Archive for August, 2009
Friday, August 28th, 2009
Great post from David Humphrey about teaching his children what makes a computer go. I still don't know my way around their insides (computers, I mean, not children); maybe I'll get to learn along with Maddie.
Posted in Family | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 28th, 2009
Tim O'Reilly: "What Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?" He'd like to know...
The City of Boston is deploying an iPhone application that will allow citizens to take pictures of things that need to be fixed and send them to city hall. (Interesting to think about combining this with the augmented ...
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
I now have two blogs up at WordPress: one for the cross-country undergrad projects I'm coordinating (http://ucosp.wordpress.com), the other for Software Carpentry stuff (http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com). I'll try to remember to post summaries here from time to time of what's happening there:
UCOSP:
Aug 18: Team Sizes
Aug 18: Code Sprint Sept 25-27
Aug 19: Ingres ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
We are very pleased to announce the release of Version 0.5 of Basie, a lightweight software project forge built on Django that borrows many ideas from Trac and DrProject. As this screencast shows, its features include:
Multiple projects per forge
Role-based access control and pluggable user account management
Subversion repository browser
Cross-component search
Per-project wiki ...
Posted in Basie, Student Projects | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
As a follow-up to our paper on software project portals, Jordi Cabot has started a discussion at Joel on Software:
...the (small) teams building these portals do not use agile methodologies themselves, but instead rely on informal collections of best practices....I'd like to know if the same behaviour can be found ...
Posted in Research | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Via Nature's "Great Beyond", this story from the Los Angeles Times:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce...wants to put the science of climate change on trial... The chamber is pushing for the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing -- with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge to rule on whether humans ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
In response to a question about what it's been like switching to Python as a first-year programming language, Paul Gries wrote the following. It might be of interest to other instructors who are thinking of changing over.
And in related news, we're compiling errata and solutions to even-numbered exercises for ...
Posted in Practical Programming, Python, Teaching | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
For their thesis projects, two of my graduate students are studying what programmers actually do when developing software. I can't give you more details than that without biasing their studies, but what I can tell you is that they're looking for Java coders with at least 3-4 years of full-time ...
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
From Lambda the Ultimate:
According to a draft statement, Scheme is to be split into a small and a large language, the small being designed for educators and "50-page purists", the large for "programmers, implementors".
Part of me says, "If you think purists and programmers belong in two different camps, you're doing ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
One by one and two by two our summer students are wrapping up:
Eben Hailemariam has moved the Eclipse feature diagram plugin to Google Code, and has posted a screencast showing the latest progress.
Maria Yancheva's MediaWiki search plugin has a screencast too.
Brent Mombourquette's Breadcrumbs plugin for Firefox is up on Google ...
Posted in Student Projects | No Comments »
