Archive for July, 2006

An Editor for Editors

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

This, via Paul Gries, is interesting: some human editors of the book and magazine kind have put together a wishlist for an editor of the computer kind, and are hoping someone out there in programming land will build it for them.  It's much less formal than the design competition idea ...

Book Review: Time Management for System Administrators

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Anyone who's ever had to keep a couple of hundred machines running, and a couple of hundred users from melting down, knows just how hard it is to avoid thrashing. Tom Limoncelli's book is a hard-knocks guide to avoiding or ignoring interruptions, building good habits (so that the right ...

It’s Hard to Pick Winners When Anyone Can Play

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

This piece from the always-informative ProgrammableWeb.com is thought-provoking.  Everyone is watching Google and Yahoo, but maybe Amazon or eBay will wind up being the main provider of application development infrastructure for the web.  After all, General Motors is now one of the world's biggest providers of financial services...

Worms for Fishes

Monday, July 24th, 2006

Nepenthes is a piece of software that emulates known holes in other applications, then captures malware that tries to exploit those vulnerabilities.  (The name is the Latin designation for pitcher plants.)  As Bruce Schneier says, it's an interesting idea for a research project.

Games Are Drugs

Monday, July 24th, 2006

This from DanC, which in turn references a New Scientist article.  It explains so much... ;-)

Iron Science Teacher

Friday, July 21st, 2006

Kewl.

The Neanderthal Genome

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

150 years after the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossil, scientists are going to sequence the Neanderthal genome. Toffler's Law ("The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order") strikes again...

DemoCamp8 is Tuesday, July 25

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Late breaking news: DemoCamp8 is this coming Tuesday, July 25, at No Regrets (42 Mowat Ave, near King and Dufferin), from 6:30-8:00 p.m. Demos include: WildApricot FileMobile Languify (a Nuvvo/CSC494 collaboration) and Pursudo There's still one slot free if anyone's feeling adventurous ;-)

The Parallel Tools Platform

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

The Parallel Tools Platform is an open source extension to Eclipse for writing, running, and debugging large parallel programs. This tutorial gives an overview of what it can do (with lots of pretty pictures); this article from CiSE goes into more detail. The lack of decent development tools ...

IT Conversations: Derek Powazek

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Derek Powazek's Design for Community was a very thought-provoking book; many of the ideas in DrProject had their origins in it (the rest came from Jon Udell's Practical Internet Groupware, and from SourceForge).  There's now a recording of a presentation he gave in March on the web; it's a little ...