Archive for April, 2006
Friday, April 28th, 2006
All the outstanding minor corrections to the Software Carpentry notes have now been made; there are still 21 diagrams outstanding, but they should be in by Sunday. My thanks to everyone who provided feedback---especially Adam Goucher and his very sharp eyes.
Posted in Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
I forwarded a link to an article called Unit Testers Get More Chicks to some friends; one immediately replied, "Because of course, they're all guys." Ironically, I was complaining in the pub last night about the skewed gender representation at Demo Camp. Oops.
Posted in Equity | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
These stats from Richard Zwicky's blog
at Metamend are interesting.
Why? Because Microsoft corporate headquarters is in 98052...
Searches originating from Zip Code 98052
Engine Used
Percentage of Traffic
...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
The University of Toronto hosted DemoCamp 5 last night. It went well: 143 people showed up, the Bell Kids Help Phone team gave a fault-free presentation, and the folks at Molly Bloom's took good care of us afterward (so good, in fact, that I'm going to let people who ...
Posted in DemoCamp | 10 Comments »
Monday, April 24th, 2006
Regular readers will know that one of my interests is entry-level modeling tools --- i.e., modeling tools that undergraduate students can learn in an hour or two, and that they will believe actually improve their productivity after using on just one assignment. I've come across two more candidates: Dependency ...
Posted in DrProject, Research | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 21st, 2006
...that Python's fragmented response to Ruby on Rails doesn't matter, or is even somehow a good thing, when you see these statistics: Python books sales this quarter are up 43% compared to last year, while Ruby's have grown a whopping seven times. I don't know what the absolute numbers ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »
Friday, April 21st, 2006
This, from Russ Olsen, via Mike Gunderloy, is a good summary. Making DrProject faster is one of our first goals for this summer---unfortunately, we don't teach performance optimization to our students. (Man, I wish Jon Bentley would update Writing Efficient Programs...)
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
I first heard the term "grand challenge" used in the 1980s to describe the kinds of big projects that would give an entire generation of scientists a focus for their work---something on the scale of putting a person on the moon, or sequencing the human genome. The phrase has ...
Posted in Research | 3 Comments »
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
Here are three
blog
postings
on the Information and Technology Cluster (ITC) presentation at MaRS last
night. Mayor David Miller opened; lots of suits were present; some interesting
claims were made. The report itself is also online:
http://www.toronto.ca/business/pdf/ict_toronto_final_report.pdf
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
These three articles from O'Reilly look at recent tech book sales, and what they indicate about technology trends.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »