Archive for February, 2008
Friday, February 15th, 2008
I decided earlier this week that the time had come to convert the Software Carpentry
notes to a wiki to make it easier for other people to contribute. My decision was motivated partly by thinking about converting DrProject to use Markdown syntax for its wiki, and partly by the realization that ...
Posted in Teaching | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Anyone who has ever worked with me knows that I should not be allowed to design user interfaces. Nature, nurture---dunno why, but anything that I find intuitive and pleasing leaves most people queasy and confused.
Which is why I'm appealing for help. DrProject's browser-based administration interface is invaluable, but we're ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Ned Gulley pointed me at this talk by fellow-Mathworkser Steve Eddins that hits a lot of the same core ideas as Software Carpentry. Time to convert SC to a wiki, I think, and start pushing it again...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Google's Highly Open Participation project (a high school equivalent of Summer of Code) has just wrapped up, and the ten grand prize winners have been announced. Congratulations to everyone involved---it was a great idea, and I hope Toronto can be involved next time around.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Via Jeff Balogh, a pointer to Hotwire Shell, a free object-oriented hypershell inspired by PowerShell that runs on Linux, and is being ported to Windows and Mac OS X. The principal author seems to be Colin Walters; I'll post more info as I get it.
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Monday, February 11th, 2008
I was talking to my software engineering class about code reviews last week, while simultaneously thinking about how to replace the wiki parser in DrProject. Two birds one stone, I decided to review a wiki parser written in Python and keep notes on what I was thinking as I ...
Posted in DrProject, Teaching | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 11th, 2008
Interesting piece on the changing environmental movement from Ross Robertson, via Ned Gulley.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. We really need to get this into DrProject --- I'm definitely proposing it as a Google Summer of Code project this year. (If it's good enough for Estonia, it's good enough for ...
Posted in DrProject | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
I just got sales figures for Beautiful Code from O'Reilly: since its release last summer, it has raised more than US$38,000 for Amnesty International. My thanks once again to the authors, and to everyone at O'Reilly who helped make the project a reality --- and, of course, to everyone ...
Posted in Beautiful Code | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
I had another reminder today of why I like to teach. I loaned a Ruby on Rails book to a student before Christmas; this morning, he sent me a link to the kanji flash card game he'd built. Neat.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »