Archive for March, 2007

Internet Self-Publishing as a Mirror for our Species

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

I gave a short talk on non-academic publishing to grad students in the Computer Science department a week ago, and one of them asked me about self-publishing. In the past, companies that did this were called "vanity presses", because in most cases what they printed was material that no other ...

Gibson’s Law and Software Engineering

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

I'm giving a talk tomorrow at the University of Toronto titled "Gibson's Law and Software Engineering".  PowerPoint and PDF are both now online, for those of you who can't make it.  (Is this what they call "ego-blogging"? ;-))

Finding Python Security Holes for GalCon

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

I'm (still) in love with GalCon, a five-minute real-time strategy game that's surprisingly addictive.  Its author, Phil Hassey, would like to provide a plugin API so that users can write bots (in Python).  He has posted a strawman proposal, and would appreciate feedback --- he'd prefer if comments about it ...

SciPy’07 Dates Announced

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

According to www.scipy.org, The SciPy 2007 Conference will be on August 16-17 this year; tutorials and sprints will run on the 14th, 15th, and 18th.  I won't be able to attend (new baby), but I'd like to organize a half-day or one-day session to update and extend the Software Carpentry ...

How to Be a Good Summer of Code Mentor

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Lots of people are linking to this post by Federico Mena-Quintero --- it's a very useful set of guidelines, and I hope lots of people will give it a try.

Reproducibility of Computational Results

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

Via Titus Brown, a link to the Insight Journal, an open access online publication covering medical image processing. They have a very interesting process requirement: your source code must compile & be verifiable by an automatic system. I've been expecting something like this for a long time; glad to ...

Beautiful Code

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

Well, the feline has apparently been debagged: in his keynote at SIGCSE 2007 on Friday, Grady Booch mentioned the book that Andy Oram and I are putting together for O'Reilly. It's called Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think, and contains essays by more than thirty great software developers ...

We Also Need a Small Plastic Snake…

Friday, March 9th, 2007

The Speech Accent Archive is a very cool idea: audio recordings of a single short passage being read by people from all over the world.  Nice test for speech recognition software, but, um, I wanna know who wrote the text they're using...

Our Sean Is Famous

Friday, March 9th, 2007

A Japanese TV show did a spot on LinkedIn, and it included an interview with our very own Sean Dawson.  W00t!

Café Scientifique

Friday, March 9th, 2007

I just discovered Café Scientifique --- if I didn't have a ton o' baby stuff to buy this weekend, I'd head down to the Rivoli on Saturday to check it out.