Archive for June, 2006

The ACM’s Top 25

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

Between October 2005 and January 2006, the ACM polled its professional members, asking them to nominate and then vote for books they considered classics. The final list is: The Elements of Programming Style Classics in Software Engineering Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling Pascal User Manual and Report Computer and the Brain Selected Writings on ...

Congratulations to this year’s grads

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

Several 49X alumni and former members of the DrProject team have graduated from the University of Toronto in the past two weeks --- congratulations to you all. I'd especially like to congratulate Sean Dawson, who received the Silver Medal from St. Michael's College today --- well done, Sean.

Donors Choose

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

Back in the day, there were bumper stickers saying, "It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers." Well, the web might move us a little closer to that. DonorsChoose matches teachers ...

Spring is Here

Wednesday, June 21st, 2006

Pat Smith and Greg Lapouchnian (both former 49X project students) have written a two-part article on the Spring framework for Red Hat Magazine. The first part is now up on the web---congrats, guys.

Reviews: Refactoring Databases and Information Dashboard Design

Wednesday, June 21st, 2006

Most modern desktop and web applications are based on a three-part design pattern called Model-View-Controller, or MVC. As their names suggest, the two books reviewed here tackle the first and second parts of this paradigm, leaving the third---the business logic---to others. Ambler and Sadalage's Refactoring Databases delivers exactly what you'd ...

As We Near 1.0…

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

...here's a belated photo of the DrProject team from last summer. One is in grad school, two are headed to Microsoft, one and a half are in England, and the last is working for me again this summer.

Agility and Romanticism

Monday, June 19th, 2006

According to Wikipedia, Romanticism was "...a secular and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. It...was in part inspired by a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the previous period, as well as a reaction against the rationalization of nature ...

TUCOWS job fair this Saturday

Monday, June 19th, 2006

TUCOWS is holding a job fair this Saturday (June 24) at their Toronto office.  Cool company doing cool things, looking for talented developers at all levels --- what's not to like?

DemoCamp 7 will be on Tuesday, July 4

Monday, June 19th, 2006

DemoCamp7 will be held on Tuesday, July 4, rather than June 27. The venue has yet to be determined, but Perl hacker extraordinaire Damian Conway will be there. Damian will also be speaking in Room 1180 of U of T's Bahen Centre for Information Technology the following evening ...

GNOME WSOP

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

Regular readers will know how disappointed I am that the gender imbalance in open source is even worse than it is in computing as a whole. I'm therefore very pleased that GNOME has announced a Women's Summer Outreach Program: three women will be given US$3000 to work on two-month ...