There’s No Such Things as One Application
March 30th, 2005
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An interesting little article on why products take so much longer to build than programs.
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Archive for March, 2005
Wanted: Web-Based Screen Saver
March 30th, 2005
I’ve decided what I want for (quick check) Saint Zosimus’ Day: a Windows-compatible screensaver that will:
- poll a web site for an XML file containing a to-do list; and
- display that list whenever my computer goes idle for 5 or 10 minutes.
Bonus marks if it’ll run on Linux and Mac; more bonus marks if it comes with a command-line tool, a Firefox browser plugin, an HTML form interface, and a little standalone GUI for editing to-do entries. Note that running a browser in full-screen mode as a “background” doesn’t count.
Fasten Your Seatbelts
March 25th, 2005
From Jon Udell’s weblog:
Civilization took a great leap forward when we learned how to write stuff down. Now we’re learning to film our stories and to TiVo them. Fasten your seat belt.
Coincidentally, I was commiserating with a fellow professor yesterday about the gulf between what universities have first-year computer science students do (“Sort a list of strings”) and what many of those same students do on their own time (“Create a Flash animation of three turtles wishing my boyfriend a happy birthday”). I guess it all comes down to Toffler’s Law: “The future always arrives too soon, and in the wrong order.”
Sorry, Make That _Two_ Rails Books
March 24th, 2005
As Dave says, the cat’s out of the bag: there’s a Rails Recipes book in the works. Really, really hope this year’s PyCon produces a concerted effort to create (or choose, I’m not fussy) a Pythonic equivalent.
What I’d Say If I Were At PyCon
March 23rd, 2005
Dave Thomas, of Pragmatic Programmer fame, is working on a new book about RubyOnRails. In my opinion, none of the entry-level Python web programming systems that Michelle Levesque has been studying is book-worthy yet, despite being several years older than RonR. It’s things like this that are going to make Ruby the refuge of choice for refugees from Perl 6. *sigh*
State of the Scripting Universe
March 22nd, 2005
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This article is an extended interview with principals in the Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and PHP worlds. Interesting how much they agree on…
Thirteen Things That Do Not Make Sense
March 18th, 2005
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Science is never finished—that’s what makes it fun. Here, courtesy of New Scientist magazine, is a list of thirteen things that do not make sense. There’s probably a Nobel prize lurking inside at least half of them.
Jolt Awards 2005
March 17th, 2005
Every year, CMP Media (owners of DDJ, Software Development, and
many other fine magazines) hand out Jolt awards in various categories.
This year’s winners
are listed below, with some comments. There’s also a new award for
exceptional writing in technology and letters, created in honor of
Stan Kelly-Bootle (who earned the world’s first graduate degree in
computer science in 1954).
| Books: General | Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra (O’Reilly) | [GVW: look extremely fluffy, but once you get into it, there's actually a lot of good material] |
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| Books: Technical | Better, Faster, Lighter Java by Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland (O’Reilly) | [GVW: I wasn't that impressed] |
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| Business Integration and Data Tools | EnterpriseTenFold (TenFold) | |
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| Change and Configuration Management Tools | Subversion 2004 (CollabNet) | |
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| Design Tools | Smart Development Environment 2.0 (Visual Paradigm International) | |
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| Languages and Development Environments | Eclipse 3.0 (Eclipse Foundation) | |
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| Libraries, Frameworks and Components | Hibernate 2.1 (JBoss) | [GVW: my students and I found it to have a very steep learning curve last fall] |
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| Management Tools | CaliberRM 2005 (Borland) | |
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| Mobile Development Tools | J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 (Sun Microsystems) | |
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| Security | Source Code Analysis 3.0 (Fortify Software) | |
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| Test — Automated Test Tools | Agitar Agitator and Dashboard 2.0 (Agitar) | |
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| Test — Defect Tracking Tools | FogBugz 3.1 (Fog Creek Software) | [GVW: produced by Joel Spolsky's company --- there's a book out on it now] |
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| Utilities | Captivate 2004 (Macromedia) | |
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| Web Development Tools | Macromedia Flex 1.5 (Macromedia) | |
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| Websites and Developer Networks | The O’Reilly Network (O’Reilly) | |
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| Hall of Fame: | InstallShield (Macrovision) | |
What Would Google Do?
March 17th, 2005
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One day, I’m sure I’ll see a bumper sticker saying, “What would Google do?” They have become this generation’s Apple—the hotspot where all the coolest coders hang out. And they now have a page devoted to open source.
Pythoneers at SIGSCSE
March 15th, 2005
Several colleagues of mine at the University of Toronto were at SIGCSE 2005 a couple of weeks ago. They came back with lots to report; most interesting for me was the feeling that there’s growing interest in Python as a teaching language. One of them said that she could easily see Python becoming a major CS1 language over the next five years, and that if she had the time, she’d try to lead the wave by writing an introduction to computer science in Python. I only know of one book of this kind, which didn’t particularly impress me. I think that if Pythoneers are really serious about increasing their user base, they should start work now to organize a bunch of tutorials and meet-and-greets at next year’s SIGCSE in Houston.
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