The Third Bit

1. Microsoft Pivot: their notion of “very large data” is smaller than mine, but this is still a fascinating tool.
2. Via Jordi Cabot (again), a library of data models created by Barry Williams. Baseball umpire scheduling, genealogy, septic tanks, and many others, all in a uniform notation. I’ll be using this in my next software engineering course.
3. Andrey Petrov, a former student and friend (sorry, that’s ambiguous, we’re still friends) is co-creator of Get Up and Move, which lets you barter exercise with friends. “I will do pushups for 1 minute if @shazow will dance for 2 songs.” Still in very early stages, but a cool idea.
4. Mark Coleran designs computer interfaces for use in movies. Seriously, how cool a job is that?
5. According to Mark Guzdial, the Open University’s new “Intro to Computing” course uses JavaScript as a first language. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, it’s one more reason to wish that JS had been better designed. (But note: see Mark’s correction to this post in the comments.)
6. Google Summer of Code and UCOSP have both shown that it’s easier for students to get into open source projects if there’s a pile of tiny tickets for them to start with. The goal of the new OpenHatch project is to collect those together by searching the raffles [1] of various projects for tickets with appropriate tags.
7. Via Peter Lorimer, a screencast for the Eclipse4Edu UCOSP project showing their Scheme plugin for Eclipse. The Star Wars music in the background is a distracting bonus .
8. Seems that a sys admin in Arizona installed SETI@Home on every computer in his school district. The result: 575 million hours of computer time over 9 years, costing $1.2-1.6 million in extra power consumption.

[1] Well, what else would you call something that collects a lot of tickets together?

Greg Wilson Uncategorized