Link Soup
July 25th, 2007
Links that accumulated while I was on the road:
- The Art of Computational Science: lengthy (several hundred pages) PDF book on numerical simulation in astrophysics with examples in Ruby. This would be a great counterpoint to Software Carpentry if it was (re-)written in Python…
- The Flexible Configuration Management system: built by the British Met Office, it combines Subversion, Trac, and a custom extract-and-build tool to give scientists and environment for managing complex climate modeling codes. It’d put most commercial shops to shame…
- The Chemistry of Game Design: I’m not convinced that user interfaces (particularly games) can ever move past “alchemy” to “chemistry”, but Danc makes a good case.
- An emotional map of San Francisco: this is just plain cool — and a little spooky.
- 6th Sense Analytics: gathers data about what developers are actually doing. In any other context, it would be called a surveillance system — there’s no way I could get ethics board approval to do this to my students, so why is it legal for companies to do it to their employees?
- Improvements to JUnit. Yes, that means even more features…
- A Google Tech Talk on YouTube’s scalability issues. We should be teaching this stuff…
- Yet more talk about universities abandoning desktop office suites and moving to their web-based cousins — this time, it’s UC Berkeley. Good links to evaluations…
- Google releases a singleton detector. Why? Because singletons make code harder to test.
- Jon Udell interviews Henryk Nielsen on the RESTful architecture of Microsoft’s Robotics Studio.
- XKCD is frighteningly prescient once again.
Because the students are paying you, whereas the employees are being paid by the company? Nah.
Because there is no such thing as an ethics board for companies? (See also Enron, Microsoft, the Tobacco Industry, the Gambling Industry, Pharmaceutical companies, etc, etc…) Hmmm… Maybe…