Archive for October, 2006

DemoCamp 10: Congratulations

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

DemoCamp 10 was held last night, and three of the five presentations were from U of T. Sana Tapal (now at Jonah Group) and Andrey Petrov led off with the Online Marking tool; Jonathan Lung (who was part of the student team that presented at DemoCamp 5) showed us ...

DrProject Internals: Setting the Stage

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

Over the past 18 months, students here at the University of Toronto have modified and enhanced an open source system called Trac to create DrProject, a classroom-friendly software project management portal that addresses the unique needs of undergraduate programming teams. With Version 1.2 of DrProject just a few days ...

And I Thought *I* Worried a Lot…

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

Anders Sandberg's "Warning Signs of Tomorrow" is funny. And frightening.:

Michelle Levesque on “Getting Hired at Google”

Friday, October 20th, 2006

This from a former 49X student who's now working at Google: Google hired me because of my extracurricular activities, not my grades.  Nothing impresses interviewers more than a student who takes an active role in the computer science community, so get involved in open-source projects, build your own website, do PEY, ...

The Baby Just Kicked!

Friday, October 20th, 2006

I am thrilled --- just thrilled --- to report that the baby just kicked Sadie in the squishy bits. There have been nudgings before, but this was the first unequivocal instance of "Goooooooaaaaaaaalllllllllll!!!!!!!" Today is the last day of week 18; we're due to ship on March 23.

Award Winners

Friday, October 20th, 2006

Several CSC49X students (past and present) are to be honored at the department's award ceremony next week: congratulations to Olga Vesselova, Maria Khomenko, Petcharat Viriyakattiyaporn, Jonathan Lung, and all the others students in our department who have done so well this past year.

Why Software Projects Are Always In Crisis

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Once you've gone mountain biking, i's hard to get excited about riding a kid's tricycle.  If you spend a lot of your time putting out fires, it's hard to get motivated to do things that aren't urgent.  Take today, for example: I owe three dozen people feedback on their outlines ...

The Last of September’s Reading

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

In the years leading up to the First World War, French military doctrine held that the élan of their troops---their superior fighting spirit---was guaranteed to win the day. Never mind the machine guns; what mattered most was courage. We all know what happened next. I was reminded of this history lesson ...

CSER, Privacy, Agility, and Games

Monday, October 16th, 2006

I spent Sunday at a workshop organized by the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER). The theme was "empirical software engineering", a subfield that has emerged since the late 1980s whose practitioners focus on studying and evaluating software development methods and tools in systematic, rigorous ways. I went there to ...

Barry Warsaw on debugging Python’s memory usage

Friday, October 13th, 2006

Barry has been part of the Python development team for yonks; this article is the first of two (or more) that describe how Python is supposed to manage memory, and how to find out what's actually going on. Good debugging tips for systems geeks...