Ever wanted to watch someone build an expert system? Now you can, thanks to Jon Udell’s Screening Room. Other entries in this screencast-cross-interview site include LINQ, Sun’s Grid, and more.
I was catching up on my journal reading over the weekend, and it struck me that one of the differences between academia and industry is the difference between caring whether something is right, and caring whether it works. Neither implies the other…
(I used to think that openness was another difference, but you can’t actually read any of the papers listed below for free.)
Still to go:
I don’t usually discuss legislative issues in this blog, but I can’t let the US House of Representatives’ decision to block social networking sites and chat rooms pass by without comment. It’s not just the decision itself that frightens me; it’s the fact that it passed 410 to 15. If only 3.5% of people understand the stupidity of such legislation, and have the backbone to say so out loud, we’re in big trouble…
This paper, via the OpenScience Project, is a couple of years old, but a good step in an interesting direction.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about extensible programming systems, which I believe are the Next Big Thing in programming. I’ve had a few pings about this recently, so I thought I’d post my current link collection:
If you know of others, I’d welcome pointers.
This month’s Seed magazine (the first I’ve ever read, and probably the last as well) has a piece by Chris Mooney on how the Bush administration’s disdain for science and the “reality-based community” has turned out to be more damaging (for it) than anyone would have expected. Coincidentally, Joel Spolsky just put this rant about anti-geek bigotry on his blog. Coincidence? Perhaps… 
Google has just entered the project hosting arena. It’s a simple system for now (home page, tickets, Subversion), but as Andrey Petrov points out, once they integrate Google Groups, blogging, Google Pages, and Google Calendar, they’ll have a compelling system.
What does this mean for DrProject? Nothing yet (at least, I don’t think so). All Google-hosted projects have to be open to the public, which rules it out as a platform for a typical software engineering course (in which each team of students is working on the same problem simultaneously). Google also doesn’t provide instructors with the control they need: there’s no way I could assign someone to a group, for example, or file identical tickets against each of 20 projects. Still, if they ever bundle it so that it can be installed on other people’s servers and administered locally, it’d be a knock-out.
“Each of your eyes transfers information to your brain at about the same speed as a fast Ethernet connection.” (as reported in this New Scientist article). That’s about 8.75 megabits/sec (extrapolating from guinea pig data). Our brains could handle more — kind of funny to discover that even evolution leads to bandwidth-limited systems.
I have no idea, but this map (created by Andy Bruno, and quoted by Tim O’Reilly) shows what people who use SourceForge are up to.
Update: this image shows book sales by language. Having passed Python several months ago, Ruby has now also passed Perl. Maybe it really is time to convert the Software Carpentry course…
Another update: here‘s a long-term version of the books-by-language graph.
They do seem to be coming thick and fast, don’t they? Last night’s DemoCamp was held at No Regrets once again; turnout was down a little from the previous one, but I blame that on it being cottage season. Presentations were:
The coolest thing for me all evening was the fact that DemoCamp9 is already full, are are four of the five slots for September’s DemoCamp10, and David Crow didn’t know. That’s as good a definition of success as I can think of…
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