Archive for November, 2009

Dear Synkronizer

Monday, November 30th, 2009

I'd really like to buy your Excel compare-and-merge tool, but when I try to submit a purchase request, I get: Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Access denied for user 'synkroni'@'localhost' (using password: YES) in /home/synkroni/public_html/synkronizer/php/inc/db_mysql.inc on line 73 Database error: pconnect(localhost, synkroni, $Password) failed. MySQL Error: () Session halted. I get the same thing when I try ...

Nothing to See Here, Folks—Move Along, Move Along

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Like a lot of people, I received email a few days ago from Ivar Jacobson about SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory), a new initiative whose "...goal is to re-found software engineering as a rigorous discipline." I can't think of a better response than Jorge Aranda's.

Feedback on the Python Book

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

71 people have answered our questionnaire about Practical Programming. Here's some of what they told us; I'll summarize the questions about use of online programming resources and what we could do differently next time in a subsequent post.

Writing About Reading

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

It's been a busy three months---I was dropping balls left and right even before I got sick. In amongst all of it, though, I managed to get through a few books. The first, and most disappointing, was Mills's Practical Formal Software Engineering. It's meant to be a textbook on formal methods ...

Amen

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009



Greatest Hits

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The list of contributors to the upcoming O'Reilly book on evidence-based software engineering seems to have settled down---we're very grateful to everyone listed below for agreeing to take part, and hope that the book will be available in the summer of 2010. Jorge Aranda: radical collocation vs. doors that close Tom Ball ...

ICSE 2010 Co-Events

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is being held in South Africa next year. Their web site is already up, and they've just announced all the workshops and whatnot that are being held along with it. It's quite a list, and some of the acronyms are very ...

Reverse Engineering a Bibliography

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Dear lazyweb, I've been handed a file with the authors and titles of approximately 140 scientific papers, and would like to construct a proper bibliography (complete with journal titles, publication dates, DOIs, etc.). If there were just 20 entries, I'd do it by hand, but with 140, I'd like some kind ...

Serendipitous and Unexpected

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Via Ryan Lilian: Most research effort does not produce what is thought of as a traditionally publishable result.  That doesn't mean, however, that nothing was gained by conducting the research.  These results, whether they are failures or merely perplexing, can provide valuable insights into open problems and prevent other researchers from ...

Special Issue

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

A special issue of Computing in Science & Engineering that Andy Lumsdaine and I edited, devoted to software engineering in computational science, is now available. We'd like to thank everyone who contributed: Report on the Second International Workshop on Software Engineering for CSE, by Jeffrey Carver (University of Alabama) Managing Chaos: Lessons ...