Archive for October, 2008

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Friday, October 31st, 2008

After a lot of thought, I have regretfully decided to resign as a contributing editor with Doctor Dobb's Journal. The magazine is still great reading, and Jon Erickson and his crew have been a rare pleasure to work with, but I simply don't have the time to keep up any ...

A Closer Look at a Distributed Single Point of Failure

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Via several people: Phil Gyford has drawn the relationships between the various web applications that own his life.  If a class diagram or a call diagram looked like this, most of us would say "ew", but somehow, when the pieces are distributed so that they're not under any one developer's ...

Cluster Challenge Teams

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Via Paul Lu (who is coaching the University of Alberta's team), a nice writeup on the teams competing in this year's Cluster Challenge: ...teams are made of...six of undergraduate students, a supervising professor and a partnering HPC vendor.  The students will architect a machine with the support of their respective vendor ...

CfP: Web 2.0 Tools for Research Scientists

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Via Science in the Open, a call for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web 2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. Given the timelines (EoI's on November 3, project to start in December) it'll be hard to get a proposal in, but it'll be interesting to ...

Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Via Cameron Neylon, a workshop in London in November on finding and re-using open scientific resources.  Wish I could go...

Gunderloy on Contributing to Rails

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Mike Gunderloy has yet another great post, this time on how to contribute to Rails.

Complete with an Egg Catapult Contest

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Over at O'Reilly, Brady Forrest has a roundup of 10 Ignite events from around the world. We've been talking about changes to the DemoCamp format; maybe we should just open it up to either ignites or demos, and let the crowd decide?

Spinellis and “Zero Defect” Code

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Diomidis Spinellis posted last week about Tokeneer, a National Security Agency case study carried out by UK software firm Praxis of "...how to develop zero-defect code in a cost-effective manner". Problem is, Diomidis found something that looked a lot like a bug, and his suspicions have now been confirmed.

The Thesis Hat

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

One of my new grad students just mailed this around: In the interest of fostering a better, more closely connected learning community with a vested interest in the academic well-being of all participants, I have installed a new device in my cubicle.  This device shall be known as the Thesis Hat.  ...

Two Others

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

In amongst a bunch of programming books, I also found time this summer to read a few for fun, like the latest in the Temeraire series. The two I enjoyed most were Felix Gilman's debut novel Thunderer, and Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road. The former is a match for ...