Archive for October, 2009
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Great post on the NOVA site about recent advances in evolutionary biology. Things like this are why I keep hoping to find a way to teach computing to scientists: it's the only way I have to thank them for all the wonders they've given the rest of us.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
The only downside of last week's DevDays in Toronto was the more-abysmal-than-usual gender ratio: it was at least 100:1, and may well have been worse. So, if you're organizing a tech event of any kind, check out geekspeakr.com --- it's a new directory of women in tech who can speak ...
Posted in Equity | 3 Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Wow --- wish I'd been there.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
The project teams in my consulting course will be demoing at the Toronto Innovations Showcase on Monday and Tuesday (Nov 2-3). If you can't make it down to City Hall, please tune into the webcast. Lots of other projects are moving ahead---just a few days ago, the City of Toronto ...
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
Software Carpentry
Oct 16: Course outline updated
Oct 21: Where to publish descriptions of scientific software? Turns out there are more venues than I realized.
Oct 21: Should modeling (E-R diagrams, UML, etc.) be part of the course?
Oct 23: What (if anything) to teach about security?
One of the ads for the Business of ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
We're putting together a (very) short survey for people who have bought Practical Programming (our intro to CS using Python). What do you think would be the most useful questions to ask readers? The three I've thought of so far are:
How much general programming experience did you have before you ...
Posted in Practical Programming | 4 Comments »
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
I have posted the slides from my DevDays talk on Slideshare---hope you find them useful.
Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
It's still a lot harder than it should be to add pictures to web pages. I know, you think it's easy, but let's do a comparison:
Modern desktop WYSIWYG editor
WordPress (and most other tools)
click on the drawing palette
draw
fire up a separate drawing application
create the image
upload it
add an <img> tag to link ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 4 Comments »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
U of T's Computer Science department is putting video of this year's distinguished lecture series on the web at http://web.cs.toronto.edu/news/lectures.htm --- enjoy!
Posted in Teaching | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
William Cook's ECOOP 2009 banquet speech is online; I nodded a lot while reading it.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »