Archive for August, 2006
Thursday, August 31st, 2006
Step 2: Build a schedule. Most students have never had to do this, so for some, it's the most valuable part of the course. In order to explain how to go about it, I need to describe two important roles in real software projects: the product manager, and ...
Posted in Student Projects | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
Another batch of CSC49X projects are due to start next week, so this seems like a good time to fulfil the promise I made two years ago to write up how the course is run, and why. (For readers outside U of T, CSC494/495 is a term-long project course, in ...
Posted in Student Projects | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
The third-bit.com home page now displays an up-to-date map showing where everyone who's ever taken part in one our projects was born. I'm a little unsure about the placement of some of the dots (especially in Ukraine and China); corrections would be welcome.
As you can probably tell, I went with ...
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Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
A screencast for the online marking tool (built using TurboGears and AJAX) is now up. It's a very cool tool --- I'm really looking forward to seeing how students and TAs react. I've also relocated the DrProject screencast to the department's server in order to reduce the load ...
Posted in Student Projects | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
This tag cloud view of a database, and these pictures of various aspects of .Net, are cool, but remind me yet again how frustrating it is that programmers will build programs for other people that use high-quality graphics, but not use those same capabilities in their own tools.
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Monday, August 28th, 2006
We did post-mortems for the summer projects last week and the week before, and I'm reading Derby and Larsen's Agile Retrospectives, so this piece was quite timely --- I'll use it as an example in class. (Via Mike Gunderloy, again.)
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 28th, 2006
The No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium is coming to Toronto. For US$775, you can go and hear bright people preach the agile Java gospel (and more). Lots of good stuff; it's a shame the price tag puts it out of students' reach.
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Monday, August 28th, 2006
(New material at the bottom.)
Another day, another reason to regret buying a Mac. Here are the stats so far:
Weeks I've owned my MacBook Pro: 16
Average number of times it bluescreens per day: 1.6 (8 in the last 5 days). Note that the screen doesn't actually turn blue; instead, ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Monday, August 28th, 2006
The 2007 edition of the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference will be held in Montreal on January 18-20. Their blog is live, and they already have some good speakers lined up. If you're a student looking to make connections, this would be a good place to start.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 25th, 2006
A nice piece by Peter Kassan in The Skeptic about AI's ongoing failure to deliver. He simplifies a bit, and there are counter-arguments, and no, I don't agree with Roger Penrose that quantum gravity and microtubules in the brain are somehow essential to intelligence (at least, that's what I think ...
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