Archive for September, 2006
Friday, September 29th, 2006
Another month, another pile of books---except that reading them never feels as onerous as that phrase makes it sound. Reading about new tools and techniques is to building software what watching a hockey game is to playing one; the older I get, the more comfortable I am letting the ...
Posted in Books | 2 Comments »
Thursday, September 28th, 2006
This Computer Weekly piece pointed me at a project that's studying immigration into open source projects. Interesting stuff: the curves are similar to the naked eye, so my next two questions would be:
What factors account for the differences between projects?
What do the curves look like when you divide the ...
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
DemoCamp 9, held two days ago, was the first that has disappointed me. Disappointment #1 was the demos themselves: ConceptShare's was great---I really want a chance to play with their stuff---and DictaBrain's voicemail-to-text was intriguing until we learned that the transcription is going to be done by typists in ...
Posted in DemoCamp, Equity | 23 Comments »
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
I should be writing, so I'm reading instead:
ProgrammableWeb now lists 1001 web service mashups. 46% involve mapping, mostly with Google Maps, which means that when Google goes into Chapter 11 and the sheriffs shut its servers down, almost 500 online applications will suddenly stop working. OK, it's unlikely to happen ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
I have committed at least nine of these mistakes.
In the last four weeks.
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Monday, September 25th, 2006
More evidence (an interactive map of New York movie clips, and Pluggd's audio search of podcasts) that manipulating non-text media online is the New Hot Thing. If you're graduating in a few months, take note and plan accordingly.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006
The ever-intriguing Jon Udell has just posted an explanation of how the use of a cryptographic database technique called translucency could address concerns about personal privacy. I reviewed Wayner's book on translucent databases for Doctor Dobb's Journal back in 2003; as Udell says, the techniques are "...as yet poorly understood ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, September 22nd, 2006
An extensive annotated list of testing tools for Python --- lots of useful links, including many I hadn't seen before.
Posted in Python | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
This post titled "Ruby vs. Python - why no-one should care" resonates. The argument is that the languages are similar enough that there's really nothing to choose between them, so stick with whichever you learn first. Now Erlang, on the other hand --- I've always wondered why there isn't ...
Posted in Python | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
This piece, from the Code Project, is titled "Visual Studio 2020", and purports to be about "...an even wilder Concept IDE". I actually found it very conservative: in particular, there doesn't seem to be any provision for the code-under-development to tell the IDE what to do, or how to do ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »