Archive for November, 2006
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
Every couple of years, I indulge in a bit of sympathetic magic by putting together a list of books I want someone to write, so that I can review them. If nothing else, doing this helps me figure out what I currently think is and isn't important in our ...
Posted in Books | 4 Comments »
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
Two of my students (Billy Chun and Darren Jung) spent the term writing a plugin for Blackboard, the Java-based learning management system (LMS) that the University of Toronto is moving to. Here are there experiences:
Billy Chun:
When first attempting to develop a 'Hello World' plug-in for Blackboard, I needed to ...
Posted in Student Projects | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
The November 2006 issue of Computing in Science and Engineering includes an article I wrote titled "Software Carpentry: Getting Scientists to Write Better Code by making Them More Productive". It's available to subscribers only on the magazine's web site, but they have kindly given me permission to post it ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
TechCrunch recently profiled Presto, which allows people who don't have Internet access to receive photos and email. (Special printer plugs into phone line; people with 'net access email yourname@presto.com; printer prints.) It reinforces a theme I've been hitting in class with increasing regularity: the fastest-growing market in the ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, November 27th, 2006
Psiphon has made the news again --- this time at O'Reilly. Yay!
Posted in Student Projects | No Comments »
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
Brian Hayes (author of Infrastructure, and of many fine articles in American Scientist) reports that National Public Radio is launching a new series on the "industriosphere", which you can listen to online.
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Saturday, November 25th, 2006
And now, DrProject's email. This was the first completely new subsystem we added after we forked; running Mailman in parallel with Trac worked well enough while we were bootstrapping, but the fact that neither system knew about the other made both a pain to use. We couldn't, for example, ...
Posted in DrProject, Teaching | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
A handful of early bloggers are calling DemoCamp 11 a "failure". I'm not sure why: I thought it had more interesting content than 9 and 10. The lead-off, AutoSSL, was an interesting idea (auto-provision of SSL certificates to small devices in the home, like security cameras); there was too much ...
Posted in DemoCamp | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 20th, 2006
Week 11, and most of the projects for next term have been lined up. Here's the current road map:
The Online Marking tool, which gives TAs the ability to mark up student code on the web. This is now being used in a couple of courses, and there was lots ...
Posted in Student Projects | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 19th, 2006
We discovered late last week that a team at TUCOWS is using DrProject. That got me wondering who else had downloaded it, so I trawled through some Apache server logs and came up with 56 distinct hosts in Canada, Japan, China, Taiwan, and the United States, including:
University of Karlsruhe
Queen's University
JPL
Thomas ...
Posted in DrProject | No Comments »