Archive for July, 2008

Please Pay For Your Copy of “Beautiful Code”…

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

...rather than downloading it from a file-sharing site. Royalties go to Amnesty International, who help people like this: A teacher who posted photos of collapsed schools on the internet after a devastating earthquake in China's Sichuan province has been ordered to serve a year of "re-education through labour".

Next Lecture?

Monday, July 28th, 2008

The Software Carpentry course currently contains the following lectures: Introduction The Unix Shell (2 lectures) Version Control Automated Builds Basic Scripting (bool/int/float, for/while/if) Strings, Lists, and Files Functions and Libraries Programming Style Quality Assurance (basic testing) Sets, Dictionaries, and Complexity Debugging Object-Oriented Programming (2 lectures) Unit Testing (unittest --- should switch this to nose) Regular Expressions Binary Data XML Relational Databases Spreadsheets Numerical Programming (the basics of NumPy) Integration (subprocess+pipes ...

Home Stretch for Students

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Coming down to the wire... Dan Servos has another Moodle visualization working. Anyone want to give me some money so I can hire this guy? Qiyu Zhu is producing useful error reports and new screens for creating users and projects. Shiny. Victoria Mui is laying out labels and making Gary Bader happy. Qi Yang ...

This Week in Greg

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Rewrite Professional Master's proposal: 0 Finalize Met Office article for CiSE: 1 Transcribe interviews with portal developers: 0.5 Interview more portal developers: 0.75 Design REST API for DrProject: 0.5 Proof-read survey of scientific computing: 1 Submit proposal for CiSE special issue on software engineering and computational science.: 1 Write and submit NSERC Discovery Grant Notice of Intent: ...

Name This Book!

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Jennifer, Paul, Jason, and I have been working on a introductory Computer Science textbook using Python.  We're in the last lap, but still haven't chosen a name, so I'd like to ask for suggestions.  Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science is taken, as are Computer Science: The Python Programming ...

Fall Courses

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I am teaching two courses this fall, and would like you to help me decide what my students should work on.  The first course, "CSC301: Introduction to Software Engineering", is aimed at third-year students (juniors in American parlance), and covers agile software development processes, design patterns, and other introductory material.  ...

Customer (Non)Support with Yahoo!

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Logged into Flickr to upload some pictures. The site tells me my premium account is going to expire in 6 days, and asks me if I want to buy another year. Go through the usual "confirm your card details" dance. After clicking the final submit, am told "Sorry, there is a temporary problem. ...

Badge of Reproducibility

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Coming back to the badge meme from earlier this week, John Cook's new Reproducible Research blog pointed me at this page on the EPFL site advertising a paper called "What, Why and How of Reproducible Research in Signal Processing". Notice the "Reproducible Research" badge? The "add your evaluation" ...

What My Students Have Learned This Summer

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

This post from John Cook, summarizing this post from Thomas Guest, is a pretty good description of what our students have spent the summer finding out...

“The Computer Was Threatening to Explode”

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

But the result was worthwhile: you can now view a super-tree showing the evolution of the dinosaurs, or read about its creation.  I think it's beautiful: