McGrath on Paradigms
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008This one resonates. (via Titus Brown)
Archive for February, 2008
Where The Puck Is Going To Be (Part 91)
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008Good article by Jon Udell on "Overcoming data friction". One of the projects in my course this term is trying to do something like this by gluing together data from various social services' web sites --- screen-scraping and after-the-fact duct tape turns out to be easier than getting various branches ...
Today’s Politicians Lead Boring Lives
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008One day in September 1197 the effective ruler of Outremer, Henry of Champagne, was reviewing his troops from a window of his palace at Acre when a delegation from the local Pisan colony entered the room behind him. He turned to greet them, and a few moments later thoughtlessly stepped ...
The Dog’s Not Barking Again
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008The US National Academy of Engineering's site is running a feature on "grand challenges in engineering". You get to vote for which you think is most important: better medicines, securing cyberspace, preventing nuclear terror, and eleven others. Carbon sequestration is there; so is economical solar power and producing energy from ...
Six Books for a Canadian Winter
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008For a long time, I have believed that Jon Udell has the best job in the world. He gets to build interesting systems and talk to interesting people about interesting futuristic things, and best of all, he gets paid for it. A couple of years ago, though, I discovered Brian ...
Spolsky on Office File Formats
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008An excellent discussion of the forces that shape real-world applications. Why can't I write this well?
February Code Sprint: Day 1
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Yesterday was Family Day, a new Ontario holiday. It was also the start of Reading Week (no classes at U of T), but David, Yi Qing, Luke, and Qiyu were in anyway, beavering away to get DrProject ready for PyCon while I wrote reports. (I miss coding...) 16 new tickets ...
Mozilla Messaging
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008David Ascher has announced the launch of Mozilla Messaging, a new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary that wants to reinvent email and internet communication. It's an increasingly crowded space, but if anyone can pull it together, the Moz folks can.
You’re In Charge — Now Do It My Way
Sunday, February 17th, 2008The project course I'm teaching this term has forty-six students in it, who are working on twenty-five projects. Some are going very well, but some teams are still trying to get the code their clients have given them to compile or run. The main reason seems to be time management: ...
Graduate Directions
Sunday, February 17th, 2008I realized this morning that I hadn't told the blogosphere what my graduate students have decided to work on. (I hope the fact that I realized this while cleaning crusty soap scum off a dishwasher says more about me than it does about my graduate students' choices...) In brief: Jeremy Handcock ...