Archive for December, 2008
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Steve Souders, author of High Performance Web Sites, is now teaching a course on the subject at Stanford. Guest lecturers are from Plaxo, Google, Netflix, and Yahoo; the class project is to improve the performance of a top-100 web site. *sigh* I'm jealous...
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Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Neat paper from Microsoft Research:
Networks and networked applications depend on several pieces of configuration information to operate correctly. Such information resides in routers, firewalls, and end hosts, among other places. Incorrect information, or misconfiguration, could interfere with the running of networked applications. This problem is particularly acute in consumer settings ...
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Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
I can just barely remember lying on the living room floor watching the first moon landing on a little black and white TV. (Apparently, I turned to the adults who were clapping and crying and saying, "Is that it?") This picture was from the earlier Apollo 8 expedition, forty years ...
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Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
Via Simon Willison: Merb (the "other" Ruby-based third-generation web programming framework) is being merged into Ruby on Rails 3. What this means in practice is that users will be able to choose which ORM they want to use, which templating framework to write their pages in, etc. Put another way, ...
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Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
As I've mentioned several times, we've started rebuilding DrProject on top of Django. We had a post-mortem last Tuesday on our first term's work, which Blake Winton was kind enough to summarize. The highlights (good and bad) are listed below.
Good
Everybody gave more than expected/requested/paid for.
The team produced some ...
Posted in DrProject | 4 Comments »
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
The finalists for this year's Jolt Awards have been announced. Very pleased to see Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking and Learning on the list, along with Blueprint Requirements Center from Toronto-based Blueprint Software Systems, Komodo (from Vancouver's ActiveState), and Rally Enterprise (in two categories). The only disappointment is how few of ...
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Friday, December 19th, 2008
Via Carl Zimmer: the US National Academy of Sciences would like you to fill in a two-minute survey about what science topics you care about most. Current results are:
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Google has decided not to launch its scientific data sharing service --- another victim of the recession, I suppose. Bummer :-(
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Friday, December 19th, 2008
Interesting piece from Nature News: "Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia."
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Thursday, December 18th, 2008
According to Google Analytics, my most popular blog posts are:
Interviewing at Google
Why Bad Software Exists
The first public announcement of Beautiful Code
My recommended reading list (now somewhat out of date) and CV (ditto) are fourth and fifth in my personal popularity list.
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