Archive for February, 2008

DemoCamp News

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

I had to cut out of DemoCamp 17 early on Monday night to catch a train, but: My students said it went well. So did the National Post. There's going to be a DemoCamp session at ICE'08 --- deadline for proposals is March 14, and we hope to see lots of you there.

Making the World a Better Place

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

One dropped stitch at a time:

Ten Times Faster

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Nice summary on High Scalability of a post by Mike Peters about making web sites run faster---much, much faster.

Scientific Groupware Revisited

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Nature would like "to hear from physicists what kind of tools would help in managing the ever-growing tide of information from, and the exciting possibilities of, the internet."  (I presume scientists in lesser disciplines will be asked to chip in at a later date ;-).  It will be interesting to ...

Google Summer of Code 2008

Monday, February 25th, 2008

And now it's official: the Google Summer of Code 2008 web page is up at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/. If you're not familiar with the program, Google provides $5000 grants for full-time university students to work on open source projects, which are mentored by people affiliated with literally dozens of different open ...

VeloCity at Waterloo

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

VeloCity calls itself a "mobile + media incubator", but the reality is more interesting: it's a residence building at the University of Waterloo that is being set aside for students with an entrepreneurial bent and an interest in new media and mobile computing.  It will undoubtedly be mocked as a ...

How Good Are Your Bezier Curves?

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

A colleague is trying to expand the subset of SVG that haxe supports. A sticking point is how to approximate SVG's elliptical arcs with a sequence of quadratic Bezier curves. If you have a flair for numerical methods and would like to offer some help, please get in touch: the ...

DemoCamp 17: Monday, Feb 25

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

The schedule is up for DemoCamp 17, which is being held at the Toronto Board of Trade on Monday, Feb 25.  Good lineup, fun crowd---look forward to seeing you there.

Teaching Python at the NRC

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

I'm introducing Python to scientists at the National Research Council today.  It's sometimes easy to forget how much fun the language is...

O’Reilly Creating a Web Version of Mathematica

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

According to this press release, O'Reilly is partnering with Wolfram Research to create a Web 2.0 version of Mathematica that will "be browser accessible and, utilizing AJAX technologies, will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity".  I'll be very interested to see how they handle equations (MathML ...