Archive for February, 2007

A Review of a Book That Should Be Read Much More Widely Than It Will Be

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

Here are two facts: This may be the most important book I've ever reviewed. Most of you will never read it. In fact, as soon as I tell you what it's about, most of you will move on to the next article, because you're tired of hearing about the topic it ...

Next: Cylons

Saturday, February 24th, 2007

Very cool post from Carl Zimmer describing experiments to breed communicating robots.  Like a lot of stuff in AI, it's kind of cooked, but it would still be a lot of fun to work on...

Hiring the Wrong Person

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

I keep telling my students that an interview is not just a chance for them to figure out if they want to hire you: it's also a chance for you to figure out if you want to work for them.  Russ Olsen's "Five ways to hire the wrong person" is ...

OpenID Screencast

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Still thinking about adding OpenID support to DrProject --- might even be a good Google Summer of Code project ;-)  This screencast from Simon Willison is very compelling...

Four-Parter on Building in Quality

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

Good four-part blog series about building in quality: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Would You Like a Little Music, Dave?

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

This report from Microsoft Research is cool: it describes software that combines physiological data from its users with playlist metadata to decide what songs to play.

Database Schema to Support Customizable/Extensible Application

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

We want to redesign the ticketing system of DrProject so that different sites can customize it to meet their needs.  Students in undergrad courses just need an ordered to-do list; companies need all the fields we currently have (with a few more values for some of the enumerations), and one ...

Bitten Again

Monday, February 19th, 2007

I'm helping to edit a book for O'Reilly, and we're keeping details on contributors, and the status of their chapters, in a little SQLite database.  The database file is kept under version control, since everything should be; unfortunately, Subversion doesn't know how to diff or merge concurrent changes.  I've griped ...

Titus Brown’s “Not in the Syllabus”

Friday, February 16th, 2007

Titus Brown is designing a course on test-driven web development. Very exciting --- I'm sure he'd welcome your input ;-)

Summer of Code 2007

Friday, February 16th, 2007

The announcement is out for Google's Summer of Code 2007. This is a great opportunity for both students and open source organizations; hope we see lots of applicants from the University of Toronto.