This, via Paul Gries, is interesting: some human editors of the book and magazine kind have put together a wishlist for an editor of the computer kind, and are hoping someone out there in programming land will build it for them. It’s much less formal than the design competition idea I tried in the original Software Carpentry project, but maybe that means it’ll actually work…
Anyone who’s ever had to keep a couple of hundred machines running, and a couple of hundred users from melting down, knows just how hard it is to avoid thrashing. Tom Limoncelli’s book is a hard-knocks guide to avoiding or ignoring interruptions, building good habits (so that the right thing will happen even when you’re frazzled), prioritization, and managing user expectations.
Thomas A. Limoncelli: Time Management for System Administrators. O’Reilly, 2005, 0596007833.
(Maybe if I put Tom’s ideas into practice, I’ll have time to explore Javascript-based grid computing, play with IronPython (which is coming up on its 1.0 release), or learn how DrProject actually works. Maybe.)
This piece from the always-informative ProgrammableWeb.com is thought-provoking. Everyone is watching Google and Yahoo, but maybe Amazon or eBay will wind up being the main provider of application development infrastructure for the web. After all, General Motors is now one of the world’s biggest providers of financial services…
Nepenthes is a piece of software that emulates known holes in other applications, then captures malware that tries to exploit those vulnerabilities. (The name is the Latin designation for pitcher plants.) As Bruce Schneier says, it’s an interesting idea for a research project.
This from DanC, which in turn references a New Scientist article. It explains so much… 
150 years after the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossil, scientists are going to sequence the Neanderthal genome. Toffler’s Law (“The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order”) strikes again…
Late breaking news: DemoCamp8 is this coming Tuesday, July 25, at No Regrets (42 Mowat Ave, near King and Dufferin), from 6:30-8:00 p.m. Demos include:
There’s still one slot free if anyone’s feeling adventurous
The Parallel Tools Platform is an open source extension to Eclipse for writing, running, and debugging large parallel programs. This tutorial gives an overview of what it can do (with lots of pretty pictures); this article from CiSE goes into more detail. The lack of decent development tools (particularly debuggers) was one of the reasons I left parallel computing a decade ago; PTP almost looks nice enough to tempt me back into the pool…
Derek Powazek’s Design for Community was a very thought-provoking book; many of the ideas in DrProject had their origins in it (the rest came from Jon Udell’s Practical Internet Groupware, and from SourceForge). There’s now a recording of a presentation he gave in March on the web; it’s a little Web 2.0-ish, but well worth listening to, particularly as we’re thinking about adding tag clouds and human-generated blogs to DrProject.
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