Archive for October, 2006
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
From the latest Nature (Vol 443, No 7114, p 1013):
When a new, independent code is used for the calculations on which the conclusions of this Letter were based, the results reported for the evolution of obliquity cannot be reproduced. This code was written in the inertial frame and is ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 30th, 2006
There is an idealized view of academic research in which that research takes greater risks than industry, plans for the longer term, and is less concerned with the commercial success of a research effort than in the intellectual content of the research. On this view, academic research can take a ...
Posted in Research, Teaching | No Comments »
Monday, October 30th, 2006
I don't bother with Wired much any more, but this piece titled "Build a Better Voting Machine" is great. Berkeley's David Wagner and Princeton's Ed Felten (who used to write computer chess programs, many years ago) have looked at what's wrong with today's machines, and described a better one. I'm ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, October 30th, 2006
I promised in the last article to move on to DrProject's ticketing system, but there are still a couple of issues around its wiki that need further description. The first is how wiki text is transformed into HTML; the second is why this is harder to do in batch ...
Posted in DrProject, Teaching | 1 Comment »
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
The previous article in this series introduced a simple security model based on authentication, authorization, and access control, then described how DrProject implements the first of these. That still leaves two important pieces, though: how to represent who's allowed to do what, and how to enforce those rules.
The key ...
Posted in DrProject, Teaching | 4 Comments »
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
Adam Goucher is the best tester I've ever worked with. He is now teaching an introductory course in Toronto called "QA 101", which includes discussion of how to automate routine setup and testing with Python.
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2006
Last time around, I described the architecture of a very simple wiki system that stored pages, along with their histories and meta-data, in a database, and let users view and edit those pages over the web. In an ideal world, the next step would be to add either a ...
Posted in DrProject, Teaching | 4 Comments »
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Victor Ng's company, MonkeyBean, builds web tools for adventure travel companies. They have a video up on YouTube that's kind of fun --- especially if you like retread 70s TV theme music ;-)
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Pat Smith (ex-49X) was the official photographer at last night's undergraduate awards ceremony. Maria Khomenko and Jonathan Lung were among the recipients --- very pleased to see them recognized.
Posted in Student Projects, Teaching | No Comments »
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
A German version of my article "Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?" has just appeared in Spektrum magazine. Pay-per-view, unfortunately, but the Software Carpentry site has had a flurry of hits from .de domains.
Dec 1: I just received my copy in the mail---I sound so much...sterner...in German ;-)
Gregory ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »