Archive for March, 2007

Madeleine Erica Wilson

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Our first child, Madeleine Erica Wilson, came into the world at half past midnight on Saturday, March 31. She's a redhead, just like her mom, and has one, two, or ten of all appropriate body parts. We're very happy --- exhausted, but happy. May she love her ...

Pictures from the Competition

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Kwasi Kwakwa is a materials scientist who teaches computer-related subjects in Ghana.  He recently posted pictures from a programming contest, the eventual aim of which is to assemble a national team for the International Programming Olympiad.  It seems that every time I start to think that the web has done ...

Beautiful Code: Chapter by Chapter

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Beautiful Code now has a cover, and I can share the chapter summaries (below the cut). I'm very excited---hope to have hardcopy in a month or so.

Alex Martelli on Python Design Patterns

Monday, March 26th, 2007

Alex Martelli is now at Google; here's a video of him talking about design patterns in Python (notes available as PDF).  I'll post the second part when it appears.

Google Summer of Code: Participating Organizations

Monday, March 26th, 2007

As I was paging through the Google Summer of Code site this morning, I realized that I recognized less than half of the participating organizations. Ten minutes and twenty-five lines of Python later, I had all their descriptions in a single page for easier printing. (Note: it was only ...

Engineering Strategies & Practice Team Wins Award

Monday, March 26th, 2007

The team that put together the "Engineering Strategies & Practice" (ESP) course at U of T just won an award from the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. From the article: ESP is required for all first-year engineering students, except those enrolled in engineering science, and includes standard lectures ...

API Explorer

Monday, March 26th, 2007

If you wait long enough, someone will build an interactive front-end for anything.  DrJava, for example, comes with a little interpreter that lets users type in simple expressions to explore the state of their code, while the people building the software for the particle detectors in the next-generation collider at ...

New Software Engineering Courses at U of T

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Starting in September 2007, the University of Toronto will replace its current three-course sequence in software engineering with two new courses. The first, CSC301, will be suitable for students in all streams; the second will primarily target Software Engineering specialists, though we expect a significant number of students from ...

Toronto Area Security Klatch (TASK) Lightning Talks March 27

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

http://task.to/events/upcoming.php has all the details.  Some of these look very interesting; if you attend, and blog, please add a link.

Maybe We Deserve to Go Under

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

The Computer Science Graduate Student Benevolent Society (CSGSBS) has chosen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to show at movie night next week.  In response, not one, but two professors in our department have suggested that people also watch Martin Durkin's trash-science "documentary" The Great Global Warming Swindle.  If the most ...