Martha Stewart and Charles Simonyi???
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007OK, I'm a little sceptical, but the rest of this post about Sci Foo 2007 was fun...
Archive for August, 2007
OK, I'm a little sceptical, but the rest of this post about Sci Foo 2007 was fun...
How and Why We Draw Code
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007Interesting paper by Mauro Cherubini et al. looking at when and why software developers draw pictures. My takeaway is that for most "thinking" purposes, today's computer drawing tools impose overhead without adding value; it's only for "archival" purposes that it's worth cleaning up. I was very interested in ...
More “Beautiful Code” News
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007A lot happened while I was on holiday: RegDeveloper in the UK liked it. Jon Bentley gave a talk about Quicksort at Google (video online). He refers to BC as "a reasonably cool book", which I think it is a good description. We discovered that a PDF of the book is already available ...
Another Summer…
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007Tomorrow is our summer students' last day (and two are already gone). It's been a great few months: everyone was productive, and I think they all had fun, too. The post-mortem is tomorrow, followed by a barbecue (and possibly a few games of Speed Scrabble). Thanks, everyone --- it's been ...
49X Projects in the Wild
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007One of the goals of CSC494/495 (one of my goals, anyway) is to give students a chance to build software that people will actually use. It's therefore been very rewarding to watch the genome browser project grow over the last couple of years. The latest development is a paper in ...
Distributing Python Applications
Friday, August 10th, 2007Rudolf Olah has a nice short piece on packaging and distributing Python apps. Thanks to David Wolever for the pointer.
Facebook Developers’ Camp
Thursday, August 9th, 2007Joey DeVilla has a good report on the Facebook Developers' Camp recently held in Toronto; David Crow adds links to developer resources. I've started wondering whether next-generation software project portals will "just" be extensions to tools people use anyway; oh, to have more hours in the day...
Late Night Thoughts on Re-Reading Terry Pratchett
Thursday, August 9th, 2007I know this is supposed to be a technical blog, but having just re-read three of Pratchett's Discworld books, I feel compelled to share. He's always funny, and there's always a sting in the tail. My personal favorites are: Mort Wyrd Sisters Guards! Guards! Small Gods The Last Hero The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents Night ...
Interview Slashdotted
Thursday, August 9th, 2007The Beautiful Code interview has been Slashdotted --- thankfully, the link points to O'Reilly's server, not this one.
Help Help — My Soil Is Dry and I Can’t Germinate
Thursday, August 9th, 2007Botanicalls is a system that lets plants phone human beings when they need help. The plants, that is, not the humans --- if plants could tell when people needed help, I'd be really scared. Haven't these people seen Day of the Triffids??