Archive for December, 2006
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Pursuant1 to last week's post on making tickets simpler to work with in DrProject, I'm now wondering whether the real problem isn't the number of fields, but the fact that the only way to file a ticket is through a web browser. If you're grinding away in Eclipse (or ...
Posted in DrProject | 2 Comments »
Saturday, December 16th, 2006
Here's a draft proposal for modifying DrProject's ticketing system based on feedback from the post-mortem:
State is simply "open" or "closed", and becomes implicit: the buttons to update a ticket are labeled "Preview", "Update", and "Close".
Tickets can be assigned to roles, as well as to specific users, so that if an ...
Posted in DrProject | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Adam Goucher has answers.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
This, via Bruce Schneier: for US$250, you can build a device that will electronically track anyone using Nike's latest toy-for-rich-people.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
A list of videos has been posted on the Google Research blog. Lots of good stuff here, including "How to Survive a Robot Uprising", and Bil Lewis on reversible debuggers.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 11th, 2006
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock's latest column in IEEE Software is titled "Explaining Your Design". She posits a hierarchy of importance in explanation:
things you can't change
problem description and requirements
things (entities)
organizing structures
the typical case
concrete examples
design principles
She also talks about the importance of story lines in explanations. It's thought-provoking, particularly as ...
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Monday, December 11th, 2006
I recently started using Thunderbird as an email client, and while I like its interface, I'm not happy with its address book. In particular, you can only save two email addresses per person (I have five right now, and many of my students have three or four), its tabbed display ...
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Monday, December 11th, 2006
As I mentioned earlier, I've put the review queue online. The latest additions are:
Brian: Berkeley DB XML (Apress)
Cockburn: Agile Software Development (Addison-Wesley)
Cohoon & Aspray (ed): Women and Information Technology (MIT Press)
Johnson: RSS and Atom in Action (Manning)
Langville & Meyer: Google's PageRank and Beyond (Princeton University Press)
Ramm, Dangoor, & Sayfan: ...
Posted in Books | No Comments »
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
We held a post mortem on this term's projects Friday before going out to dinner. I took away three major points:
We have to simplify the ticketing interface in DrProject, so that people will use it even in very small groups. One suggestion is to make it more like Basecamp's to-do ...
Posted in DrProject, Teaching | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 8th, 2006
It's official: Jon Udell (the John McPhee of the Internet) is joining Microsoft. Why? Because, "This isn't your father's---or maybe your older brother's or sister's -- Microsoft. Initiatives like [several he describes] matter, they're solidly in line with my own agenda, they're being pursued in very open ways, and I ...
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