Archive for June, 2006
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
We are very pleased to announce that DrProject 1.0 RC1 is now available:
As a tarball: http://www.third-bit.com/drproject-1.0.tar.gz
Via Subversion: https://pyre.third-bit.com/svn/drproject/trunk
Questions and feedback: drproject@third-bit.com
Thanks to everyone who got us this far---we look forward to your feedback.
Posted in DrProject | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
Overnight links:
A New Scientist article reports: "...thenative language you speak may determine how your brain solves mathematical puzzles, according to a new study. Brain scans have revealed that Chinese speakers rely more on visual regions than English speakers when comparing numbers and doing sums." I wonder if it applies ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
Brian Hayes on "Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators" (with a side reference to "The Effects of Moore’s Law and Slacking on Large Computations").
Standpedia, a collaborative site for building a "social encyclopedia of belief". Basically, you can submit a question or belief, with some support, and then other people can agree or ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
I was pleasantly surprised a few years ago when programmers (particularly open source programmers) actually started writing unit tests. XP is usually given the lion's share of the credit, but I think that JUnit was the real reason: it was just enough structure to get people in, and had ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
Billy Chun has been investigating why DrProject is so slow (5.1 seconds per request). As regular readers will know, we're running it as a pure CGI: a new Python interpreter is forked for every request. The fork itself costs about half a second, and importing all the libraries ...
Posted in DrProject | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
This map of generic names for soft drinks is fascinating. I can understand why "Coke" is a generic name in the south, with "pop" predominating in the north, but why the four disconnected islands of "soda"? Do they represent the remnants of some earlier wave of migration that was overwhelmed ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, June 26th, 2006
We're edging up on DrProject 1.0's first release candidate --- 98% of our tickets are closed. If all goes well tomorrow and Wednesday, it should be available for trial on June 30, with the "real" release following a week or two later (depending on feedback). We still have ...
Posted in DrProject | 4 Comments »
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
Model-driven architecture, or MDA, is the latest darling of those who would have us program by describing our system at a high level in something other than code, then generate something runnable automatically. Ruby on Rails is an MVC web application development framework that favors convention over configuration: for example, ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
Thanks to the folks at Enthought, the Software Carpentry course notes have a new home at http://www.swc.scipy.org. I'll move the wiki, bug tracker, and mailing lists there over the next couple of days as well. I hope the community will find the material useful --- it's certainly been ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
Perforce certainly has a stellar reputation amongst software
developers; Perforce for real projects, and your choice of open source
version control system if you cannot afford to foot the Perforce bill.
This naturally leads to the idea that Perforce is for power users,
whereas systems like CVS or Subversion are for beginners. After ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »