Archive for January, 2007

CS Games 2007

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

CS Games are an inter-university competition involving Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Software Engineering students from across North America. As their site says: For an entire weekend, you will be challenged both individually ...

Jeremy Miller on the Anti-Team

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Funny post. Until you've been there.

Links for Breakfast

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

The Project Horseshoe report on "Building Innovative Games that Sell" is out. Conicidentally, so is Joel Spolsky's review of Dreaming in Code, which is meant to be a Soul of a New Machine for the early 21st Century.

Many Ways to Break

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

One of the driving forces behind DrProject was instructors' need for a scripting API to support batch operations (such as creating one repository for each pair of students in a course, or filing the same ticket against each team). We have mostly succeeded, but as we discovered last week, ...

Jolt Finalists

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

This year's Jolt award finalists are up. I've read nine of the fifteen books, but recognzie less than 20% of the names of the products... Must be getting old...

Debugging Trick

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

A neat trick when debugging: give the object a unique ID (to avoid confusion if it's relocated by the garbage collector in a way that changes its address), then break on that ID.  I really, really want someone to write a good book on debuggers.

Threading Maturity Model

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Two good posts calling for a Threading Maturity Model and Personal Threading Maturity Model respectively.

Udell on use experience vs. user experience

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Another great post from Jon Udell, this time calling on developers to worry about use experience before user experience.  Coincidentally, I was trying to explain a couple of days ago to a senior figure in a publishing firm why I hadn't reviewed any of their books recently.  "I find out ...

Adam Goucher’s QA101

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Adam Goucher has put the notes for his QA 101 course on the web.  Thanks, Adam.

Four Reviews

Friday, January 19th, 2007

I have a confession to make: I fold down page corners when I'm reviewing technical books. Only technical books, mind---I'd never, ever do something like that to a novel. And yes, I've tried yellow sticky notes, bits of strings, and other mnemonic devices, but somehow, a folded corner ...