Iatrogenesis
Saturday, May 26th, 2007Iatrogenesis (n.): disease induced by a physician, as in this ironic development in China.
Archive for May, 2007
Iatrogenesis (n.): disease induced by a physician, as in this ironic development in China.
Teaching Software Architecture
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007Our department has had a fourth-year course called "CSC407: Software Architecture" for several years. I taught it for the first time last summer, and had a lot of trouble figuring out what to put in front of students. Design patterns and basic queueing theory were no-brainers, but everything ...
Useful Links
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007Another good rule for running meetings. A survey of image spam techniques. How to get your seven-week-old daughter to sleep.
Theory Prize
Monday, May 21st, 2007Congratulations to Alexander Razborov and Steven Rudich, winners of the 2007 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science for their 1994 paper Natural Proofs, which showed that there's no "Natural Proof" of the P vs. NP Problem (the most important open problem in theoretical computer science). For details, see Jon Erickson's ...
RailsConf: Plus Ca Change…
Saturday, May 19th, 2007RailsConf 2007 (a gathering of and for Ruby On Rails developers) is happening right now in Portland. Next-generation web frameworks, Web 2.0, blah blah blah --- all very exciting, but the gender ratio among speakers is 71 to 5 (6.5% female), and from the photos, all but one of ...
Arrrgghh *whimper* (or, PySqlite, Matplotlib, and paths)
Thursday, May 17th, 2007Muhammad Ali and Adam Foster prototyped a dashboard display for DrProject as a term project this winter. It collects information on the number of tickets in various states, and the number of check-ins, then uses Matplotlib to construct time-series charts. It's pretty cool, so Ali agreed to spend a week ...
Humor (Ruby On Rails ads)
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007These are funny: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 should be coming soon.
Update to Summer Roster
Saturday, May 12th, 2007I'm pleased to announce that we're adding one more student to this summer's team. Tony Balkissoon just finished an engineering degree at U of T; he has been very active on campus in efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur, and is heading to Harvard Law School in September. Thanks ...
Half Empty, Half Full
Saturday, May 12th, 2007Leslie Hawthorn posted some stats about female participation in Google's Summer of Code yesterday. It's a case of half-empty, half-full: only 4% of student participants are female, which is much less than the 28% often cited for the industry as a whole (based on data from the year 2000---I ...
Holding Steady
Saturday, May 12th, 2007Web site stats are fascinating (with a small 'f', anyway). Traffic to the Software Carpentry site was relatively stable in April, and looks to be on track for another good month in May: Meanwhile, this blog seems to have about 250 regular readers, scattered fairly widely across the globe; another 100-150 ...