Archive for March, 2009
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, gave a talk at the MaRS Centre this morning to promote his new book about the economics of free stuff. I was looking forward to hearing him speak: his resume includes stints at The Economist, Nature, Science, and ...
Posted in Teaching | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
The students in this term's combined CSC494/CSC2125 consulting course will be doing their end-of-term demos in the Graduate Student Union at the University of Toronto between 1:30 and 3:00 pm on Tuesday, April 14. Projects include:
A Cost-Effectiveness Study of NFS v4
A Fluid Flow Simulator on GPUs
A Plugin Generation Wizard for ...
Posted in Announcements, Student Projects, Teaching | No Comments »
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
With a bit of help from Mike Conley and Adam Goucher, I've exported all the posts in this blog related to the Software Carpentry course and imported them into a new blog at http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com/. Those of you interested in software development for science and engineering, computer-supported collaborative science, and related ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
The 2009 Season of Usability Call for Projects is now open and available until April 15:
http://85.10.193.9/UCCASS/survey.php?sid=47
OpenUsability Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS). During a 3 month ...
Posted in Announcements, Student Projects | No Comments »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
While waiting for someone to explain why so many people are excited about Bespin, I came across a demo video for Microsoft's Code Canvas. Several cool ideas, esp. if you start thinking about code layout and organization within classes and methods...
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Have a cool video about your research? Want to be rich and famous? (Small
'r' and small 'f', but still...) Then submit something to the OCE Discovery Student Video Competition. Entries can be no more than 5 minutes
long; forms are due April 9, notification is April 23, showcase is May 11-12. There ...
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Friday, March 27th, 2009
http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/node/238 --- I can't attend (my daughter's birthday), but I hope lots of you will. Even if you're not planning to do Summer of Code this year, you should come out and learn more about how open source, who's doing it, why, and how:
Tuesday March 31
Rm 244 Galbraith Building (36 ...
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
Inference for R lets users nest the R statistical language in Word and Excel. It's a neat idea, and another example of the kind of bottom-up innovation that I predict will eventually lead to fully-fledged extensible programming systems. (If Bespin made it easier to do things like this, I might ...
Posted in Extensible Programming, Research, Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
As part of writing my first book, I put together a point-form history of parallel computing. Several people subsequently told me how useful it was in helping them understand the context of papers they were reading (and one guy republished it on the web under his own name, but that's ...
Posted in Research | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
"Plans to refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed." True story, and another hint at how computer scientists could help physical scientists and engineers: constructing tools to act as ...
Posted in Research | 2 Comments »