Archive for November, 2008

Igor, Connect the Electrodes!

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

The Software Carpentry course site is still getting a fair bit of traffic, although readership is definitely tailing off: I'm hoping to run an intensive three-week version of the course in June 2009 in Toronto (details to follow); hope I can find time between now and then to finish wikifying the ...

Software Craftsmanship 2009

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

Unlikely I'll go (no money), but Software Craftsmanship 2009 (in London on February 26) looks pretty cool.

VeloCity Project Exhibition

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Via David Crow (who has comments on it as well), an article by Joey deVilla on the Fall 2008 VeloCity Project Exhibition at the University of Waterloo. VeloCity is a dorm reserved for would-be entrepreneurs, complete with a boardroom, a mobile device lab, high-bandwidth wifi, large flatscreens, etc. The ...

My Via Experience

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Tuesday: go to train station to buy a round-trip ticket to Kitchener. "Does the train have wireless?" "Let me check... yes, that train has wireless." Wednesday: get on the train, turn on laptop, try to connect to the Internet. 24 hours of wireless for $8.95 plus taxes sounds pretty good: I'll ...

StreetKnit is Back!

Monday, November 24th, 2008

After a bit of hiatus caused by getting married (to me) and moving house (with me --- and yes, we're still married), Sadie is warming up StreetKnit for another season. You knit, they give it to the homeless to help them get through the winter, and the world is a ...

SECSE’09 Call for Papers

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Second International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering Saturday, May 23, 2009 Co-located with ICSE 2009 - Vancouver, Canada http://www.cs.ua.edu/~SECSE09 Overview This workshop is concerned with the development of: Scientific software applications, where the focus is on directly solving scientific problems. These applications include, but are not limited to, large parallel models/simulations ...

Getting the Science Right—Or At Least, Less Wrong

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Via The Great Beyond:  The US National Academy of Sciences has created an initiative that will link TV and movie directors with scientists and engineers to incorporate more accurate science content into entertainment. Press release here, web site here. That would be a cool job...

Happy 25th Birthday, TurboPascal

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

A lot of it seems obvious now, but it really did change the world...

A Rails Question

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

One of our project students has a weird problem with Rails --- if you have an answer (weird or otherwise), we'd like to hear from you. I want to send an AJAX request to the server using POST. Rails is supposed to handle parameter passing, placing all parameters in the params hash. When ...

If a Computer Has Touched You Inappropriately…

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

The Computer Science department at the University of Toronto is featured in a recent episode of "Byte Club".  I can hear the hippos whispering...