Archive for August, 2006

Chris Lenz on Django

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

Chris Lenz has been a major contributor to Trac, and spent a month working on DrProject for us earlier this year.  His post in the wake of Guido's endorsement of Django is a thoughtful look at the framework's strengths and weaknesses.

Revised List of Project Students

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

I've updated my roster of project students (appears below the divide): 116 students, of whom 28 have done two projects. I still need to update my map, though, and I don't have birthplaces for the following people: Lillian Angel Daniel Charles Jim Clarke Victor Glazer John Greene Robert Liu Jason Nolan Andrey Petrov David Scannell Jane Shen Thuan Ta Details would be ...

Rome In Its Later Days

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

A survey of 32 European countries, the US, and Japan, reveals that the only people less willing to believe in evolution than Americans are those living in Turkey: I'm surprised no one has cast this as a national security issue. America isn't the world's only superpower because its soldiers are braver ...

BarCamp Earth in Toronto

Friday, August 18th, 2006

BarCamp Earth is a simultaneous compendium of Barcamps around the world to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the first-ever BarCamp taking place August 25-27.  Local editions will be held in Toronto, Waterloo, and Sudbury (and I still sometimes feel a pang that Vancouver isn't local).  There are only 70 spaces ...

When I Rule the World #173: Google’s Summer of Code

Friday, August 18th, 2006

The second edition of Google's Summer of Code is winding down, so I figured it'd be a good time to post my (unsolicited ;-)) thoughts on what they should do next time around. Here are my starting points: The world will be a better place if everyone studying software engineering ...

Oh My God It’s Django!

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

Guido just pronounced: Django is the web framework Won't be part of the core, but will be as "standard" as PIL or NumPy This was not what I expected the outcome of my talk would be, but hey, I'll take it ;-) He hopes that Django and TurboGears will converge Eric Jones: Enthought Tool ...

SciPy’06: First Morning

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

Guido van Rossum's Keynote Python 2.5 coming Real Soon (Sept 12) Python 3000 is a brand-new revision of the language Name chosen as a dig at Windows 2000, and so that it couldn't possibly be late Fix design bugs dating from 1990-91 + get rid of deprecated features First time Guido has allowed himself to ...

Ambient Tech Talks

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Ambient Vector has started a series of tech talks.  Their first guest was Nick Koudas, from U of T.  May seem like a small thing, but there haven't been as many ties between the university and local software companies (other than giants like IBM) as there ought to be --- ...

The Trouble With Normal

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

We were listening to Bruce Cockburn on the way up to the cottage last Friday.  "Lovers in a Dangerous Time", "Rumors of Glory", "Wondering Where the Lions Are", and so many others are gorgeous, but the line that stuck in my head was, "The trouble with normal is it always ...

SciPy and Software Carpentry

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

I'm flying down to CalTech this evening to give a talk on Software Carpentry at SciPy'06. There's been a fair bit of traffic on the web site in the last couple of weeks, and I'm looking forward to hearing how else we can help scientists and engineers become more ...