Archive for June, 2007

ACM Student Research Competition

Friday, June 29th, 2007

Via Jim Clarke, a link to the ACM Student Research Competition. The deadline for submissions to Supercomputing'07 is the end of July, and others are posted regularly.  No sign of an RSS feed, though :-(.

Why This Site Is Sometimes Slow

Friday, June 29th, 2007

I have figured out why third-bit.com crawls from time to time: this blog is being inundated by a wave of comment spam.  I'm using the Akismet plugin to filter it (I delete several hundred to several thousand spam comments a day, unread), but filing them away to be rejected is ...

Girl Scouts Survey

Friday, June 29th, 2007

Girl Scouts of the USA 420 5th Avenue New York, NY 10018 V 212-852-5049 F 212-852-6515 rfarmer@girlscouts.org www.girlscouts.org What influenced you to pursue a career in information technology? What could we learn from you and other women working in IT that will increase the number of girls and women who are interested in the field? The K-12 ...

Richard Stallman Speaking at University of Toronto (Mississauga) on July 5

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Here's the official announcement [update: yes, it's open to the general public, and free]. Update: here's a map of UTM --- the Kaneff Centre is right in the middle.  World-renowned activist and free software developer Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, will speak on "Copyright vs. Community in the ...

Today

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Today I: Clicked the "submit" button on my first major grant application. Got my first copy of Beautiful Code (picture below). Sold a science fiction story to On Spec magazine. Finished [sic] rewriting the introduction to the first-year Python book we've been working on. Lost a game of chess (came out on the short end ...

Quinn’s argument: a swing and a mis

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

[Posted on behalf of Tony Balkissoon.] Making sound arguments is not like playing sports. In sports, everyone remembers the hero, the amazing play, the unbelievable shot. It doesn't matter how many times you miss, it's the one you make that counts. That's why everyone remembers Michael Jordan as ...

No OLPC for Cuba (or Syria, or…)

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Depressing post on Slashdot for a change --- US export restrictions may apply to the One Laptop Per Child program.

What Tools Do We Use?

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Another excellent post from Diomidis Spinellis, this one reporting a study of where CPU cycles are spent building software. On BSD, the four leaders are (in order): C++ compiler tar Perl C compiler

Interchangeable Parts

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective has been doing the rounds, so I might as well link to it as well. One can speculate for hours about whether it's genuine, or a very clever piece of agitprop.  (See also this piece from a while back...)

Two Studies of ASCI (and no, that’s not a typo)

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

After spending ten years helping scientists write programs for massively-parallel computers, I realized that what scientists really needed was to learn how to program, full stop. It took me another eight years to (a) get up to speed with the theory and practice of modern software engineering, (b) realize ...