The Third Bit

Link Soup

Oh dear — I have fallen behind again.

• MyTTC.ca is up (Jorge’s comments are more coherent than mine). Should this be the starting point for student projects in my fall CSC301 Software Engineering course?
• The science maps at Eigenfactor are pretty cool — this post talks about what’s going on behind the scenes.
• How much of your code is comments?  Meaningful identifiers?  Spacing?  Better yet, which open source project are you most like?
• Jon Udell is watching you, Senator Sununu.
• And finally, who owns science?

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Mail Traffic Over Time

Twenty lines of Python, an Excel chart, and here we are:

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It Wasn’t *Meant* To Be Funny, But…

From the OSCON’08 schedule:

People for Geeks

People, whether other geeks or “normal” people, we’re bad at them. They’re such an important part of our lives and jobs and the point of all the technology we love so much. Misunderstandings between people can be the root cause of so many vast, deep, frustrating, and expensive mistakes. Yet we put so little effort into understanding them, or learning how to work with people.

You can learn how to deal with people, and you can even learn to enjoy it. This tutorial gathers together some of the best speakers on “people topics” and teaches you—the programmer, the sysadmin, the DBA, the geek—how better to deal with people.

…

People planning to attend this session also want to see:

• Programming Vim

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DrProject Status Update

http://www.drproject.org hosts two projects: All, which is for people interested in announcements and general news, and DrProject itself, which is for developers (and those wishing to file tickets against our code). This message is going out to the list belonging to the former; if you’d like to join the latter, you can do so by following the Preferences link and requesting membership. (There are about half a dozen messages per day.)

Along with the usual bug fixes, we are working on some new features:

1. Updating the administration panel to simplify workflow. Qiyu Zhu and Liz Blankenship have been making good progress, and this will definitely be in the end-of-August release.
2. Integration with IRC. Kosta Zabashta presented this at DemoCamp a few days ago; we have some issues to work out with administering channels, but again, this will be in the end-of-August release.
3. Status charts. Kosta has been working with Jeremy Handcock to integrate a few simple charts to show projects’ status. We’ll know by the end of July whether this will make it into the next release.
4. A configurable ticketing system. This is the most ambitious of our current projects; Nick Jamil posted a video showing what it can do, and once Jeff Balogh finishes his Dojo-based drag-and-drop form editor, we’ll put another one up. This needs a lot of testing before we put it in a release, but Luke Petrolekas has already started, and if we don’t make the end-of-August release, we ought to have it in your hands by Christmas.

As always, if you need help getting DrProject installed, please mail help@drproject.org—we’d be happy to help you out.

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Badge of Honor?

I met up with Shirley Wu, Michael Nielsen, and a few other ISMB attendees yesterday to talk about what’s variously called Science 2.0 or Open Science. It was pretty rushed (and not helped by the bar we wound up in), but it got me thinking about creating an “open science” badge that scientists could apply to their work. Right now, people are using a variety of terms in inconsistent ways; it sometimes takes a very close reading to figure out exactly what the mean. I’d really like to see the PSB workshop (or some other meeting like it) put a peg in the ground and say, “If you do the following things, you can put this ‘open science’ badge on your lab’s web site, and put, ‘This research is certified open.’ in your papers.” The W3C’s familiar badges and the Open Source Initiative’s certification of software licenses have done a lot to clarify discussion, and have given people standards to aspire to. Nine years after the “Open Source/Open Science” workshop at Brookhaven National Laboratory, maybe it’s time to borrow those ideas and put them into practice.

Posted in Software Carpentry | 6 Comments »

Just Another Saturday

Maddie on her way to the show:

Theo on stage (in his dreams):

Maddie gives it a try:

The backstage party:

Sadie’s reaction to it all:

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A Distributed Single Point of Failure

And this week:

• Kosta Zabashta has discovered that infinite loops can span machines.
• Nicole Allard has finished her Eclipse plugin, and made a new screencast to show it off.
• Liz Blankenship has been busy.
• Dan Servos has discovered that the web never sleeps.
• Eva Wong is assembling her final GUI.
• Jeff Balogh is wrestling with grids.

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Nick’s Last Day

Tomorrow is Nick Jamil’s last day with us—he’ss done a great job of building a variable-speed ticketing system for DrProject, but now he’s got to put all that energy into getting married To wrap up, he has put two posts on his blog:

1. The problems that join limits in SQLite are causing (and the ways he’s tried to get around them).
2. A new-and-improved screencast of what the system can do.

It’s been a pleasure working with him; I hope I get the chance to do so again.  Happy nuptials, dude.

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Up On Stage

Tuesday was Kosta’s turn; today was Victoria Mui’s.  Having spent most of the last week and a half reading source code, she got up a few minutes ago and gave a quick talk about her Google Summer of Code project at the Cytoscape retreat. I was impressed once again with how well she presented her work — our students do us proud.

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Nerd Girls on TV

The Nerd Girls are supposed to be on the Today show tomorrow (Friday July 18) — anyone have details?

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