. While Kid was much nicer to work with, we were surprised at how slow it was. Chris Lenz, however, corrected me by pointing out that inserting XML fragments into ...
Posted in DrProject | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006
This article, by Sun's Bart Smaalders, describes ten common performance mistakes software developers make. One example:
During Solaris 10 development, Solaris engineers fixed a long list of performance problems across the kernel and user libraries. Toward the end of the release, [they] spent some time reviewing just what had been improved ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006
The official Python web site finally has a new 21st Century look. Guess that means I'll have to update Third Bit some time soon ;-)
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 6th, 2006
This article, via Joey deVilla (again), explains the "new new rules":
More features isn't better, it's worse.
You can't make things easier by adding to them.
Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
Style matters.
Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 6th, 2006
The lecture on server-side programming is up: if you think it should be split into two parts, please let me know. That leaves only three to go (XML, security, and integration).
And by this time on Thursday, we'll be in Lima, Peru...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »
Monday, March 6th, 2006
This diagram from Joey de Villa is the best explanation I've seen yet of the differences between Web 1.0 and 2.0:
Web 1.0
Web 2.0
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 5th, 2006
I just discovered the Lost Garden site, via this article on a notation for describing game play. Worth adding to your blog roll; worth asking if there's a similar notation waiting to be invented to describe user interactions with standard desktop GUIs.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, March 5th, 2006
You don't often get to glimpse the future, and when you do, you usually don't realize what you've seen until it's too late to take advantage of it. Take the World Wide Web, for example: I saw a demo of an early version of the Mosaic browser in 1993, ...
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 5th, 2006
We'd like to add some simple time-series charts to DrProject. We've played with matplotlib (server-side Python, a pain to install) and XML/SWF Flash charts (can't handle irregularly-spaced data, not open source, requires Flash); and I'm wondering: are there any libraries out there to do this in Javascript? Our ...
Posted in DrProject | 1 Comment »