Web 2.1 Has Arrived!
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006This, via Mike Gunderloy's always-informative Daily Grind. "There is nothing but that Man may turn it to evil purposes..."
Archive for April, 2006
This, via Mike Gunderloy's always-informative Daily Grind. "There is nothing but that Man may turn it to evil purposes..."
Making Money from Better Software
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006Two interesting business models for people who want to make money from open source software: Coverity is using its static analysis tools to look for defects in widely-used open source packages. Their current report makes for interesting reading; equally interesting is the way that some communities (such as AMANDA) have ...
Zipf’s Law of Feedback
Monday, April 17th, 2006Zipf's Law says that frequency is inversely proportional to rank, i.e., the second most common word in a large body of text will occur half as many times as the most common. I have observed an even steeper curve for Software Carpentry feedback: of the 336 corrections I've received, ...
Summer of Code 2006
Monday, April 17th, 2006Yes, it's back: Google's Summer of Code is going to give students grants to work full-time on open source projects this summer. You can start applying on May 1. Two U of T students got grants last year; I hope to see at least as many get them ...
DrProject Screencast
Sunday, April 16th, 2006Our first screencast of DrProject is now available for viewing. Thanks to Igor Foox, Pat Smith, and Greg Lapouchnian for putting it together, and to Wink's creators for making such a useful tool.
Bobet on Tushingham
Sunday, April 16th, 2006Leah Bobet (a Toronto-area writer) has posted a lengthy summary of the Mark Tushingham case. For non-Canadian readers, he's a scientist with Environment Canada who was ordered by our new Conservative government not to speak about the science behind his new science fiction novel. Please, contact your MP and gripe ...
Brian Hayes is Blogging
Saturday, April 15th, 2006Brian Hayes' column in American Scientist is almost always my favorite part of the magazine. He now has a blog at http://bit-player.org/, which I recommend highly. I don't know anyone else who writes popular computer science this well, at this level---if you do, I'd be grateful for a ...
2006 Int’l Collegiate Programming Contest Results
Friday, April 14th, 2006The final standings in the 2006 ACM-ICPC, held in San Antonio, Texas, have been announced: 1 Saratov State University Russia 6 917 2 Jagiellonian University - Krakow Poland 6 1258 3 Altai State Technical University Russia 5 681 4 University of Twente Netherlands 5 744 5 Shanghai Jiao Tong University China 5 766 6 St. Petersburg State University Russia 5 815 7 Warsaw University Poland 5 820 8 Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States 5 831 9 Moscow State University Russia 5 870 10 Ufa State Technical University of Aviation Russia 5 980 11 University of Alberta Canada 4 479 12 University of Waterloo Canada 4 636 You can take a ...
StickyMinds Part Deux
Friday, April 14th, 2006The second part of a StickyMinds article on Data Crunching is now on-line (the first part went up in February).
Python 3000: What To Leave Out?
Friday, April 14th, 2006Discussion about Python 3000 is heating up. What I haven't seen so far is a list of things that will be dropped from the language to make room for new ideas. Back quotes? Don't think anyone will miss those. Tuples? If the language acquires a generic ...