Archive for June, 2008

Recent Research Reading

Friday, June 20th, 2008

I really did mean to blog more regularly about the research papers I'm reading... Oh well---here are the highlights from the last three months; together, they represent about 25% of what I've actually read. I haven't bothered hyperlinking, since many of them are behind paywalls, and the rest ...

Take the Survey, Win Prizes!

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Tony and Dan are running a survey at compsci.ca --- 11 questions, mostly multiple choice, and you could win some bits.

More Links

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Zombies are beaten back by preppy types in orange shirts and khakis in Las Vegas. The last line is the best... The latest Toronto startup index is up on the web. I still don't know most of these companies... Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz has discovered requirements traceability in Mingle, which turns out to mean, ...

Where My Grad Students Are

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I've been blogging about undergrad projects pretty regularly, but not about the progress my graduate students have been making.  In brief: Samira is using Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to group events in a project's history (email messages, ticket changes, repository check-ins, etc.) into larger-scale events so that they'll be easier for ...

New Pics

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Recent pictures of Madeleine helping in the garden: and of the new house (main floor and upstairs):

Writing a Technical Book

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Baron Schwartz has put up a lengthy post describing what it's like to write a technical book (which I found through Matt Doar's smaller, but more graphical, post). I'm doing this for the fifth time right now (two solo, two edited, the current one collaborative).  I haven't been keeping ...

Why I Go To DemoCamp

Monday, June 16th, 2008

A chance to introduce students to potential future employers is all well and good, but the real reason I go is that there's nowhere else in Toronto I could see things like Zoomi. Jevon MacDonald has posted a great description.  Gibson's Law strikes again...

Link Soup

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Sometimes I post links here because I think you'll be interested. Sometimes I post them so that I can find them again. Either way, it's useful. Lily is a Firefox add-in that lets users create programs visually. It's pretty cool; I'm still wondering why nobody has built a spreadsheet-like interface ...

And One That Failed

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

To round out the series, this proposal went in last year, but was rejected.  I wish I could blame it on wrong place/wrong time, but NSERC (Canada's major funding agency for science and engineering) has rejected everything related to DrProject that I've sent them as well. Maybe someone's trying to ...

Another Sample Proposal

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

People seem interested, so here's another proposal that just went in for internal review at the university. If it gets through that, my collaborators and I will have two months in which to flesh it out to submit to NSERC. Realistically, it'll be some time next year before ...