Archive for April, 2008

OK, What Would *You* Draw?

Monday, April 21st, 2008

A year and a bit ago, I posted pictures of DrProject's database schema and architecture. I'm happy with the former --- the only thing I'd do differently is make it larger and add comments (or change field names to be more descriptive) --- but the latter still bugs me.  It ...

Someone’s a Fan

Monday, April 21st, 2008



Google Mentoring Videos

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Via Lin Zhou: From: Susan Dorward Google has started offering coaching to most of their employees, and I've been lucky enough to be approved as one of their coaches. They recently sponsored a series of talks given by their coaches and they have posted videos of these talks up on YouTube. ...

Student Impressions of haXe

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Two of the students in this term's consulting course, Robert Beghian and Tom Plaskon, spent the term working with haXe. Their impressions of it are below... HaXe is a high-level, object-oriented programming language for the development of web applications. Programs written in haXe can be compiled on several platforms including ...

Zis Is Cursed, Zat Is Cursed

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Spring has definitely started in Toronto --- it's 23 degrees outside (yes, Celsius), and the sky is that slightly dusty blue that I always associate with hot dogs, frisbees, and sunburn. It helps put this week's rejections in perspective: NSERC turned down a proposal to study the usefulness of integrated IM, ...

Consulting Course Videos

Friday, April 18th, 2008

There's a metric shoeful of demo videos up on the consulting course web site now showing off what students did this term.  I (or rather Samira and Jeremy, two of my grad students) would be particularly interested in comments on their tool for threading project histories --- it's going to ...

Introducing Stack Overflow

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

Jeff Atwood (who didn't like Beautiful Code, but is a nice guy anyway) and Joel Spolsky (best known these days for being Joel Spolsky) are jointly launching a new company called stackoverflow.com, which will be a Q&A/ask-the-experts/find-what-you-need site for programmers.  Bookmarked...

Pogy Travel Crib

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Madeleine is now a year, two weeks, and one day old. Still only has two teeth, but love gnawing on bananas (and occasionally fingers); walkin' up a storm, and we're the proud owners of two hand-painted... um... paintings. So this seems like as good a time as any to put in ...

Integration Irony

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

We've been having a problem recently with self-registration in the new version of DrProject. Would-be users fill an oh-so-familiar form (preferred ID, email address, password); their data is then held in queue for an admin to approve. However, when the admin clicks "approve", DrProject reports "user already exists in ...

SPOC

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Regarding the idea of reproducible research, I stumbled over I-SPOC while looking through Google Summer of Code stuff. From their pitch: The overall goal of this project is to build computational and social infrastructure to support the use of a new form of scientific communication called a SPOC (Scientific ...