Managing Kids in the Home Office
Friday, January 19th, 2007Yet another interesting and useful post from the prolific Mike Gunderloy.
Archive for January, 2007
Yet another interesting and useful post from the prolific Mike Gunderloy.
StreetKnit
Friday, January 19th, 2007Now that winter has finally arrived, the StreetKnit project needs you more than ever.
Structured Online Laboratory Notebooks
Thursday, January 18th, 2007I spent some time last week with a group of medical imaging researchers who manage their work with Excel. They explained that it's almost ideal for their needs, since they can use cells to organize their experimental results, diagrams, code snippets, and whatever else they like in whatever free-form manner ...
Software Carpentry Usage in December
Thursday, January 18th, 2007Visits to the Software Carpentry site were down quite a bit in December; I had expected a drop because of the holiday, but not this large. On the bright side, 47 students have signed up for the course at U of T this term; about 1/3 are from Computer Science, ...
Creating Tables in DrProject
Thursday, January 18th, 2007Courtesy of David Scannell, here's a quick rundown of how to create a new table in DrProject's database. (Yes, I know, we should convert to SQLObject or SQLAlchemy; if you have time to do the work, please let me know...) Suppose I want to create a table called Demo with ...
Schneier Explains How to Fix Insecure Software
Thursday, January 18th, 2007This short essay by Bruce Schneier is an excellent little summary of what has to be done to make software more secure. In the wake of this morning's announcement that systems at several major retail chains were hacked as far back as 2003, I'd really like elected officials and other ...
The Open Laboratory
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007Collections of essays have been around since Montaigne --- my copy of Orwell's is practically falling apart from repeated use. Collecting blog postings is a newer literary form, but as Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, and others have shown, it can be equally worthy. A new entry in this field is The ...
No Such Thing As One Program
Sunday, January 14th, 2007As Craig Andera observed last March, there's no such thing as "just one application". Every real program is surrounded by ancillary tools to pre- and post-process its data files, monitor its status, connect it to other programs, and so on. Six months after deploying DrProject in classrooms at ...
Pervasive Computing, Horror, and the Double Chin Effect
Saturday, January 13th, 2007The Fifth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (you know, the stuff that watches your every move?) is being held in Toronto this May. Funnily enough, the web ad for it also mentions that the 2007 World Horror Convention is being held at the same venue. Coincidence? We think not... And the ...
Never Mind the Web — Ruby is Winning the Book Wars
Saturday, January 13th, 2007Martin Fowler's Refactoring (which is on just about everyone's software engineering must-read list) is being translated from Java to Ruby. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a good Python design patterns book...