Archive for August, 2006
Friday, August 25th, 2006
I just finished reorganizing my database of former project students, and now it looks like I have to re-jig the schema once again. The reason is that South Indians use a Unix-like path for personal names: village/father's-name/name. Thus, the "C." in "C. V. Raman" identifies a place, "V." identifies his ...
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Thursday, August 24th, 2006
More papers, most from the journal Computer Science Education (which has a lot of nebulous meta-meta content, but a few gems):
Gal-Ezer, Vilner, and Zur: "Teaching Algorithm Efficiency at CS1 Level". CSE, 14(), 2004. Describes a way to introduce big-O notation early: on each assignment, students are asked (a) what does ...
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Thursday, August 24th, 2006
The idea has been around for years: buy CPU cycles in bulk, just as you buy watts, and let someone else worry about how it all happens. Amazon's EC2 (reviewed here by Jon Udell, and here by TechCrunch) brings it one step closer to reality. How long before someone ...
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Thursday, August 24th, 2006
Two articles that help put squabbles over Python web programming frameworks (and just about everything else) into perspective:
Haroon Siddiqui's "The Muslim Malaise", from last weekend's star. The first couple of paragraphs almost made me throw it away; I'm glad I stuck with it to find what how a sensible, liberal, ...
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
The folks at Enthought (sponsors of SciPy) were kind enough to set up a Trac so that I could manage development of the Software Carpentry course. Unfortunately, spammers have figured out how to bomb Trac: over a dozen tickets relating to gay porn, online casinos, and the like have been ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
Another good article from Jon Udell, this one on debugging. As far as I can tell, the topic is wide open as a research area: if you want to do graduate work in systems, coming up with better ways to track down and repair problems would be a high-yield topic ...
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
I realize that not everyone is an evolution geek, but this is just wonderful: social behavior in spiders has been observed for the very first time.
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
In response to comments and emails over the last few days saying, "I don't know why you are so obsessed with having just one Python web framework --- different people have different needs, competition spurs everyone to do better, and anyway, the technical issues aren't settled enough yet to pick ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments »
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
I've been rationalizing my database of CSC49X project participants, and want to update the map that appears on this site's home page. I'm going to have to do this every three or four months, so I'd like a simple Python script that takes a bunch of latitudes and longitudes, and ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto will be hosting an industry showcase from 4-6 p.m. on Tuesday, September 5, to give local software companies doing leading-edge work a chance to show off what they're doing to incoming graduate students, build bridges, make connections, etc. Groups ...
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