Archive for December, 2008
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
Jon Pipitone sent the following in response to this morning's post customer disservice post:
As he points out, my use of the word "*sigh*" has been an almost perfect exponential; the use earlier this sentence puts 2008 right on the curve.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
We've been getting automated calls that start, "This is not a telemarketing call: please call [phone number] and quote [reference number] immediately regarding your account." Doesn't say who it's from, or what's wrong with the account, and the reference number isn't familiar, so we've been ignoring them. Finally snapped this ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
I tell the students in my software engineering classes that the absolute value of code coverage in testing isn't as important as the trend: if you're testing a smaller percentage of your software as time goes by, you're headed for trouble. The same is true of site stats: I don't ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Via Brian Hayes: jsMath "...provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of Unix. It...uses native fonts, so they resize when you change the size of the text in your browser, they print at ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Several people have created family trees to trace the evolution of programming languages (see, for example, the Mother Tongues chart). Given the news that closures are being added to Objective-C, I'd like to see someone trace the ideas that make up programming languages, such as user-defined data types, generators, forall ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Had an interesting discussion today about the pros and cons of profs becoming Facebook friends with their students. On the one hand, profs want to connect with students as individuals --- it makes education more effective, as well as more fun. On the other hand, everyone is entitled to keep ...
Posted in Teaching | 6 Comments »
Friday, December 26th, 2008
One of the things I teach my students is that the real purpose of a schedule is to tell you when to start cutting corners and dropping features. The ticker on my web site tells me I have 489 days left in my contract with the university; I signed up ...
Posted in Basie, DrProject, Practical Programming, Research, Software Carpentry, Teaching, Writing | 4 Comments »
Friday, December 26th, 2008
This one has come up before, but with a near year dawning, I think it's worth revisiting. Suppose you had been asked to audit a medium-sized software development project---something with a couple of dozen people, split between two or three sites, with a couple of hundred thousand lines of moderately ...
Posted in Teaching | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
I'd like to be a better teacher. In particular, I'd like to drag my teaching practices into the 21st Century and start doing more with the Interweb than bulletin boards and static HTML slides. I picked up a couple of highly-rated books, but the first didn't contain anything that wasn't ...
Posted in Teaching | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Titus Brown's latest post (which opens with, "The latest hot idea for making a protein-protein interaction database leaves me lukewarm") should be read by every computer scientist who's "just trying to help":
...while tools can be helpeful, the fundamental problem is much more, well, fundamental: science is hard. Connecting the ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »